Housewarming

There isn't much to report from our housewarming party -- a lot of Chinese came and had interesting American food and drink -- but there are a couple of photos worth sharing.

The first is this piece of "Italian cauliflower" that I found CitySuper, Hong Kong's ritzyest supermarket. It was slightly tougher than the white cauliflower I'm used to, but it had a similar flavor.

The second is this photo that proves that all garbage is edible, especially when it's made from meat. Our little scavengers found the trash bag before it made it to the trash can. You'd think we starved them or something...

* * *

And with that, I'm on my way to Denver. I'll post more photos in the coming days, including some of Hong Kong all decked out for Christmas.

7 Eleven

If you've ever been to Hong Kong, you know that there is a convenience store practically every block. More often than not, there two within a few paces of each other.

Happy Valley is home to Hong Kong's first-ever 7 Eleven, which opened something like 40 years ago. (I took a photo of the plaque commemorating the store's historic significance, but it didn't turn out and, well, I'm in Portland right now, so "something like 40 years ago" will have to suffice.)

The store sits in front of the Happy Valley tram terminus. To the right is a day spa, to the left is a Japan Home store where you can buy cheap housewares.

iPod Culture

My iPod has gotten a work out since moving to Hong Kong.

It's on my head constantly. More than when I was Manila. More than when I was in Maryland. Shelly is not far from correct when she says I am addicted to it.

But so is everybody else in Hong Kong.

It's probably no different than in most cities with good public transportation. In fact, I'm looking forward to conducting a short, very non-scientific analysis of Washington commuters when I'm there this weekend.

iPods are so prevalent in Hong Kong that Shelly even uses one now, after she swore she would never want an iPod. She says, though, that she's not addicted.

I say, just give her a little time.

The Office Has Been Blessed

One of Shelly's first duties has been to set up her company's office. She handled most everything, from furnishing the office to setting up the utilities. That sort of logistical stuff is something she's really good at, so she was probably the perfect person for the job.

One of the elements she did not handle was the office blessing.

As it was explained to me, Chinese believe that someone (or maybe something) owns, or controls, each and every parcel of land. In order to appease the spirits, it's appropriate to make an offering to them when you use a spot of land. The office secretary brought her mother-in-law, who's a practitioner of this sort of thing, in to do the honors. She brought a bunch of apples and oranges, some delicious pork and chicken, a cake designed especially for this purpose, and a variety of sheets of paper representing money and other riches which we burned in the stairwell, directly under the fire sprinkler.

Fortunately, nobody got wet, and the office should be well on its way to success.

It's Autumn!

It's autumn for the first time in two years!

The November weather in Hong Kong was blissfully cool after a year in Manila. We pulled out the blankets -- what we have for blankets, at any rate -- and the long-sleeve shirts. The cats curled up under the blankets with us. And Hong Kong's bakeries rolled out their attractive fall pastry lines. These pumpkins -- which each have a small pretzel stick in the role of the stem -- were on sale throughout the fall at the Das Gout bakeries.

It's deja vu all over again

I'm currently experiencing my second 8:45 a.m. of the day.

That's because I'm in Portland, where it is still early Thursday morning. The thing is, at 8:45 Thursday morning, I was boarding a Northwest Airlines flight in Hong Kong, so it's 8:45 all over again. I'll finally be done traveling sometime after 11:00 p.m. Eastern time tonight, when I'll arrive in Washington after a nice tour of the Denver and Charlotte airports.

This is shaping up to be a long day.

On the bright side, the Portland airport has thoughtfully provided me with free wireless Internet access, so even though my body thinks it's 12:45 a.m. Friday, I am going to attempt to catch this thing up between flights.

The past month has been ridiculously busy. I have a bunch of photos I'll post this morning, but we've done, in no particular order, the following:

• Done loads of Christmas shopping at Hong Kong's famous Stanley Market.

• Found a new church home, the Lutheran Church of All Nations in Repulse Bay.

• Hosted a housewarming party for about 20 guests.

• Prepared for a visit from one of Shelly's colleagues, only to have it postponed a week by a major blizzard in Chicago.

• Spent hours reinstalling all my computer software after a hard drive crash. Replaced the hard hard drive after it crashed again. Spent hours reinstalling all my software again. I use this as my main excuse for not updating the blog often enough.

