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They are alive

I’ve talked and chatted with Muse.  Her and all the animals are alive and well after their grueling trip halfway around the world.  It seems that no one messed their cages this time through which is very surprising.  Two of the three we sent to Hong Kong were disgusting messes when we received them.  Muse got lucky on that one.  So did the importer I suppose.

Muse is suffering from some jetlag as she chatted with me at what would have been 1:30am back in the States.  The dogs are crashed and the cats are off exploring the new environment.  If that’s the worst of it all then we couldn’t ask for more.

I imagine she will be updating her site pretty soon to tell everyone all about it.

Gone

I dropped Muse off with her luggage and waited for her at the bus stop to the airport. I put her bags on the bus when it arrived. I asked her for the fifth time if she had her passport and drivers license. I waited by the bus and watched as it pulled away.

Now I’m sitting here with the pets waiting for the exporter to arrive. They are late. Soon though, they will all be gone.

I’m very sad.

EDIT——

I’m back from taking the dogs and cats to the airport. I don’t know how Muse did it before. They were so scared and pitiful I actually was crying when they put their cages in the air-conditioned live animal room. There were two small white dogs in crates in the room already. They were excited to see people. Our animals looked and acted like they were being sentenced to their deaths. They were that pitiful.

Now I’m even more sad….

Melon Jerry… erm, Jelly

It’s a fact that Japanese people speaking English often confuse the letter L with the letter R and sometimes the other way around too.  Some people would call that Engrish.  But not often do I get to see it in writing.

These Melon Jelly Chocolates were available in a gift shop in Narita International Airport in Japan outside of Tokyo.  Notice that it’s not actually jelly but jerry.  Perhaps the order of the words could be changed around a bit too.  Ah well, I guess you can’t spell check everything.

A Sort of Homecoming

I believe Muse has already let the kitteh out of the bag, so to speak, but we will be coming home to St. Louis this year.  Muse will be leaving Hong Kong before me to get the pets all sorted and safe.  I was the first to arrive between us and I’ll be the last to leave.  I suppose I should take some comfort in that I’ll get to live here in Hong Kong for just a bit longer but I also remember the loneliness of my first month here.  But that was a long time ago now and I’m no longer a stranger in a strange land with no idea of what to do/where to go/what to eat.  I no longer need to subsist on ham sandwiches and cans of soup.  Although I may just because.

Now, when the time comes, I’ll probably spend my free time leisurely walking the street markets and shopping malls without the worry of wasting Muse’s time or needing to feed or walk the dogs.  Maybe I’ll go directly from the office to a local bar with people from work and see what the night life is like before I leave.  Maybe I’ll go for a hike without worrying about time constraints or anything but my own ability.  Or maybe I’ll just sit in front of the computer and play World of Warcraft all night.   It’s hard to say.

Actually when I say we will be coming home this year that makes it sound like something that will be happening at some far point in the future.  But really it’s nothing like that.  Muse may be leaving in a month or less.  I won’t be here any longer than mid-August.  It’s scary close to those dates already.  By the end of August we will be back in the United States of America and trying to figure out life once more.  This time with a baby on the way.

When we moved we did so on short notice and also threw in our wedding because it wasn’t a stressful enough experience.  Now with a baby coming, I see now that we just really like to complicate things.  I can offer no other explanation.  We sold our house and our cars and most of the rest of the stuff we didn’t ship to Hong Kong.  So add in another layer of sphincter-clenching in that we have a baby coming and we need to buy a house and at least one car but really we need two and baby stuff and furniture and Oh My Gawd what are we insane?

Yes.  Yes we are.  Nice to meet you.

The Pink Dolphins

Muse has already posted about our trip to see the Pink Dolphins so I’m just going to post a couple of the pictures I got from the trip.  The boat ride was taken with the Hong Kong Dolphinwatch tour.

Like Muse said, the young dolphins are actually grey and they become pink as they reach adulthood.  We got to see a few bright pink adults but they were always farther out and not as curious as the young ones.  They’ve probably learned some hard lessons.  So that made the adults pretty hard to snap pictures of.

At least we got to see them though.  That’s the important thing.

For those with time

For those of you with the time and inclination, Lifehacker has a fun Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks to use on your unsuspecting users, friends and family. Of course, if you plan on doing any of these at your place of work, please keep in mind the mentality and patience of your co-workers and your management. No point in getting fired over a dumb prank.

I’m a big fan of pranks myself and would love to try some of these out. But like I said, I just don’t have the time. I got a call from my boss in St. Louis and was told that they were cutting my contract here in Hong Kong a bit short. It seems I’ve done such a good job here that they now want me to take over the IT for the European region and do for it the same as I have for the Asia-Pacific region. That’s a great thing of course and I’m glad they have such faith in me but I have my doubts of course. Europeans are a much different breed of people than Asians.

So needless to say things are going to be a bit crazy for the next few months. We need to figure out how to arrange getting our things moved from Hong Kong to London and make sure the pets are all taken care of. Finding a place to live should be even more difficult than it was in Hong Kong I imagine. Hopefully we can find a place near a pub. With good internet access of course.

Not only that but I’ll have to interview for my replacement here and do training and everything else that’s involved. The guy who’s leaving the lead position in London now seems to have stopped caring for how things were done quite a while ago, so it sounds like it may be in even worse shape their than it was here when I first moved. All in all, a good challenge of course but I don’t imagine it will be easy by any means. Add to this that I’m an American and I imagine that some of the existing staff will probably rebel a bit as well.

