A photo will capture a wonder in Iceland, but it won’t show that Iceland itself was a wonder; we could have stopped our car anywhere and at least one good photo would have been there. Nature’s improvisations came in a playful rhythm: sudden patches of dandelions (apparently used by locals as a Viagra substitute) and lupine adorned a desolate yet attractive landscape, with stern skies and rugged rocks that would have been great for faking the Moon landing. In impossible places were the ancient stone structure, a bird with a beak of the wrong color, or the carefree sheep, as if a tired artist made a few errant strokes before bed.

Sometimes, one of these guys would somehow find their way onto the tops of these mountains.

The sheep were the most unreasonable, stuck onto sides of vertical walls like scattered cotton balls, or curled for a nap in ditches from which I would have trouble escaping. I was jealous of the views they had as we drove by, imagining them baaing at me with arrogance, as if they owned the entire island. They were haughty creatures who would scuttle away in rapid little steps when we came close. I ate a lot of lamb on this trip, the most memorable of which at the Indian restaurant in Reykjavik which was purportedly ranked as the 2nd “best thing to do in Europe,” beating out the Louvre and only losing to the Eiffel Tower. Later we found out that this was the result of some online survey with 12 total votes. However, the lamb was excellent, with rich, juicy onion slices on the side.

The Comfort Zone

Gulfoss.

Geysir, the true O.G.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out why I couldn’t say anything interesting about these attractions, but I think I’ve finally got it – they were too close to other people.

Traveling is an inherently greedy activity. Iceland, a land of treasures, enables that vice. There were small treasures: a colorful sleeping pony, an abandoned graveyard, or an assertive flower, scattered generously everywhere we bothered to look. There were large treasures: waterfalls, craters, unnamed lakes, each of which would be daily attractions if the population in a hundred-mile radius were more than a few hundred. I even felt we owned the road, as we would usually be the only car going either way, and stopping on the middle of the highway to take pictures was (arguably) a reasonable thing to do. Spoiled by everything else in Iceland, how could I feel the same freedom and control with these “big attractions” near Reykjavik? The number of other tourists near these wonders meant I couldn’t selfishly claim my genuinely great experiences with them, from the intense pleasure of the Blue Lagoon to the humbling view in front of Gulfoss, as my own.

Myrdalsjokull

It looked like a staircase into the heavens.

The gravel road leading towards Myrdalsjokull was a winding, curvy tease; the glacier would sporadically poke out, shiny like a beacon in the moody sky, but then hide behind the hills with each new sharp turn. The only view we had from the “parking lot” (i.e. a flat space surrounded by rocks) at the end of the road were mounds of black ash, residue from thousands of years of Icelandic volcanoes volcano-ing. I looked for the highest walkable point and begun to climb. Of course at the end of that was just another black hill, so I’d take another round. An unreasonable amount of time later, I was there. It was eerie and unreal because a second earlier I was just staring at the side of a hill. The wind was still and I shivered. It was not cold. I stared down at a gigantic army of black, jagged colossi, behind whom were clearer ice, heading off an onyx trail into the distant mist.

When we walked on the glacier and chipped away at it, we realized the black ash was very thin. Sure enough, through the occasional crack in the sheet we could see the healthy, blue, and clear body of the glacier.

Alejandro and I were on the top of the hill, and Joel and Greta were under a steep incline at our feet. Real men don’t go backwards, so instead of backtracking we decided to climb down the incline. Real men are also pretty stupid, as my first foothold, a rock that was noncommittally inserted into the soft wall, fell off and rolled a hundred feet below. Now I couldn’t go back, so I tried to take a step down — and my body immediately began to slide, burning my hands grasping at the wall. I was only able to stop when I dug my entire feet and my fingers into the sand. It would have been fun to have taken up Kat’s offer of a crash-course in climbing, but for now I only had time to focus on letting my legs do the work instead of my arms, hugging the wall (but still sliding, like one of those old cartoons). Alejandro made it down slowly, pointing out potential footholds and offering his inexhaustible moral support. I slid from stone to stone with his help, changing footholds to handholds, occasionally improvising a rough sideways crawl with triceps and calves. About halfway there, I looked down, only to see Greta on the phone and Joel taking pictures. Thanking God for such considerate friends, I positioned myself so that if I did slip and roll I would take them out with me. There was a lot of black sand in my socks that I had to shake out once I got to the bottom.

“What? I knew you were going to be okay.”

Jokulsarlon

Jokusarlon, looking like it doesn't belong in this world.

On that day, there was a lone seal in Jokulsarlon; it humored us with occasional dives, which I was entranced by until half of the giant iceberg on my left just broke. It played two beats: horizontal, boxy cracks simultaneously blinked into existence; one long second of suspense later, the iceberg split beautifully and decisively with a crackle like muted thunder. The weaker piece floundered and spun so that its naked bottom half, a lucid crystal unlike its ash-smeared tip, floated to the top. The crowed oohed. The seal didn’t care. A curious duck turned when the waves from the rupture went under it. The torn limb of ice floated towards some brethren who formed a huddled phalanx at the mouth of the river. Eventually, they too will drift out to sea and then melt into obscurity.

[a smaller piece breaking and then catching on the said phalanx (curtesy of Alejandro)]

The glacier is retreating and must eventually disappear. I wondered how many more centuries would pass before there would be no more Jokulsarlon. By then, this place would just be a blue lake, but probably still beautiful, giving its visitors a calm measure of peace.

Svartifoss

Where's Yan? Alejandro, with a stylish hat, is easier to spot.

I’ve always had a curiosity to figure out certain things that are cool to me and nobody else. This was probably the same itch that made me hopeless with girls for most of high school, but I really had to count the number of sides on those basalt columns that looked way too damn regular. The upper road was off-limits that day, so I hopped from stone to stone, thinking myself some Asian version of the Beverly Hills Ninja. I ended up triumphant under the waterfall, only to hear angry French behind me. I turned and realized two people were taking pictures and waving their hands unhappily, so I ducked under the nearest rock to give them space. There was nothing to do there besides being taken in by the fullness of the mist, which rushed at my face and penetrated my shirt, and counting the number of sides on the columns. They were mostly six-sided, with an odd five or even four, a looming set of beautiful yet imposing teeth ready to swallow me.

Somewhere behind me, the woman was complaining to Joel that I violated her rights to take pictures of the falls. To that woman, whomever you are, I really do hope that you got some good, Yan-free pictures, though I wouldn’t have minded if you got just a couple with me sticking my head out behind the rocks. Knowing my goofy face, I’m sure it will be amusing for someone reading your album! =)

Being American

Kex (coincidentally, Tynan, a blogger I respect, also recently enjoyed a stay there during a one-week trip similar to  mine, though I think his ended right when mine began) was our hostel in Reykjavik and our last stop before the flight. Kex was hip. One of the first things Joel said when he entered was “this hostel is cooler than me,” and I for once agreed with him. Relaxing after my trip, I would frequently just sit on the patio and sketch, sipping a glass of Viking beer whose only redeeming quality is its name.

Midnight in an Icelandic summer.

It was my final midnight in Iceland, and in the lounge I started talking with a trio of Finnish recent-graduates about Facebook and travel. The oldest giggled the most but was the most mature: “you don’t want to travel with BFFs. You want to travel with complementary people.” I was impressed, first at the proliferation of “BFF,” and second at the realization of how varied my group was – we spent the entire drive back from Hvoll trying to find a single song that we could all sing. I didn’t know any Beatles, Joel didn’t know any song from this century (except Umbrella), but Greta wins (?) for not knowing any Disney nor the Sound of Music. Also, Alejandro isn’t the only one to blame; the Americans couldn’t figure out the Star-Spangled Banner. I wondered what being American meant.

