Friday's thoughts and Saturday's excursion

It's the end of week 3. I'm already in the groove at work and that's been really good. Have I mentioned that they sanitize the phones once a week? Cause they do that, and the lady just came by cleaning my phone.

Work is work. Pipes, ducts, space proofing and the like. I'm not getting to do my own plant design just yet but we'll see what happens. But it's the little things that make working out here interesting. For instance, I've been working on an educational building at a sludge plant. This place has a pool area with three pools (perfectly clean pools, heated with excess heat). Again this is at a sludge (or sewage) treatment plant. "Kids the field trip is to the sludge treatment facility, bring your bathing suits." If that's your kid, are you signing that permission slip?

Fun fact, unlike Arup New York, here they actually have the Annual Dinner (basically a Holiday Party) in December. What a thought.

So far I haven't found middle class, modest shopping. It's either really high end, fancy-pants malls (which all the same designer stores) or it's cheap stuff on the street. I'm not saying it's not here, but I can't find it. (Sunday update: I found some. More on that later on.)

I haven't seen the giant Buddha everyone's told me about yet. But it's on my list of places to visit.

Okay it's time for a beer and I'll finish up later...

So guess what I did saturday? Saw the giant Buddha. Or the Tian Tan Buddha in Ngong Ping, a Buddhist village on Lantau Island. It was a really cool trip. So at the end of one of the MTR lines, I took a gondola to the village. The gondola trip alone was worth it; the views are stunning! Just these island mountains covered in green, and then the sea. Side note, in the gondola with me was a guy who works in the village and he told us about the emergency rations stored in each gondola car in case of any long stoppage. He told us about a 20 km bridge that's just starting to be built from Hong Kong to Macau and Southern China. I thought that was pretty cool, and I think I know a one time bridge engineer who might also.

So anyway the base of the gondola is a pretty commercial. They're catering to the tourists. But it's nice and I sat outside and had some nice dumplings and a hoegaarden (a real beer!!!!) before continuing through to the Buddha statue itself.

There's a big arch and series of statues of the 12 heavenly generals. Each represents a different 2 hour period of the day and has it's own weapon.

From here I reached the steps of the Buddha statue itself. 300 steps to be exact. I hiked up and got a closer look. There are some great views from the base of the statue!! I took some pictures of the surrounding village and the sun setting over the hills. Again, just magnificent. My favorite part had to be the statues kneeling and making offerings to the Buddha. You can see one of them below.


Inside, there are a number of artifacts that were impressive to look at but I had no idea what their significance was because I couldn't read any of them. Wish I had my sister with me to explain them to me.

I simply loved the afternoon, despite the hour long line for the gondola back. I need to go back to see the Po Lin Monastery. If I have someone to go with me, I might try to hike the trip from the MTR station instead of the gondola...

Well it's getting late and I'll check back in shortly with the news on the apartment and how I found medium range shopping.

My last sentence is about Nic Cage so I have an excuse to use that tag again.

And for more photos check out the album.

Cheers!!

The weekender: beach, supermarkets, and cellphone service

First some beach shots from basically right outside the hotel. I hit up the beach on Friday; the water was a bit dirty, but thanks to years swimming in the water off Jersey, dirty water doesn't faze me as much as it probably should. There were some old men out in the water too and they seemed fine; I guess this made me feel better about going in. It's probably busier on the weekend. (Note, I wrote that Friday night, it's not true, it was just as empty on the weekend) But it was nice to take a 3 minute walk and end up on small local beach.

I found a supermarket for the first time. Nothing like the supermarkets back home. But there was so much good fresh food; I bought some marinated meats among other things. Delicious. I love the food here so far. They had a bunch of meat available by the pound. They had little plastic baskets with paper bags wrapped around them. You pick the meat you want and put it in the basket and then just take the bag with you. What's not clear is that you have to get the guy at the meat counter to weigh your bags before you check out. I guess I could have figured that one out. Fun fact: I couldn't find a small package of rice. They only sold it in sacks the size of pillows. It would take me a month of eating rice every day to finish that much. And where would I keep it? Come to think of it where does anyone keep that much rice around here?

So Saturday I found some shops on Hong Kong Island, a little more like New York City. I tried this chain of Japanese fast food places that's everywhere here: Yoshinoya. Eh. I also found an English language book store, but the choice of books was somewhat random. I guess I'll HAVE to check back in there from time to time. Twist my arm.

Today (Sunday) was really successful. I found the office. I really liked the area around the office. Kowloon Tong was nice, kind of quiet, a pretty park, clean. This was in the area outside the office:

Now I had heard that it was above a mall, I didn't realize that it was a HUGE, western style mall with all the expensive American and British chains. I wouldn't shop at these places in the States. Most of them anyway. I didn't want to spend too much time there (trying to explore the city and the culture). But I did venture into a music/video store. I loved two things about this.

A)They didn't have a rap/r&b section it was all just called "Urban". China, don't co-opt our racial PC hangups. No one's fooled when something's called "urban" in the States, and no one's fooled over here.
B)They sorted the movies by actor (I know Dad will get a kick out that). I guess if it works... but for instance, Pulp Fiction, one of my favorite movies, was listed as a John Travolta film. That's misleading to me. I think some movies are defined by the writer/director (Tarrantino films, Kevin Smith movies) some by the actor in them (Nick Cage movies, Jet Li movies) and some not at all (Fight Club, The Kings Speech). I think I can understand how this makes sense in Hong Kong though. If someone in Hong Kong is looking for a movie, they're going to think of the actors in it, not its niche in American pop culture.

The best thing about today though was that I found not one but two REAL honest to goodness supermarkets. With some local foods but with most of the day to day stuff that I need. The larger fancier one was in the lower level of the mall below the office. But this made my day. I felt so much more comfortable. So much worry about how I was going to get by completely disappeared. I've never been so happy to find a supermarket. They still only sold rice in apocalypse sizes, but I'm going to guess that Uncle Ben's size boxes are just laughable around here.

I now have a local cell phone number, e-mail me or something if you want it for whatever reason. I'm going to see if I can afford to keep my US number on a super cheap minimal minutes/no data plan just so I can hold on the number. I'll let people know about that one.

And I'll wrap up this long post with a little silliness. Some of you may remember my hip hop alter-ego, Cap'n Funky Fresh. Well like all great hip hop stars, The Cap'n needs to re-invent himself at this point in his career. Funky Fresh is retired and he will now be known exclusively as: