Library Card

I finally got a Hong Kong Library card! I've been meaning to do this since I now live really close to the Main library. One short form, ID card, and proof of address are all you need. It was fast and there's no "probation" period. The maximum limit for checkout is 8 though. I'm not sure I remember a limit for the Oakland libraries. But I think it's a matter of the number of people to the number of items available. Anyway, I have fond memories of pulling books off the shelf and borrowing them without any restrictions other than my own physical limit.

The main library here is really nice! There is a big atrium on the ground floor, along with a cafe that overlooks a green space. So it would be a pretty nice place to read your books after borrowing them. All around the perimeter of each floor is plenty of seating areas for people to read. I would have spent some time at the cafe too but I had just finished grocery shopping and was carrying a ton of veggies along with my books.

Tentative Japan and Korea trip coming up at the end of March! Stay tuned.

Reflections on 2013 and Thoughts on 2014

Another year! I just reread what I wrote about 2012 and all those events feels like a lifetime ago. I spent most of this year working on a construction site and really got to see things happen. While on site, I had more time in general and was able to get a lot of life things in order, such as getting my PE and started keeping track of my finances. After paying back all my student loans, I started putting money away in savings and finally ended 2013 with a fully maxed out Roth IRA.

Some highlights of this year:
January - Started my site assignment. I think I need to write something about how my site experience has contributed to my engineering career overall. It has definitely broaden my experience.
February - Adjusted to life on site. Finally got a smart phone.
March - Moved to a new apartment on Hong Kong Island. Parents and brother visited. Xiumin visited.
April - Went back to the US again and took the last of my PE exam. Passed everything and is officially a Professional Engineer in California!
May - Attended Yalu+Mike's wedding
June - Met up with Yi in Hangzhou!
July - Weekend trip to Singapore with roommate
August - Hot, sweltering days at site
September - Major geotech conference in Paris and then vacationed in Marseilles. There are definitely perks to working at a big office with money for "training" and a small professional society that can also support these kinds of activities. Back at the office.
October - Weekend trip to Guangzhou and nearby areas.
November - Adjusting back to life at the office. Celebrated Thanksgiving with friends.
December - Really busy at the office...

Thoughts for 2014:

• I really need to put some serious thought into how long I want to stay in Hong Kong. It's weird because there's not really a deadline or anything and I can really just leave anytime I want to. But there are a lot of things I like about living in HK and feel like I would really need to re-adjust to living in the US. More on this later. 
• I heard a podcast (either HBS or TED) about being grateful and that it really makes a difference if you list your blessings on a weekly basis. I might try that.. That would be a good motivation to write in this blog at least once a week.
• Along with this whole moving/not moving business, I would really like to do more traveling in Asia while I'm here. Definitely need to do a long trip before I leave but in the meantime, short trips would do too.
• As far as work goes, I will have been working 3 years full time in April/May. Hope to get another chartership status within this year.

That's it so far. We get New Year's Day off and since it's so cold here lately, I might stay around the house and write more. 

Thanksgiving in Hong Kong

Been really busy lately! I have been meaning to write about Thanksgiving celebrations but haven't had the chance. Anyway, here it is:

I celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time in Hong Kong this year with some friends from work. I baked a pumpkin pie, some cookies, and made mashed potatoes for our small party of five people. People kept being really amazed by the pie and I keep having to explain that the flesh of the pumpkin is attached to the skin. We ordered a turkey from one of the restaurants at the mall attached to our office. At first we thought that we can order from different restaurants because many of them were advertising it. But then we realized that it's from the same catering place. We should really piggback on them and offer a pie option for people. I bet a lot of people would be interested.

It took me a while to find canned pumpkin as it is not popular here. I went through several of the more upscale versions of the big chain supermarkets and failed to find anything. The big supermarket chains here have "regular" versions and more upscale versions, usually branded as "international" or similar that sources more international foods, catering to expats. Anyway, I was forced to look up "American" grocery stores and went to a store that sells things solely imported from the US. They were out of canned pumpkin! Good thing I made a list and a plan of attack. The second store on my list turned out to be closed. I finally found a really upscale supermarket that had a mountain of Libby's canned pumpkins. All through this process I kept thinking of the times I searched through both Cambridges (US and UK) for Chinese food and now that I'm in Hong Kong, I'm combing through the city for American food.

