Man, what a bizarre place I'm headed to. I feel strangely like an outsider as I zoom by spots like Pacific Beach, full of surfers and failed auditioners for The Hills. 
I was in San Diego this week to find myself an apartment for my upcoming jaunt to grad school. After a stressful full day of bad apartment tours and sketchy property owners, I found myself a Taiwanese lady looking to rent her furnished place in a complex I like right by the UCSD campus. I used my Asian Studies skillz to beat the competition, secure the place, and at $100 under her asking price for each month's rent.
How does one use Asian Studies in finding an apartment? The following two ways:
-Say that I'm staying a long time. OK, on second thought, any landlord would prefer a guy who says he'll stay two years to someone who doesn't know how long they'll stay, but at least I get a few points for connecting that to Confucius in my head, right? I also used my long stay as leverage to get the rent to come down.
-The lease starting date was earlier than I wanted, so I asked for a discount on the first month's rent... by invoking my mother. I don't even know how I did it, and I'm not sure it was grammatical when I asked, but it broke the ice on a negotiation where my then-tentative landlady was starting to hold firm. OK, so in all fairness it wasn't a massive discount and she knew I was agreeing to pay for earlier than I wanted to.
Still, I'm holding to my theory that my extremely skewed and limited knowledge of Chinese philosophy helped me get a place that I actually like.
Don't have pics yet, but it's a small studio with an OK bed, a wee little TV stand, a nice glass dining table, and a fully stocked kitchen (plates, knives, cooking ware, etc.) and even linens. This is nice, because I don't have to dig into my savings to go on a shopping rampage at Ikea or stress out over selling it all in a last-second rush upon my eventual departure from SD.
My time not spent apartment hunting was spent observing California. Here's what I found, which will no doubt contribute to an overwhelming sense of culture shock and possible depression come July or August:
-Yelling hobos
-More sushi places than all other cuisines' restaurants put together
-A linguistic melting pot not unlike Blade Runner. That is, tons of people speaking a huge variety of languages on the street.
-A taco shop [there's also tons of these] decorated entirely with the inspiration of Lucha Libre wrestling
-Nice weather with overcast skies called "shitty weather"
-Car pornography so nasty it's bannable in Germany: Ferrari/Maserati, Lotus, and Bentley dealers all in a 3-block radius, also next to private sellers with more Ferraris, a Ford GT and a Veyron. How you doin', La Jolla.
-San Diego staying classy