Regina Glei's Blog, page 24

A Trip to Vietnam – Part 3

My flight back to Japan was only leaving around midnight, so I had a full day of exploring Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) on my own. First station was the Saigon post office and Notre Dame right next to it. The post office is a beautiful building with an old legend sitting inside it on some days.

I spotted the gentleman during our team building day but it was kind of too obvious and intruding to take a picture of him. Seems he takes off on Saturdays and his place was empty.





The Notre Dame and the independence palace are closed over lunch and I walked to the Hotel Intercontinental Saigon. On the way, I stopped at a crossroad and studied a map. Promptly one of the scooter drivers drove onto the pavement and asked me in broken English where I want to go. Next, he offered me to take me around town on his scooter for 5 USD

A Trip to Vietnam – Part 2

On the team building day of my Vietnam business trip, they had organized a sort of treasure hunt through the city (Ho Chi Minh City – HCMC). We were supposed to find clues to the whereabouts of a lady called Mai who had remained in Vietnam, but her former friend/lover had left for the US after the communists took over. Now he returned, thirty years later, and we were supposed to find Mai for him following up clues in town.

One interesting clue station was a flower market where not only flowers are for sale.



It seems to be a hub for chicken fights and I managed to take a snapshot of a guy inspecting one of the gamecocks. I am not sure whether gamecocks are illegal or not, if they are, the rules cannot be very strict, since the birds were all over the market place.



Another remarkable location was our lunch venue – the propaganda restaurant. Let me put it under the category socialist art. I remain unsure about the intention behind this decoration. Is it meant as criticism? Patriotism? Simply appreciation of this kind of style? It was interesting for sure!



The clue hunt also led us to the Binh Tay retail market. Wow. I’ve never seen so many goods cramped into such a small space. No ariconditioning inside the hall, hundreds of tiny stalls packed to the ceiling with goods, people in between eating their lunch, sleeping, doing business and all that with barely enough space for their bodies – if you are prone to claustrophobia, I don’t recommend going there

A Trip to Vietnam – Part 1

Thanks to a work conference I had the opportunity to visit Vietnam for the first time in my life and thus my countries-I’ve-been-to count has climbed to 29

Thinking of Paris

Everyone is shocked by the terror attacks of Paris last night and I am no exception. I wanted to post something else today, but it feels odd to pretend nothing happened.

Yet again the world has been shocked by a vicious terrorist attack. Memories of 9/11 are coming back. When I watched the World Trade Center fall live on TV, I thought World War III would start.

Now it’s hitting Paris – again – Je Suis Charlie is not that long ago yet.

Nobody with a sound mind and heart can understand what these people are doing and why they are doing it. What especially pains me is that because of a few madmen one of the world’s great religions is suffering. Terrible how religious fanaticism polarizes people and makes morons out of them. It’s got nothing to do with what religion they come from. Just look at the complete idiots who feel disturbed by “hellish” red Starbucks paper cups.

Religious fanatics, no matter which religion they belong to, are creating hell on earth. Because of a few assholes many many innocent and decent people have to suffer.

I don’t know how to stop these madmen, nobody does, I suppose. The only thing we can do is not to let them win and not to give them the satisfaction of living our lives in fear.

My thoughts are with the victims and their families in Paris.

Je Suis Charlie.

Head vs. Guts

Last week, during a business trip to China, I had the opportunity to experience the great difference between understanding something with your head = intellectually, versus understanding something with your guts, heart and soul = fully, deeply, in all its consequence.

I knew about a certain work issue for more than a year intellectually, but during the conference in China, I realized with soul, gut and heart what this issue really means, and my, what a different level of understanding that is.

I was quite cool intellectually about the issue, yeah, that’s the way it is, but now, seeing and feeling it live, let the understanding settle into the lower parts of the body. Only when something arrives “down there”, have you really understood it.

In this particular case, the understanding was unfavorable to me and triggered a rush of emotions of betrayal and abandonment. Those are strong emotions and I ranted and raved, much to the dismay of my hosts who thought the issue was long settled. I wasn’t alone with that sentiment of betrayal and abandonment by the way, the story affected a bunch of other people too, who were equally upset.

Thinking about it later, I was amazed by the big difference between understanding something intellectually vs. intrinsically.

Only when something arrives in the heart and soul are you able to process such emotion and put it behind you. I think much personal unhappiness results from only intellectually processed emotions that have not, quite literally, been digested. Not always is the digestions triggered from the outside like in the case of that conference. Often, we have to somehow find a trigger to digest something we don’t like within ourselves and that’s a difficult task.

I’m grateful for that outside trigger that made me think about something, I haven’t thought of in a long time. And I hope the ranted at counterpart at the conference, understands what’s been going on

Shanghai October 2015

There were no big surprises on my maybe 6th or 7th visit to Shanghai. Since it was a business trip, I didn’t see much of the town, but I managed to get to the Bund one evening.

Before that – look at the sky over Tokyo and from much lower height the sky over Shanghai… The pictures speak for themselves.



Actually the smog was less severe than the last time I’ve been in Shanghai for longer than a few hours (see the from Hongqiao to Pudong blog entry last winter).

The last time I’ve been longer in Shanghai was in June 2013 and at that time the smog was particularly bad.

This time I arrived at the older Hongqiao airport, which is closer to our office in Shanghai and ventured to the hotel by taxi.

Of course the taxi driver didn’t speak a word of English and the print-out of the hotel’s name in Chinese proved essential again. The ride was luckily rather short and after some obligatory traffic jam I arrived at the hotel only 28 yuan later. I told the driver by hand sign to make it 40. Later I noticed the shrewd gentleman had interpreted that as giving me back 40 yuan from the 100 bill I gave him. Haha! Well, 60 yuan is still way cheaper than the 400 something they want to have for a “limousine” service from the airport.

