Tuesday/ the Mid-Autumn Festival starts

There was an inch or two of rain last night from the typhoon, but nothing the roads and streets couldn’t handle.

Today marks the start of this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival* – also known as the Moon Festival or in Chinese Zhongqiujie (traditional Chinese: 中秋節) or in Vietnamese  “Tết Trung Thu” ,  is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese people.  It dates back over 3,000 years to moon worship in China’s Shang Dynasty.  The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the four most important Chinese festivals.

*an odd name given that it’s the start of autumn

Mooncakes (not the same as moon pies) are Chinese bakery products traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival.  The festival is for lunar worship and moon watching and moon cakes are regarded as an indispensable delicacy on this occasion.   Mooncakes are offered between friends or on family gatherings while celebrating the festival.

Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 4-5 cm thick. A thick filling usually made from lotus seed paste is surrounded by a relatively thin (2-3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs.   Mooncakes are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.   [Information from Wikipedia].

I am off to Bangkok tonight on a red-eye flight .. one night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster! says the 1984 song sung by Murray Head.    So I will report back if that’s the case!

Friday/ team dinner

Friday night and we went out to a team dinner since most of the team sticks around for the weekend to work on Sunday.   We have been at this restaurant before – its signature dish is young pigeon – of which we had some to start with.  (Makes you feel like a mean carnivore, eating the pigeon! Aww).   The food in the front on the picture is a lotus root-carrot-broccolini-black mushroom stir fry, pork with the same mushroom and a whole eggplant in foil.   Afterward we went to Dameisha beach to stick our feet in the lukewarm water.  The picture is of one of the stalls on the beach selling trinkets and food and sodas.  There is still a lot of people that come out to the beach over the weekend even though the days are getting shorter.

Wednesday/ the spicy restaurant

Over the hump of the week, sort of.   We have Saturday off but we are working on Sunday to accommodate some Chinese holidays next week.    We are also working to meet a deadline that has actually come and gone.    I guess the deadline is dead .. or the goal of meeting it is dead ! 

Tonight we ate at one of our regular restaurants, ‘The Spicy One’.  The food may not look spicy but all of the dishes are hott! : the green beans, the shrimp on a stick and the potato slices with a basil-green veggie and meat garnish.    It made me break out in a sweat. 

Monday/ team dinner

It has been a long weary day packed with someone stopping by my cubicle every 5 minutes with a question or issue.  And we have a LOT of those.   So I was very tempted to beg out of the monthly team dinner, but then went nonetheless.    We’ve been to this restaurant here in Dameisha before; we simply call it ‘The Restaurant Under The Tree’.  I’ll have to find out the Chinese name.  They bring one dish after the other to the table and the eggplant in garlic butter was one of my favorites tonight.  The second picture was taken on the walk back to my apartment; that’s the King Key Palace Hotel’s light reflected on the water.  The shot came out nice enough on my compact camera after I darkened the picture a little bit to make the water an inky black.

Wednesday/ white tea

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 !

Friday night/ restaurant Felix

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!

Wednesday/ extra dark chocolate and Shakespeare

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.

Monday/ Lay’s chips and Simba chips

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.

Saturday morning in Hong Kong

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.

Wednesday/ an ‘Indian’ buffet

A few of us went to the King Key* Palace Hotel’s restaurant for dinner tonight, and here is the billboard in the lobby that advertises the Indian cuisine buffet dinner on Fridays.   It’s not cheap at RMB 228 ($US33.65).   And without the benefit of the billboard, one could be forgiven for expecting to find tandoori chicken at the buffet instead of hamburgers and T-bone steak!

*say it slowly :  King. Key. : )

Friday/ the Elysian Brewing Co

Friday evenings finds me at the Elysian Brewing Co more often than not, with Bryan and Gary, drinking some Zephyrus Pilsner if it is available, or any other of the 16 beers they have on tap.  It is brewed on the property.   Constructed in a 1919-era Packard storage building, the pub embdies the classic American brewpub feel with large exposed timbers, high ceilings, concrete floor and a full wall of brewery tanks.

And where does the name come from?  In Greek mythology, Elysium was a section of the Underworld.  (Hence the Ionic column in the picture, a greek architectural classic).  The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, were the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous.

Tuesday/ iced coffee please

I cannot drink warm coffee or tea now that it’s high summer .. too darn hot outside, and sometimes inside when we get here and the air conditioning had not been left on overnight in the office.   Nescafe make a nice little gulp-size iced coffee, so I keep some of those in the refrigerator at home.

Monday/ soccer and cereal from South Africa

My early morning ProNutro cereal as well as my soccer* come from South Africa.  The honey and banana are my favorite add-ins. Yum.

*The poor North Koreans are not in the same league as Portugal – and I see a steady sifting rain is coming down in Green Point stadium in Cape Town, much the same as it does in Seattle in winter time.

Between the soccer, the remaining jet lag and conference calls to China, I am not having much luck getting into a regular sleeping pattern here!  And on top of all that Wimbledon coverage on ESPN2 at 7.00 am in the morning starts today as well – and I see Federer is two sets down in his opening match against Alejandro Falla (Columbia). Uh-oh.

Thursday/ all-hands meeting

Directions at one of the T-junctions on the way to the office in our shuttle bus. We go left here, to Da Peng village.

Thursday – so, mercifully, the week is drawing to a close.    We have an all- hands meeting this afternoon which is a break for me: I get to just sit and listen, and not stand up front, trying to control a raucous discussion with a room full of 20 people.

I’m going to Hong Kong with three colleagues from work, so we will see how that works out. I suspect my way of exploring the city is very different from theirs.  I will join them for a big dinner at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, but it’s good to explore the offerings from local restaurants, or just eat in the hotel where they also offer a good variety of Asian cuisine. Also, I tend to steer clear of the big touristy places, and just walk around on my own. I work with great people, but I already spent 12 hours every day this week with you. On the weekends, I need some ‘me’ time :).

Sunday/ breakfast at the Sheraton

Shumai is a traditional Chinese dumpling  served in dim sum*; it’s essentially a pork and mushroom dumpling. It’s steamed in a wooden basket like the one on my plate.
*Dim sum is the collective name for a southern Chinese cuisine which involves a wide range of light dishes served alongside Chinese tea.

A few of us treated ourselves to a buffet breakfast at the Sheraton Hotel close by – expensive by Dameisha meal standards – but still very affordable at $20.

I just had some scrambled egg, toast and some shumai. (Gobbled up the first one of the two little dumplings in my bowl before I took the picture).

We went to the Dameisha beach afterwards. Some people were out on the beach, but it’s only slowly warming up.  Highs today reached only 60 ºF (15 ºC), with the sun is struggling to come out.    We may go to a resort close by where we live this afternoon with a cable car that runs up the mountains with a panoramic view.

Angels and a sparse crowd on the main beach in Dameisha. It’s hard to see where the sea meets the sky in the hazy distance. The Sheraton hotel is close by and has its own stretch of sand just for its guests.

 

Saturday night/ rough translation

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/ coffee, with coconut

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 !

Tuesday/ flowers & mandarins

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.

 

Thursday/ at Hong Kong airport

No, I did not eat too much Chinese food while I was here! .. the photo is a reflection from a polished work of art at the airport.

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.

Tuesday/ work, dinner

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.

Here’s a red bean milkshake that I had at the Silver Dragon restaurant in Hong Kong  on Saturday (very nice !).

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.