I was not sleepy after the Finns left, so I ended up chilling with a Brooklyn girl interested in writing, and minutes after, a Norwegian interested in the Brooklyn girl. We talked about pickpockets in Oslo, about what manliness meant, about what it must be like to come here in the winter when, instead of getting nearly 24 hours of sun, we get entire days of darkness. I was still wondering what being American meant, so we started talking about that too. The Brooklynite thought for a while and gave an honest answer: “I think we Americans are not very good at anything, so we make it up by being cool, and then we attract pretty good people at everything.”

Epilogue – an Ode to the Icelanders

Water is the soul of the Icelandic manhood. One proof of manliness was to swim to Drangey from the mainland, carrying a torch in the free land, while singing the Icelandic national anthem...

As for Icelanders? I searched my memories and only found respect. To me, the Icelanders themselves are probably the greatest treasures of Iceland; they are few, fiercely proud (especially of their “baby mountains”), defiantly beautiful, but most of all, still here. They’ve managed to be extremely functional and frequently workaholic, in one of the most uncompromising places on Earth. The locals I’ve chatted up all looked at me with bemusement (mostly at my flip-flops) but no condescension, through intelligent, curious, and haunting whitish-blue eyes.

…

“Is that an Icelandic malt beverage? Yeah? Do you have something like that where you come from? I really like it – I hope everyone in the world can enjoy it!”

“I hope you… enjoy… our country. You are welcome here.”

“Hi, I’ll be your tour guide today. I’m a Valkyrie.”

…

When we were in an outdoor pool, a middle schooler swam up to us, started a water fight, and decided to speak English with us for as long as possible. His teeth were in transition; his eyes were focused. He knew what a “conference” was. He said “fight” instead of “play” as in “…and we had to fight France in the handball championships!” He frequently had to break conversation to splash water at his sister, “she’s always following me around and copying me. I hope she grows up one day.” After a brief struggle, he got “tectonic plates” from Joel and explained that Iceland has a lot of earthquake trouble “… because we are on two tectonic plates… but Japan has it worse! They have three!”

-Yan (w/ thanks to Joel, Greta, and Nan for pictures)

Go is a wonderful game. Although I’ve decided to stop learning for now, the decision came completely from a new time-consuming responsibility, rather than Go itself. Otherwise, I would still be passionately learning this game into and through the summer, because it really is that fun and that amazing and that deep and I feel I’m just getting to the interesting part (this is apparently a dangerous feeling that all Go players have at every stage of their development). I’ll definitely pick up the game again and try to learn it better the next time, but before that, I think it is best to split my adventures with Go so far into three main sections, and summarize the lessons I’ve learned from each. (to any stronger player sneering at a SDK calling his Go history a “history”: for now, excuse my ignorance of your much harsher and longer Go history and let me enjoy my stories as my own)

1986-2007: The Fence

While I found it was easy to not notice chess in the U.S., it was hard to grow up in China without touching Go. Like Starcraft (and Go itself, of course) in Korea, in China Go was televised, and children watch TV. My father was an enthusiast, so my introduction to Go was through his books and his set. The stones were glass and uneven, and the black stones broke more than the white ones so there were lots of half black-pieces that doubled as safety hazards. He tried to teach me and demonstrate his prowess to me at the same time, by beating me with a 15-stone handicap in the most ruthless and uneducational way possible. Needless to say, with an my ego as a child having been just as big as his, I didn’t play any more with him after a couple of games. I still peeked at the books for fun though and did problems from time to time, usually only the first 2-3 problems in each section, so maybe they paid off when I was re-introduced to the game years later. It was 2003 and around the Hikaru no Go boom, so some of the kids would play Go during our free activity periods. One of my best friends, J, played a few games with me. I didn’t play at all through college, and J came over to stay once after I graduated saying he got stronger (all of these stories involve him and some cute girl, this time a cute girl who played Go. However, he actually was stronger so who knows) and we played about a dozen matches, around one game a day, where our wins see-sawed from each day to the next. I was probably something like 12-11k around this time.

Lessons:

• if you’re going to teach your kid anything, don’t teach by beating the crap out of him, especially if he was emotionally fragile like me (or if he’s, you know, like 5 years old).
• I remembered only starting to “care” about the game when I had a “rival,” an experience I had in many other activities as well (especially sports). I think this is a great way to fuel study of competitive-type skills and to use that teenage male ego for something productive.
• the only reason I started saving games was because I had no board when J came over, which accidentally taught me the lesson of saving and analyzing past games. I grew a lot from those games since I would secretly study them to beat J the next day. Furthermore, I learned the habit of reviewing and extracting information from past games, which was a very efficient way for me to learn.

2008-2009: The Teacher

Around the time J came over, I got word that one of my coworkers, G, played Go. Furthermore, he was really strong (funnily, someone described him somewhere as “a million dan,” which actually meant something like 6). I excitedly asked him to play and teach me, and he was somehow patient enough to sit through 5 games with me. I lost all of these 9-handicap games, though I came close in the last one. The feeling of going up against a forcefield was both crushing and exciting. Furthermore, G let me borrow his favorite Go book, Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, which probably improved me by a stone from just reading it. Work got pretty serious so I didn’t get to play more versus him, but he continued to give advice and good discussions up to this day, for which I was extremely grateful.

After I quit work, I met several other teachers like J and D, mostly around first dan. From each I’ve not only seen strength, but also a maturity that I felt was a necessary step to achieve that strength. In these two years I only played just about 10-15 games and I was probably around 10-9k afterwards, but I’ve gained a new appreciation for the game after actually seeing a strong player, which built a secret desire to be strong. Unfortunately, work was fairly pressing and New York extremely distracting, so actually learning had to wait.

Lessons:

• Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go may be one of the best Go books ever.
• To generalize, in any discipline, even those that I think I’ve mastered at some point, studying and re-studying fundamentals have always been the sessions that improved me the most and broke the most plateaus. The problem with learning is that I often get into habits, some good even, but I might forget why I got those habits in the first place. By asking myself “why” and forcing myself to come up with either a reason or “I don’t know,” I usually reach a new level of understanding. Back when I was weightlifting more seriously, the breakthroughs definitely came when I thought/learned more about the form of an exercise and why it was the correct form. Recently, this happened to me in mathematics as well, as I really got down and asked myself why some of the fundamental things “worked.” The resulting calculations, though simple, suddenly showed me tons of stuff that were invisible before but definitely within reach.
• It is not only inspiring, but also educational, to meet the strongest people you can find in a discipline. Not only will you learn what they did, you’ll also see what mentality they needed to get there. What the actual “good mentality” is seems to be discipline-specific, though I think it is universal that strong people are different from the rest – they all have a spark and they all have a fire to light that spark, whereas the rest of us tend to lack one or both. Also, without seeing what the strong can do in their discipline, I tend to fall into the trap as underestimating human potential in that discipline, which definitely stunts my growth.

2010-2011 The Program

This is the current story. In September 2010 I decided to start learning and gauge my progress at the end of May in 2011, after meeting some very enthusiastic and helpful teachers, such as L, A, and mate105, who had given me great reviews and feedback on my ideas. The funny thing was that my teachers would give very contrary advice – one would tell me to ignore openings completely and only play slow games, and another would tell me to learn feeling from careful study of openings and try to play as many games as possible. Thus, I decided to make sure I did things that they were unanimous on, which basically came down to – surprise – studying hard and playing hard. On the “theory” end, I decided to read some books including Attack and Defense and In the Opening, do problems via Sensei’s Library or goproblems.com, and view Wang Yuan’s lectures about Go fundamentals. On the “practice” end, I actually played games. Before this, I found it hard between work and my other hobbies to consistently fit games in. However, because of the injury I could now play games when I would usually go to the gym, which was a very regular rhythm. I played about 100 games in this period (excluding January and February because of the MIT Pokerbots competition during IAP), which was roughly one game every couple of days, about twice the number of games I’ve ever played before this in my life. I ended May with a KGS ranking of 5k before hearing about my new project.

