a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Yes, that’s me on the stretcher (cot? not sure that it’s a ‘cot’) doing night shift in the conference room that we set up as the ‘war room’ at work. But please note 1. I didn’t really sleep and 2. the lavender blanket is not mine! (nice color, though! LOL). We are taking turns to do night shifts to support the final data conversion sequence into the production system that started last week.
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’ !
The ‘baby on board’ sticker is from Saturday morning’s ‘black’ taxi that took 3 of us to work to support the on-going data conversion for the May go-live. The flowers are from the swank lobby of the Dameisha Sheraton where we had a burger and a beer Friday night. It would have been nice to stay in the Sheraton for the project, but it’s too expensive and instead we stay in the Pattaya Hotel (with the blue LED trim, and marked on the Dameisha map).
I still see new real estate agencies every time I come back here for my next trip, but the word is that the 2009-2010 purchasing frenzy is no longer occurring at real estate centers. The ‘sweet spring’ of real estate buying in March and April has not materialized this year. There are reports that housing prices especially for second hand homes as they are called here, have declined some 5% in cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. And there is still no sign of life in the Ocean Crown condo complex (picture with the reflection in the water) across from the Pattaya Hotel.
A colleague of mine working here on the project brought out some biltong from South Africa. Biltong is South African ‘beef jerky’ but comes in many many more incarnations than just beef. So in South Africa one would find bilong made from beef, kudu, eland, wildebeest, even ostrich. Blue wildebeest is a very common antelope found in Africa and has a ‘least concerned’ status on the endangered species list (see panel from Wikipedia), which made me feel better – it being Earth Day and all on Friday ! There are about 1 million of the ‘beasts’ roaming the plains of the Serengeti.
I bought the ‘bee-hive’ honey bottle in a fancy grocery store in Hong Kong some time ago. Check out the French-engineered ‘valve’ on the bottom that allows honey to be squeezed through with no dripping. Quite a feat, huh? My cereal bowl* for use in the hotel room is melamine and from the local grocery store. It is the perfect shape for me to mix my sloppy Pronutro cereal in. (It’s like instant oatmeal). If the bowl is too shallow, the milk and stuff sloshes out to easily – very annoying !
*go ahead and ignore the little pooh-bear, I didn’t buy the bowl for that : )
The two striking bottled water advertisements* are from shop windows on my early morning walk around Dameisha (getting up early made possible by my jet lag, hard for me to do otherwise!). It’s also nice to be able to take a in-the-middle-of-the-street picture since there is no traffic. The building with the curved roof is a recent construction close to where we work in the Da Peng area but I’m not sure what its purpose is. The final two pictures are from buildings close to the power station. They house indoor sports facilities such as basket ball courts.
*Yes, I know I should not promote bottled water. These 5 good reasons from a web site called Mother Nature Network –
1) Bottled water isn’t a good value for one’s money
2) No healthier than tap water (my note: it depends where in the world you are)
3) Bottled water means garbage
4) Bottled water means less attention to public systems
5) The corporatization of water
As promised here are some images from the Doraemon – Gadget Cat from the Future – books I bought at Narita airport. This is the first in a a series of 10 books. I thought I’d get the first two and see if I like it .. and so far I do! The little copters allows the Cat and those with him to fly. And check out the Cat’s matching facial expressions as he asks ‘Did I upset you?‘ and says ‘I can’t answer all of your questions at once’.
The last two pictures are of items with Doraemon pictures on that I found in the grocery store here in Dameisha.
The ice cream was a welcome little snack we got on the plane ride in to Hong Kong. It was 1 am by the time I checked into the Pattaya Hotel in Dameisha (view from my balcony this morning) .. my driver and I again had long waits at the border crossings out of Hong Kong and into mainland China (this is at 12 midnight on a Sunday night !). We also run into a lot of traffic into work this morning. Someone said a journalist from Hong Kong to demonstrated recently that almost anyone can get into the main security entrance gate and that there has been a crackdown and every vehicle is now checked.
So here at the work site the final upload sequence into the live SAP production system (as we call it) has started. It’s all systems go! and all hands on deck! for the teams. Wish us well !
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.
The cloudy and rainy winter weather here in Seattle still lets up only now and then, and then I feel I have to run out and take pictures of the blue sky and buildings that reflect it. I took the first two pictures in the Virginia St/ 9th Ave area on Thursday. The Tutta Bella pizza restaurant is in Columbia City on the south in Seattle and is where we had some wood-fired pizza on Friday night. We saw on the oven thermometer that it is a singeing 750 ºF (400 ºC) inside. At that temperature it takes only 90 seconds to bake the pizza! I fly to Tokyo’s Narita airport tomorrow directly from Seattle, and then to Hong Kong. There is a few hours between the connecting flights, and I should have time to check out the stores at the airport.
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.
