a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It’s the 31st! The month of August* is on its way out .. and it looks like I might have trouble finding my way out of Hong Kong on Thursday. The typhoon is twisting towards Hong Kong !
*and do you know the meaning of the word august? it’s ‘marked by majestic dignity or grandeur’
Why does it seem to me every time my travel back to the USA comes due, a typhoon is approaching? (I am scheduled to leave on Thu morning). This one is called Lionrock, named after a famous hill in Hong Kong. It is located in Kowloon and is 495 metres high. We drive though the Lion Rock tunnel on our way to Hong Kong on Fridays.
From Wikipedia : Lion Rock is famous for its shape and is visible from various places in Kowloon; its resemblance to a crouching lion is most striking from the Choi Hung and San Po Kong areas in East Kowloon. A trail wends its way up the forested hillside to the top, culminating atop the lion’s head. The trail can be followed across the profile of the lion, eventually linking up with the MacLehose Trail. The rock provides a beautiful view of the city and Hong Kong Island in the distance. The entire hill is located within Lion Rock Country Park in Hung Mui Kuk, Tai Wai and is made passable by vehicles by Lion Rock Tunnel, which connects Kowloon Tong and Tai Wai.
The attractive young people with their bubble tea say ‘Come to Taiwan!’ , on a Hong Kong subway billboard on the way back today. I just might !
Then tonight I finally walked around Dameisha with my camera to capture some of the apartment buildings that had recently been fitted with lighting strips (my apartment has none). The Yanba Expressway runs by Dameisha. And close by is a real estate office called the Australian Villa Demonstration Centre, kangaroo and all. Hmm. Australian-style villas in China? Or villas in Australia? I am not sure. And just as a side note – a villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house.
Saturday morning we took the Star Ferry from Hong Kong island to Kowloon. It’s a quick 10 minute crossing, mostly for tourists. The metro or the traffic tunnels under the harbor is a much more efficient way to get across! The sky was hazy .. not as clear as Friday.
We found this painter in Kowloon Park, and the Chinese banyan is from Nathan Road right by the park. We stopped at a coffee shop for lunch.
Saturday night three of us from work went to the Pacific Place mall to go to Dan Ryan’s Chicago Grill for some American comfort food. The menu says Warning! We serve American-sized portions. A young Asian couple that sat across from us ordered one item from the menu and shared it. The neon sign is from Tsim Tsa Tsui district, my favorite night-time haunt in the city where I went after dinner.
In the first picture I pose with those same cumulus clouds I saw from my hotel room earlier – this time from The Peak’s observation deck. (The clouds seem to look down and laugh at the so-called skyscrapers far below). After dinner I went for a walk-about in Central district on Hong Kong Island. Those are the tops of the Bank of China building, the Citibank building and the HSBC building. The stone lion is from the front of another bank building nearby and that’s a lion cub under the lion’s paw. ‘The Stool Pigeon‘ is a new locally -made movie that started showing, about the police and informants. (See the reflection of the name of a famous South African diamond company in the picture?). Then I went over to Kowloon and stalked this Lamborghini in the late-night traffic on foot until I could take a picture of it. Moments later the light turned green and it was gone with a roar.
It’s a gorgeous day in Hong Kong with puffy cumulus clouds out over the harbor. I’m working from the hotel room .. but my colleague Vic and I want to take advantage of the weekday this afternoon to take the Peak tram up the hillside overlooking the city. The brand-new 110 story International Commerce Center building has not yet opened its observation deck – they will do so by the end of the year, says the website. Now back to work !
The city of Shenzhen is turning 30 tomorrow, and has declared Friday a holiday. So there will be no one here and we are not coming in to work – we will work from our apartments. In my case I will work from the hotel in Hong Kong since I am going there tonight already. It will be good to be able to work uninterrupted for a whole day.
These pictures from this link http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/shenzhen30years/sz.html . The city has certainly come a long way from being a fishing village in 1980. The central government has also announced that two new districts are added to the Special Economic Zone for Shenzhen. In an article from the Wall Street Journal, it is reported that China’s broader economy seems to have bounced back just fine from the great recession of 2008 and 2009 .. but that in its two most vibrant southern cities, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, one casualty is still struggling to recover: entrepreneurialism.
Our client company handed out tin boxes with white tea to us here. The loose tea buds are packaged into one foil bag. The second picture is what it looks like in my cup. (I need a strainer !) I drink it without sugar (for once) and it actually tastes very good .. but of course not nearly as strong black tea, my favorite ‘color’ tea. I know of green tea and red tea, and there may even be other colors.
It rained overnight and the weather has cooled down nicely. I am sure both the humidity and the temperature will go back to their normal values, though !
Yahoo USA ran this report today on its home page :
Thousands of vehicles were bogged down Monday in a more than 100-kilometre (62-mile) traffic jam leading to Beijing that has lasted nine days and highlights China’s growing road congestion woes.