Lessons:

• not all games are created equal – games where my thinking is pushed to the limit but not too much beyond, especially when they’re well-reviewed by a stronger player who did not participate in the game, felt like they were “worth” several games. This is similar to Csíkszentmihályi’s description of “flow.” Before playing online games where players of similar rank are easily matched, I usually played games which were too one-sided (like playing against a 3d), which caused many hopeless situations and frustration because there were no positive feedback at all to any of my moves (even a move that would be objectively “solid” would be “punished” because of complications a dan player could concot, so it was hard to tell the quality of my own moves apart).
• it was good to get a combination of theory and practice. I feel theory is like filling a cup with tea and practice is like enjoying the tea. With no application the cup will begin to “overflow” since I’ll be filled with theoretical ideas that I’ve seen in a book without seeing how they can be applied, varied, or countered, since most books only set up a few lines of play in each situation. When I binged on playing games with no studying, however, I frequently fell into the trap of repeating the same motions of ineffective play and often I would have no choice but to make the same mistakes I used to make, even realizing them as mistakes, because I couldn’t see a better alternative. In the macroscopic picture this describes the academic vs. engineer schools of thought, and I feel the right answer for me was, as always, a balance.
• spikes of unusual and very intense training sessions help go over plateaus, since they challenge my limiting beliefs of what I cannot do. During my training montage there were two instances where I felt I got instantly stronger afterwards and they both fell into this category. The first instance was my first tournament, where the tournament situation made every move that much more nerve-wracking and tested my mental endurance more than it tested Go skill. The second was attending a Go retreat/workshop with Guo Juan, where I met avid and helpful players like Adam and Karen. This was about 3 days full of intense go in peaceful upstate New York, where I felt like I was breathing Go and still had dreams of Go after I came back.

It had been a really fun two semesters. I find it very sad that my new project requires me to leave this beautiful game for a while, just as I am finally learning to stand and maybe even walk after being on the floor for so long. However, unlike my new project, I think I will have Go all my life, so there’s no reason for her to be jealous. A. had told me her favorite moments playing Go had been when she was a single-kyu player; maybe it isn’t so bad to elongate that period of my life. One day, I will happily walk with the stones again; until then, you may find me randomly online as Eggplant86, if only to keep KGS from deleting my account.

-YZ

A couple of days in, I wanted to import my music information from my windows partition into Rhythmbox, the Ubuntu music player. This was surprisingly frustrating, and the closest thing I found was an orphaned (?) python script here. Unfortunately, it did not do the main thing I desired, which was to grab my 200+ iTunes playlists that I didn’t want to remake, so I decided to write the functionality into the aforementioned file. I also cleaned up the code a tiny bit. I put the result up at Google Code here:

http://code.google.com/p/itunes2rhythm/

It still has many flaws (it is too dumb to deal with bad filenames, the code for putting in other playlists besides those from iTunes is amateurish, etc.), so it is nothing more than a hack right now (but it works!). I doubt I will work on it anymore, so I’ll put it here in case anyone else can find some use for it (or improve upon it, which is highly welcome).

Best,

-Y

His first couple of hands were fairly standard, so a “dude you’re destroying him here, just bet” or “well bottom-two may not be good here since he’s so tight” settled those. The next hand got interesting: after he c-bet a dry Axx flop with mid-pair meh-kicker, the turn paired the A. I asked T to give his analysis, and he gave me several reasons to bet, along the lines of “I think I’m ahead” and “I bet because I didn’t want to look weak since I’ve been checking.”

To me, this was completely fine – these thoughts describe exactly how I would first approach the situation, if not how I might just make the decision. However, for this particular hand several factors bugged me (for example, I knew that his opponent is solid and balances his ranges well), so I decided to ask what I thought to be the natural next question: what is his opponent’s range? What is the range T is representing? What is the expected value in each part of the range given his river plan?

T was confused for a moment, and gave me a few more sentences like “well, I think he’s strong?” or “well, he probably doesn’t have an A.” I was in turn confused myself because he wasn’t answering my questions, but I quickly realized that I was speaking a different language. I understood at that point what his plateau was, why I would make a horrible mathematician, and why Martin Luther King Jr’s battle was so difficult.

I’ll explain. Cards first.

Poker, Chess, and Hard Work in Play

By design, poker is a game about making the best decision in each position, which we define as all the information available to a player for his move. The alluring complexity of the game is that calculating the opponent’s hand distribution in a position is difficult (in fact mathematically impossible, given the element of human psychology). Regardless, we can set an educated guess on the opponent’s possible hands (and more importantly, how he’ll play each hand given the situation) based on our experience of the common archetypes of poker players (“maniacs,” “tight-passive,” etc.). Then,  we can split the opponent’s hand into a few “buckets” (monsters, strong hands, air, combo draws, etc.) based on how likely they’ll react to our plays. The key idea is after making these assumptions, the problem actually becomes completely mathematical – we just sum our expected gain/loss against each “bucket” to calculate the value of each play, a mental calculation that is much easier to do than most people think.

In practice, even this is too costly in mental cycles to do for every decision during every hand. This is why we have heuristics, delicious nuggets of information that allow us to short-cut thinking in ubiquitous situations. Wisdom such as “do not go broke with top pair,” “don’t draw except to the nuts,” or as I told T earlier, “keep betting if you think you are ahead” allow us to make decisions almost instantly when a pattern matches one of our heuristics.

However, poker is ultimately a game about winning positions, not following heuristics. Heuristics are *man-made* principles used to make thinking faster, not more correct. You don’t get karma points when you follow a heuristic, even though knowing lots of them stack the odds in your favor. In difficult situations, heuristics often directly contradict each other, which can only mean that some of the heuristics were just wrong in these situations (there are times when the opponent’s betting pattern tells you that not only should you go broke with top pair, you may even want to call with ace high!). These are the situations where we must sit down and calculate, an action that, while itself an estimate, is the best we can reasonably do.

This was the real story of T’s hand. T was very comfortable using these nuggets of poker wisdom – precisely the one- or two-sentence answers I gave him on the earlier hands! – but none of these were useful enough for this particular hand, *which was what made the hand more interesting in the first place.* When I get into these situations, I try to “fall back” onto the next level of calculation. T was not used to this, and so he was stuck juggling with heuristics in a “lost” state that many players are familiar with (I’m certainly not excluding myself, who not only had been in T’s rut for at least 2 years but still gets “lost” in more complicated hands fairly regularly).

In this sense, poker is really no different from other games. Beginners in chess quickly learn to “control the center,” “create strong linked pawns,” and “develop minor pieces before major pieces.” Go has an even more elaborate set of heuristics encoded into “shapes,” with proverbs that go as far as to say “if you just play good shapes and avoid bad shapes, you will win.” Again, often these notions simply break down in specialized cases where we must just calculate – look at a list of moves, the opponent’s counter-moves, your own counter-counter-moves, etc. – basically, sitting down to do the hard work.

