a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here are a few pictures of my apartment in Dameisha (it’s a three bedroom) that I share with my colleagues. One can walk down to the beach from here, but is a good 15 or 20 minutes, though.
It’s still chilly outside and in, and we don’t have central heating, hence the space heater. (Yes, we need to keep an eye on it, and be sure to turn it off when we leave).
Yes, home it is not but it will do, right? Only three of us got picked up tonight by the driver at Hong Kong airport. The rest of the gang will come out tomorrow due to the snowstorm that closed the airports out east.
The flight went very well; the sore throat I started with even cleared up somewhat. My friendly little teddy bear piggy bank was waiting on my desk in my room for me, so that cheered me up a little bit (aww LOL) ! I have ‘reconfigured’ my wallet (out with the greenbacks, in with the red 100 yuan notes), and my computer bag, so I should be ready in the morning for the shuttle bus to the Daya Bay offices at 6.30 am.
I got put on the earlier 6am flight to San Francisco again, which is good – gives me a little more time to make the connection to Hong Kong. Dry and clear here, no sign of rain and snow. One could almost think winter is passing us over this season, but I don’t believe that !
Oh, and the two canisters of powdered Parmesan cheese pasta have been tested for explosives by security at the airport ! My roommates and I had better enjoy them. I’m not packing powdered parmesan cheese into my bags again.
I’m packing my bags and shipping out on Saturday morning (flying out, that is). Most of my other team members will have to stay put for a day or two longer. They are on the East Coast and there is a massive blizzard moving in. It looks like they will have to wait until Sunday or Monday.
I took the bus to downtown to go pick up my passport with the new visa in, at the office. I stayed there for a bit to catch up on my e-mails as well.
It was rainy this morning, and cleared up later. I don’t mind the rain at all. One of Seattle’s monikers is Rain City, after all. (For a while there was Jet City, while Boeing was still headquartered here, and we have Emerald City for tourists, a better one than Rain City, I’m sure).
It was a busy day, but not too hectic. I bought a Mandarin phrasebook (the inevitable panda on the little guy’s shirt), a Hong Kong book, and a Chinese character study book. Sounds like I’m serious about learning some Chines, but all I hope for is to make a start with, say 200 or so characters !
My passport and multiple-entry visa will arrive tomorrow (the first visa only allowed two entries, and I have used both). I also went ahead today and applied for an ‘enhanced’ drivers license that can be used to cross the border into Canada and Mexico by car, ferry or rail (or foot, I suppose) – just in case I had to send in my passport, and then want to go up to Vancouver for the weekend. I was allowed to smile, see? : ) which surprised me because I thought smiling distorts the biometric data gleaned from one’s face (lines between the eyes, nose and mouth) on the picture.
Tonight my friends & I went to a nice neighborhood bar for cocktails, beers and pub food. It was wonderful – it always is.
My body clock is still somewhat shifted, so I got up really early to come into the office here in downtown Seattle. I use the bus two blocks from my house with my Orca card (in Hong Kong it’s an Octopus card, which I already have and plan to use lots as well).
All the printers in the office were replaced just last week (of course) with different models, so it took 30 mins for me to install new printer drivers, and then when people started arriving at 8.00 am I still had to go ask for help to scan and send in my expense reports since the instructions by the printer had not been replaced. Aargh.
Looks like a beautiful day here from where I’m sitting. I wonder if February will be as mild as January. Last month was the warmest January on record here in Seattle.
It’s Monday and I already have to catch up with some work! (from home, giving myself one more day then I’ll go into the office tomorrow). It also allows me to take care of very necessary little tasks, such as throwing my computer backpack into the washing machine to get rid of the smell from a chunk of banana that went unnoticed and bad inside of it! Blech. My house is in decent shape, and the deck and yard at the back is finally free of leaves and twigs now that the neighbor’s maple tree has shed all it had for the season.
The 2007 versions of Microsoft Word and Excel that we upgraded to recently, seems buggy and glitchy and I’ll go and ask the tech support guy tomorrow if he had similar complaints from other users. (Always a bad situation when you’re the only one with a problem that no one has ever seen before).