• Completed three separate freelance projects, two of them with my trusty old computer, which is currently being held together with tape and a binder clip.

• Prepared for a long trip to America, where we will be home for Christmas.

We also had to euthanise one of our kittens. Princess Ernie had never been able to put on any weight in the two months we had her, but she never seemed to be ill. This past Sunday, she was fine. Monday, her hind legs were weakening. On Tuesday, she was diagnosed with FIP, an incurable feline virus. By Wednesday, she could hardly walk, and we euthanised her. Having to put two cats to sleep in the past six months should fulfill our quota for some time.

If you're curious about the past four weeks, read on...

I'm The Subversive Element

Shelly has just e-mailed me from Shanghai, where she is currently on business, with this bit of news:

Tried to open the blog today and it wont open - the
sensors are after you.

How very exciting! My blog of freedom and democracy has been shut down by the censors in Beijing!

Something tells me, though, that China keeps a tight rein on all Blogspot blogs. It's not like I'm actually controversial.

Evening in Wan Chai

Photography-speaking, I get lucky every once in a while. I had a clear evening when heading back from Kowloon on the Star Ferry recently. Here's a view of Hong Kong Island from the harbour, with the convention center in the foreground and Victoria Peak in the background. Amazingly, this photo was taken with my phone.


Dusk was falling when I got back to Wan Chai. Traffic was light because it was a weekend.


From Wan Chai, I hopped on one of Hong Kong's old-fashioned trams and rode it home. I have some day-time photos of these trams which I will post in a day or two.

Ernie

When Princess Ernie wasn't busy chasing the camera strap, she gladly posed for this portrait.

Crap. I'm posting photos of our cats. That's the first step on the path to thinking of them as my children.

Climbing Victoria Peak

We headed out this morning to climb Victoria Peak, the tallest mountain on Hong Kong island. Knowing that I would climb more slowly than Shelly, I left an hour or so before she did and met her at the top. We'd both been to Victoria Peak before, but never under our own power. This is why most people who visit the top decide to take some form of vehicular transportation:


Most of them take the Peak Tram, which has been in operation since the late 1888 and, at one point, climbs a 27 degree incline. This is how we each reached the peak the last time.


There are as many routes for the first few legs of the climb as there are streets in Hong Kong, but we decided to follow the Tramway Path until it ends, which is about halfway up.


After an hour or so of climbing, I was finally above most of the buildings below me, from the skyscrapers in Central and Admiralty to the high-rise apartments in the Mid-Levels. It took Shelly much less than an hour to reach this point. What can I say ... I'm slow.


Amazingly, we timed our arrival at the top almost perfectly. It was windy and cool at the top but, unfortunately, the pollution from eastern China -- which seems to obscure the view most days -- kept us from getting great photos. It was not nearly this hazy a decade ago, the last time I was here. Still, these photos seemed to turn out okay.




As we joined the throngs of tourists at the top, we tried not to feel too superior, knowing that most of them had not climbed the mountain on their own. The Peak these days is full of fancy shops and a variety of restaurants, including one of only two Burger Kings in Hong Kong.

How's that for fast food trivia?

Cats

Ernie (full name: Most Perfect Princess Ernestine, our tribute to some Filipina-style names), left, and Fat Choy (from the Chinese New Year greeting Gung Hei Fat Choy), have settled in quite well and seem to be content in calling our home their home.


Fat Choy is demonstrating her good taste in using my Mac PowerBook as a pillow, while Ernie shows off her smarts by napping on a copy of the Internal Revenue Service Publication 17. That's some great reading, let me tell you.

Ernie and Fat Choy have at least one person who sympathizes with them in our odd choice of names. Shelly's mom recently wrote "what horrid names for little girls!" in an e-mail to us. I can't argue with her; in fact, that's probably some of the appeal of their names.

I Hate Laundry

I hate laundry.

It's not the washing -- even though two loads in a U.S.-style washing machine equals four or five loads in our teeny tiny Euro-style machine -- or the folding, or even in the putting away. (Of course, I rarely put the laundry away any more, as my lack of proper folding skills tends to result in Shelly refolding most of what I've done, anyway.)