The Beijing-Tibet expressway slowed to a crawl on August 14 due to a spike in traffic by cargo-bearing heavy trucks heading to the capital, and compounded by road maintenance work that began five days later, the Global Times said.
The photo below shows early morning traffic crosses the Huanhuayuan bridge across the Jialing in southwest China’s Chongqing municipality on July 28, 2010. China’s car production and sales will both exceed 15 million units this year, state media quoted an industry association as saying on August 4. In the USA, 2009 sales of light vehicles (cars and light trucks) in the United States came in at only 10.4m units, the lowest level in 27 years.
6.30 am on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. The pink silhouette sign is a new fixture and has a street name on that it’s pointing to, indicating there are bands and live music to be found ‘that way’. (On Friday nights and Saturday nights but not on Monday morning, of course!). The black computer bag is mine (the bicycle is not), with laundry I have to take in tonight after work in the green and white bags.
On Monday mornings I feel the end of the year rushing up to us, and I don’t know how we will get all our work done – and it’s only the end of August.
It was very warm out today .. the public service banner does not say Beware of heat stroke for nothing ! (Isn’t the dog with the flapping ears cute?) It is so humid along with the heat. My camera malfunctioned on Saturday – the shutter started firing uncontrollably as soon as I switched the camera on. Today the problem was gone, but I read in the Sunday newspaper this morning that many iPhone users in Hong Kong have reported problems related to the 95%+ humidity in the city.
The self-picture is from the MTR station at Wan Chai, and there is a guy on the on-coming tram taking a picture of me taking a picture of him : ).
Here are a few pictures from the Hong Kong Computer and Communication Festival 2010 at the Hong Kong Exhibition Center this weekend. The exhibition center is in Wan Chai district on Hong Kong Island. It was quite crowded, even though it’s not too apparent from the pictures I posted here.
Most of the major hardware and software vendors seemed to be there – Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, HP, Samsung, Microsoft, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Brother, Epson – as well as lots of resellers that had little stalls selling cameras, keyboards, mice, flash cards, portable hard drives, gadgets and gear. Apple Computer was notably absent. Some of the vendors that we don’t really know about in the USA were BenQ (notebook computers), ASK Computer Technology (Google andriod smart pads and cell phones) and Hanvon Corp. (e-book readers, tablet PCs).
I was very intrigued by the ASK 711 SP Smart Pad that runs on Google’s Android system (picture below, website http://www.uthk.com), but the screen was not nearly as nice and as clear as Apple’s iPad’s and I wasn’t sure what processor they used. It only cost US $200. The green ice cream picture is just for fun – it’s from Google’s Android website at android.com.
My colleague Will and I arrived in Hong Kong again last night with the Daya Bay shuttle, and after checking into the Marriott Courtyard, made our way to the Peninsula hotel where the restaurant Felix is. The restaurant is on the 28th floor. (The second picture is the view as one approaches the restaurant from the elevators). I started with a lychee martini to go with the appetizers we ordered – grilled foie gras and pear, and scallops. My main course was Tasmanian salmon with caviar, with some pinot grigio. The food was very good. They had some background piano music, and the restaurant offered nice views of the city and the harbor. But the best view is actually provided in the men’s room while one is doing one’s thing in a free standing urn while you peruse the Kowloon city scenery below through the floor-to-ceiling window!
So, here we are at August 19, 2010 and it’s my 49th birthday. Yes, I’m going for it! – the big five-oh. There’s no stopping me! : ).
But first today’s stop at 49. The card in my hand shows 七七 qī qī seven sevens (equals 49), written in simplified Mandarin. I don’t have a cake here in China, but I plan to go to Hong Kong for the weekend tomorrow. It just happened that three of us from work made have plans to go to the fancy Felix restaurant on top of the Peninsula Hotel. So we will have a toast for my birthday there.
And since I love numbers, here are some references to the number 49 that I like :
* 49 is the square of 7 and is therefore the fourth squared prime number.
* It is the atomic number of indium.
* It is the number of strings on a harp.
* The 49th parallel runs between Canada and the USA.
* The 49th State of the USA is Alaska.
* The term 49er is the moniker of one who participated in the 1849 California Gold Rush, as well as the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers.
Wednesday – from the Middle English Wednes dei, before that from Old English Wōdnesdæg, the day of the English god Woden. To the Germans it’s Mittwoch middle of the week and to the Chinese 星期三 xīng qī sān the third day of the planets or 周三 zhōu sān Zhou dynasty & the third day.
In any event, it’s downhill to the weekend now, and allow me to show off my chunk of chocolate I got last weekend in Oliver’s grocery store in Hong Kong : extra dark chocolate from New Zealand made from Ghanian cocoa beans. Bittersweet, the way life is. Did not Juliet tell Romeo ‘parting is such sweet sorrow‘ ? meaning saying goodbye, at the same time starts up her anticipation of seeing him again, giving the sad emotion a pleasant tingle.