The Game of Life and Why We’re All a Little Bit Racist

When chewing on T’s problem, my big realization (for myself, not for the world – I’m probably reinventing a whole warehouse of wheels by now) was that the danger of only having heuristics not only extends to thinking in games, but to thinking in general – about economics, about other people, about everything.

What are heuristics when we abstract them from the games we’ve been talking about?  They are sweeping statements of the form “X is Y” or “X causes Y,” shortcuts in the bigger game of analyzing life’s information and decisions. When these heuristics work (and they frequently do, which is why they exist), we grok big world situations very quickly, which leaves a great aftertaste of wisdom for our egos.

But look at controversial issues that involve a lot of agents: financial crises, terrorism, health care. Much of the controversy comes down to people not really knowing things at a deep level, rather just heuristics of buzz-words and labelling of groups. Everybody knows we’re in a “financial crisis,” and I’ve talked to many people who says “it is because of the people on Wall Street,” but would be hard pressed to tell you how exactly the crisis happened (or even what subprime mortgages *are*), because the only information they had was the heuristic  “Wall Street people are greedy.” As true as that assessment may be, it trivializes a very important issue (I myself do not claim to know it satisfactorily, even after working for a year at a hedge fund specializing in subprime mortgages). The danger of lazy thinking contaminates more than just cocktail party arguments. For example, keen politicians can convert heuristics like the above into fuel for their own agendas from anti-Wall Street legislation to the Patriot Act. People with a bit of medical knowledge also get a “med school syndrome” where they diagnose themselves with all kinds of diseases because of a few heuristics – in this case, some knowledge of symptoms.

It actually gets a lot worse when we involve other people. While not everyone may care about philosophical debate, everyone lives life with a social identity defined by groups, and often these groups really don’t like each other that much. Animosity brews when everyone brandishes their heuristics about others as truth instead of estimations. Many of my fellow atheists are quick to denounce stereotypes of “amoral” (which has a grain of truth as an estimation) as an oversimplification, while somehow not giving equal treatment to our stereotype of the religious as “illogical.”When we replace tongues with more sophisticated weapons, we get fantastic celebrations of human nature: Crusades, extermination camps, and The War on Terrorism.

As scary as this all sounds, are we really going to stop and throw away all stereotypes we have of others? Of course not – each of us is so complex that we spend whole lifetimes trying to “find ourselves.” We don’t have nearly as much time to look at all the nuances of even our closest family and friends – why would we even think of giving credit to our “enemies?” We should treat them as statistics since it requires much less memory in our brain.

When we fight racism, we’re fighting laziness. This is why we’re going to lose.

But in games we don’t have to lose: remember, we fought laziness by calculating through all variants from a position. Can we do something similar here? Well, what we really want to do is a perfect calculation, which can only mean somehow simulating the entire world and every individual in some giantic computer and see what would happen when we make each decision – this is of course computationally impossible. The next best thing, which we can do, is to split the bigger population into smaller groups, fine enough so that one can reasonbly think of them as units (and pray that some variation of the Central Limit Theorem holds). Yes, this is still inefficient and always makes for ugly math, but it is by definition a more refined picture. And of course, on things like job hiring or college entrances, there’s no reason why we should be making these groups at all. We have so much information in each application and the interviews about that particular applicant that using heuristics like race is more stupid than amoral.

… but They’re Really not that Different

The alert reader will quickly point out that this grouping *is* heuristic, and he is completely right. There is no real definition to “smallest groups possible,” so if I chose the groups to be fairly large, say “Blacks,” we easily rediscover… racism! Not an achievement to be proud about, given all the preaching I just did. To be honest, I have already tried a sleight of hand at the beginning of this post – remember how we had to do estimates in poker for our opponent’s archetypes? That was a heuristic too: “archetype” and “stereotype” are not really different here. I haven’t even mentioned the very act of “bucketing” the opponent’s cards, which is completely analogous to the “grouping” of people I just discussed.

My real point is *not* that “heuristics = bad” and “calculation = good” (these are two horrible heuristics!), rather that while heuristics and calculations are on the same spectrum of decision-making tools, we usually *err on the side of less calculation.* The more we lean towards the “big picture” (heuristic) side, the faster we can make decisions. The more we lean towards the “small picture” (calculation) side, the more accurate our decision becomes. The art is then finding the right level of abstraction for each problem, because life is not a math Olympiad and we can rarely find perfect calculations that are elegantly short (let’s call this “The Zhang Uncertainty Principle”). However, the real bottleneck is usually our ability to do calculations since heuristics are, by nature, easier to digest. Thus, when we get stuck learning something, like T did with poker, our next step to mastery usually involves being able to do the next level of calculation.

I actually love heuristics – in every field, the heuristics are the “big lessons,” which inherently lend themselves to be more transferable to other fields and thus generate creative ideas. As a generalist, I feel I have a much harder time-allocation problem than specialists: since it is basically impossible to master any sufficiently large field, the generalist needs a good idea of when to stop learning something. I personally look for points in a skill where heuristics tend to disappear; the lessons from the skill after the point will generally be mostly useful *only for the skill itself* which loses some of its charm for me. Specialists tend to dismiss this as “lazy,” but how many of them usually go beyond the basics in areas like socialization, cooking, or fitness, each a respectable skill with lots of ideas and complexity? I think either approach is okay: we don’t have time to learn everything in the world, so we naturally choose to learn some things for their own sake and some things for raw functionality. Both generalists and specialists have spikes and flat points, just in different numbers.

This melding of heuristics and calculation is not really a surprise, because heuristics are just estimates of calculations. Actually, once we spend enough time with a game, a more beautiful phenomenon occurs. Someone with a degree of mastery in any of the games I’ve mentioned can attest that eventually players develop meta-heuristics that basically put checks and balances on heuristics – masters gain an instinct about exactly when their heuristics fail to hold (something like changing the heuristic “if X then Y” to “if X then Y, but only if Z”). Now they freely rely on heuristics to make quick decisions, because this mental layer won’t even consider heuristics that might not hold! Both Go and chess masters have known to claim that often they “only see one move – the right one,” because many of the moves were crossed off by the tremendously developed “society” of heuristics in their mind. My favorite relevant quote is attributed (dubiously) to Bruce Lee:

“Before I studied the art, a punch was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I studied the art, a punch is no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.”

I feel the right path here is (again, a heuristic) balance, and since we usually don’t calculate enough, to balance generally means to think “smaller” (as Josh Waitzkin of The Art of Learning says, “make small circles.”). It would be horrible to only learn the heuristics in everything – one will not be able to enjoy the higher fruits of learning skills deeply. But if we refuse to learn heuristics, not only would we be burned out after overclocking our brains, we would fall into the trap of pedantry. I feel the right thing to do is to use heuristics to make decisions, but have a feel for when those shortcuts stop holding (typically, when things look complicated). Then, we have to stare at the board and play the position. Luckily, most chess games of life are not blitz.

-Y

P.S. Yes, I know a couple of you among the five or so readers I actually have for this blog are really just here for a poker hand, so here’s an interesting one at 5/10: I have AQh in the BB, cutoff (reads: tight, medium aggression) raises a limper to 40, I make it 120, cutoff calls and everyone else folds (we both have around 2k). Pot roughly 270. Flop AcJc7d , I cbet to 175, he calls, pot ~ 420. Turn a Ts, I check (I debated a long time between checking/betting here), he bets around 250, I call, pot ~900, we both about about 1.5k behind. River a 6s. I think and check. As played, river is definitely a check/call. The main question is the turn – is betting better?

