Recent weekend activities: hiking and touring

The weather has been really nice these past couple of weeks. It's been sunny and warm. I usually take a light jacket out with me in the morning but haven't really needed it. The only places that are really cold are indoor places due to the cold air from ACs.

After the strenuous hike up and down the 8 Immortals, I did another hike that was much more chill. This one was out in the Saikung area and the hike ended at a beach. I hadn't realized how long it's been since I went out to Saikung. When I lived in Kowloon, I used to go every now and then, sometimes just to wander around the town area. I think I blogged about this before. Anyway, it was really nice to get out there again and it was hot that day.

My roommate, her boyfriend, and I were joined by another friend when we got out to Saikung. We ate some noodles for lunch and then set off to find the trailhead. It always amazes me how many local people are out on hiking excursions. These outer reaches of HK are local vacation spots that are always very alive with people during weekends and public holidays. We hiked for less than 2 hours on trails with slight inclines and declines and then found ourselves at a really nice beach.

The beach is also a camping area and we saw some tents pitched on the sand. It was generally really nice and quiet there. The beach was not crowded at all since it's a trek to get out there. We jumped in the water but didn't go too far out as the waves were really strong. I definitely felt myself being carried around by the waves. I just stayed near the shore area and floated around. I fell asleep on the beach afterwards and we made a collective decision to head back rather than to keep going on the trail. I think this was a good decision as the sunset was complete by the time we got back out to the road area to wait for the bus. We got dinner in Saikung before finding that there's a minibus that goes right to where we live. So convenient!

Last week, Sally had some friends visiting. They were moving from France to Australia and this was part of their layover. We took them out to dim sum and they said that this was their first or second time having dim sum. Chinese food is not so easy to find in France. We also took them to see the Occupied staging area. It was also my first time out to the main one in Admiralty. It's really amazing how they've managed to cut off a central thoroughfare in the middle of the city. We approached the blockade from the eastern end and walked for a while on an empty multi-lane expressway. There were kids on rollerblades and bicycles just clearly making use of the free space. We walked around the camp areas where people were putting various prints on blank t-shirts, making speeches, and studying. There are designated areas with tables and chairs for students to study. Places were really well organized with makeshift steps and stairs. I wonder how this is all going to end.

Hiking the 8 Immortals

Long overdue post about another hiking adventure. This hike was really an exception one. I'm pretty sure this is the most challenging hike I've ever been on. This was compounded by the fact that I don't think I'm in very good shape these days. The hike that we decided to do was Pat Sin Leng, which is means The Ridge of 8 Immortals. There are supposed to be 8 peaks in this ridge but I really think there are more.

The hike up the first peak was the most challenging and I was really out of breath. But we made it up the top, pretty satisfied with ourselves. The trees fell away as we went up and there were no trees in sight.

The view was really nice. It was a clear day. 

The long road ahead:

See, no trees:

A large reservoir can be seen in the distance. Our end destination is down near the water.

This is what we hike. Pretty sure there were more than 8, count them! 

Towards the end, I honestly didn't think I could go up any more peaks. The hike took us about 4-5 hours. I've never felt so tired walking uphill. The descent took a while as well and we were totally exhausted when we finally reached a big road with a rest station. We washed up and refilled our depleted water supply. I was hoping for some tofu dessert place at the nearest village but all they had were BBQ places. We sat down at a little convenience store selling American goods. I quickly finished two cold drinks. I was sore for a week afterwards. 

Hiking weekend

Last weekend I really felt the need to go away from the craziness of the city. I tried to get people to go hiking with me on Saturday but no one was available so I decided to go somewhere close by myself. I went out to Cape D'Aguilar, which is a marine reserve park near Shek O. I've seen the bus stop for it many times on the bus to Shek O but didn't know what it was. I got off and started on walking down the path. 

The entire hike in was on a paved road that actually had a good amount of traffic. I think there's some kind of construction going on so there were big trucks coming in and out. There were some people on motorbikes and others in private vehicles. Not sure where all these people ended up since I didn't see any of them at the end. At one point, I was going to give up and turn back but then I checked my location on GPS and it seemed like I was almost at the coast. So I kept going until I got to the gates of one of the radio station towers and the road ends. 

I didn't really know what to do at this point but an older guy who was walking in front of me told me to take the footpath to the side of the fence. I went on the path and it took me around the radio tower. But I didn't know what to do at the end of that and was turning back when the guy came by showed me the way down. He said that he grew up in this area back when it was a station for long distance telephone services and other utilities things. There were several houses built for the people who worked out here and the families thrived on catching fish and planting their own vegetables. He said he spent his childhood swimming and playing out in the area. All the houses that were out there before have now been demolished. The entire area has been made into a marine reserve and is kept by HKU as a research station. There are some student housing for the researchers.