I have to get a light jacket and maybe a few more dress shirts so that I have some extra ones, out in China. Isabella, the dry cleaner shop in the apartment complex, is on the pricey side at $2 a shirt and even more for pants, but the clothes come out of the cleaners looking like new.
More pictures while roaming around on the streets of Hong Kong.
Here is an assembly of most of the things I brought back from this trip : Noritake bone China coffee mugs, Will Pan aka 潘玮柏 Pan Wei Bo 3 CD set made in Germany, panda bear (cannot go to China and NOT come back with a panda bear, right?!), Starbucks espresso mugs for Shenzhen and China, ‘lucky cat’ piggy bank (Japanese, not Chinese, though), ‘Cartier’ watch (Chinese, not French! hah), Year of the Tiger crocheted card, Starbucks gift in bag, cheap but beautiful bone China. A modest collection, yes – no silk!, no jade!, no expensive China! – I’m too cheap! Actually, my Chinese-English electronic translator didn’t make it into the picture and was a few $100.
Got my passport out to New York by overnight mail, I need a visa again, hopefully I will get a multiple-entry one this time. Otherwise I just ran errands, picked up three weeks’ mail (90% junk mail of course) at the post office, and went to the gym. It felt so nice to get some exercise.
.. and it’s still Thursday. I traveled back in time, so to speak, of course. It reminds me of the limerick –
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light;
She set out one day,
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
– by Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, in the December 19, 1923 issue of Punch
It’s 10 o’clock at night and I have to run out to get milk and bread. I’ll put a few more Hong Kong pictures up tomorrow.
My flight has been delayed by 6 hours, but that’s OK. It is so nice to be able to go home for a week. Wednesday night, we stayed at the upmarket Marriott Hong Kong Sky City hotel, close to the airport last night.
My colleagues, carnivorous Americans that they are, couldn’t wait to sink their teeth into a cheeseburger in the hotel’s restaurant. They talked about it with some of our Chinese colleagues already as we were leaving Daya Bay. The conversation went as follows : ‘You should not kill animals and eat them, you should eat vegetables’. Response : ‘Oh, we kill the animals to save the vegetables!’. Oh boy : ).
I had plans of my own : grabbed a sandwich in the hotel lobby and went out to explore the city with the help of the MTR subway system. I will post a few night-time pictures of Hong Kong when I get home. Night time there offers spectacular cityscapes. At one point the train went through an out-worldly forest of 50 story-high apartment buildings. The airport is out on Lantau island west of Hong Kong island, and it takes a while to get to Kowloon or Hong Kong and so it was already 10pm by the time I got there, and most of the stores were closing. I should be able to come back to Hong Kong several times, though.
We are cramming in as much work as possible today before we leave. We plan to leave at 4pm today for Hong Kong, and stay over at the airport hotel.
I might have been able to have stuck around until Thursday morning, because my flight is only at noon on Thursday. It’s better to travel with the departing group, though. I plan to explore Hong Kong at night on my own a little – I hope there is time for that.
Hey, Tuesday is one day closer to Thursday. By now the bus ride in to work offers few surprises, but I still see many more ‘out of place things’ than perhaps I would see in the USA on the way to work : a kid that seems way too young to be bicycling on his own on the busy road; an electrical control panel door left open on the side of a building, a driver doing a risky move.
We had dinner last night at a new (for us) little restaurant close to our apartments, and the food was excellent: pork on a bone with Szechuan spices (I’m still careful to bite too big into food with these), eggplant strips with garlic, noodles in a broth (got to have those!) and TsingTao beer. The tab? A scant 43 yuan ($6) each. I’m told the cleaning lady for our apartment gets $6 for two hours’ work.
On a Saturday morning we can walk down towards the beach and buy a delicious omelet-like breakfast on the sidewalk by the beach for 50 American cents. The radiant heater-fan combination in our apartment was all of $12 at Walmart. Of course, a cheap currency helps exports (as my dad told us many times at the dinner table when we were kids!), but it also makes the money in the Great Piggy Bank of China (by some estimates it was $4.3 trillion in 2009) worth a lot less.
I’ve borrowed one of the weekend in Hong Kong’s pictures to cheer me up, since it’s Monday – a working sap’s un-favorite day of the week. These characters adorned a rack of jackets in the clothing floor of the Sogo department store which reminded me much of Macy’s in the USA.