The evening, when I was most lonely, was filled with people. Families, couples, tourist groups – smiling, having fun, maybe even willing to help me. Only hours ago they were warm and fair companions, soaking up Paris alongside me without taking more than their share, but now they seemed almost like cold extras, simply there to decorate the scene before darkness shambles in with its army of horrors. My lack of a cellphone suddenly made sense as a move planted by the malicious director.

The night was as expensive as it was exhausting. After taking a cab to the PC cafe just so I could learn some French online and to email my group, my horrible accent rewarded me with an extra 30-euro half-hour round trip to eastern Paris as my “Gare du Nord” somehow became “Gare du Lyon.” Exhausted, I stumbled into the closest hostel I could find and agreed to the first price I heard. The set of keys I got was so heavy that I was busy contemplating its weight while walking up the creaky wooden stairs. After I took the last step, I looked up, only to be greeted with a fitting sight to end my diabolical script: an aged oil painting of a ghostly pale girl with eyes that radiated a piercing cold from sorrowful sockets, the kind of gaze that locked onto me no matter how I moved. I quickly looked away and dodged into my room, the door of which took too long to open. The room was bare besides simple furniture and a tiny TV in the ceiling looking down like a security camera, and I felt it twisting to follow me as I walked around the room, but every time I looked up it would cleverly reset position.

I left the curtains open when I showered, just in case.

Ruby, from The Path. My best approximation of the painting.

I woke up before Paris did; I went to buy the train ticket three hours in advance, leaving no space for fate’s shenanigans. Even though I spoke to almost none of them, the people of Paris suddenly seemed more receptive when I finally bought my ticket than the night before when I didn’t have one – even the electronic voices of the station operator sounded friendlier and more human than it did eight hours ago. With the ticket keeping me secure and inexplicably warm, I was brave enough to explore again.

I passed by a homeless man sleeping on a mattress under a kelly green blanket, with three pairs of shoes lined up neatly on a earthy-brown shoe rack by his cart. Remembering I was hungry, I looked for a place to eat, before seeing the golden arch whose banality now filled me with comfort. I entered the MacDonalds and ordered their morning special, a surprisingly calorie-conscious yet filling package of an egg sandwich, a yogurt, 3 pastries, orange juice, and an espresso. I did not care about how Starbucks the whole affair seemed – it was at that moment the most perfect meal Paris had for me.

At the station, to pass the time, I struck up a conversation with Jean, a college student with bright, sharp eyes dug deeply into a dark face. He was waiting at the station to go back home to northern France from his part-time work. He had no patience for good-for-nothings and did not care about different variants of coffee. Inspired by his hard-working attitude, I promised him I’d get as good as French as he spoke English, after learning from him about how to succeed in life: “if you have two arms like me, two feet like me, two eyes like me, then you can do anything if you just use them.” Minutes after he left for his train, mine came.

*

Under tasty-looking clouds, the plains were adorned by sheep, trees, and a few brushes of the occasional wheat, gold patches amidst aged green bronze. I daydreamed about having a compartment on top of the train where I could actually grab the clouds. A truck occasionally broke my idyllic idle until I realized I was probably doing the same thing to them.

The bad luck plague spasmed one last time before leaving me – the train broke down one stop away from Munich. Luckily, my compartment-mate’s functional English, which got me safely to the hotel. Before I entered, I paused for a bit examining the industrial Munich.

This was a city with scars, aesthetically reserved but brewing within its cranes, bricks, and steel a quiet strength. It lived and breathed not unlike its citizens, with strong, angular features, signs of a hard-working, efficient, and no-nonsense society. A mother described her daughter’s structured classes and activities, indirectly explaining their excellent English, and stopped occasionally to beam at the girl with pride, who blinked at me with large, intelligent eyes. I people-watched for a bit more before succumbing to fatigue, and passed out soon entering my hotel room.

During my train ride, the others were in the BMW museum looking at beauties such as this. I was annoyed that they were having fun without me, but I would be sadder if they weren't.

My sheepish return to the flock called for German-style celebration. The idea of the Hofbrauhaus seemed too touristy, so to be even more touristy by avoiding what most “other tourists” do, we peeked into the Ayinger beer hall next door. And our inner Bavarians were pleased.

Calling a German beer hall a “big bar” is like calling a fratwurst a “big sausage.” Technically correct, but you lose a lot of flavor. The inside of Ayinger had no guzzlers, no rabble-rousers, and no perverts. In their stead were amply-portioned cheese and sausage over sour cabbage, served in the atmosphere of a family restaurant (I think I saw some kids there, but this may be beer memory working) for a seating space of around five hundred over the three floors.

As for the biggest difference? “Welcome to Germany,” a plaid-shirted fellow in his thirties turned around and said to us with an honest smile, with no judgment, flattery, or pretension, just a gesture acknowledging the universal human bond over the most important beverage ever created. I said my best “Vielendank,” but even if he had heard it as just static my intentions were clear. I saluted with my hand, he raised his glass. At that point, I realized two things.

One, we were both reveling in something that connected the world beyond prejudice, beyond differences, beyond Munich. Two, the glasses were huge – the smallest measuring unit they had was a liter. All that training since college was for moments like these. I knew to check out the light and drinkable Helles, a German staple, but I made sure to try out the Dunkel, a fading, malted coffee memory of an old Germany that was perfect for a Guiness lover. The surprise of the day was the Dunkel Randlemas, a beer/lemonade hybrid that delighted the child inside of me as much as the adult.

Characteristically, Y was knocked out in round two. I tagged in.

While they had physically near-identical cloudy skies, Munich’s felt austere while Zurich’s was relaxed. Actually, Zurich probably went on vacation before we did, as nothing seemed to have been open after 4PM when we arrived. I had to throw away my dreams of slowly eating chocolate while looking at elephants in the zoo, and decided to accompany Y, who procrastinated his gift-buying until the most expensive city on our itinerary. Speaking of which, Zurich was really as expensive as it looked – but only when things were on sale.

Squandering our last day in Europe was no way to finish, especially after the terrific night in Munich. That subtle end-of-summer-camp feeling crept up, so we agreed to grab beer from a nearby train station, people watch, and toast to Zurich, Europe, and ourselves. That evening, young couples adorned the boardwalk much like they did in Paris, except the atmosphere was less romantic and more stoic. A couple drinks later, we heard crisp sounds that could have either been gunshots or champagne, and decided it was champagne. They scared some swans, who began flying around and attracting themselves to P while staying away from Y, whose track record with fowls remain unimpressive since the episode in Amsterdam when he almost fell in the canal chasing a duck. We had a chuckle, and I noticed how chilly it was. I gave Y my jacket while trying to breathe in more of the air before I leave it all as P and G lit cigarettes. I shivered from not just cold, but also increasing anxiety as night crawled in.

We kept communicating for a while without the burden of words.

Which reminds me: Zurich didn't have lowly ducks. It had Swans. I suspect eugenics.

Epilogue

I’ve always been irritated by the phenomenon that emotions, memories, and ideas seem to surface most frequently when I am going or coming, but never when I am just being. Hence, I’ve learned to make sure I have my notebook on me at every airport, but the mental baggage I had at Zurich International was more than I’ve ever had on a flight.

At one of the boutiques, those I usually just pass by while thinking of more important things, I saw some Zurich chocolate. They might not be representative, they might not be the best-tasting, they might not even be Swiss, and they were certainly overpriced. I went to buy a box anyway, the brand of which I forgot since I just nodded after asking the clerk to point to her favorite dark. The name did not matter anyway – I just wanted to be comfortable in the fact that by the time I got home I had a physical charm, but unlike toys and mugs and stuffed animals, one which I could eat to release its powers, tasting something that I brought from half a world away.