  Rock arch

Real whale bone

The research station

He took me around to see the lighthouse and rock arch and left me near the whale bone. The entire area is really, really nice. You can look out to the sea and climb onto the rock outcrop. I think most hikers are really respectful of the area and there's no trash or other random things left behind. There weren't a lot of people around but the guy said that there's usually more people. 

Random updates while filing emails away

My shoulders and neck has been feeling extremely stiff lately. I've signed up for a couple of massage sessions in hopes that they can help me relax the muscles there. I think I just need to work less. I have this big submission that is finally getting down to the wire in terms of needing to push out a submission. I've even taken over the living room at home with drawings and such. My roommate is away this week in Australia. The table at home is actually bigger than the table at work.

There are two public holidays next week, on Wednesday and Thursday. But I have a big deadline on Friday. It should still make the week better though since I can come into the office whenever I want on those days. I really think having a more flexible schedule would make me more efficient. I do my best work between 7-9pm. Whenever I have a difficult problem, I leave it until those hours and solve it then. Anyway, hard to have a really flexible schedule when you're coordinating things with other parties.

My work has upgraded to Microsoft Office 2013. The color scheme is really lacking! You can only chose between white, light gray, and dark gray. Honestly don't know what the designers were thinking. It's really hard to see with everything so white and not enough contrast. How hard could it be to just let people chose?? There seems to be a lot of complaints about this on the forms. Hope they fix this soon.

I finally redeemed my book prize of $300 HKD with Page One from writing an article after an AGS site visit. I got a Lonely Planet book for Korea and What Color is Your Parachute. The Korea book is kind of slim but I guess that makes it good to carry around while traveling. It even has a section for North Korea. I think it would be cool to do a train trip around South Korea using their rail pass. But the book says that the rail system is not that comprehensive. I guess not everywhere is like Japan.

Team BBQ

Long days at work again. One deadline after another. At least this latest one is for my own project and I feel like I'm doing enough analysis and research to justify my design. This latest project is one that I feel like I'm really the engineer for the project. I've been looking after it since the beginning and I've made the important decisions for the project so far. The construction works will start early next year so once we've finalized the design, it's going to happen really quickly. There's not much time to make any changes other than those that happen during construction.

I've been thinking about applying for ICE membership (UK chartership) for this spring. I would need to submit two reports, one summarizing all my experience so far and another that goes in depth for a project. I would also need to pick a project to do a presentation. It's pretty hard to choose since I feel like there are pros and cons among the projects I've worked on. Maybe once I write the broader report (or start to write it), I'll have a better idea of which project to use for the chartership exam.

In other news, I'm now a licensed engineer in Texas! There's a long story to go with why I'm doing this. Hopefully it all works out... In the meantime, I'm getting my stamps for CA and TX made at a local stamp shop. They are pretty fast! 4pm next day service.

Last Friday, I helped organized a team gathering event that consisted of BBQ and playing around at a golf driving range. The location is kind of out of the way but it hard to find a location that satisfies everyone. I think it was still too hot to comfortably have a BBQ. Actually, it's a lot cooler this week than last week so maybe we should have had it this week. Anyway, one of the attractions of this BBQ site is that you can order a suckling pig to roast. We ordered a pig and a duck. It took us about 4 hours to roast them. It might have taken less time but I don't think we knew what we were doing for a while. They were really fat and really good. But I think we had a lot of leftovers because everyone was full from all the other food.

The duck

The pig

Salad for lunch this week to make up for eating all this roasted food. Hydroponically and locally grown!

Totally unrelated but I'm a big fan of these cakes

Mid-Autumn Festival

Happy mid-autumn festival! I went out to dinner with a couple of Yalu's friends who are here for their internship. One girl is from Dalian and she took us to a Dalian restaurant out near Austin MTR station. I've only been to this area one other time in an attempt to find Vietnamese sandwiches. I think I've blogged about that in this blog post. The area is laid out in a grid and feels like an old neighborhood with small shops and family run restaurants all along the streets. The place we went to was also very small and run by a family. All the other patrons at this restaurant are from the Dongbei area. 