I do have Wednesday to look forward to as the last day of this trip. Most of us go back on Thursday. (Yippee!). Some team members will ‘hold the fort’ and retain a presence here, and back in the USA we will have to finish up some documentation.
Pictures from exploring Hong Kong.
Wow! I made it to Hong Kong today! and I so wished all of you could be here to experience it with me ! I would never have made it without going with my colleague from work, though. We started out on a bus ride in Dameisha, and had to transfer twice. There is no way I could have figured out the Chinese bus tables at the transfer stops. The buses took us to Shenzhen, and then we got separated at the Chinese customs, and again at the Hong Kong customs points. Isn’t customs/ immigration is a little like human relationships? Do I let you in? Do I like you? Do I like your politics? What will you offer in return for the offer of new cultures, new vistas, new experiences? (Money! I guess).
After getting through Hong Kong customs, the efficient (and crowded) Mass Transit Railway (MTR) System is at one’s disposal to go just about anywhere on Hong Kong Island (bottom of map picture) and Kowloon (top part of map). First a few basics about Hong Kong .. it is now a special administrative region of China (handed over in 1997 by the British), they have a different currency from China, the Hong Kong dollar. The written language is the same as in mainland China, but they speak Cantonese and not Mandarin!
So here goes with a quick run-down of what we did. We stopped at a nice electronics store, and I bought a little handheld Chinese-English translator-computer with a stylus that lets one practice Chinese writing as well (I’ll try to learn just a few characters at a time. I have no illusions about how difficult it is, given that it takes a Chinese person 15 years of schooling to learn the written language! Next we had a nice lunch, dumplings and noodles in a broth for me. The MTR got us to Victoria Bay/ Hong Kong harbor where the picture of me was taken (so it’s the Hong Kong Island skyline behind me, a little foggy). Then we took the short Star Ferry ride across the water to Hong Kong Island. My colleague Samuel went clothes shopping while I went to a department store called Sogo. I came away with a stuffed panda bear, a lucky cat piggy bank and two Noritake coffee mugs. The MTR took us back to the border post with Shenzhen, where we again negotiated the two customs entry points. I was called out of the long line (no doubt because I was looking very foreign with my lily-white face in the large crowd of Asian people). My temperature was taken with an infrared scanner before they let me through.
I’ll post a selection of colorful pictures of Hong Kong tomorrow. It was all a little overwhelming and I couldn’t get enough of the imagery everywhere. I will have to go back.
So here we are : our third and last Friday before we get to go back home. From where I sit in the corner, I see a collection of long desks and chairs on both sides, where we are all working. There’s a Chinese SAP desk calendar on my right, and today we all got little red gift boxes from a guy that got married. The little box has a miniature pink teddy bear with a bow tie on the lid, and there are little pieces of candy inside. Little bears and other cuddly creatures are used on labeling & cards & advertising to signal a warm and fuzzy feeling, much as is the case in the USA, but more extensively so.
My weekend getaway plan is to go to Hong Kong by bus with a co-worker – only for a Saturday day trip. It would be so great to have a local person to go with! It’s intimidating to step into a bus full of Chinese people, feeling that they are staring at you (usually they are not)! I have not even been able to find a bus schedule online or at the bus stop. Without the bus, my next best shot at the moment, is to walk down to the Sheraton hotel and see if they can get me a taxi.
The whole team went to dinner last night at the restaurant that serves up baby pigeons as its specialty. (Yes, I am horrible – I ate some baby pigeon as well. It is quite good!). The table has a lazy Susan, and they must have brought out 25 different dishes : roasted peanuts, spicy cabbage, jellyfish (none for me), fish with parsnip, a hot corn drink, beer, oolong tea, goose, noodles, green beans with garlic; most of it interesting, and tasty.
I love the old-fashioned neon signage at this seafood restaurant in Dameisha.
In China, most workers take a ‘siesta’ after lunch (I thought it was only the Spanish, but no) – it is called wǔ jiào and they really have cots here at work on which they sleep for an hour after lunch! Then they troop back in here and work with us. Not fair! I want some wǔ jiào too!