A quick update

This week has been a little strange so far. It's Thursday, and I feel like a fish out of water. I mean, I've been at home in HK all week. Something is terribly wrong! And it's getting worse - it looks like I will probably be in HK next week as well. My trip to Seoul will be rescheduled to some future date (to be determined) because the other people are not ready for the meetings.

Oh dear - will have to invent some reason to travel. It has been a while since I spent time with the team in Malaysia, so maybe that's where I need to go - and Thailand at the same time.

Anyway, just stopped for 5 minutes at Pacific Coffee as I collect my coffee and breakfast ("everything bagel", toasted, grande americano with milk). Better get moving and get to work now.

Oh - almost forgot - got Sharon's birthday present sent off - wonder if she will "get it"?

Another go

We had another go at The Brunch Club yesterday. Very disappointing. We went thinking that maybe last weekend was not their best. Well that's probably true. But it wasn't their worst either.

Slow service, meals coming out separately, coffee coming out one cup at a time (with about 5 minutes in between - how hard is it to make two lattes at once?), no knives and forks until we asked for them. And the food was just average. Once again, the only redeeming factor was the chocolate milkshake. I don't think we will be going back for breakfast by choice. I did go one night for dinner with one of the guys from work - that was reasonable and the service was ok.

Last night was dinner at Harlan's in order to have a serious discussion about careers and future countries. Not sure whether we came to any decisions, but the giant fries with truffle mayo were great as usual. And the slow-cooked beef cheek was excellent (again). I ordered linguine with red crab in champagne sauce as a main, but when it arrived, Sonia decided that she liked it better than the beef cheek (which has quite a bit of gravy), so we ended up swapping. No complaints after that.

Anyway, we're at Pacific Coffee for breakfast and the bagels have just been served. Got to go!

Plans

Well, we're starting to think about what we need to plan for Mum and Dad when they're here.

First things first - getting from the airport to the apartment. I'm going to be in Seoul, returning late in the day. Conveniently, M&D have selected a flight that arrives early in the day - landing (if on time) at 06:45 in the morning. They will need to get the Airport Express to town, where Sonia will meet them.

Having been on a long (10-11 hours?) and being somewhat advanced in years, they will of course need to recuperate (sleep) for most of the rest of the day.

I arrive back in the evening, just in time for dinner. If they haven't managed to make it to town on the train, then I guess I will collect them somewhere between the arrival gate at the airport and the apartment!

The Brunch Club

Not great - good milkshakes and the coffee was fine. But the Eggs Benedict was on the disappointing side. Sonia's omlette (with bacon and parmesan) was good as well - except that she originally ordered Belgian Waffles. They'd run out, and only worked this out after I'd almost finished mine.

Enough said.

Getting slack

We do seem to have been getting particularly slack at keeping the blog updated. Sometimes it feels like there is not really much happening that is worth writing about.

This week, I went back to Tokyo for three days, returning on Saturday morning. It was an incredibly busy time, and I left feeling like I did not achieve the underlying purpose of the trip. However, we did get lots of other "stuff" done. Next time....

The big discussion in Tokyo was around the timing of the Cherry Blossoms. For those who don't know, the observatories maintain a running forecast of the timing. They thought it might be next week, however we apparently had snow in Tokyo on Friday, so I guess that puts a big question mark on the date. It's a big deal for people there - they spend the day sitting on the ground having a picnic (traditionally supplemented with alcoholic beverages) underneath the blossoms. A real social occasion for family and friends.

Sonia spent the week in HK, suprisingly no travel plans either last week or this coming week. I'm in HK all this week, at a leadership conference for the first half of the week.

I overslept this morning, so no happy-clappy. Heading out shortly to find brunch - there is a place called "The Brunch Club". It specialises in breakfasts, including a variety of Eggs Benedict-based dishes. Will update here with a review later on.

