So Ive actually been working quite a bit, thats the main reason why I havnt really written anything but Ive also made sure Ive been busy during my free time.
The whole cultural forum going on in Monterrey has something to do with the vast amount of cultural activities that have suddenly taken over the city but most of the events Ive gone to havnt been part of the forum. Theres a lot of concerts going on like the "Heroes del Silencio" concert about two weeks ago and the "Riders of the Storm"(or whats left of the doors) concert last week, I sneaked my camera in and recorded the whole "Light my fire" song, Ill try and post it on youtube probably violating a bunch of different rights, ill take it off if somebody whines about it. Life in Monterrey is actually more and more enjoyable each day. Also because of all the forum thing they are actually making the city very pretty, they made this new riverwalk and they are installing a bunch of statues all around the city.

I recently adopted a new pet, well actually its been living with me for a while but I just noticed its made a home of my bathroom and decided to let it be and adopt it. Some time ago I noticed there was a spider in my bathroom and I decided to let it be(that was about two years ago or so) then I left to china and came back(its been a year since I came back) well this week I was brushing my teeth and for some strange reason I decided to do something I hadnt done in a very very very long time, I looked at the ceiling in my bathroom, well it turns out it has been taken over by the spider and what once was a small spider about one fourth the size of my fingerprint now its a huge spider about one fourth the size of my entire hand. So since I realized its been there for quite some time(I can tell because of the size of its spider web) and we have been coexisting all of this time I might as well let it be and adopt it. It doesnt have a name yet but Im open to suggestions. I leave my window open from time to time to let bugs in so that my spider has lots of food. This is an actual picture of my spider.

After spending a total of 26 days abroad I am finally back from Asia. My trip ended up with a few more stops than the ones I originally planned.

I started out by flying out of Monterrey to Mexico City and then to Tijuana, that was a bit of a surprise since I didn't actually expected to stop in Tijuana and not only did we stop but we had a 3 hour layover at the airport, quite annoying. At the end of it I ended leaving Tijuana by 3am which is 5am central time(time in Monterrey) so that was pretty much a Night Owl Flight without me knowing about it. I didn't complain too much since the service was actually really nice, but what can I say, I was flying on first class. After leaving Tijuana at 3am local time we went straight to Tokyo.

Once in Tokyo I discovered how annoyingly racists, self centered and proud Japanese are, I learnt that the hard way. Everyone is very nice, too nice it even seemed fake. Turns out Japanese banks tend to over protect their economy and therefore do not take any international card anywhere so finding an ATM that actually works with international cards tends to be annoyingly troublesome and to top it off MasterCard(the type of card I was carrying) is pretty much non existent in japan and therefore trouble is usually double. Hotels and stores take international cards perfectly fine, most small restaurant don't nor do travel agents. The main problem in Tokyo was my flight to Beijing, I had reserved the flight through a Chinese travel agency only to find out that the idiots reserved it the wrong way, going from Beijing to Tokyo and then back to Beijing. I had then to try and find a ticket to Beijing only to notice that that was the precise time for vacations in Tokyo and therefore everyone was leaving the city, airplane tickets where a hard thing to come about. I finally ended up finding a ticket with some sort of an international travel agency but surprise surprise they don't take international cards and since they expected me to pay it in cash two days before the flight it was impossible for me to pay for it. Luckily a friend of mine named Sharon helped me out by finding another ticket with a rather flexible travel agency. They didn't take card either but at least I could pretty much pay for the ticket anytime until two hours prior to departure which was just great, that gave me enough time to get money from the atms. However I ended up with only about 300US in cash to spend in Tokyo and my card for whoever would take it. That added to the fact that my hotel was actually on the outskirts of Tokyo in a boring neighborhood(although on the Internet it said it was really close to the city center, walking distance), I pretty much ended finding Tokyo as a city with a strong working culture, great food, great architecture but not really much fun at all.