So more news to come as I have it and hopefully it will be a smooth transition (yeah right). I’m trying to get a trip there to check things out in person before hand to see what I’ve gotten myself into. They’ll probably agree to that since they did the same before I came to Hong Kong. Oh well, at least London is a bit close to the States as far as time difference goes! Wish me luck….

Easter in the Far East

I’ve got a long holiday coming up tomorrow. We get both Friday and Monday off for Easter, which is surprising considering how little Christianity there is in Hong Kong. Or maybe there’s a lot of it about but it’s just not forever being rammed down your throat like it is in the States. Either way, that is one more thing I like about this place. I’m thinking Muse and I should go visit the giant sitting Buddha on Easter Sunday. Just for kicks.

In other news, I’ve launched another web site but it’s still being tweaked at the moment and not ready for the official unveiling yet.  Thanks to Yoshi (as always) for helping me figure out how to change a few things.  I really need to learn CSS.  Anyway, I’ve got a lot of work to do on the new site over the weekend, so I’ll be posting all the important information (like the URL) on that next week.  Let’s say Monday if I can hope to be so optimistic.  I’m excited.  Seriously.

The Peak, Hong Kong

This past Saturday, Muse and I went to The Peak which is the small tourist area at the top of the mountain that makes up Hong Kong island. Muse had been there once before on a tour but I’d never been. Which everyone here thinks is weird because that is one of the major tourist places to visit here in Hong Kong. Well… whatever.

The weather has been beautiful here in Hong Kong lately and since I know it will be miserably hot and humid soon, I’m glad we’re getting out and about outside while we can. The Peak isn’t all that much to see actually. It’s basically two small multi-story shopping malls side by side, one with a funky shape and a roof-top viewing deck that you have to pay to go on. There’s lots of restaurants and tourist gifts and a Madame Tussauds wax museum (which we didn’t visit) and a nice path that is generally crowded with people taking pictures of the hazy but nice city skyline.

Above: A picture of the Central district skyline at night from The Peak. Kowloon can be seen across the harbor.

We ate at a Bubba Gump restaurant which had a nice view overlooking the path and a portion of the city. I’d never been to one of these restaurants before and we thought that it was funny that my first time at one was in Hong Kong. It was a bit expensive, but considering how expensive everything else on The Peak is, it was actually a hell of a bargain. I would definitely recommend it if you go to The Peak. Considerig Muse and I shared the same meals and drinks, I don’t think the severe diarrhea I had later that night had anything to do with that place.

We waited till night time so we could get some night shots of the city skyline and then we took a taxi back to Central. We had taken a bus up the mountain so we kind of skipped the main attraction of the famous Peak Tram. It’s always too long of a queue to wait in. I don’t like waiting.

The hike

So Muse and I went on a hike today with some folks from my office. They had chartered a bus for us which was nice and we only got lost once on the way to the starting point. The hike was in an area of Hong Kong called Clearwater Bay on a trail called the High Junk Peak Country Trail which I have to admit didn’t have much junk on it at all. Supposedly the hike is only rated a 2 out of 5 for difficulty and a distance of 6.6km and should have taken around 2.5 hours, so says the brochure. I have since renamed this route “The (new) Trail of Tears” and it took us a bit over 3 hours. Mostly because the rest of the group kept waiting for me to catch up.

The first half the trip was rather pleasant with mild hills and no death easily visible.  That was nice.  However the second half of the journey, once we passed High Junk Peak (which I now rename “Devil’s Horn”), should have been rated at about a level 4 or so in my opinion.  The rest of the trip had beautiful vistas overlooking sandy beaches and clean clear water (which I had no idea existed in Hong Kong).  It also had constant tromping up and down the sides of mountains.

Now luckily for us, some poor bastard(s) must have had the unfortunate job of hauling large stones up and down the sides of these peaks and cementing those rocks into place to make stone-age steps.  I assume they must have made convicts do this, because I can’t believe anyone would have signed up for this voluntarily.  If they did then maybe they were from the asylum.

After a while my legs can only take so much and it’s the exceedingly steep downhill portions that really tore me up.  Add to this the fact that in most places we are on a one to two foot wide path with death off the edge of the sheer cliff that makes up the border of said path.  And that’s on the straight bits.  One mis-step on the downhill portions and my broken corpse would have made good time in catching up to the rest of the group.  I actually considered that route at one point.

Eventually the torture ended though and we stopped in a very tiny village and had a seafood lunch on the water.  I’ve had a lot better food in Hong Kong, but it was sure nice to sit down for a while.  On the way back on that same chartered bus, Muse and I compared sunburns and dozed for the rest of the trip.  Then we got ice cream.  We’d earned it.

Sick day today

I’m back from Kuala Lumpur but I had to take a sick day today.  It seems I ate or drank something that has turned my intestines into a juice factory.  I had water at one or two restaurants and by the time I was supposed to be leaving for the airport, I was still worrying about where the next bathroom would be on the way out.  I wasn’t late for my flight, but I was a little worried about half way to the airport that I might have to ask the taxi driver to stop at the next brightly colored mosque so I could pay tribute, so to speak.

Before dinner, I started playing Overlord on the XBox 360.  I hadn’t intended to get it but the Broadway electronics store had a bunch of 360 games on sale for only $159 HKD (about $20 USD) which is dirt cheap.  I haven’t gotten very far in it yet, but I think I’ll like it.  I’m not sure it’s going to be as good as the classic Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2, but for current games that allow you to play as the bad guy, this is about all the choice you get.