We also need to find an air-bed for when M&D come - only two weeks away. Hope they like air-beds! Seriously, I guess we will give up our bedroom so that they can sleep in comfort while on holiday. Meanwhile we (the martyrs) will suffer on the air-bed in the lounge (it won't fit in the spare bedroom).

Macau - a little bit of Portugal in the middle of China...

It is Monday and we have just come back from the weekend in Macau. We were both working in Bangkok for the last couple of days of last week, so compared to the 40 degree temperatures there Macau felt very chilly at around 17. Andrew is out at a work dinner tonight so I am at home watching the silly comedies on tv - should be cleaning my messy house but I am not :-)















Macau is really interesting. I have no idea how many years it was ruled by Portugal, but it was only returned to China in 1999 and forms another SAR (Special Administrative Region) which is self ruling but part of China. Portugese influence is everywhere. Beautiful buildings and forts, stunning gardens and a strange mix of Chinese and Portugese food. The main island is reasonably small - if you don't mind a good bit of walking you can get to a lot of the sights on foot. We sure walked...




















The casinos that Macau is becoming more and more famous for put on a spectacular light show, and the fountain synchronised to music outide the Wynns casino is definitely the most impressive I have ever seen.
















We did of course find our fair share of eating establishments - fantastic Italian on Saturday night, and a funny little place called the Singing Coffee Bean for lunch on Sunday. The menu took great pains to point out that they 'play Mozart to the beans to ensure they are suitably nourished'. No idea if it was the Mozart or not but the coffee was not bad.

































And a couple of Chinese New Year pictures - makes Christmas decoration look conservative!!

My Turn

Just checked the blog and so disappointed in Andrew – did he really not post anything between Feb 22 and Mar 4? He is definitely slacking!!!

This week sees me in Shanghai trying to make sense of the business requirements for the latest work project with our IT vendor. It is freezing. Everyone tells me that it was warm until yesterday, and will be warm again from Thursday. I leave on Wednesday, so not much good to me…

The end of the week (Thursday) Andrew and I are both going up to Bangkok. Definitely on the other end of the climate scale with ‘summer’ there seeing temperatures more like 35 – 37C. We are on leave on Monday so I’ve been trying to convince Andrew to stay over and make a long weekend of it – not having much luck though, he really just wants to go home. A definite disadvantage to traveling so much for work – airplanes and flash hotel rooms are not at all exciting any more.

Probably would be a good thing for us to spend the weekend in HK anyway. We are away so often on the weekend and still have not managed to find a real ‘home’ church. Whenever we are in town we have been going to the ‘happy clappy’ one that we first found. This week they waved hello to Jesus – that just might be it for us I think!! We keep saying that we will go and try the Baptist one once we get a car, but a car is proving hard to come upon. Andrew really wants to replace the SLK he left behind in England, but there just are not too many of them on the market so still no success there.

Really nothing exciting to tell – maybe why Andrew slacked off so badly in February. Be good and take care,

Sonia

Another week goes by

Another week is officially over. The week started in Tokyo, having worked through from last week. On Wednesday I returned to HK, meeting Sonia at the airport. She was coming back from a visit to Bangkok. I got off the plane, walked out into the path towards immigration, and turned on the phone (as instructed by "she-who-must-be-obeyed"). While speaking to Sonia, I could hear the same noises in the background as were around me. It turned out she had just landed and was all of two gates ahead of me! Home to bed.

Thursday and Friday were spent in the office - up until this few days, I think I've managed about 1 day in the office out of each fortnight. Thursday night was a chance to catch up with friends who we used to work with.

Saturday was a fairly slow day, waking up late and going out in search of food. Then another "House" marathon.

Back to work tomorrow, me in HK and Sonia on the way back to Bangkok. Anyone who says it's me doing all the travelling does not understand the situation!

Happy Birthday to Sharon! We hope that Hotel du Vin was nice this weekend...

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...

FYI again

It did not snow in Seoul this morning. However it was very cold on the walk to the office (about 10 minutes down the street).

