The Misadventures of Jason

Bienvenue à Paris!

Bienvenue à Paris! Welcome to Paris. I finally did it, I moved to Paris, France. I got a "Carte Compètences et Talents" aka a Skills and Talents visa. It is for 3 years and is renewable once for a total of up to 6 years. I don't know how long i'm staying yet. "You may be granted this card if you are likely to make a significant or lasting contribution, through your skills or talents, to France’s economic development or to its intellectual, scientific, cultural, humanitarian or athletic prestige, and directly or indirectly, to that of your own country." I went through a lot to get this visa. I had to get police reports from China, Japan, the American FBI and the State of New York. That means i had to get fingerprinted 4 times. There was a bunch of other legwork and then a ton of paperwork to gather. I had to show my professional credentials and make an appealing proposal. Overall I probably spend $2-300 to get this visa which is pretty damn good compared to the thousands of dollars people in other countries have to spend to get visas and lawyers. Looking back on it now it didn't seem that hard to get this visa. I waited a little over a week for an answer after they accepted my proposal package. There are tons of minute but annoying details like the french consulate only accepting you between the hours of 9-12 am, etc... but i won't get into that because there is red tape with every process like this. I wanted it bad enough and i worked hard for it and now I get to live in Paris! Join me on my new life in Paris.

short side street near my house.

i think this is on avenue des gobelins. double take? no it's not like little goblins, its named after the Gobelin family.

the seine via boulevard de l'hopital

"look francoise, the beauty in the way the sun hits his urine in the 6pm sun is hard to capture"

sunbathers along the seine.

will be lots of girls on bikes photos.

Chez Julien in the Marais somewhere.

wait, are these glasses hipster or french? or both? i'm gonna have to adjust my vocabulary maybe.

this is what repair trucks look like here.

Centre Pompidou

area outside centre pompidou is filled with performers and people lazing about. that's the theme here.

boudin, blood sausage. its big here. it's good

Kyungwon from Korea happened to be visiting his sister Heyyoung on the day i arrived so i met them for dinner and drinks. funny that that's the first person i met in Paris.

DC to DE

DC to DE, district of columbia to delaware

Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwiches from Sau Voi in NYC chinatown for the road on the way to DC

we got to DC at like 10 at night so it was straight to U street for friday night fun. we ended the night at Ben's Chili Bowl. Obama ate here

kayaking in the potomac

the rooftop of Yoon's place on M street and 20 something

in Virginia playing croquet with much of the family including my parents, Beijing aunt and uncle, Paris Aunt, uncle and cousins, yoon, and zhu ru

then it was on to Cranium

on the drive back to NYC we made a detour through Philadelphia for cheese steak. we ended up at Tony Luke's. not really impressed

on a bus stop in bed stuy.

at the society of illustrators happy hour on 63rd and Lex. Jonathan Bartlett and Jonny Dombrowski

Barry Bruner and Skip Sterling

Chinatown pixel ginseng on purpose? or a horrible quality stolen jpeg that's like 12 dpi used for their sign?

fat cat in nyc

band was rehearsing cuz it was like 5 in the afternoon

we used to go to this beach house every summer in bethany beach, Delaware. its a nice quiet clean family beach town, not like ocean city maryland or even rehoboth beach. now that im back here as an old person i can appreciate it more.

the number of babes you will see on this beach is very very very low, and if you do happen to see one the chances of her being underage are very very very high. chances of seeing tons of kids and overweight parents and blinding white skin and sunburns is 100%

what are we doing?

flying that 40 meter kite i bought in beijing. it's magical. as soon as you take it out of the bag it starts dancing and flying away out of your hands. so it got all f'ing tangled up but we got it undone finally and got it up in the sky! it really takes no skill whatsover. literally it just flys out of your hand on its own. just make sure you let the ones at the end go slowly bit by bit.

i don't look as attractive or cool doing it do i.

horse shoe crab washed up onto shore.

smelled horrible cuz its been dead for who knows how long. these things are huge and hard. you could make helmets out of them if they didnt smell so bad.

mini golf, a Delaware beach tradition. mini golf is literally everywhere. no that i'm an old person i have the patience to putt decently. again please not too many comments about how cool and mature i am now. Well that's it for america, next time i see you on this blog i'll be in Paris!!!! Way to go out with a bang by cramming as much stuff into the north eastern part of the USA. see you soon Paris.

Hot New York Summer - Part 3

this guy came up to me while i was waiting for zhu ru at the pet store and said "where did you get your balls from"? i was like what are talking about. he said, your balls, you got big balls and nice shiny white teeth. then he asked me for a quarter. then he put his arm around me. was he trying to strong arm me or was he just crazy? i was getting annoyed and wanted dude away from me and didn't want to have to do anything. then he said, "what, you know kung fu or something". and i looked at him and said i might, then he walked away and turned around down the street and said that's a nice camera take picture of these balls. so i did, end of story