Two weeks later, sitting to draft these entries, I ate the chocolate. It was delicious.

-Y

P.S.

Zurich waterfront. I wish I owned a camera.

The train to Paris was delayed by 11 minutes, but to cry bad luck would have been unguestlike, considering the absolutely gorgeous weather that Europe had given us so far. We slumbered through a comfortable ride, and exited at Gare Du Nord, a hulk of a train station with a great window view. A French pigeon sauntered down the second floor, proud to observe its suit-wearing peons and the Asian tourists.

The Meridien was in Montparnasse, a ways south of the left bank. W advised me to get food on Rue St.Louis-en-l’ile, known for its homely atmosphere and reasonably-priced food. The thirty-minute walk gave plenty of time for smoke breaks and general banter, despite Y’s hunger-driven orders to change the leisurely walk into a force-march. At times I felt like one of the oxen in Oregon Trail when the player decides to be sadistic.

The Parthenon, one of the landmarks on the walk. We could not see all we wanted in Paris in 3 days, so this was one of the many things we passed on.

G’s ettiquete is unmatched. By that, I mean there cannot be another person alive like him since those two would enter a fight to the death and only one would remain. “I’m a simple farmer, dude,” said the legend himself, walking up the street and scaring the locals with his gait. Despite this pretense, G was responsible for some of the most acute wisdom on the trip, acquired from swimming in life instead university lectures.

“This is a nice walk, here.”
“Yeah, totally. I’m glad we’re visiting here.”
“I agree – if I lived here, I probably would not enjoy it.”

The oxen were rebellious, so by the time we arrived at the island, we were given a beautiful night view of Notre Dame. Pairs of youths encamped the sides of the river, beer in the hands and romance in the hearts.

Food at the Aux Anysetiers du Roy. Steaks for all, with a light and clean Bordeaux (Chateau Les Morins, 2007). For dessert, we grabbed crepes on the left bank - nutella and banana mean business for the tongue.

The next morning, I woke up to an impeccable skyline. A youth in the distances came onto his balcony, but I knew my view was better – this was my city.

The plan to explore my city would start at Notre Dame, from where we would head west and try to cover as many landmarks as we could, ending at the Eiffel Tower. I stayed inside the great Church for a while, tuning myself with the haunting golden cross while P lit a candle to pay respects.

Outside Notre Dame, the sun was blinding.

Inside Notre Dame. It felt like an eternal (yet spiritually soothing) night, and the cross beckoned to me with its cold glow to take a picture. I gave in.

At a Haagan-Daas we grabbed smoothies to perfect English-speaking waiters (a first in France, as most people don’t like speaking English). I got an immensely refreshing “Red Dream.” Then we passed the Louvre:

The only thing we did at the Louvre was to use the bathroom. L would later give me Hell for doing this, but I am coming back to soak myself in this city several more times, so why do everything now?

West of the Louvre was a park, where the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel was especially memorable. We coined it the “Arc du Bird* because a pigeon decided that P was a bathroom. Unflappable, P ran to wipe off his shirt on the nearest tree as the rest of us laughed and backed away from the Arc.

After heading west some more through a garden (stopping for a nice beer + Sprite panache), we reached the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, a majestic street full of trees and shopping leading directly to the Arc du Triomphe (not to be confused with the earlier Arc). I fell asleep during a massage at the incredibly sexy Citroen Showroom on the Avenue and lost the guys, though I eventually found them again at the Arc itself. Not having cellphones was actually kind of scary, so I reminded myself not to separate from the group again.

The Arch, from the middle of the Avenue that rises neatly to meet it. There was a nice illusion here - the Arch always looked closer than it actually was.

We went to the Luxembourg Gardens to unwind before the final stop. I was still impressed at how healthy the French seem to be – the only fat creatures there were pigeons. We discussed a range of topics, from weightlifting to the Cultural Revolution to the extremely out-of-place giant head in the Gardens.

The gardens my favorite chill spot on the whole trip. We first wondered if this was someone's home at some point, then wondered if we would just let people play in our front yard if we had owned such a place. I felt it would be too much of a waste if we didn't.

By dark, we finally came to the obligatory landmark – the Eiffel tower! Readers may recall I have a fear of heights (this and this), so I almost died on the way up. But with Y cheering me on, I somehow made it to the second level. The third and final level was closed, though I promised myself that one day I would make it up there.

Euphoric, I talked to everyone there who weren’t making out, which was about 3 people – this really was a city for lovers. I met two more travel virgins from South Carolina and Georgia. The guy was a little wary of me but warmed up to my irresistible charms soon enough. We took pictures, shared drinks, and toasted each other good luck.

A strange thing happened after we got back on the ground involving two Japanese girls and four locals; G and I agreed after analysis that the girls (and us) almost get mugged. Regardless, we ended up in a taxi with the most amazing cabbie ever, spiced by racism, wisdom about life and the streets, and probably illegal alien-smuggling. These stories are off the record.

A peek up the Iron Lady's Skirt from the ground.

The next day was a doozie.

A few hours before leaving, I suddenly realized D was in town, so we elected to meet outside Luxembourg gardens and grab some drinks. This involved me separating from the group (mistake #1), but I had everything under control so I took my ticket and left. I was there a bit early, so I waited for the main gate (mistake #2). A few rowdy youths kicked a ball outside the gate, once in a while sending the ball into the knobs with a loud clash. I took the time to introspect and to write in my journal a bit. The clouds were a little gloomy, but no dark omens yet.

A cute brunette jogged by, swinging by the front gate from north-to-south, following an implied rule that nobody jogs south-to-north. I observed the eyes of a wizened gentleman behind her, whose eyes forllowed her butt as she turned. He finally resigned, turned, and spat his gum into the trash can.

A few cops pull up to deal with the kids. The oldest one, wearing a Brazilian soccer jersey, animately talk to the police with impudence. By now it was 30 minutes past the rendezvous time. I curse not having a working cellphone (mistake #0), so I walk back towards the station. Suddenly, I see D reading at the other gate. We laugh and sit down outside a nearby restaurant. I order a gin-and-tonic to accompany our discussion about what is important in life.

A shot of the main building and the pond in the Luxembourg Gardens. A healing salve for weariness.

The most impressive difference about the French (or in general European) rhythm of life can be found in food. The French really take their food slowly – we can have two hour meals here with nobody hurrying us to take the check. The meal is a time to enjoy food, enjoy company, and to rest the soul. The outside seating is another bonus, something I don’t see much Stateside except, say, on Newbury St. in Cambridge. This concept of enjoying each moment as its own reward instead of a stepping point to the next thing on the “queue of important things” offers a stark contrast to the hurried American way of life. I really admire it, and take my time with the food and enjoy D’s company, talking about everything from France to girls in our lives.

In retrospect this was an error (mistake #3), but I do strongly believe in this singletasking, non-hurried lifestyle in general. D asks for a second round of gin. I accept (mistake #4). We part ways, promise to see each other again back in the States next year, and I head down into the Luxembourg subway stop.

The line was quite long, so I waited (mistake #5) for about 5 minutes before I get to the ticket station. I then discovered the only subway station which did not accept cash in Paris. I ran about half a mile to get to the Notre Dame stop. I made the train just in time, and counted seconds to get to Gare du Nord. I quickly realized my arrival time would be exactly 5 minutes late, which wasn’t too bad, unless… oh, the trains were never late in Eruope, were they?

At that point, reality fell on me like it did on P: I was…

…to be continued.
-Y

Brussels probably had my favorite architecture on the trip, next to some parts of Paris.