It's that we live nine stories above the streets below. (Our address says we live on the seventh floor, but with Hong Kong's European style of floor numbering -- where the floor at street level is generally called "ground" and the floor above street level is "one" -- and hills -- where buildings frequently end up with floors below ground level -- we're actually nine stories up.) It's enough to make a guy miss a big, sprawling clothesline in the backyard.

You see, in order to hang our laundry out to dry -- there's no dryer in our apartment -- I am required to lean out a 12-inch gap in the window, pull a 12-foot, plastic-covered bamboo pole into our one-butt kitchen, prop one end of the pole on the window sill and the other on the counter and, finally, clip the wet laundry onto the pole.


That's not the tricky part, of course. Neither, technically, is picking up the pole, bunching up the sheets or shirts or towels or whatever enough to move them over the window sill, lean back out the 12-inch gap and replace the pole on its holder. The tricky part, as we have discovered on separate occasions, is doing all of that while managing to not knock the poles which are already outside out of their holder and to the street nine stories below.

Perhaps the worst part of the whole thing is that the poles are too long to fit in the lift, so after retrieving the fallen one, you get to enjoy a nine story climb back to the apartment.

More chicken feet, sir?

Shelly is in the poultry business, yet had somehow managed to never eat these Chinese delicacies -- until last week, when she ate them for three consecutive meals. Known as chicken feet on the menu or chicken paws in the industry, there's really not much to eating a chicken's foot. You kind of stick it in your mouth, take a bite, chew that bite until the skin sort of disintegrates in your mouth, then spit the bones back on to your plate. Though they're fairly inoffensive, they're not exactly at the top of my favorite foods list.

Perhaps I'll serve them for dinner tonight ... it is a special day after all. Happy birthday, Shelly!

Settling In

Wow...taking a look at my poor, neglected blog, I note it's been a month since I last updated it.

More surprisingly, that means it's been nearly a month since we moved to Hong Kong. Where has the month gone??

• Setting up our apartment. At approximately one-third the size of our house in Manila, we're much closer to each other than we were previously. Shelly refers to our kitchen as a "one butt kitchen." I'd say that's about right.

• Setting up Shelly's office. Admittedly, this has been mostly Shelly's job, but I have pitched in here and there, running errands and delivering things while Shell waits for the company's secretary to start work a couple weeks from now.

• Walking, walking, walking. I've spent most of my free time outside, walking around this incredible city. This has been the real reason I haven't blogged much. I'm rarely home, prefering the beautiful autumn weather of Hong Kong to spending time in the apartment.

• Enjoying the beautiful autumn weather of Hong Kong. Hey, it's cool again! I can wear pants without sweating! (That doesn't mean that I actually am wearing pants, just that I can from time to time.)

• Looking for a church. We've been to several different churches as we look for a new church home. We've been to an Anglican cathedral with loads of Brits and Filipinas, an international non-denominational church with an interesting cross section of nationalities and a Lutheran church with lots and lots of Americans. We're getting close to finding one, I think.

• Adopting two cats. Most Perfect Princess Ernestine and Fat Choy moved in a couple weeks ago after we adopted the sisters from the cattery at the Hong Kong SPCA. I used to make fun of people who used names like Princess or Fluffy for their cats -- we planned to call her Ernie -- but Princess fit Ernie's personality to a T when she moved in when she needed lots and lots of attention. Ernie has relaxed a bit, but Princess seems to be sticking as a name. Fat Choy is the trouble-maker of the two, already finding her way past all of Shelly's cat-proofing efforts to a perch on the narrow ledge outside our 7th floor window (more cat-proofing has since taken place) and spending the night at the vet after eating something that made her throw up 18 times in 12 hours.

• Using the words "weeing" and "pooing" with the British vet at the SPCA.

• Enjoying the convenience of grocery home delivery. Don't want to lug cases of beer and Coke up the hill to the house? Just call for delivery!

Now that we're settled in, I should be back online more often. Sorry for the delays in getting this update up. I'll get some photos up soon.

Update from Hong Kong

Our refrigerator is nearly empty, so it must be time to move again.