It was a very chill day in general. I managed to finish off this one project that has been sucking up all my time on Friday and can finally start on the project that I've been neglecting. I went into the office on Saturday for a little bit to wrap up some stuff and then had a easy day on Sunday. On Monday, I decided to go to the CPS site to see the first step of the destrutting for the excavation that I have been working on these last few years. We thought it would happen in the morning but all the preparation works took a while and so they didn't start until the afternoon. Everyone wanted to go home early so things happened pretty speedily. Nothing major happened but we did take measurements after every major cut. We're actually very lucky that BD had required strain gauge monitoring. I really don't think other private projects have such extensive monitoring records. It would be really interesting to do back analysis and possibly publish a paper somewhere.

After I stood around for a few hours watching this whole thing happen, I felt pretty gross from all the sweat and grim. So I went home to shower instead of going into the office. I checked email and then headed out for dinner at this Dalian place. I got stuck in traffic after deciding to take the bus and go to the dinner place about half an hour late. Anyway, the food was very good and we had a good time chatting. The food is heavily spiced (unlike Guangdong style food) but not spicy. There's a lot of grilled things on the menu and we got lamb and chicken skewers along with grilled eggplant and corn. They sliced up the eggplant, drizzled it with oil, and added a lot of garlic and spices. It was really good. 

The two friends had been wanting to hang out but I didn't hear from them for a week. This was good for me since I was really busy last week. But it turned out that they had been in a really scary boat accident. Their boat was tugging a banana boat (a boat where people saddle on for fun) and the rope broke, came flying back to their boat, and hit them in the face. Luckily, they were both wearing sunglasses, which saved them from any eye injuries and they came away with bruises and small cuts. No stitches needed. But I think they were in bad shape the whole week. They said that the accident was totally preventable because the boat guy saw that the rope was frayed so he cut it and tied it with a knot. The knot slipped. I'm glad they're both okay except for some really bad bruises and superficial cuts. 

Anyway, had another chill day today (Tuesday). It's a public holiday here since it's expected that everyone had a late night with family dinners.

Summer updates

Thought I'd write a quick post since it's been a while since I've written anything here. I was home for about a month. My trip was originally going to be a little more than 2 weeks but I ended up extending my stay. It was nice to stay home for an extended amount of time. There were many days where I didn't do that much. I feel like our lives are always so fast paced and we're always trying to fit everything in that it's actually hard to stop. I always feel like I need to be productive and do things during the day. It's actually really nice not to do very much and lounge around.

Anyway, it was nice to be back. I met up with friends and met new friends. The wedding that I went to was really nice. The ceremony was at the Stanford chapel. The chapel was spacious and it was easy to see what was happening on stage. Outdoor setups tend not to be the greatest in terms of viewing the actual ceremony. There was a bunch of shuttles that took the entire party up to a winery for the reception. The winery is really nice! Actually, it was amazing. The view of the Bay was unbeatable against the vineyards. There were indoor rooms and outdoor mingling spaces. The dinner was held in a large gazebo area that was shaded from the direct sunlight overhead but can still be considered an outdoor space. We enjoyed the dinner in the long sunset. I really don't know if the couple and the wedding party was able to enjoy the wedding as much as the guests. They seemed busy, which is a shame. It would be nice if these wedding venues could have a package deal where you get to enjoy the place after the wedding for half a day or something.

On my flight back, I had a layover in Taipei. My long flight between SF and Taipei was not that full and I had all 3 seats to myself! Usually these trans-Pacific flights are really full so this was a nice surprise. I think what happened was that these summer flights are in high demand. All the other airlines were fully booked. And EVA airlines decided to run an extra flight. So there were 2 flights that night from SF to Taipei, leaving 20 minutes apart. I was on the earlier flight, which (I think) is the extra one. Anyway, after eating dinner and watching the latest Detective Conan movie (!), I laid down on the seats and slept. The seats weren't completely flat so it wasn't that comfortable but it was still better. I read an article about this rich guy, who instead of booking First Class, would book all three seats in Economy and had this inflatable thing that fits in the legroom space. This would actually give him more space to sleep on than a First Class seat.

I've been back in HK for more than a week now. One of my friends came to visit last week. He had originally told me that his flight was leaving Friday late evening and had asked if he should arrive Wednesday or Thursday. I told him that there's a lot to see and do so he should probably come in on Wednesday. It's a good thing that he did because it turns out that his flight was Thursday evening! We still made it out to a dim sum dinner on Wed night and then a bunch of places on Thursday before he had to leave to catch his flight. There's too much to see and it's hard to be walking around in the heat. HK is a much better place in the winter. At least there wasn't any tropical rainstorm or typhoon during his 24 hour stay.