I then arrived in Beijing 3 days afterwards. I pretty much just met with old friends and went around all the parts of Beijing I liked. Then my girlfriend ended up with some sort of visa problem since she was about to overstay her legal time in china so we had to leave the country and go back in. We took an advantage of that and went to South Korea for a whole week. Mostly went to Seoul but also went island hopping on the west island of South Korea. Seoul was a lot of fun and Koreans where definitely better than the Japanese as far as attitude and everything goes, plus they are almost as efficient, clean and organized but I found out that there are also really really strong christian influences and ended up being preached to in the subway which was a bit annoying but all in all I kind of fell in love with Seoul although I think the hotel had a lot to do with it, we stayed in the W hotel which was by far the best choice we could have taken. The beaches on the west where really nice and surprisingly untouched, we pretty much traveled over four different islands eating delicious fresh seafood everywhere.

After that we went back to Beijing. I did everything else I wanted to do in Beijing and pretty much just went out as often as I could. Also managed to spent some great quality time with my girlfriend as expected. Other than that pretty much just did random shopping for interesting things.

Then I went back to Tokyo for a night since I didn't manage to get a flight from Beijing to Tokyo to catch my flight from Tokyo at 2pm. That was actually good since because of that Tokyo pretty much redeemed itself. I made sure I was taking lots of cash to Tokyo before I went there and found a small but yet nice hotel in one of the best districts full of life, shopping and all in all fun. I ended up going in a shopping spree in the hundreds of Japanese designer stores buying all sorts of funky Japanese stuff, from chopsticks to stress balls, notebooks and tea supplies.

It was a fun trip and now its actually really sad to be back in Mexico.

Beijing hasn't changed that much except they are trying really hard to get prepared for the Olympics, but they are still a bit far away from it. I'm still sure they will finish everything by then though, worst thing that can happen they bring in even more Chinese to work at the construction sites. Lots of new cool buildings, a really cool stadium, more subway lines and lots and lots of random Olympics paraphernalia. Pollution has apparently gone down but its still pretty harmful and hard to notice the difference.

I'm about to go to China for a month or so, actually a bit less than that but almost a month. I managed to get a free ticket to Tokyo with Aeromexico stealing my father's miles. I'm still trying to figure out how will I get to Beijing from Tokyo, its not as easy as I had originally planned.

Why am I going back to Beijing you might ask? Well as it happens with most people who live in Beijing, the developement of a dependence occurs while your there. Your lungs get used to breathing smog and fresh air in great quantities might even kill you. Your blood becomes dependant of the fake almost radioactive alcohol that you get around the Beijing bars. Your digestive process ends up requiring the burnt carburetor oil used for cooking the food in the street restaurants. Beijing will kill you in small doses but it large doses it will will make you dependent. Therefore those of us who leave Beijing will end up loosing our sanity, at best, or our life, at worst, if we part for too long. The psychiatrist recommends at least a yearly visit, which is what I'm about to do.

Ill probably not write much while I'm there, well actually I will, just most likely not here. Although with the frequency I do write here you might not even notice I'm gone.

On other news I posted four more pictures on my pretentious selection, then I randomly organized everything. Extra points for those who figure out which are the new pictures.

Talking of my pretentious selection, a friend of mine made a note on my lack of pretentiousness because of the sole reason that I wasn't an active member in the most artistically failing and yet pretentious web community, deviant art. So to try and prove how pretentious I can get to be I now sustain an active deviant art account with about 25% of the pretentious selection of pictures currently hosted here.

Other than that my time has been consumed by a new web-page I'm starting(which unlike this one actually has a purpose). Its hosted in www.noescierto.com and its supposed to be an informative mean to the best places to visit in Monterrey. Unfortunately for those illiterate of you its mostly in Spanish and a another bit in some sort of illegible language produced by the iso encoding while trying to interpret the orthographical Spanish accents(mostly because I haven't been able to fix it). So for those of you who can actually read Spanish you can go there and find out more about Monterrey, for those of you who cant you can still go there and try and pretend you do.

Oh yes and I'm writing a new book, this one an actual novel and not the failure that I wrote earlier. Its about the clever process in which the ITESM(the university I shamefully graduated from) is able to conceive incoherence through its teachers.

Ive implemented a new RSS feed which unlike the old one feeds posts from most categories independently if they are published in the frontpage or not, both the pretentious and the picture gallery are not included in the feed, neither the answers section(that's disappearing soon). The old one will be removed soon so please update your feeds. The frontpage will now only be used for news, mainly about me, my doings, my life and the nonsense network(some people whined about not knowing anything about whats going on with me even though they read my webpage regularly). Plus the new feed has an official nonsense network button. Enjoy...