Earthquakes

Just in case anyone missed it, Auckland had earthquakes yesterday. As the Herald pointed out, Wellington regularly has earthquakes of a similar size and it evokes little reaction. However, Aucklanders being Aucklanders, there were more than 1400 reports to the GNS. For the report of the earthquake from GEONet, click here.

Manila

We're at the end of our short visit to Manila, sitting at the airport waiting for the flight. Jonathan appears to still be in one piece, but does not look "local" yet. He seems to have found a second mother in Lorna (met for coffee yesterday), who he met through Dinah in Auckland. It does not look like work in Manila is busy yet...

We visited one of the GK villages in Baseco. Lots of smiles, but obviously a very different situation. Compared to the squatter housing across the water, these guys have made real differences. Interesting to see the names of the companies that are sponsoring parts of the village.

We caught a taxi to the village - actually we caught the third taxi to the village. The first two thought it was too dangerous to go there. On the way out, we found someone who would take us on their tricycle - a motorbike with sidecar contraption. However, it appears that local politics intervened (organised groups?), and he was only able to take us part of the way. We ended up transferring to another tricycle who could take us further. Even he was not keen to get too close to town. Then a 15 minute walk to the closest hotel for a cold drink in air-conditioned comfort.

The rest of our trip has been a series of short dashes between air-conditioned buildings (mostly shops). I guess we've quickly grown accustomed to the temperatures in Hong Kong, so Manila feels very warm. Even Lorna mentioned that this is particularly warm.

Nothing else worth mentioning really. Just a good break from HK. I saw on the news this morning that the weather in HK is rainy - oh good.

At the airport again

Well it's less than 48 hours between visits to the airport. Today, Sonia and I are waiting to fly to Manila for the Chinese New Year weekend. We return to HK on Tuesday.

I returned from an overnight trip to Seoul on Thursday night. Actually by the time the flight was delayed (some unspecified problem with the plane) I arrived in HK in the early hours of Friday morning. Actually crawled into bed at 2:15am. Airports are getting a little tired.

Last night was another House marathon. Not sure if any of you are fans of the show, but we enjoy the sense of humour. Often wonder if Daryl watches it - I am sure he'd appreciate it if he did. Sonia picked up the first series on DVD in Malaysia, and we're slowly working our way through the episodes. We started watching part-way through, so it's interesting going back and filling in the gaps.

Anyway, this weekend we're planning to catch up with Jonathan and see if he's still in one piece following his first few weeks in Manila.

Union Bar & Grill

Another Eggs Benedict place: Union Bar and Grill in IFC Mall, Central. Lunch last Sunday.

On muffins instead of bagel or bread - finally someone who does it properly. Strangely, however, there was a slice of tomato on each half of the muffin. This added an interesting taste for the first half, but after a while it started to subtract from the overall taste. Other than that, it was an ok deal - the sauce tasted good, although there could have been a little more. The eggs were cooked properly but not overcooked. The coffee cannot be scored because we didn't have any - the ambience went downhill fairly quickly as families arrived with screeds of ankle-biters!

So, the scores:

• Eggs - 9/10
• Bread - 9/10
• Hollandaise - 7/10 - was ok but could do with a little more
• Coffee - 5/10 - because we didn't have any
• Ambience - 5/10 - more of a family place
• Total - 35/50

I write this from Seoul where the temperature when I landed (a few hours ago) was 0 degrees!

A bit of a slow one

Well it seems to have been a bit of a slow week in some ways.

I spent most of it in Tokyo again, flying up on Monday afternoon, arriving back about 9pm on Friday. It was a busy trip, as there is lots going on at the moment.

Saturday morning we bounced out of bed, and out to the coffee shop (first things first). On the list was looking at cars, buying a desk, buying a stepladder, getting an office chair, and a few other bits and pieces. We managed to have coffee/bagels, then purchase a desk from Ikea. Having realised that it's very difficult to carry the desk around the other places we needed to go, we headed home and put the desk together. It's a small desk (120cm x 80cm) but still manages to take up most of the room in the office/spare room.

Which reminds me - we sold the spare bed for HKD 600 last weekend. There's a website called AsiaXPat with a classified ads section. We stuck the bed on the site on Friday night, and by 10am on Saturday we'd had a call. By 3pm the bed was spoken for. They sent their "Man With a Van" around during the week to collect. Later on Saturday afternoon we decided (given the success of the bed) to get rid of the table as well. The table was a pretty cheap purchase in KL, so we decided to offer it free for collection. Advertised about 3pm, we had the first call by about 7pm. Sold!

So now we have a smidgen more room available, hence the office desk, and the stepladder. The stepladder is to enable us to store some of the dining chairs out of the way on top of the wardrobes. I've managed to get two of them up there yesterday afternoon.

Anyway, back to yesterday's story. After putting the desk together, we ended up heading out again around 4pm to purchase the aforementioned stepladder, plus something to eat for dinner. Returning to the house, we watched the first three episodes of House. Hugh Laurie on fine form. Incidentally I realised that the TV channel in Tokyo is replaying House from the start - I saw the first episode earlier this week.

This morning's epistle comes to you courtesy of Pacific Coffee in Vicwood Plaza (Des Vouex Rdoad).

Images of Tokyo

Finally got the pictures off the camera. There are more, but here is a small selection for your edification AND COMMENTS.

As we walked along the road towards the Palace, we passed the entrance to a small shrine.














At the palace, as close as we could get:














Close by the palace, almost at Tokyo Station, we came across a small "park". The backdrop of the city seemed to make for a good picture.



















At the Meiji Jingu shrine we came across a wedding party having a photo session:














The wedding party included three small boys who were doing their best to behave.














Coming out of the shrine's park, we saw a group busking Japanese style:

And now we are both in the airport lounge..

..not often that happens!

We are sitting in Shanghai airport waiting for our delayed flight to be ready for boarding. Just a short flight - only 2 hours back to home.

Shanghai has been really interesting. Yummy food, friendly people, and my dreadful attempts at Mandarin greetings! Languages are definitely not my strong point.

Andrew has just been reading the Herald and laughing about the fact that the lead story today is that more NZ'ers have been deported from Australia in the last three years than any other nationality - what a horrible statistic!!

The weekend is going to be just a quiet one. Off to look for cars (again - how boring), and perhaps we will try a different church on Sunday. Really not sure that we can cope with the clapping after every song that the one we have been going to seems to insist on.

We will post the Toyko pictures sometime this weekend - log on again soon for that excitement!!

Sonia.

Shanghai

Shanghai reminds me of Canada in winter. Lots of brown, open spaces. Everything built big (six lanes in each direction on the motorway). Except that the population and the cars and the driving manners are nothing like Canada...