Mid-Autumn Festival, Part 2

More on the Mid-Autumn Festival edition of HK exploration. In HK, they have these weird mid-week holidays, most of which are traditional Chinese holidays. We got Tuesday off for the mid-autumn festival because they expect people to stay out late on Monday night (I suppose). So on Tuesday, A and I went to HKUST, which is one of the universities in HK that focuses on tech. Their civil engineering department is famous for being really tough.

Their campus is really nice though. It's right on the bay.

Student housing have great views of the bay. It was really, really quiet when we were there. Most local students live at home so all we saw were international students. There weren't many of them around. They were probably all out on the beach. We had dim sum at one of the cafeterias and walked around the campus a bit.

Then we headed to Clear Water Bay. The bus stop looked like this. I really like this picture. Reminds me of California with shrubs on rolling hills and wide roads. It's really nice to get out of the city once in a while. It feels really refreshing.

Clear Water Bay is really nice. The water at the beach is actually clear, unlike the one in Mui Wo. I wish I had brought my swim suit along. There were a lot of people though. Very crowded. There were also big rocks on the other side of the beach and we climbed those

After that, we went back to HKUST, ate some more food, and then took the bus to Sai Kung. I've heard a lot about this place from people who like to go hiking and camping. Unfortunately, we got stuck in traffic due to an accident on the highway. It took us forever to get there! It turns out Sai Kung consists of a small town with a very active pier. There were boats that will take you out to the neighboring islands where there are a lot of interesting geological formations to be found. I will definitely come back for more hiking. 

Really cool cakes at a pastry shop:

We found out that there's a minibus that goes to Mongkok. I'm not sure if it's entirely due to the accident but the line for the bus was extremely long. Each minibus only takes 16 people. We tried to wait it out by walking around and even eating dinner there. But in the end, we ended up taking a regular bus. I was really tired and fell asleep the entire way. We walked around a mall before heading back on the MTR.

HK Adventures: Mid-Autumn Festival Version

Been a while since I've written about what I've been up to. I've been spending a lot of time at work these days but recently some friends came to visit so I took the chance to go explore some more of Hong Kong.

The first week of the month, a friend of a friend, W, from Stanford came to HK to start her second job. She graduated from Stanford undergrad the same year as me and then went to Boston to work for the last two years. Now she's out here working for another company. We have some mutual friends from Stanford so we met up at Sham Shui Po and had dim sum. There's a pretty good dim sum place near where I live. I totally forgot about it when my parents were here. Oh wells, next time.

We walked around the neighborhood for a little bit afterwards and then she went off to look for apartments. I tried to tell her that it's not necessary to look so soon but I think she's still on the US schedule of apartment searching. Anyway, I went to work that day. That Sunday, I got some mint seeds and started a mint plant at the office. It hasn't sprouted yet but hopefully there will be something happening soon.

I went to the gym with a friend from work. We've been meaning to do this for a while now and finally found a time that works for both of us. We got there with the intention of joining a class but I think we got the schedule wrong because we caught the last of the class instead of the beginning. We headed for the treadmill and I went to warm up on the elliptical for 5 minutes before joining her. In that short amount of time, she got targeted by a couple of the personal trainers at the gym. They had her working out for an hour or so and then started selling their services. I think she signed up for something in the end. This is one of the very annoying things about HK - people are always trying to sell you stuff. We went for dinner afterwards and then got coffee chendol.

The next week was another busy week at work. I had thought about going back to China for the moon festival but it didn't seem like work was getting any less busy and a friend of mine, A, from Stanford was visiting for the weekend. He arrived on the 10th, Saturday afternoon. I got W to come along and the three of us went sightseeing. I took them to the Big Buddha and let them go on the cable cars themselves. I went shopping in the outlet mall next to the MTR station. I didn't think the prices were that great but there were a lot of sales going on. I wasn't looking for anything in particular so I didn't end up buying anything.

After they got back from the cable cars, we took the bus to Mui Wo and walked along the beach for a bit. Then we got dinner at a seafood place and then took the ferry back to Central. W went to meet up with some other friends so A and I just walked around Central for a little bit and headed back to Kowloon.

The next day, A met up with another friend of his and the three of us had dim sum at the Sham Shui Po place again.



After that, we went to take the Peak Tram. We took our time walking around the mall around the Peak and found out about the moon festival celebration in Causeway Bay. It started at 7:30pm and it would take us more than half an hour on the bus to get there. I managed to convince the guys to do the 3K hike around the Peak in less time than advertised. I think I exhausted them but the view was really nice. It wasn't very hot out either so it was a very nice walk. We got on the bus with a couple of dumb American guys who were trying to flirt with two girls. I was going to die listening to their conversation.

Anyway, we found a huge lantern fish at Victoria Park and it is now my Facebook profile picture.

We then tried to go see the fire dragon dance but there was wayy too much people. The street was packed. So we gave up and headed to TST for the HK Light Show. We caught the end of the light show, which was good enough for A. By the time we finished with the light show, we were all really hungry so we ate dinner at one of the expensive malls. We had Singaporean food that was really good. The owner is supposed to be a Stanford grad. I need to make more friends in the right type of industries...We got dessert at the mango place where A managed to drop his share of the mochi. It was really funny and we laughed for 5 straight minutes.