Anyway, some pictures of our feast:

Recent kitchen creations

Haven't written much here in a while so I thought I'd upload some pictures. I've realized that I can make pizza in the little oven we have. It's actually really easy to make your own pizza! The dough is just normal flour, water, and yeast. I did my first one without yeast and just used baking powder, which meant the bread was more flat. The sauce was just tomato paste with some olive oil, crushed garlic, and dried basil. The sauce was really good! 

This was the one last night. I ran out of veggies so this one featured Ikea meatballs. I made several in between these two but those pictures are on my iPad.

Also got a pre-made mix for pancakes that produced really fluffy pancakes. The pot in the background contains apple cinnamon sauce. 

Recent and upcoming weekends

I splurged on a mechanical keyboard yesterday after being really frustrated with my keyboard at work! The one that I had at work is kind of old and it takes a lot of pressure to get anything typed. I went for the blue switch one that makes a clicking sound. I hope it's not too loud for my neighbors. Will see if I get any complaints on Monday. But I really doubt my typing will be a distraction since there's usually a lot of noise in our open plan environment anyway. I basically tried out every keyboard at the computer place in Sham Shui Po before setting on one. Some of these keyboards can get seriously expensive!

There's a another typhoon passing by so it's been really windy this weekend. No real rain though. I wanted to go to Peng Chau last weekend, which was really nice but never made it. It didn't seem like a good idea to go on the ferry this weekend since it was so windy. I basically used the weekend to catch up on work and did some household cleaning and cooking. I've been bringing lunch to work whenever I can because I find the takeout at the food court to be extremely boring. I don't mind so much if we went out to eat because that at least involves getting away from the office for a while. This buying takeout business is also very time consuming. Anyway, cooking is lot more healthy and less expensive.

Our office managed to get a professor from one of the universities to come give some classes on advanced soil mechanics. We're doing three days of classes spread over the next couple of months. I feel like a full day is too long though because people can't really absorb so much. Anyway, we'll see how that goes. The first class is next Saturday. I kind of feel like I should review basic soil mechanics. Not sure if I ever learned it in the first place...

Hong Kong Park

Autumn in Hong Kong is very refreshing. It is finally cool enough to walk outside without feeling like you're trapped in an oven! I walked around Hong Kong Park last weekend and discovered parts of it that I've never been through. There was a shallow fish pond with lots of fish and turtles. There was also an aviary with lots of nice birds. I wanted to do the hike from the Peak down to Aberdeen but stopped at Pok Fu Lam as it was getting dark. Will find a chance to do all of it next time.

Weekend in nearby Mainland cities

This weekend I went with a couple of friends on a weekend adventure to nearby cities in the Mainland. It is a long weekend over here with Monday the 14th being a holiday. The pan was to go hiking in Shaoguan on Saturday and rafting somewhere else on Sunday. I would leave them Monday to go to Zhongshan to visit family. Not very much went as according to plan.

As it turned out, my friend is actually a very bad planner. Unlike my other trips where most of the important things are figured out, we had nothing figured out when we started. We only found out we can buy train tickets from HK to Guangzhou online the afternoon before we left and most trains were already full. So we decided to take the MTR to Shenzhen. My friend had read that you can take either a bus or a train from Shenzhen to Shaoguan so we looked for bus tickets after we got off of the MTR at Lukwu. But turns out you can only get buses at the other cross border checkpoint so we ended up taking the SZ Metro to the SZ train station. This took a long time as SZ is actually a very big city. When we got too the train station, we found that trains to Shaoguan leaves at 5pm which would not be ideal for hiking. In hindsight, we could have still gone, spent the night there and then hike leisurely the next day.

But instead, we chose to buy a ticket for Guangzhou that left an hour and a half later. We had lunch and then promptly napped on the benches. I didn't get very much sleep the night before and was still a little sick so I had been really looking forward to an opportunity to a long train or bus ride. After we finally got to GZ, we find that the high speed train station is really far from the city center and it took more than half an hour to get into the city by metro where we finally were about to properly start our holiday.

