Month: April 2011

The corporate steering committee’s reviews and assessments have been completed. and we have been given the green light to go live on Tuesday with our system.   The cut-over activities went well this week – so well that we don’t have to work over the weekend.      So a colleague and I jumped on the bus and came to Hong Kong.   Pictures :  a new face for the Sha Tou Jiao border crossing building, waiting for the bus to Hong Kong.    Prince Edward station on the Hong Kong metro and a British pub in Lan Kwai Fong televising the Royal Wedding (of course).    All kinds of pubs and restaurants in Lan Kwai Fong, we picked a Greek restaurant for dinner.   The Hong Kong Hard Rock Cafe has just opened.

Since I had Tuesday off (due to Monday’s night shift) I went back to where I was on Sunday : the Shenzhen Library and Concert Hall.    (I bought a silver coin with a rabbit on.   I will show it tomorrow).    So the first picture is of the Shenzhen Library.    Remember the building with the wavy roof?    It houses the Shenzhen Museum, and check out the second picture – made me think the building is galloping towards me, very cool.   It was designed by architect Li Mingyi, built by the Shenzhen QiXin Construction Group and completed in 2004.     The small picture is an artist’s rendition.   It shows the entire structure which I couldn’t into a single picture, so I covered it from left to right with three pictures.    The Civic Plaza from where I took these three pictures has big and small light fixtures powered by solar energy.     I don’t know the names of the other glitzy new glass and steel buildings, but the last picture is of the Children’s  Palace.   It’s a science museum but it was very much closed on Tuesday night.

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I was finally free to go to the city on Sunday, and so I did.    I started off by going to the SEG electronics market (赛格电子市场) in the Futian area (exit A of Huaqiang Lu station – this for my own reference!).     There are several electronics marts and buildings, some more formal than others.   The tall building is the SEG building.    The inside pictures are from a cylindrical building called Huaqiang Market if I recall correctly.    The lighting orbs five floors up on the ceiling change color every few seconds, making for a nice display.     Check out the close-up of the green traffic light figure -fitting for located at ground zero for electronics geeks !

My other major stop was at the Children’s Palace station (少年宮站) to go to the Book Experience Mall.   At over 74,000 sqm (800,000 sqf) and occupying two city blocks,  it is billed as the world’s first and largest retail center dedicated exclusively to books, music and art.     Unfortunately for me it has very few English books (probably by design).   I bought a country map of China and snapped pictures of the covers of a 600 page tome about the Yin and the Yang and Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in Chinese.    (By the way, South Africa’s Chinese population is 350,000. Google ‘Chinese in South Africa and read the The Wikipedia entry for more).    I couldn’t resist taking a discreet cell-phone picture of the two kids reading the book together.     I envy them with a lifetime of books to read ahead of them! – and thought why do I not make more time for reading myself?    The final pictures are outside of the bookstore.   There is an open plaza with musicians and singers performing in public.    It was such a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and made for a very nice experience.     So the backdrop of the musicians and audience picture is the Shenzhen Library and Concert Hall.    The dad teaching his daughter to ride her bike and the enormous wavy roof structure is the view looking out from the steps on the way to the lobbies of the library and the concert hall.   The lobbies face each other (with the pyramid-shaped roofs).     I took two pictures of the roof beams-as-art inside the library before the security guard ran up to me and said ‘no pictures’ !

I’m on solid ground here in the airport lounge and happy to report nothing is a-wry.   I got my boarding pass as well.  It’s an All Nippon Airlines flight masquerading as a Continental flight that will take me to Hong Kong.    I snapped all the pictures the last hour or so.   Oh, no Tin tin books but I did get two Doraemon books from which I will post some pictures later.

The pictures :  I’m at Terminal 1, the International terminal / view outside of Terminal 1/ set your watch to Japan time, 16 hrs ahead of Seattle time/  the Narita aiport mascot points to something / my childhood favorite Kit Kat candy bars are available in green tea and wasabi flavor here / the red lettering ‘K’S COFFEE SHOP’ looks like Starbucks but its not, it’s Beck’s Coffee Shop /  ever seen a paper hippopotamus?  it’s from the origami art store, as is the scene from Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf !  he heh / check out the tuft of hair that the Gap Japan dude is sporting / and a Newsweek magazine showing 3.11 (as the day of the earthquake became known)

I am at Seattle-Tacoma airport.   A Boeing 777 is going to fly us to Tokyo’s Narita airport.  There is also Haneda airport, closer to the city.    I see there was another tremor of 5.8 that shook buildings in Tokyo this Saturday morning there.    The layover time for the flight from there to Hong Kong is 3 hrs so I hope everything will be OK.   I’m not used to earthquake tremors!   (Is anyone?)    I actually need a little extra time since  United couldn’t issue my Tokyo-Hong Kong boarding pass – I have to get it in Tokyo.   (The connecting flight is is on ‘another’ air-line :  Continental.     So given that Continental and United are merging, they still have some merging to do!     I can also check out some of the souvenir and book stores at the airport.      Maybe I will find a Japanese-language Tintin book to add to my collection (classic European comic strip book from the 30s now translated in 50 languages).      I can also look for a book with the Doraemon character that I have seen on sweatshirts that my China colleagues wear.     Doraemon is an earless robotic cat (!) who travels back in time from the 22nd century to aid a schoolboy Nobita Nobi.     The character is a Japanese cultural icon and was riginally a manga series which later became an anime series and an Asian franchise.

I leave on Saturday and that means I have to jump at it and make the purchases I need to so that I can pack on Friday.   At the top of the list was a replacement for my raggedy computer backpack.  The woven ballistic nylon is indestructable but the shoulder straps and stitching into the bag are getting frayed and that’s trouble.   This is basically an identical replacement for my older bag : a Victorinox Architecture 2.0 Big Ben Business Backpack.   It works very nicely for me as a computer bag that looks good enough to go to work with, with plenty of additional pockets and zips – and at the same time it doubles as a weekend city-backpack as well.    This new one has a so-called Fast Pass feature – you tear open the velcro that holds the computer section to the backpack and try your luck with the TSA official what might just let the whole thing go through the scanner without one needing to take the computer out.   Hey, anything that speeds up the process and reduces the number of items I have to stuff back into the bag, right ?

The gorgeous tiger picture arrived in the mail fom World Wildlife Fund.  I send them a little money sometimes for their efforts to save the wildlife on earth.    I hope we can save the world’s tigers a little while longer – what magnificent beasts they are.