Summer’s Palace

“It was a dream after all?” — Hachiware, Chiikawa, Chapter 330

Odyssey

Lots of people have been criticizing Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie for its casting choices, diction, deviation from the original plot, and historical inaccuracies, but I think none of these factors are truly at the heart of what the story is really about.

Historical Accuracy

People are right to complain about historical inaccuracies: the casting of non-white characters, the use of the word “daddy,” and the clothes and ornaments.

They are right because the Odyssey is historically inaccurate by definition. Homer saw all of the things he wrote about exactly when they happened, and he wrote it exactly how it all happened.

All the characters should be Greek people, speaking Greek, and not modern Greek. They should use the dialect they would have spoken 3000 years ago. All of the gods should appear on the screen, they should find a giant guy with one eye, a monster with long tentacles, and a whirlpool full of teeth. Oh yeah, and all of the actors should kill each other for real.

Escape from Spotify

If you think about it, Spotify has a really good business model, because let’s say you pay 150 every year to them, and you’ll live for ~50 more years. If the interest rate is 3.5%, then with a discounted cash flow (DCF) model you are worth $3640 to them right now.

The median annual income in the U.S. is $65k, and the median annual work hours logged is 1.8k. So, 1 hour is worth ~$36 dollars. This means that Spotify subscription costs 100 hours of the median person’s present time.

The Escape Plan

Can I successfully escape from Spotify in 100 hours?

My plan is this:

• Get a list of all of my favorite songs
• Collect data on their audio/lyrics
• Place them in some kind of latent space
• Make an app with a recommendation algorithm

The biggest problem here is likely collecting data on 2000 songs and turning these features into numbers that can be used.

For the songs which have lyrics, I think we can scrape them from online. One issue is dealing with songs in different languages, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, English.

To get the vibe of the song, I’m thinking of learning some audio analysis of the frequencies of the notes to calculate some things about the music.

Perhaps I could just recreate the Spotify dataset’s features, or use the Spotify Web API.

This paper might be useful, since they seem to be doing something similar.

Something else to add might be the age of the song, like if I just skipped some old songs, I might want to hear some new songs.

I don’t want to have any input on the algorithm except for maybe having it figure out how long I’ve been listening to each song before I skip it.

Nihon

Last time I tasted happiness I was in Kyoto.

So the first thing I did after landing in Japan was go straight to Kyoto.

Stand Ikibara

On my way to Kyoto, I was supposed to take the limited express, but I accidentally took the local train, so it was taking much longer than expected.

As per usual, I got hungry, so I got off at a town where there looked to be a few restaurants around the station so that I could eat and get back on.

I ended up in a small city called Ikibara. And I wanted to eat at some restaurant with good reviews but the line was a bit long and it was hot out.

So, I went back toward the station to a restaurant I passed, and a man in the window eating with a group looked at me distrustfully. So, I went back a bit more into a small alleyway to a bar/restaurant called Stand Ikibara.

I seem to be naturally attracted to places with the word “Stand” in the name. In Japan, I think “Stand” just means “Bar”? Since I realize now that there are so many restaurants with it in the name.

Anyway, the door is a manual sliding door, I open it quietly, walk in, and close it quietly. Maybe too quietly, because they dont even know I’m inside.

There is no air conditioning but it’s surprisingly cool. Its quite dark but there’s faint sunlight coming through the curtains.

Two people are running the kitchen. And one guy is talking on the phone in the dining area. The guy on the phone might actually be the owner, I’m not sure. He waved at them and told them that I was here, and then I got seated more toward the inside.

I’m pretty sure it’s just a normal house converted to a restaurant.

The Drawing Board

Anyway, I order by QR code and then the food comes. I got some carbonara, salad, and a homemade lemon soda. The lemon soda was the best part, but the salad was quite typical with some Japanese long skinny bean sprout things.

As I’m eating, I have the idea of drawing the people working there.

The Drawing

I try to draw the waiter first: she has her hair in the back bound by a clip, and has some squiggly curly strands coming down the sides. I think she had bangs as well.

Then I draw the guy who was cooking. He has a very wavy perm, with hair that was probably dyed many months ago, or frosted tips? and thick-rimmed black glasses. I noticed at the end that he had a small goatee as well.

In the middle of eating my pasta, I hear two women talking to each other, at which point I realized I need to draw the second woman as well. She was well-hidden behind a tall metal box which looked like the boxes used at Red Door to hold cookies and croissants.

