a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here’s the cute translation into English, from the back of the coconut coffee bag. (Would have posted it yesterday, but had to wait until I got home so that I could take a high-resolution picture). Note the creative breaks in the words T-his (wow) and su-mmer, and – the taste will be better when it is hot drink in winter. Gotcha! :).
Saturday morning and hey! we saw the sun shine this morning on the way in to work with the bus. We got a little reprieve and left the apartments at 7 am instead of at 6.30 am.
The local Daya Bay team is mostly back on site – they were out all week, but work today and tomorrow. One of them brought in coconut-flavored instant coffee for us (picture of bag that contains packets). The US team has the day off tomorrow, thankfully. A really busy schedule of system design workshops start on Monday. I am facilitating the discussions for my team. We spent this week getting the all our ducks in a row, and I think we are ready. I am sure we will find out !
Friday, and a rough week it was, with long work days. It’s the last day of the new year’s week, and hopefully the firecrackers at night will now draw to a close. It wasn’t really all that bad, though.
Here is a little Mandarin lesson from our colleague: how to write and say ‘Happy New Year’.
新 new, recent, fresh, modern
年 year; new-years; person’s age
好 good / well / proper / good to / easy to / very / so / (suffix indicating completion or readiness)
Our project manager ran out to Walmart yesterday and brought back a bunch of space heaters for the office. Yay! and Thank You! we said. There will be no gallivanting around Shenzhen or Hong Kong this weekend : we have to work !
This metro bus with the giant giraffe, advertising South African Airways flights out of Hong Kong, pulled up across from my hotel when I was there last weekend. The direct flight to Johannesburg is 13 hours.
It was cold in the office yesterday. The new building’s heat pump was not working for some reason. Back at the apartment in Dameisha at night, we still hear a barrage of fire-cracker pops and fireworks go off, as the week-long celebration of the Lunar New Year continues. It is cold in the apartment as well. Our $12 space heaters from Shenzhen’s Walmart are not quite up to the task of warming up the entire apartment, of course.
Anyway, sticking to the theme of cold: below are the snowy cover pages of the English & Chinese versions of ‘Tintin in Tibet’. Tintin translates to Ding Ding in Chinese.
[From Wikipedia] The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic strips created by the Belgian artist Georges Rémi (1907–1983), who wrote under the pen name of Hergé. Tintin in Tibet is the twentieth book in the series. It is said to have been Hergé’s favorite of the Tintin series (previously The Secret of the Unicorn), and was written during a personally difficult time in his life, as he was divorcing from his first wife. The story is unlike any previous Tintin books, before or since: there is a small number of characters and no enemies, villains, spies or gangsters. This adventure revolves around a rescue mission of Tintin’s Chinese friend Chang Chong-Chen.
It is also unusually emotional for a Tintin story: moments of strong emotion for the characters include Tintin’s enduring belief in Chang’s survival, the discovery of the teddy bear in the snow, Haddock’s attempting to sacrifice himself to save Tintin, Tharkey’s return, Tintin’s discovery of Chang, and the yeti losing his only friend. Indeed Tintin is seen to cry when he believes Chang’s fate, something he is only seen to do three times throughout the entire series (the other occurrences being in The Blue Lotus and Flight 714).
Here are a few more pictures from my weekend in Hong Kong.
First, a quick refresher orientation of the Hong Kong area. Hong Kong Island is at the bottom of the picture. Kowloon (literal meaning ‘Nine Dragons’) is across Victoria Harbor to its north and west. My hotel was on the Island towards its west, but the MTR (Mass Transit Rail, red dots) whisked me around, anywhere I wanted to go. It goes under the water, in tunnels under the harbor (thin red line). The roads shown on the map that cross Victoria harbor all run across massive suspension bridges. (Note: this is an updated map from 12/2020 on Google Maps).
The street scene pictures were taken late on Saturday night in the Tsim Sha Tsui district in Kowloon. The little propeller fans were at New Years Fair in Victoria Park the (northeast on the island). The double-decker street tram with Chinese basket ball star Yao Ming is on the route that runs on the north of Hong Kong island.
Monday and I’m posting more ‘happy’ pictures to take the blah out of Monday after such a nice weekend in Hong Kong. The characters below were on a canvas poster on the street outside the hotel. I just couldn’t tell what they were happy about! And who wants some MeltyKiss with fruity strawberry chocolates? Saw these in a candy store in a Hong Kong subway station and had to take a picture of the box : ).
They do celebrate Valentine’s Day in China, and this year it coincides with the Chinese New Year’s Day – very rare since the new year’s day is late on the calendar this year.
It turned out that my fears of masses of people trying to get into Hong Kong on Friday through the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border was unfounded; I sailed through with no trouble at all. I stayed at a Marriott Courtyard Hotel on Hong Kong Island, very reasonably priced at US$100 per night, a tall 30 story structure with only 6 rooms on every floor (picture below is from my hotel room). The room was very cozy, the bed had six perfectly firm pillows, the glass shower stall a large oversized ‘rain’ showerhead .. and the food in the restaurant was superb.
I was so tired on Friday night, and sat there enjoying a crisp Asahi beer and fried halibut with jasmine rice and Thai asparagus. Saturday I crisscrossed the city on several missions, to the bookstore, to the jewelry store, to the toy store, and they were all successful. I also learned that the New Year’s parade (another parade other than the January one) and fireworks was only going to be tonight, so I missed that. But I did go to the New Year’s Fair in Victoria Park; I will post more pictures later this week.
My roommates and others are going to Shenzhen for the weekend. Later today I am going to attempt to get to Hong Kong on my own.
To get from the red dot at Dameisha on the far right where the apartments are, to the ‘Train Station’ dot on the Hong Kong border with a taxi driver, should go without a hitch.
Then I might run into a mob scene at the Hong Kong border, with thousands of mainland travelers trying to get through customs (it’s Chinese New Year weekend, after all). It might count in my favor that I’m a foreigner. Sometimes we have a separate line at customs.
Once through mainland China & Hong Kong customs, I should be all clear, since I know how to use the Mass Transit Rail system. I might still encounter seas of people that will want to use the train go to into Hong Kong city. We shall see!
My plan B is to turn around, go back to Shenzhen to stay there in a hotel and give up on Hong Kong. Hong Kong should have a really big fireworks display on Saturday night to herald in the Chinese new year. And who wants to miss a Year of the Tiger fireworks display in the country where it was invented?
So check this out .. I wrote ‘Do not Erase’ on the whiteboard, and then my Chinese colleague wrote it in Chinese next to it, for good measure. That second one is a 17-stroke character! Wow. So as the amateur very limited-time student of Chinese I had become, just had to go look up the characters on my translator .. and voila!
勿 wù must not, do not; without, never
擦 cā to wipe / to erase / rubbing (brush stroke in painting) / to clean / to polish
And this sign says ‘Good Luck’ .. which I hope I will have a little of for my trip this weekend to Hong Kong. I see the New Year’s Parade was back in January, so I missed that, but even so there should be an exciting vibe there this weekend. I need it, since I am a little homesick, and that after just one week out here this trip.
This cute translation is displayed on the ATM machine at the apartments.
The red lanterns that the apartment complex’s management have put up are just spectacular. I finally figured out how to use the bracket function on my camera to slightly over-expose the image to make the lantern ‘glow’ in its dark surroundings.
This beautiful flower and mandarin tree arrangement is at the entrance of our offices, in anticipation of the start of the Chinese New Year.
I believe the mandarins will be put to good use (eaten) afterwards, and not be discarded.
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.