I went to work on Monday and had a really stressful morning getting drawings printed and signed by four people. Can't believe it's so hard to get four sets of signatures. My boss felt sorry for me and helped me call a secretary and things went pretty fast after that. Since it was the Mid-Autumn Festival, a lot of people left work early. The office was pretty empty by 6pm. I met up with A and we had dinner at Mongkok. There weren't a lot of people out and all the restaurants were lacking customers. We had food at a small place and felt like the waitresses all wanted to leave as soon as we were finished. I decided to go to the restaurant because they were advertising fried mantou:



Even the Ladies Market was not very crowded. I wanted to buy a purse but the lady wasn't in so we moved on.

Then we went to Langhram Place and went up all the way up to the top. This mall has a very small footprint but is very tall. There are over 60 boutique shops that sell very cute stuff. There were statues of the western zodiac on display and A took pictures of all of them as we made our way down. We also played air hockey at one of the arcades.

 Being eaten by the fishies:

 The pictures are courtesy of A, who likes to take pictures of funny things.

Sunday happenings

This was the first Sunday in a while where I stuck around the neighborhood. Got up at 11am this morning due to getting back late the night before. I had thought about going into the office but ended up having too many errands to run.

By the time I finished chatting with Y and family, it was nearly 2pm. I dropped off a lot of laundry and went to pay rent. I've been here for 4.5 months now! I think I have a pretty good idea at this point of how much I make and how much I use each month. I think I can definitely make enough in overtime pay to pay rent every month. It's not very difficult given the current workload.

I walked by a bakery on my way to pay rent and saw some really delicious looking egg tarts. I made a mental note to myself to stop by on my way back. But when I got there after paying rent, there were no more egg tarts. I was really sad and then I realized that this meant that the next batch was coming. So I waited around and indeed, there was a new batch fresh from the oven. They were $5 (HKD) for 3.

I had them for an afternoon snack and then proceeded to clean my apartment. My apartment was in desperate need of cleaning after having a lot of guests. After that, I went to the market to pick up some ingredients for pasta sauce.

Bell peppers from the market.

They went into this pasta sauce:

Dinner!

Random Photos

Some random photos that I've been meaning to post:

So cute!! Very tempted to buy it, but no room in the house for more pots.

Really small jar of peanut butter.

Breakfast: Bread with mozzarella, tomato, and home (office) grown basil. Japanese eggs with orange yolk (the color is not showing up very well in this picture). Cheese is sooo expensive here!

Ikea meatballs and pasta. I made the sauce with tomato, onions, peppers, and garlic.

Puppies: hehe

Time

Reposting an interesting article about the concept of time:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/09/01/ten-things-everyone-should-know-about-time/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CosmicVarianceBlog+%28Cosmic+Variance%29

Insane workload

Wow, I can't believe it's September already. I only blogged 4 times in August. The other day, one of my coworkers asked me which month I thought was busier, July or August. We came to the consensus that August was definitely busier. This past week, in particular, was crazy. Let's start with last week though, when all the craziness started.

Last Monday (as in 2 weeks ago), I ran into a girl who also went to Stanford in the elevator going up to the office. She just graduated as well and we had met back in SF. I had another Stanford friend coming to visit on the same day so the three of us all ended up having lunch together. That was the fun part of last Monday, now onto the tragic part.

I've been working on a project where we are supporting the structural group with renovating works for some historical buildings. The guy on our team who had been working on the project left the company a month ago. He handed the project over to another guy on the team. And it just so happened that around that same time, the guy who had been supervising site activities also had to go to another site. It was difficult to find a replacement for him and we finally found one guy who had 1 yr and 11 months of experience to fulfill the requirement of having 2 years of experience. I mean, technically he didn't qualify but seriously, it's close enough.  The only small problem was that he's from England and doesn't speak Cantonese. But we threw him on site anyway and he had been there for a week when we found out that the position actually requires someone who has 2 years of experience AND at least 1 year of local experience. We found out about this Monday morning and the only way out was that we switched that guy with the design engineer (who I had been helping out). So this has really bad implications for me because I'm basically the only person left in the office doing design. The guy out on site brought a laptop with him and even came back to the office after being on site. But it's just not the same.

So basically, for the majority of the past two weeks, I've been doing a lot of design work/trying to appease other people. I still don't feel like I've had a proper briefing on this project though. I keep finding out "facts" that I don't know about. It's a lot easier when there's someone there telling me what I should be doing. It's not that I can't figure out how to make the necessary calculations, it's more like I don't know what I have to get done. The only other chartered engineer on our team helped me out a lot. I'm pretty sure he asked the question, "Lucy, did you THINK about this??!" at least ten times a day.

