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Sunday/ Valentine’s Day & Lunar New Year

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.

Here’s the outside of the Luohu border crossing that separates mainland China from the Hong Kong special territory. There is an MTR station on the other side called Lo Wu on the East Rail Line that runs all the way into Hong Kong city.
Catching my reflection on a stainless steel-plated pillar on one of the plazas outside the International Finance Center mall, an upscale shopping mall on the waterfront of Hong Kong’s Central District.
These ‘happy happy’ guys are from the foyer of the International Finance Center mall, an upscale shopping mall on the waterfront of Hong Kong Island’s Central District.
A family of tigers, heralding the start of the Year of the Tiger, inside the fancy Landmark shopping mall on Queens Road in Central District on Hong Kong Island. This mall is very upscale and designer oriented, all Gucci and Louis Vuitton and all that.
Lots of people on Saturday night, and lots of food vendors in the Tsim Sha Tsui district in Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Ice cream at Mister Softee in the Tsim Sha Tsui district in Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Hole-in-the-wall stores in Tsim Tsa Tsui that are not on the street level can be found on other levels in the tall buildings. Look for the sign for the South African ‘Van Der Merwe’ camera store on the left !
A forest of tall apartment towers from a high floor in the Marriott Courtyard on Connaught Rd West in, Sai Ying Pun on Hong Kong Island.

 

 

 

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Friday morning/ on my own

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?

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Friday/ 勿 擦 do not erase

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!

wù cā : do not erase!

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.

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Thursday/ avoid peek

This cute translation is displayed on the ATM machine at the apartments.

A more ‘proper’ translation could be ‘Please block when entering password/ Prevent prying eyes’. I say this one is perfect as it is.
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Wednesday/ red lanterns

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.

 

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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.

 

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Monday/ apartment

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).

 

 

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Sunday night/ ‘home’ (far away from home)

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.

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Saturday/ at Seattle airport

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.

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Friday/ packing up

Picture: CNN Weather Center.

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.

The Great Wall of China from my visa. I hope to see it for real, some time.
A little peek into the goodies that go with this time : chocolate & coffee, Dove soap that I couldn’t find there, and just some snacks for work.  Big old can of parmesan cheese for the pasta we cook in the apartment!  No parmesan cheese in China could be found so far by us.

 

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Thursday/ got the visa

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.

Waiting for the No 10 bus on 15th Avenue. The Newcastle Brown Ale beer truck must have replenished the supplies of the bars and restaurants close by : ).
The view of downtown from my desk in the offices on 5th Avenue, towards Elliott Bay in Puget Sound. (Ignore the mosquito in the window! Ha!). There’s Macy’s department store, and to its right the lower triangular one is Westlake Center. Look for the monorail train at the bottom, picking up passengers for the short run to the Space Needle.
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Wednesday/ passports and visas

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.

 

 

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Tuesday/ at the office

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.

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Monday/ work & other stuff

It’s Monday and I already have to catch up with some work! (from home, giving myself one more day then I’ll go into the office tomorrow).   It also allows me to take care of very necessary little tasks, such as throwing my computer backpack into the washing machine to get rid of the smell from a chunk of banana that went unnoticed and bad inside of it!  Blech. My house is in decent shape, and the deck and yard at the back is finally free of leaves and twigs now that the neighbor’s maple tree has shed all it had for the season.

The 2007 versions of Microsoft Word and Excel that we upgraded to recently, seems buggy and glitchy and I’ll go and ask the tech support guy tomorrow if he had similar complaints from other users.   (Always a bad situation when you’re the only one with a problem that no one has ever seen before).

I have to get a light jacket and maybe a few more dress shirts so that I have some extra ones, out in China.  Isabella, the dry cleaner shop in the apartment complex, is on the pricey side at $2 a shirt and even more for pants, but the clothes come out of the cleaners looking like new.

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Saturday/ more Hong Kong pictures

More pictures while roaming around on the streets of Hong Kong.

The Center is a 73-story skyscraper located on Queen’s Road Central halfway between the MTR Island Line’s Sheung Wan and Central stations, at height of 350m (1,150 ft). It is the city’s 5th tallest building.
Scene at the International Finance Center, Bank of China building with the diagonal stripes in the background was once the tallest outside New York and Chicago, but no more.
Lots of night buses and trolleys to take restaurant and store workers home, about 10pm.
Billboard with website promoting collaboration between Hong Kong and Shenzhen’s for a combined infrastructure as twin cities across the HK-China ‘border’ (eat your bokchoy! it’s good for you : )
Overhead reflection walking in Hong Kong Island’s fancy shopping district.
Don’t spit in the subway! says the sign .. which must be working, because I saw very few people spit.
I love the dragon-turtle on the HKD 50 (about 8 HKD to the US Dollar).
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Friday/ souvenirs

Here is an assembly of most of the things I brought back from this trip : Noritake bone China coffee mugs, Will Pan aka 潘玮柏 Pan Wei Bo 3 CD set made in Germany, panda bear (cannot go to China and NOT come back with a panda bear, right?!), Starbucks espresso mugs for Shenzhen and China, ‘lucky cat’ piggy bank (Japanese, not Chinese, though), ‘Cartier’ watch (Chinese, not French! hah), Year of the Tiger crocheted card, Starbucks gift in bag, cheap but beautiful bone China.  A modest collection, yes – no silk!, no jade!, no expensive China! – I’m too cheap!  Actually, my Chinese-English electronic translator didn’t make it into the picture and was a few $100.

Got my passport out to New York by overnight mail, I need a visa again, hopefully I will get a multiple-entry one this time.  Otherwise I just ran errands, picked up three weeks’ mail (90% junk mail of course) at the post office, and went to the gym.  It felt so nice to get some exercise.

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Thursday/ home!

.. and it’s still Thursday.   I traveled back in time, so to speak, of course.  It reminds me of the limerick –

There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light;
She set out one day,
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

– by Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, in the December 19, 1923 issue of Punch

It’s 10 o’clock at night and I have to run out to get milk and bread. I’ll put a few more Hong Kong pictures up tomorrow.

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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.

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Wednesday/ last day

Let’s go! Let’s go! .. is what Gus is saying, telling us to get in our little bus so that we can leave. This bus only takes us into the little town of Da Peng, where a minibus driver with Hong Kong as well as China mainland registration plates will pick us up to take us to the airport hotel.

We are cramming in as much work as possible today before we leave. We plan to leave at 4pm today for Hong Kong, and stay over at the airport hotel.

I might have been able to have stuck around until Thursday morning, because my flight is only at noon on Thursday. It’s better to travel with the departing group, though. I plan to explore Hong Kong at night on my own a little – I hope there is time for that.

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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.