I think she was the baker, because I saw that they serve some baked sweets as I was walking out.

The woman behind the box

In any case, she was behind the box the whole time so I couldn’t get a good look at her. When I did see her, it was a side profile, which I’m horrible at drawing. Since that was the only angle I could see, I tried drawing that perspective, which was a bad idea.

I had to cross it out and draw a sort-of squiggly rose over it. However, I identified that she had a ponytail.

Near the end of the meal I saw that she had bangs in the front (curtain bangs), but I messed up by giving her the same squiggly curly strands when, in actuality, her hair was more crescent shaped.

At the end of the meal, I paid the bill and then also gave them the drawing. I heard them giggling about it as I walked out the door, and the guy being confused because they were so happy and he didn’t yet know why.

Sometimes it’s good to be in a part of the world where they haven’t heard of your art.

Grandma

I went to the confectionary store after getting off a very crowded 205 bus and then said “long time no see” to grandma, she was sort of amazed and confused because I think she remembered my face but she wasn’t sure from where. So, I spent some time pulling up the picture we took last spring. I think she remembered after that.

She asked me how my mom was, which was kind of confusing at the time, but i later realized that she thought my friend P’s mom who visited earlier this year was my mom.

I thought she meant my mom though, so I said she was doing well.

Then she asked about my grandparents and how they are doing, I found it hard to explain in Japanese that my grandpa died a while ago, so I said my dad’s dad instead of grandpa, but then I didn’t know how to say died, though now I remember the meme “omae wa mou shindeiru” so I guess I should have said he shindeiru’ed.

Regardless, she got the idea. And according to Google Translate, she was talking about how her grandpa also died and she wishes she could have spent more time with him.

That was kind of awkward, but I started looking for candy to buy after that. I saw some of the same stuff from last time, and then some new stuff as well.

Fruit jello, and some circular Chinese zodiac hard candys. I pointed to the monkey and said “I’m this” and asked what she was, and she said “Usagi,” which is a word I knew from my many hours of watching Chiikawa reels.

I was amazed because Usagi is actually my favorite character.

Anyway, I bought a few things and then she sort of forced me to take some free stuff just like last time. Luckily, I avoided the matcha crunchy rolls, but I had to take the chestnut dorayaki.

We took a picture and I asked if I could draw a portrait of her.

Something of an artist myself

She was shocked by this and asked if I was an artist (which I didn’t understand) and then asked me what I did after I said no. I said I was a college student.

She asked “Kyoto University?” And I said I go to school in California. She was even more shocked by this and then started saying stuff about Trump, how grandpa is always complaining about inflation from the war, and how the world is a mess.

Then she asked me what I think happens after people die, to which I replied that I didn’t know. I think she expected some kind of answer from me but I don’t feel good about lying to her.

Either way, I again asked if I could draw her and she agreed. So, I tried to find my red LAMY Safari pen but couldn’t find it anywhere. Even though I brought 3 fountain pens on this trip, I could only find the ballpoint pen.

Perhaps it was a sign that not everything happens the way you want it to, but the result can still be beautiful.

Anyway, she kept laughing while I was drawing, which is something I’m sort of used to.

When I finished the drawing, I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to get the distance between the eyes correct, or the shape of her face, but she was very happy. She had this glimmer in her eyes and said it was “Kakkoi!” and “Sugoi!”

Perhaps, technique is not all that matters in art.

Parting Gifts

I closed my book and was about to leave, but I realized I could just give her the page and take a picture of it. So that’s what I did.

She was overjoyed. I asked her to write her name on the drawing and she wrote 三得子 and then next to it, the characters for “Miuko,” her name.

Then, I wrote my chinese name and had to explain the characters. She said she didnt know what they meant so I said takoyaki, morning, healthy. And she was like, “Hmm… cool.”

I’m not sure if her last name is 三得子 but it looks like it means “has 3 sons” in chinese characters.

It seems kind of ominous, but that seems like something that would be written on a tombstone instead of a surname.

Or maybe thats just how it works in Japan?

Nanzenji

I don’t really like shrines that much, since they are so commercial, but I went to Nanzen-ji, where there’s a cool aqueduct structure called the Waterway Pavilion, and then Komaga Falls, a small waterfall a small hike up the mountain.

Surprisingly, there was no one who hiked up to see the waterfall. Everyone was just there to see the aqueduct.

At the waterfall, there was a red bridge which led to some graves above the waterfall. It reminded me of my conversation with grandma about the afterlife.