I posted pictures of the proposed livery for airplanes of the merger between Continental and United Airlines about a week ago.
Then yesterday I got pictures from a friend showing the livery for Kulula Air’s airplanes. (Kulula is South Africa’s low fare airline). The pictures are all from their website at kulula.com. It shows their route map, the flying 101 plane, the camo plane, the daylight savings time plane (the airline is campaigning for daylight saving time in South Africa), the jet setter plane and the this way up plane.
Here is a can of Lay’s Cool and Refreshing/ Little Tomato flavor chips I spotted on someone’s desk here at work.
My comments – 1. Two flavors at once? What’s going on? 2. Presumably the tomato is little, and not the flavor. Simba chips in South Africa, with a lion character as its mascot-marketer and the tag line chips that roarrr with flavor would have a problem with a ‘little’ flavor. I have fond memories of Simba chips. Can someone tell them to change the garish green color on the package shown in the picture I found on-line, though?
Here’s more information from Wikipedia. Simba is a popular potato chip manufacturer and has been producing its products in South Africa since 1956, when it was established by the Greyvenstein family. Having successfully marketed Ouma’s Rusks in the 1940s and 1950s, by 1955 the Greyvenstein family were looking for ways to diversify their family business. In that year, Leon Greyvenstein travelled to a food fair in Germany in search of ideas and met a man called Herman Lay – the co-founder of Frito-Lay, the largest chip company in the world. The two men struck up a friendship, and Leon travelled on to the USA where he saw a potato chip factory in action.
These pictures from Saturday .. the trams on Hong Kong Island are always fun to watch, all of them decked out in attractive artwork. I thought this next one was a martial arts picture but no, it’s the billboard for Step Up 3D, a dance flick. The giant cutie pie doll is from a Japanese store window in Harbour City shopping mall. Basketball player Yao Ming left big shoes to fill – this is in a sporting goods store in the same mall, as is the Tag Heuer watch. I drooled at it inside the store, but it is too expensive to buy! – about US$3,000.
While I was checking out at the Marriott hotel on Sunday, the giant touch screen’s headline ‘Hooker advances in pole vault‘ made me look twice. (Hooker is an Australian athlete). Next one – we accidentally found our own company’s offices in Hong Kong’s Central district in a building where we stopped for lunch.
The final three pictures are artwork from Times Square mall in Causeway Bay. No, I didn’t upload the picture with the bronze figures with distorted pixel dimensions. I’m really not sure how the artist made real three dimensional figures with distorted proportions. Same for the girl at the mailbox – it is as if her image was distorted by a curved mirror. Finally, check out the very very creative use this artist put rubber tire shreds to. A mean muscular black rhinoceros!
I had a late night out last night after checking into the Marriott Courtyard Hotel here in Hong Kong. My colleague Will and I went to the Harbour City Mall on the Kowloon side, billed as the biggest mall in the city. It’s a very nice place – upscale but not filled with designer Versace and Gucci and Louis Vuitton stores. So one can actually hang out there and enjoy food at the restaurants and check out the offerings in electronic stores and the like.
The first picture is of a gorgeous dome skylight in the mall. The next one shows a place where we picked up the specialty dish octopus balls to go. (Maybe further explanation is in order? Balls of light fried batter with cooked octopus pieces inside!). After that we went to Dan Ryan’s Chicago Grill, a classic beer and burgers place that offers lots of other American food on the menu. (We craved some ‘American’ food).
The spider crab offered for US$60 is from a Whole Foods-like (a reference for my American readers) grocery store in the mall – scary, the crab! And the final picture is from my hotel room on the 26th floor this morning.
It’s warm outside but not unbearably so. But of course I will report back later about the rest of the weekend.
I’m going to Hong Kong for the weekend. So is Friday the 13th unlucky in China as well? I don’t really care since I’m not a triskaidekaphobe, but according to Chinese and Cantonese superstition I would do well to steer clear of the numbers FOUR and FOURTEEN. Bad news.
Some of the information here is from Wikipedia :
Number 4 (四 sì) is considered an unlucky number in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures because it is nearly homophonous to the word death (死 sǐ). Due to that, many numbered product lines skip the 4 such as Nokia’s cell phones (there is no series beginning with a 4), and the Canon PowerShot camera G series (after G3 comes G5). The Marriott Hotel where I stay in Hong Kong does not have a 4th floor. Some high-rise residential buildings there literally miss all floor numbers with 4, such as 4, 14, 24, 34 and all 40–49 floors ! As a result, a building whose highest floor is number 50 may actually have only 36 physical floors.
Then there is number 14 – considered to be one of the unluckiest numbers. Although 14 is usually said in Mandarin as 十四 shí sì, which sounds like 十死 ten die, it can also be said as 一四 yī sì or 么四 yāo sì, literally one four which sounds like want to die (要死). In Cantonese, 14 sounds like certainly die (實死). Not all Chinese people consider it to be an unlucky number as the pronunciation differs among the various dialects.