A note from Shanghai

Well my funny story for this week is that I got lost at the Crown Plaza Hotel. That is, my taxi dropped me off at a different Crown Plaza Hotel than the one I had checked into earlier that day... No wonder my key card did not work in the bedroom door... They all look the same honestly!! Am very pleased I worked it out before the staff had a too bigger laugh at my expense.

Anyway, all sorted now :-) I am happily sitting in the Shanghai Fudan hotel rather than the Shanghai Pudong hotel, and feeling none the worse for wear.

Shanghai is so different from Toyko. Development is going on all around, and everything is under construction. The roads a full of honking cars, and the pedestrians just walk out in front of the cars - adding to the reasons for honking. Toyko was so organised in comparison. Everyone (other than Andrew!) patiently waited at the crossing for the lights to change even if there were no cars coming. Here the more cars when you try to cross the better. If you flag down a taxi it stops in whatever lane it was in when it saw you - and you dodge the traffic (that is all honking!) to get into the cab. You feel like a real local.

Food here is so so cheap compared to Hong Kong - and plentiful. Out with work mates at lunch today in a nice Chinese restaurant cost RMB140 f0r 5 of us. That is less than six NZD each ...and we could not eat it all. When you realise that a Startbucks coffee (about the only type you can find in China sorry Paul) is about the same price it makes you realise why the locals think the western chains are so expensive. Frog was on the menu at the restaurant today (amongst the 10 or so other dishes they ordered). The little toads kept jumping off my chopsticks - man they are slippery! Not too bad tasting though :-).

Time for bed. Be good :-). Sonia

FYI

It was snowing in Seoul at 6:45 this morning.

Tokyo

We had a great day walking around Tokyo on Saturday.

Actually I should start with Friday first.

Sonia arrived in Tokyo at about two in the afternoon. That is, she arrived at the airport. By the time she got into town it was after four - it's about a 1.5 hour bus ride if everything is working properly. I was out of the office at a meeting, so Sonia decided to wait at Starbucks. In Japan, the automatic doors are slightly less automatic that you and I are used to. You need to touch a vertical strip on the door in order to instruct it to open. As Sonia stood there trying to figure it out, with the staff attempting to instruct her from behind the counter, someone else was leaving and opened the door. So Sonia managed to get in and obtain a coffee (and yes Paul, it's still called coffee, even at Starbucks).

I had arranged earlier for the consultants to head out for a drink after work to make sure they all get to know each other (we have a few companies working in the project). In the end they had turned it into a dinner instead. They were very concerned that it was at a local Japanese place and wasn't "flash and expensive". It was great to get the feel for the place - there were only four westerners there (Sonia and I, plus two french Accenture consultants). So Sonia had her first taste of Japanese business culture!

On Saturday, as I indicated earlier, we walked. And walked. And walked. And took the subway (you know - the one you see on TV where they push people on during peak hours). We started by walking from the hotel up into Akasaka, then across to the Imperial Palace grounds, and around to Tokyo station. By that stage it was time for more coffee at Starbucks, then off to find the subway.

We visited the Meiji Jingu shrine (most famous shrine in Tokyo, in honour of the Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken). It's in a suburb/district/prefecture (not sure what the correct term is) called Harajuku. Coincidentally it is the place that the teenagers dress strangely, which adds to the atmosphere. We have a few photos around there, including the gardens inside the shrine's park (Yen 500 per person to enter) where an older gentleman was playing the leaf!

Then we walked from Harajuku to Shibuya, with Sonia gaa-gaa'ing over the cute Japanese toddlers along the way. Given the low Japanese birth rate there weren't many, but those that were visible were cute.

The main intersection in Shibuya is the site of a great sequence in the movie "The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift". When I get the photos off the camera you'll see the mass of people crossing the intersection and you'll know which scene I'm referring to.

Then this morning we took the subway to Giza - expensive shopping area. Way expensive.

Sonia was packed off on the bus to the airport at 2:30, and I went to the gym. Exciting stuff.

I'll post photos here once I get the camera (Sonia's taken it back to HK with her).