The red bridge.

Seeing the sunlight through the leaves hitting the bridge in a particular way was spiritual. It’s a bridge that most people, including me, are not intending to cross any time soon. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

C.stand

Right before I left for the airport, I wanted to get a quick last treat like some dessert or drink, so I went on my phone and found a place called C.stand.

In the pictures, there were very comfortable-looking seats and seemed very spacious and relaxing, so i chose it.

I went up the elevator to the 11th floor and I was punched in the nose by the smell of a strange smoke, and the room looked cloudy.

Looking around, I saw that someone’s drink had steam coming out of it, so I thought “It must be some kind of special Japanese bartender liquid nitrogen thing.”

Then, I saw a table of guys smoking with long pipes, and that’s when I found out that this was a “shisha bar,” which is also known as a hookah bar, which I learned about from Valorant.

I was not interested in inhaling smoke, so I left immediately. Maybe it would have been fun, but I had to go to the airport.

By the way, KIX is one of the worst airports imaginable.

Wazzup Beijing?

I went to Beijing last month to meet my friends P and K. We went to some anime merch malls and palaces and ate Beijing hotpot, which is where the meme with the singing mushroom comes from.

The hotpot may have been too hot though, since I stuck a piece of meat on the top for too long and then part of it wouldn’t come off and it got burnt to a crisp.

I also accidentally put my hand partially over the opening of the pot for too long and curled the hairs on the back of my right middle finger’s first segment. K was laughing at me but thankfully, the hairs uncurled the following day.

At the end of the day, I realized that J was also in Beijing at the time, so I asked to hang out on Sunday.

Humble A Boat

On Sunday, all four of us met up at the Summer Palace, also known as 颐和园. My mom was actually the one who recommended that we all go row some boats at the Summer Palace on the previous night.

There were no row boats, only motorboats, so it turned out to be a lot of fun. I took some pictures of the ducks, as well as the thumbnail of this post from it. Also, we almost got into a few boat crashes.

Beijing duck!

We were being good environmentalists and picked up a floating water bottle from the lake and then P wanted to get close to shore so that he could throw out the bottle in a trash can.

As foreshadowed, we obviously got beached and then we had to do some crazy combination of turning and reversing and P getting off the boat to push the boat back into the water, and then jumping back onto the boat.

Overall, a great sidequest.

Bonus Ducks!

For lunch, we weren’t sure where to go, but we were going to the subway station when K started feeling a bit unwell so instead we just ate at a Peking duck restaurant close to the station.

One of the waitresses, or probably the owner, noticed that we were speaking English and asked where we were from. I said that we were just some college students from America and then she gifted us some free tanghulu for dessert!

Peking duck. And tanghulu.

The No-Arbitrage Principle

After that, J and I finessed a Casio watch saleslady from the mall into selling me a new G-Shock at a 20% discount with an unintentional and unplanned good cop, bad cop strategy.

I pulled up the U.S. prices on my phone which was around $125 and when she said she couldn’t go that low, I was like, “It’s ok, I don’t really need the watch” and then tried to leave.

But she already took the watch out of the display, so she sort of got sunk-cost fallacied, I guess. This is the point where J, the bad cop said that it’s cheaper online.

Then, a few currency conversions later, it was over. We got out of there quite proud of ourselves, but deep down, I was quite sad for her. She probably got chewed out by her boss for making that deal.

However, I do enjoy educating others, and some lessons are best taught the hard way.

Dress 2 Impress

Before dinner, we weren’t sure what to do, and then J had the brilliant idea of playing a game where we pick outfits for each other and then vote on who makes the best outfit for each other.

I had my doubts, but then I realized that this game is incredibly fun. We went into an Urban Revivo and then picked out some outfits.

I’m not too sure who won, but it definitely wasn’t me. I was just dressing the other people how I would dress myself (unfashionably) and getting a good laugh out of it.

Bearing the Cold

For dinner, we went to a place called “The Tree” which had these really cute bear-shaped ice cubes for the milk tea.

Bear milk tea

Afterward, for second dessert, we had some bingsu, which was about the same as Oakobing back in Pasadena.

Summer’s Palace

I think I realized at the end of the trip that this is one of the last summers that I will be able to do anything fun with my friends, perhaps for the rest of my life. This is a bit sad and a bit happy, a matter of perspective.

Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether I have everything or nothing.

As days get shorter, nights get colder, and the engine of time revs on, I prefer to have each other’s backs.