Our first goal was Autoworld, a museum of historical cars located in the awesome Parc du Cinquantenaire. The archway was the most breathtaking building I’ve seen up to that point, unapologetically magnificent, from the extremely wide wall paintings on either sides of the horseshoe to the bronzed guardians on the chariot. Brilliant.

Charles Girault was a man among men.

Autoworld was a lot more fun than it should be, given that the only thing I know about cars is how to mooch rides off friends so I don’t have to drive. The most interesting car was the Amphicar, pictured below (runner-up: the 1954 BAT 7 ).

I used my car as a boat too, but that's just because I was a really bad driver.

Alex and Nathan have told me to not miss Delirium Cafe, but even getting to it turned out to be an adventure, as we had to fight through a trecherous gauntlet of outdoor restaurants which I named the Red Food District. Around 10 maitre d’s would block our way and ping us with every language they figured we would speak and attempt to drag us to the tables. We fearlessly fought through the undead horde and arrived at the home of the 2000-long beer list. I am not a big enough beer buff to peruse the full list of 2000 beers, so we just looked at a small list and picked out the Floris berry kriek and the St. Bernadus Abt 12. This was as unholy as beer matrimonies go, but I wasn’t exactly feeling saintly by the 50 or so taps.

The infamous St. Bernadus Abt 12 (10.5% abv). I assure you the monks were not their monkly selves after drinking a liter of this.

Y was starting to see pink elephants at this point, so we willingly offer ourselves to the vices of the Red Food District. I actually got a pretty amazing rumsteak (though the wine was bland) for 17 Euro. Quite full, we sit and take in the town square before going back for sleep.

One of the overseers of this tourist deathtrap would not let me physically pass without saying we would be back. "Good. We have an American promise," he said. What does that mean????

In the morning, we take the bus in the wrong direction and get lost (I blame P’s French, or maybe the nice grandmother on the bus giving him directions really wanted him to be with her longer), but we somehow bumble our way back to the city center, where we ate at the climatically-named Brussels Grill. P reminded us that there was a Belgium specialty we should not be forgetting.

Belgium is not just known for chocolate. This glorified cocaine for the tongue made me melt into it instead of the other way around, for an altogether amazing (yet creepy) experience.

Before finally getting on the train to Paris, I stopped by the Tintin Boutique, revisiting my childhood hero (Harry Potter has nothing on the most badass 22-year-old freelance reporter of all time). I settled on a Captain Haddock coffee mug, but I realized it could not be the only souvenir when I saw the Snowy plush. Now I had a lovable and fiercely loyal companion to aid me through the dangers of graduate school. Little did we know that an unexpected storm already awaited me in Paris.

Thousands of blistering barnacles.

-Y

Snowy, curtesy of the Tintin Boutique (store.tintin.com)

P.S. Brussels elevators earn massive points by having a mathematically clean numbering system. The B’s, L’s, and M’s always annoyed me.

This is the kind of things I (and probably that xkcd guy) think about when zoning out.

P.P.S. Y astutely pointed out that having the trunk of the car opening up to be a seat was a pretty sweet feature. I think he is spot on.

Now you can finally (legally) fit 7 Asians into a car.

He looked like he was trying to look happier than he was – his smiles sighed and his laughs frowned when we talked about mundane work and life and he gave advice that seemed to have been nailed to his heart: “If you get the big things right – and there are only two big things really: your job and your wife (chuckles, points to ring), you can make all the small mistakes you want. Never make the mistake of working for money. It drives people crazy and doesn’t make you happy. Find a job you love and you will not have to work.”

But there was no mistaking the youthful sparkle in his eyes when he recalled the tonic-like air of Notre Dame and the comfortable drizzle of the streets of London. A naked glee surfaced when he talked about how the best part of 8-AM meetings in Europe was getting to climb mountains and enjoy parks for the rest of the day. I handed the conversation to him at that point, and his hat no longer looked as heavy on him.

“Good meeting you, son. You have a long and exciting life ahead of you. Good luck on your trip.”

“You look like you still have sixty years yourself.” I was not really joking.

Of course, we get another delay taxi-ing in the airport, so by the time I exit the plane,  Y, G, and P were already in the plane to Amsterdam. I started running Olympic-speed (in the event involving flip-flops and two bags). “Final boarding call for Yan Zhang for flight XXX, departure time 5:20″ repeated itself twice, but two Continental workers cheered for me (“Go go go!”) as I Usain Bolted down the final stretch, ending with a long jump into the gate at 5:09. “No need to be so feisty, brother,” said the second worker.

*

The first thing that caught my attention exiting Amsterdam Centraal was an elegant-looking tween brushing past me, a flurry of camera flashes following her. She had the face of a girl heading to a final exam. Then I saw the bikes.

It's China! With white people!

P, the Amsterdam expert, led the search for coffeeshops (as opposed to coffee shops) of Amsterdam, through the Rijksmuseum, the Dam Square (where we saw a shielded Inca Warrior and.. Batman taking pictures with tourists next to the wonderfully phallic National Monument). It took me quite a while to know what this meant, but I understood soon after entering one. Maybe it was the Rastafarian art on every wall, the sculptures of aliens and UFOs on the ceilings, or the marijuana menu in plain sight catering every strain from Purple Haze to Northern Lights. An elderly couple in their fifties came in after us, grabbed two seats, and started rolling their joints.

We soon come to the I AMSTERDAM sign at Museumplein Park. We sit and breathe in the air, which breezed de-stress and relaxation… or maybe that is just all the secondhand hash in the wind working.

I am sterdam! But where am I? (Solutions at the end of the chapter)

Of the few things I planned ahead for in this trip, the first was the Van Gogh Museum, which was visible in the distance at this time across a green field. The museum was small and unassuming, and all of Van Gogh’s works were collected on one floor in a cycle of rooms with no doors, starting from the darker (shade, not context) works of Dutch influence of Nuenen (early 1880′s), through the colorful works he adapted from French and Japanese art (despite his earlier disdain for them) in Paris, ending with the amazingly varied and mature works in Saint-Remy (including my favorite, cliched yet abrasively efficient in its strokes: “Wheat Field with Crows, 1890″). Considering I have the memory facilities of a peanut, I strained to take down every pixel I could, looking at each piece several times. I was frequently distracted by Y, who at this time (had a little too much coffee?) was hulking around like an iron golem behind me, whom he (it?) took as his adaptive mother. However, I did manage to find a couple of new favorite pieces, including this one:

Tree Trunks with Ivy, 1889. Watching the tesselating strokes somehow form a coherent picture was mesmerizing. (Source: www.vangoghgallery.com)

I gained more admiration for the master’s refusal to be bound to academic tradition (almost entirely self-taught!), and wished I could summon the same genius while being a rebel to tradition. On the way out, G buys a Moleskin to pay respects. The notes from my own,which I bought in Boston before the flight, will eventually become these blog posts.

At this park, a boy in red plaid was throwing balls for two cute white puppies with an instrument that looked like it came from jai alai. "Do dogs instinctively know how to run after balls?" Y asked.

The next day, we woke up fighting jetlag to see Fernando Torres score a hat trick on New Zealand, and now I have a new favorite soccer player. I became more excited about soccer simply because I was in Europe, a testament to the power of ambient culture, something that will resurface several times. For various reasons we were more chilled-out today, so we spent more time canal-watching. I ordered a pretty mean caprinha (Brazil’s national cocktail) from one of the canal-side bars, and the “frites speciaal” from Fedo (fries, mayo, delicious bad-for-you-goodness). I saw ducklings.

Cute duckies. Like me.

