Hong Freaking Kong

Hello all, sorry about the several days without posting anything, it was a rather taxing few days in LA and it's been a whirlwind getting settled back into the city I call my 2nd home, Hong Kong.

So LA was excellent, got to hang out with my old friend Mike from High School for a few days, and he showed me around the city. One observation--people drive ALL THE TIME in LA. That is, to get anywhere involves like a 30+ minute drive, and you're always going on the highways that surround the city. Needless to say, given my absolute hatred of driving cars, I don't think I could handle that on a consistent basis, but for those who can, more power to them. Definitely a very interesting city, with a lot of different neighborhoods full of people of countless ethnicities (apparently not a word. The plural of ethnicity was my intent. Whatever that is). Anyway, loads of Mexicans, Armenians, Asians from all over the place in Asia, etc., so really cool stuff. Some of the highlights of the trip included visiting Koreatown, UCLA's campus, and the Hollywood area, which involved a lot of surreal homeless people dressed as everything from Darth Vader to homeless people. Interestingly, when 2 guys passed us dressed as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, I immediately said to Mike "what legends those guys are!" His response--"yeah, there's a good chance they're homeless"

What a place, California. Another huge highlight of the trip to LA was seeing my wonderful friend from Hong Kong, Miss Catherine Bumble. She brought Mike and I to a German/Belgian brewhouse where we had some sausages and large liters of beer, then to a club with some electronic music. The night got to be fairly blurry fairly early on, but still had some great times with an old friend.

The morning after we hung out with Bumble was my flight to Hong Kong via Beijing. Incidentally, during this flight I became a United Airlines Premier Silver flier, indicating that I've flown over 25,000 miles with United this year, which was kind of cool. Upon arrival in Hong Kong, as planned, my good friend Douglon was waiting for me at the airport. With his driver.

From the airport I was whisked to Douglon's flat, which is located about a 5 minute walk from the University of Hong Kong. This brings back all sorts of nostalgia. My first few days in Hong Kong have been good. Met up with some friends from Shenzhen on Friday night, and sure enough, when we were out at LKF, at the first corner we stopped at I ran into some of the legends from my floor at Lee Hysan Hall while I was on exchange. Was great to catch up with them. First night out involved me staying completely sober while everyone I knew from Shenzhen got completely hammered drunk, which was a pretty hilarious thing to watch. I took them to the Flying Pan (a really awesome breakfast restaurant open 24 hrs in Central Hong Kong) about 4:00am for breakfast, and from there headed back to the flat.

Saturday night in Lan Kwai Fong was staggering. As it was Halloween weekend, there were literally like 15,000 people there (Note: I have NO IDEA how to estimate how many people were there. Could have only been like 5,000. Could have been 25,000. It was a lot. Here's a video with awkward music that some guy made) It was a pretty unbelievable night, and one which also ended very late, which ended up being quite a struggle due to my jet lag and having slept 2 hours the night before. But still grand.

Last night Douglon threw a party for his birthday, which involved a BBQ at Deepwater Bay, near the Southwest part of Hong Kong Island. It was a great time, with about 10-12 people coming out at various times of the evening. Today I applied for my China visa, so with any luck I'll be heading into Shenzhen by early next week for a couple of job interviews.

Anyway! That's about a summary of what I've been up to. My apologies for not being insightful or universal with any of this, but I intend on throwing some posts up here in the coming days that offer more thought-provoking stuff rather than just saying "yeah here's what's been happening. Enjoy". So hopefully that'll be good. Not sure if I want to commit to a blog-post-per-day, but expect them pretty regularly. Thanks for reading up to this point, and for bearing with the inconsistencies of my blog posting!

A Rather Short, Random Thought Which Barely Qualifies as a Blog Post: 30 Days of Blogging, Day 10

So today was insanely busy, with me working at a trade show from 8:00am until 7:30pm, then going to dinner with a manufacturer for 2 hours. Consequently, I don't see me coming up with something insightful on my own during the last hour and a bit of today, so I've decided to use a story which I read today during down-time at the show. The story is the introduction to the book The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (which, by the way, is one of the best books I've ever read. It's currently one of like 3 books that I've read twice), and it's a very simple and interesting example of seeing things in a different light. Anyway, without further ado, in the words of Coelho

The Alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.

The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who daily knelt beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.

But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.

He said that when Narcissus died, the Goddesses of the Forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.

"Why do you weep?" the Goddesses asked.

"I weep for Narcissus," the lake replied.

"Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus," they said, "for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand."

"But..... was Narcissus beautiful?" the lake asked.

"Who better than you to know that?" the Goddesses said in wonder, "After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!!"

The lake was silent for some time.

Finally it said:

"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected."

"What a lovely story," the alchemist thought.

So anyway, a very interesting story. My sincerest apologies for not being insightful or original in any way today, I will do what I can to rectify for those misdeeds tomorrow, though it should also be quite a busy day, so we'll see how that goes...