Christmas Parties 2007

Identity Theft

Someone was using my debit card yesterday and this morning buying grocery! I encountered identity theft!

Last night, I checked my bank account online and found there was $97.65 unauthorized transaction with Trader Joe's at U-district. This morning, there was another $58.77 unauthorized transaction with Safeway Store at U-district. I went to my bank and filed for a report in the afternoon. In addition, I reported to the Seattle police. My bank advised me that I should check my bank balance every day. This means one more thing I have to do every day besides emails.

West vs. East

I was TAing last quarter. I'm not very good at remembering the names of all my students. Coincidentally, most of the students are Caucasians. The professor who is a Caucasian himself would joke that I couldn't differentiate "the white people".

When I lived in China, all my family and friends are Chinese. I couldn't tell the different ages of non-Chinese. It shouldn't be surprising, as I often heard non-Asians complain that it was hard to tell the age of a Asian.

Even though the East doesn't completely understand the West, the East loves the West, and vice versa. Westerners might see some serious Asian grannies wear T-shirts with English letters such as "Kiss me". Chinese or Japanese might see some very "cool" looking young western with Tattoos in Chinese characters like "壞孩男". If the young fellow wanted to say "bad boy", he got the sequence of Chinese characters wrong unfortunately.

Holiday Seasons

At a free Jazz concert with Sahera, and Alessandro


At a free Jazz concert with Sahera, and Shumei


At a bar after the concert