I went into the office both last Saturday and Sunday. I have to admit that I wasn't particularly efficient last Saturday since I hung out with a friend who came to visit for like 4 hours in between. I had thought she was leaving on Sunday and therefore we would have time for dinner. Anyway, we had a deadline for Tuesday so the three of us were in the office pretty late on Sunday. We the same dai pai dong we went to last time we worked late on a weekend for dinner. One of the guys suggested salt and pepper duck chin. The other guy was like, "by duck chin, you mean... a duck's chin??" and motioned to his own chin. The guy who suggested the dish gave him a look that was said, "what else could it be?!" Anyway, it turned out that that dish was no good but at least now we know!

This past Monday and Tuesday was definitely record breaking. We thought we had basically every for the project that we needed to submit on Tuesday ready. Again, the engineer responsible for this project was the one who got sent onto site. So he didn't make it back to the office until around 6pm. Once he got back, we went over the report and calculation with our supervisor who asked a bunch of questions. His main concern was that our methods of calculating things wasn't consistent with what we did previously. And we would definitely get questioned by the client. So he suggested a bunch of stuff and we worked until 1:30am that night.

The next day, we were all really tired and after sitting through a 3 hour workshop on excavation lateral support systems (held by our bosses), we talked about the calculations again. We finally agreed on an approach and started working on the calculations again. After finishing the calculations, it took us another 2 hours to get everything into the right format and uploading it for the client. The record breaking part was that we left at 2am. Definitely did not make it to the gym Wednesday morning.

The rest of the week was better though but we seem to be bidding for more projects. No clue how we can handle any more workload. Most likely will be in the office this weekend as well. I think my electricity bill this month will seriously be very small.

Food and more food

It's a good thing I joined the gym because I have been (and will be) eating out a lot these days. I actually don't prefer to eat a lot for dinner but when friends want to hang out, that's usually the default thing to do.

I managed to go to the gym three times last week. I went Mon, Wed, and Fri before work. So I woke up at 6am and was at the gym by 7am. I feel like I have a lot more energy because of working out. I never really understood how exercising can make you feel more energetic but it definitely does. I have been feeling really sluggish the past few weeks and couldn't get up in the mornings. I didn't manage to go to the gym on the weekend though so we'll see if I can keep this up.

Wednesday night, I met up with a friend of a friend for dinner. We walked around TST for a while looking for a restaurant. We finally settled on Red Ant, a place that does a weird sort of fusion. We couldn't really figure out what the cuisine was but the food was really good! I had a lamb rack in yogurt curry and it was really flavorful. We got a couple of appetizers and they were really tasty. This friend does trading and his works seems stressful. But it seems like he gets paid very decently (American salary). I don't think I would last very long doing his type of work.

Friday night I met up with a middle school friend who is here visiting family. I had originally planned to take her to Gaylord, a highly rated Indian restaurant in TST. But it turned out that to use the Groupon, I was supposed to book a day in advance. So we booked for the next night and tried our luck somewhere else. TST is super crazy on Friday nights though, it turned out. There were long lines everywhere. We tried to go to another place that I had a Groupon for but the line there was long too. In the end, we got tired and just waited at a restaurant that I had been to before. We walked around the harbor afterwards and just chatted.

Saturday, I went to a basic presentation skills class offered by my company. They hired a consultant from a company that does professional coaching. The class was all day. There were 9 of us in the class and it was very hands-on. We went through a lot of material, including how to use gestures, structure your presentation, interacting with the audience, making eye-contact, etc. It was all very useful. But definitely need to practice all this. The guy even taped us and we all got a personal DVD of us making a 5 min presentation. I think it would be super embarrassing to watch. I can definitely see how this could become a weekly class where people go learn the techniques and practice them.

I meant to go to the gym Sunday morning but I didn't get up until 9:30am. I called my parents and then hung out with X and Y on Google+. Then my friend called to say that she was finished with church. So I met her in Central, where she is staying and we found the pasta place that I had been wanting to try out. I don't think she does the "wander around" type of traveling a whole lot because she seemed anxious about wanting to find the place. Or maybe she was just worried about me getting to the office afterwards...

Anyway, we went to a pasta take-out place that was featured in the HK Time-Out magazine. This place lets you choose your pasta, the sauce, cheese, and such. So you can get many different combos. It was pretty good. But I guess you can't go wrong with gnocchi in a sauce that had lots of garlic. haha. Then we walked around a bit and went into a mall to cool down. We came across a Phiten store. One of my coworkers has a necklace (very sporty and guy looking) from this place and he says it helps his neck. My neck and right arm has been feeling really tired lately so I have been meaning to go get one of these things to try out. The nice looking necklaces are very expensive so I got a cheap bracelet to try it out. And... I think it works. The guy at the store had me lift some weights with and without a bracelet (very big one) and it actually felt different. My arm has had a tingling feeling after I put on this bracelet but it doesn't hurt anymore. If this keeps working, maybe I'll invest in a necklace as well.

I went back to the office after lunch. It was sweltering hot even with all the fans on. I was falling asleep and was not very productive. A friend from the structures group texted to ask if I wanted to go for dinner so I ate out again.Meeting a friend from Stanford for lunch tomorrow. She's here for a few days to visit. Friday night, we're doing another group gathering/dinner for a guy who's leaving the company soon. So eating out like crazy these days.