We walked around a pedestrian street and were really not that impressed by the shops. There were not as many accommodation choices as we expected but we managed to find a pretty nice 3 star hotel with reasonable prices. One of the things I like about traveling in the Mainland is that accommodation is cheap. We proceeded to walk around Shammien Island and then found a place to eat at another pedestrian street. The restaurant we ate at had traditional Guangdong food which we ate with pretty good tea. We walked around the pedestrian area after but it was mostly clothing stores and not many interesting things. We walked along the Pearl river for a bit and then tooka taxi to the Canton Tower. Wee got there after 10pm and I have to say that night views are not very good. Daytime viewing is much more interesting as you can see more stuff. Especially since this tower did not have an outdoor viewing area and the glass window reflections blocked a lot of the view. We tried unsuccessfully to get a cab back and ended up taking one of those motorized "three wheel vehicles" which consisted of open air seating behind a driver of a scooter like vehicle who drive through many red lights. We got back safely in the end and slept pretty well that night.

We were in a bit of a rush to get to the train station the next morning to catch our train to Shaoguan. We had thought our train left at 9:30 and ran to the gate at exactly 9:30. Luckily for us, the train's actual departure was at 9:44am. None of us has bothered to actually read the ticket after we bought it.

So we finally got to Shaoguan and found the train station to be very desolate again. We asked about buses to the hiking area in Danxia Mountain and found that we had missed the bus. Some driver trying to make money told us the bus only confess every hour so we asked around for prices and ended up taking a taxi. The bus probably comes more often but who knows. We were again accosted by people trying to make money after getting to Danxia Mountain. These people on scooters told us that tickets would cost $120 each but that they can take us in through the backdoor for $60. I think it was not too bad to take them because everything is very far apart and it would have taken us a long time by foot. This backdoor deal was a bit sketchy but we ended up right at the start of one of the trails so that worked out fine.

We did some serious hiking all the way up to this fortress. We all agreed that there really should be more warning at the start so that people know what they are getting themselves into. Fortunately for us we went up one way where we can easily see the highest point. The way back down was more hidden so the people who took that way up had no idea how far they had to go and where they were going. We saw one group who were complainting loudly at the start and one of the girls even has her shoes off (probably had a pair of shoes that were unsuitable for hiking to begin with) and we warned them they had a long way to go.

After our tiring hike, we chilled at a restaurant/bar and recovered before striking out to find the geology museum. We found a driver who was willing to take us for very cheap. After we got there we found ourselves at the sex/erotic museum instead and were told that the geology museum was actually inside the park. We would need tickets to go back in. I wouldn't have minded staying at the park for the night as it is very scenic and peaceful. But we had already left the park and wanted to try to get to another nearby city to stay for the night. That city has some temples and things but I really doubt we would've been able to see anything given all the travel time necessary to get there. I've found that it's hard for my friend to give up on an idea after he's decided on something. Anyway, we got to the high speed train station only to find that all tickets to that city were sold out for the day and that the next available train for GZ was at nearly 8pm, which meant we would have 2.5 hours to kill. So that's where I wrote most of this on my phone due to the lack of anything else to do.

After we successfully got to GZ, I got another train ticket to Zhongshan for the next morning. We asked about nearby hotels at the information desk and was recommended one that had train station pickup and dropoff included. The hotel was pretty standard but didn't have any 3 people room. The double delux had a couch included so we opt for that. The couch was kind of small but still OK. We proceeded to go find food and went into a nearby mall whose Chinese name is the same as Festival Walk, the name of the mall I work at. Really can't escape. But as it was nearly 10pm, things were closed. We settled for a Cha Chan Tang serving HK style food. They really made everything that you could find in HK. So we all got some stir fried noodles and milk tea. It was 11 by the time we finished and we still hadn't showered so we basically went back to the hotel and slept.

The next day we parted ways and I headed to Zhongshan by high speed rail. Got up to the platform just as they were letting people in. Really need to reserve more time for these train stations. They are very big! It takes forever to walk from one end to the other. Anyway I got to Zhongshan and was met by my uncle. We had a lunch together and I managed to get some bank stuff done before heading back to HK. The trip back took a while as there were no ferries due to a typhoon. So I took the bus to Shenzhen and then took the MTR back. There was lots of traffic in Shenzhen and tons of people at the border crossing. Maybe I should have had dinner in SZ and avoided the rush.

I think it was good to get away from HK for a long weekend. Should really do this more often. But better planning and not being sick would definitely help.