The taxi quality ranges from acceptable to total crap, the first taxi fell under the latter category, very smelly, old and dirty… Uhhhh… Anyway, I was grateful to arrive safely at the hotel.

Heading to the Bund meant a good 2km walk to the next subway station past crowded 5 lane highways and tons of electric scooters who don’t have much love for pedestrians.

The subway is the best way to move from A to B in Shanghai, it’s fast, clean, no traffic jams, cheap and amazingly not painfully crowded, despite riding at evening rush hour.

The subway doesn’t stop directly at the Bund and there are so many exists at East Nanjing Road station, you don’t know into which direction you’re heading when you get out. I was lost for a while but then spotted the Oriental Pearl Tower and changed direction. Unfortunately I only saw the Bund at night this time, but in all its nightly glory with a relatively clear sky and the moon shining over the sky scrapers.



Note the new round tower, simply called Shanghai Tower, which is a staggering 632 meters high, a Chinese colleague told me later it’s not yet fully operational but from the outside it looked finished. The Internet says it will open next month – that will be some celebration I guess!

The Bund is quite a sight, old Shanghai behind you and glitzy Pudong in front of you. There were a lot of people on the promenade but not painful masses.



I wandered back in a loop to the station I arrived at, landing in the shopping center street which is as bright as day during the night and the Apple Store is still a very popular location.



The other days were filled with conference and meetings. On the last night we went into one of the restaurant streets and there was some Halloween decoration but far less than in Japan. I wonder when the Chinese will completely pick up on Halloween.

In the “normal” restaurants there you have to deal with frowning and not very friendly waiters, something I’m not quite used to anymore

Writing Progress

I’ve not done a writing progress update in a while, so here it is

I’m busy as always.

Right now I’m working on the final revisions of the second Dome of Souls novel. The first one is Dome Child and already 4 years old. Now, finally, there will be a second one, I hope the beast will be ready around January or February 2016?

Then I’m also polishing a stand-alone second-world contemporary fantasy which I want to send into the submission gauntlet… Not much hope for such endeavors, but… “never give up, never surrender!”

There is a high fantasy novel lying in the archives of Dark Quest Books with a vague promise at publication, but I haven’t heard from the decision maker yet in the entirety of 2015, despite emailing him some 30 times. No further comment…………….

Then there is stuff going on under the pseudonym! One novel out, one novel under submission under that name and if nobody wants it, I’ll put that one out next. The (very nice) cover for it already exists

I’ve written part two of the first novel published under the pseudonym this summer, and at the moment that first draft is resting. I have a very good feeling about this part 2 and shall get back to it shortly.

Dome of Souls novel number 3 is also already done (the hardest first draft I ever wrote so far) and will follow the second Dome of Souls novel at the end of 2016, perhaps?

Then I’m going back a bit back to screenplays

Loudpark 2015 – Gig Report

This year Loudpark heavy metal festival celebrated its 10th anniversary and for that reason and also sheer luck, they had a very nice lineup with so many bands that I wanted to see. On three stages and within two days, I saw the gigs of a staggering 21 bands either in full or at least partially. 14 bands I had never seen before and 7 bands I saw again.

My highlights and lowlights for the “never seen before” bands were:

Highlights:

Dark Tranquility and Hammerfall left the biggest impressions. Dark Tranquility sounds like melodic death metal to me, for which I have a particular weakness

Loudpark 2015 – live

Greetings from Loudpark 2015 heavy metal festival in the Saitama Super Arena north of Tokyo where I am happily spending my weekend! Report will follow next weekend. Cheers!  There’s some good metal being played here

Fearing the Wrong Things

This is a very interesting topic in my opinion and people far more knowledgeable than me have written articles and whole books about it. I don’t claim to know anything about the topic but nevertheless I dare to have an opinion.

There are a ton of things humankind wrongly fears. One classic example is shark attacks. Maybe a dozen people die every year from shark attacks – but how many die from smoking? Car accidents? War? And and and? Not a single death from smoking makes it into the media, but shark attacks are big news. – why? Because shark attacks are rare, scary, and sudden, whilst dying from smoking is a long-term process.

Which leads me to the statement that we fear short-term, sudden things, no matter what they are, much more than long-term, creeping, and slow things, while actually it should be the other way round. This fear of sudden things like a shark attack is juicy for the media and they ride it out for a few days until the next big news happens, which is again short-term, and so forth. Thus our focus shifts from what we should really worry about, long-term creeping stuff to short-term catastrophes.

One great example for that is climate change, which doesn’t happen overnight. Other great examples are smoking or alcoholism. Stuff that destroys you over years and years seems far less scary than it should be.

What triggered thinking about such stuff was an article, which I forwarded around in Facebook, about the health problems in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. In that article they stated that nobody had any problems with radiation, but people died from being suddenly evacuated or from suicide triggered by losing their homes, social networks, jobs etc. People all around the world went bonkers when Fukushima happened, as far as Germany, which is 10,000 miles away. Even four years on, I hear ridiculous comments about babies being born with three ears here because we are all radioactive, while natural background radiation in the south of Germany is three times higher than radiation levels in Tokyo. I do not wish to say in any form that what happened in Fukushima wasn’t/isn’t dangerous and terrible. I think it’s crazy to have dozens of nuclear reactors operating in one of the seismically most active regions in the world. But just how many people who believe that we are all radioactively contaminated here smoke and/or drink…?

I think that our media reporting and our desire for scandals, big events, and big news is distorting reality. Short-term, sudden events get much more media coverage than they deserve. What really kills people and what really affects the future of our planet, slumbers in the background and doesn’t get enough attention and that could prove to be a fatal mistake, quite literally.