Here’s the Bruce Lee graffiti-mural on Olive Way I walk by every time I go to the hairdresser. | This Chevy Volt was parked on the street nearby. There’s still long waiting lists for them at dealers across the country. Check it out at http://www.chevrolet.com/vehicles/2011/volt/overview. | And then I stumbled across a plaque marking the ‘Center of Seattle’. Hmm. It’s at Thomas and Minor Ave N. But why would this be the center of the city? Google Earth says Seattle is ‘located’ at 47°36′35″N 122°19′59″W .. a little different from what the plaque says. | The STOP sign with the earth mover sticker is right there as well. | And how about the Smart car with the bike rack (a rarer sight than a Chevy Volt?) .. spotted Tue night outside the Elysian Alehouse where we had a beer and dinner to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday.
Dove’s ‘White’ soap – a non-fragranced, no-nonsense, mild soap – is my favorite, but the store was out of it yesterday and I thought I’d try their new soap for men (with patented technology .. I love technology). Well, the verdict is in and it is : out with the man-soap. I don’t like the fragrance, and the corners and edges on the soap is a classic case of ‘form over function’ in design. Sorry Unilever, I’m sure you spent a lot of money on it.
Just for fun I checked out some the product reviews on line. This one from a reviewer from Chicago and made me smile.
Hello Manhood ***** (5 out of 5 stars) Yes! – I feel cleaner and manlier using this soap. My wife wants to have 5 more kids as a result. She cannot stop grabbing me and giving me a nice long sniff. Get it, enjoy it and subscribe to it …much cheaper and you will preserve your manhood. Go on, be a man.
.. because I learned Sunday night from my neighbor that his house is for sale. He had a U-haul in the back alley to cart some stuff away. The two dogs and the kitty kat that likes to sit on my fence (as in the picture) will go elsewhere while the house is staged (aww). Sure enough, this Monday morning the realtor planted the sign with a photographer in tow. We know that a house further down in our street sold at the end of this March for within 5% of what it was bought for in 2007 (see graph from Zillow.com*). So the zillow website, usually pretty accurate in its estimates, underestimated that house’s value by some 20% compared to what it sold for recently. So who knows? Since the combination of the house sold, its seller and its buyer is unique every time, time will tell if my neighbor can get a good price for his house as well.
*Zillow.com is a Seattle-based website started in 2007 that collects and displays sales prices and estimated valuations of homes throughout the USA. I edited out the price estimates on the right side of the graph since I just wanted to show the trend lines.
This tree is on 16th Ave in Capitol Hill not far from my house and stands out on the street with its riot of blossoms. Bulbs like daffodils are also popular in my neighborhood.
My license plate tags arrived, so my old Camry is now good until 2012 (seems so far away, but it’s not really, right?). It was a beautiful blue sky day here in Seattle (photo taken at the corner of Denny and Fairview). I bought the letter opener in Seoul’s Incheon airport on the way in on my last trip. Very handy. Now I can avoid getting paper cuts on my finger when opening my pile of junk mail ! (Yes, I should just throw it away but some have credit card offers in which I take out and shred).
The Korean Air plane at Hong Kong airport was at the gate next to our Asiana Air plane. My three checked bags as well as I made the 45 min connection in Seoul – I had to make a run for Gate 49 ! and here I am in Seattle. It was raining all over South Korea and the newspaper reported that a large number of schools closed for the day, over concerns of radioactive particles from Japan coming down in the rain. Well, I thought — and what about the air conditioning at the airport, and the airplane? .. should I care?. Let me sit back and drink my Korean pilsner beer (called Cass, probably too light and mild for most beer lovers, but I liked it fine). As always I kept an eye on our flight path over Japan. We flew almost directly over Tokyo, then turned north, brushed by the Aleution islands in the North Pacific and then down to Seattle.
P.S. Yes, I refer to the 1962 Bob Dylan song in the title of the post. I love the words, but note that Bob Dylan is on record to have said he did not refer to nuclear fall-out or rain from that, in the song. The opening lyrics :
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son ?
And where have you been my darling young one ?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
I made it to Hong Kong airport after taking care not to slide in my Dameisha hotel bathroom (picture of the sign posted in there). : ) Even at 9 in the morning we still got held up in Shenzhen traffic, but I allowed plenty of time to get to the airport. I’m flying back through Seoul, South Korea and then on to Seattle.
The first two pictures are from Tuesday. They show the departure hall at Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport. Condé Nast Traveler magazine named Beijing Capital International as the World’s Best Airport in 2009 ! Terminal 3 is very large, second only to Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, says Wikipedia.
Everything was gray upon our arrival at Shenzhen airport (this is around 6pm in the evening)- the airplane, the tarmac, the building, the sky. Shenzhen’s Bao’an International Airport is more convenient than Hong Kong for connections to cities in China from the south, but the airport has work to do to improve its limited spoken English. (Admittedly I may have work to do to improve my Mandarin).
I’m staying one more night in the Pattaya Hotel in Dameisha before going home tomorrow. Yes!