For the day’s walk, we decided to walk down to Sarphal Park south of the city center. We grabbed some coffee at Coffee & Company, chilled a bit in the park, and swung back north to the infamous Red Light District. Coffeeshops galore, this den of legal iniquity featured, at each crimson-framed window, a worker showing her jiggly wares, always impeccably dressed and made up.

It was late and we have an early train to Brussels, so being the ballers we are, we end the day by eating at a high-class restaurant that “you people” can never afford.

This is how we roll

-Yan

P.S. Answer to quiz:

If you still can't find Yan then you need glasses

P.P.S. I mean seriously. Not only can the guy score from anywhere, he is hot too! Check out his official site.

Explanation: I recently had a good conversation with Christian, who was about to graduate from Harvard, about the role of people in life. One of my biggest regrets is that I neglected people a bit in senior year, especially when I worked furiously on my thesis. When I moved up to Stamford, I made it a personal goal to work on my relationships more seriously.

At college, the less socially talented people (like me) have a temptation to take friends for granted. It is easy to bump into everyone around campus – if you meet someone you do not need to make that connection right away; you’ll see them by the ABP, working in Lamont, or at some drunken Quad party. Both your classroom and your dorms create atmospheres where you can naturally meet people your age with similar interests and situations. At work, there are more artificial barriers – seniority status, age differences, professional nature of the workplace, etc. all make creating personal relationships a bit harder (even though coworkers are still the easiest new friends to make, and I have met/re-met some awesome people at Ellington with whom I will keeping in touch, such as G, J, I, or R). The dorm equivalent – the apartment – is hardly a social scene compared to college dorms, except the walls are still so thin for you to hear people having sex, domestic disputes, or both at the most curious hours. Ironic that in this age when saying a simple “hi” to a neighbor in urban areas is considered more “creepy” than friendly, we are much further apart even though the web creates an illusion that we should be further connected.

Last year, when I was surfing Facebook, I suddenly asked myself: “out of the 500 – 600 friends I have on Facebook, how many do I genuinely interact with?” Even though in general I refuse friend requests from people I don’t know, maybe 300 of my contacts were people I met as a result of a school/club/summer thing with no real connection, or some unmemorable party/nightclub experience where the number/contact exchange was just for fun instead of genuine interest. I have probably only 50 actual “good friends,” as in people who would hang out with me in the same town by one of us *naturally* remembering and contacting the other person. But this means in the middle there are probably at least 100-200 people with whom I’ve had a nontrivial connection, and with whom I can carry on a generally interesting face-to-face conversation if he/she were sitting in front of me.

This was a massive inefficiency – all my warning bells in my brain rang, preparing me for the “aha” moment. It suddenly clicked for me on how much I was missing without being actively social with this “middle group” – the people with whom I can very easily find common ground, because they are actually very similar to the “good friend” group except that one of the parties have to *actively* remember and contact the other person, which is something of very little cost, especially with Facebook! I almost kicked myself at how simple this all was, and how easy this must be for my “naturally social” friends (yes, *those* people). I learned an incredible amount from my work last year, but this was one of the most important observations I made all year. Indeed, this is why I started New York Survivor (a game I made for myself where I go to NY on friday nights, and do as much as possible while trying to stay in the city until Sunday). Now I am in grad school, even though I’m not going out as much (the Boston and New York club scenes are just… uncomparable ;P), I am still trying to do the same thing; this was actually made easier since Boston/Cambridge is a much easier place to just chill due to the ample sitting room and the non-croweded streets. Instead of Central Park, the downtown restaurants, or Soho, I’m typically doing the Miracle of Science Bar, Rangzen, or Cafe Luna (they have really sexy food and smoothies).

With V, the daughter of one of my father’s old friends, I discovered a lot of new music and broadened my playlist. With C, the new boyfriend of a not-so-close friend I had in college, I found many common interests and that he was a dan-level Go player who had a lot to teach me about my game. With A, an old classmate from a writing seminar who made herself run the Boston Marathon “just because” even though she was never a runner in college, I reminded myself of my love for writing and I’m even beginning to run again to complement weightlifting. With K and S, two of the most social people I know, I talked about this exact topic and how rewarding it can be to our happiness.

Each event was so precarious – without that one conscious click on that “Send Message” button on Facebook I would not have made a connection that would be so easy to pass away otherwise. The opportunity cost was invisible yet incredible. Instead of taking time to do those things I might have just been watching Youtube videos, taking a nap, or reading FML (yes, realistically I would have tried to use that time to do things with higher value, but the point is that each of these particular meetings were pretty amazing), but otherwise I wouldn’t have discovered the PAL soundtrack, I wouldn’t have realized how much crappier my middle game seemed to have become (probably worse than 10k…), and I probably would not have started this long-overdue blog post. I’m sure many of you are wondering why I got so excited over such a simple concept (that you probably already use very efficiently), but when the blind suddenly sees, he is bound to be excited.

Then again, my back hurts like hell.

Ow,

-Yan

While I’m not getting into the Zagat anytime soon, I will learn to salt the eggplant next time and put in the chicken a bit later. And maybe get a real wok.

Like studying for a test, I’ve put off learning to cook for a very long time. Maybe it is because I know I’ll never make it taste, smell, or even look like my mother’s dishes; maybe it is because eating out gives some measure of peace that I am able to, through some process, make a fragrant, hearty serving of Thai crispy chicken goodness appear in front of my plate. I knew the first real dish I cook would be a disaster, so to stall the pain to the ego I had all sorts of excuses to push it back.

The way these things usually go, everyone in the universe conspires against me to make the fated day happen. It was probably the tenth time my roommate J. casually left his chicken stew simmer on the stove, so flavorful that I got hungry while opening the room door, while my conscience kindly poked the back of my brain (with a chef’s knife?) that the last thing I cooked for myself, like the 500 times before it, was either cereal, microwavable oatmeal, or fried eggs when I decide to get fancy. Of course at school, G. suggested in her energetic European way that I simply *must* go watch Ratatouille because it was “so good that it makes you hungry,” only the day before L. wanted to watch a happy film. Ratatouille it was.

The universe conspiring to make me learn to cook.

I tried to go to sleep that night after the film, but my stomach kept me awake, lecturing me in that language that only we both know, a kind of Morse code with rumbles, that I needed to cook. The next day I was somehow in front of the board, chopping onions, defrosting the chicken, and having one of those “huh what am I doing here” moments where I didn’t quite believe I was actually there cooking.

The garlic was somewhat burnt, the onions not so much, combining into barbeque smell with a hint of backyard charcoal. The chicken was overcooked just a little bit thanks to salmonella paranoia and I used too much soy sauce, but it was edible. I recycled the sauce from the pan in the first dish to make a quick omelet, a spark of the upper bound of my cooking genius. A microwaved bag of vegetables completed dinner, and L. approved.

It wasn’t bad. No painstaking work of breathtaking genius (TM), but it wasn’t bad.

Five days later Bittman’s How to Cook Everything arrived in the mail. Now my pantry has a little more than salt, pepper, and canned soup. I have tomatoes in the fridge and chicken in the freezer (in little ziploc bags after learning the hard way not to just put the whole piece in there at once). More than just cooking technique though, Bittman crystallized in one digestible packet the love of cooking I found in Emil (the rat chef from Ratatouille): “cooking is one of the few simple, routine joys of daily life.”

By spending much of my time avoiding learning how to cook and to rationalize it by the time I am saving, I lost time spent in earnest enjoyment in the moment as I smell the tomatoes, chop the onions, wipe my brow and salivate in anticipation at the satisfaction of one of God’s five basic sensations that can be born at my hands. It was jazz for my taste buds.

-YZ