Having another no work weekend! I'm spending a lot of it with coworkers though. It was my birthday on Friday and everyone in the office seemed to know, mostly through facebook. I had a pretty chill day on Friday and went to lunch with the graduate engineers on our floor. They had actually organized this lunch for another coworker, whose birthday was also this past week. So it ended up being a birthday lunch for both of us.
I left work at a decent-ish time and finally managed to sell my microwave. So happy to finally get rid of that thing. I hope it works out well for the guy who bought it. I've honestly only used that thing less than 10 times. It's way too big for my little space and I've been trying to get rid of it for more than 2 months. I guess I just wasn't aggressive enough in selling it. Anyway, I think I finally managed to name a price that's agreeable to other people and got some responses. It's quite heavy and my arms are sore from carrying it to the MTR station.
Then I crashed another birthday party. This time, it was a friend who I met here in HK through a mutual friend. She and another friend of hers decided to hold a party for their birthdays and invited me. It was held at the Sky Lounge of an apartment complex in Wanchai. The apartment complex is pretty nice. Very slender so the use of space is very efficient, like most places on the Island. The Sky Lounge is really nice, with great views of the harbor. They have party rooms that residents can rent out and do gatherings like this. It started out pretty small and quiet and then people started pouring in. Everyone bought a bottle of alcohol so that accumulated to be a really big collection by the end of the night. It got really loud at some point and the management asked us to move out of the room and into the big lounge area, which helped disbursed people a bit. The management got put off the the large amount of alcohol we bought with us and the two cakes. I think they would have been okay with a small amount of snacks and one cake but two cakes and tons of alcohol was too much for them. They wanted to make money by having people rent out the place and then paying for their food. I'm sure they are making plenty by collecting rent from expats though so it's not like I feel sorry for them.
The good thing about being on the other side of the world is that it feels like I get an extended birthday. People were sending me happy birthday wishes through facebook for basically two days. I was pretty lazy this morning (Saturday) and ended up just dropping off laundry before heading to another gathering with coworkers. We had a gathering/fun day among the graduates in the geotech group. We went to one guy's apartment and played board games for a while. He lives with his parents in a really nice apartment complex. It looks like a hotel with indoor and outdoor pool, game rooms, even music rooms. We played this number board game called Rummikub, which really makes you think. It got addicting after a while and we played several games before stopping to eat apple crumble with ice cream fresh out of the oven. I'm surprised they even had an oven in the house.
We moved on to the pool room and some of the guys played pool while the rest of us moved out to this outdoor balcony to play another card game, called Saboteur. That outdoor space was really nice, again, with a great view of the harbor. They had nice seats and I can definitely imagine hanging out there during the late afternoon and sunset time. Very expensive to actually rent out though. The game was fun and I somehow was on the "good" side every time we played. I think it would be more fun to be on the "bad" side. Anyway, the first couple of rounds were quite confusing because most people were still trying to figure out how to play the game. And then people started doing silly things so the saboteurs won every round.
We had a nice dinner at Simply Life. I'm usually very opposed to eating at chains that are available at Festival Walk. But I was assured that the food they served at this one is different from the one at the office. The food was really good and for a good price. I think we were all happy with the food and atmosphere so we sat around for a long while chatting.
Tomorrow will be another day of hanging out with coworkers, this time with the expats.
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