I wish I was so on the ball that I could say we will be moving shortly, but we have actually already moved. The last three weeks have flown by, first with a wonderful week's vacation in Palau and Guam, followed by a manic two days at work for both of us, followed by a whirlwind apartment-hunting trip to .... Hong Kong, where we're now living. The last week in Manila was crazy, too, with packing and cleaning (thank goodness for Cheryll, who did most of the cleaning), living in a hotel for several days and finishing up all the last-minute social and business stuff.

We're actually in a hotel in Hong Kong tonight, but will be moving in to our new apartment, er, flat, tomorrow morning.

The move itself was not so bad. Our landlord was extremely impressed with how clean the house was (kudos to Shelly and Cheryll for that). Cheryll found a new job on her last day with us, earning the same pay and working the same hours; we are happy that we aren't leaving her unemployed. Living in a hotel and not cooking for a week wasn't the worst experience of my life. And a two-hour flight from Manila to Hong Kong beats the pants off a 24-plus hour flight from Maryland to Manila.

Challenges ahead include shoehorning ourselves into a small Hong Kong apartment, especially after living in a spacious, two-story house in Manila, finding some cheap furniture to sit on and getting our utilities set up, though I think we'll have help from the real estate agent with that.

If you know Hong Kong, we'll be living in Happy Valley, which seems to be an interesting neighborhood with a good mix of Chinese and foreign residents. We have one set of friends here already (friends of Shelly's aunt ... we decided to live here after meeting them for dinner last week) and met the owner of a neighborhood yakitori restaurant tonight. Jack is a Hong Kong native, but graduated from Ohio State and is a major Big Ten sports fan. What a way for me to start!

We'll update you once we get the flat online. Hopefully that won't take more than a few days.

Typhoon Stomps Around Manila

We always miss the excitement.

While we were out of town this past week, typhoon Milenyo hit Manila, knocking out power over most of Luzon and pouring buckets of rain into our living room where, unaware of the typhoon's approach, we had conveniently left the windows open.

Known by the rest of Asia as Xangsane, the Laotian word for elephant, the typhoon lined up perfectly with Manila, dragging its eyewall across the city, knocking down trees everywhere, including in our neighborhood. When we returned home Saturday evening, there was no power at all in our neighborhood, and not much water, since there was no electricity to power the water pumps. I've been through that joy before, when I was without power for three weeks on Guam after supertyphoon Paka struck in 1997, just two months after I moved to Guam. "Gee," I thought then, "what a great idea to move here..."

Luckily for us, the power came back on around 2:00 a.m. Sunday. I know many who were not that fortunate.

These are the branches I pulled out of our yard. Nothing major, really.


It also blew an outside door off its hinges.


And here are a few photos from around the neighborhood...

The Micronesia Nostalgia Tour 2006: Guam

Much like Shelly felt in Palau, I was excited to be back on Guam. It was my home for three years in the late 1990s, and I had kept in touch with a number of friends I was looking forward to seeing again. While on Guam, I made most of my income by writing about tourism and construction, and I was especially interested in seeing how those industries were doing.

Guam is truly a tropical paradise. It serves as a great tropical destination for much of Asia, especially the Japanese, more than a million of whom flock to Guam every year for a bit of sun, sand and the ability to say they had visited America. Guam, as the slogan goes, is where America's Day Begins.

The sand was great. It was nice to be back in America for a few days. But the sun was missing. "It's the first time we've had rain in two months," the hotel staff assured us as we looked at the beach out the lobby's rain-streaked windows. "It will go away."


And it did, mostly. And with as much shopping as we wanted to do, to buy all those things we can't buy overseas, a bit of rain didn't really cause us any problems.

It did, however, rain on our trip to Ritidian Beach at the northern tip of Guam. The land is a national wildlife preserve, the beach is among the island's most beautiful and the current among the most dangerous. It's also blissfully deserted most weekdays, making it a great place for some private time on the sand.


Due perhaps to its isolated location, it's also a great place to look for shells.


It's also a federal crime to take any of them home with you.

This trip to Guam was the first time I had been on the island without a car, so we hopped aboard the trolley and played tourist for the first day. It's tough to get around Guam without a car, though, so we picked one up for the rest of our visit.


Shopping took us from the Micronesia Mall, where we found a hip carabao, to the world's largest Kmart. Because I profiled the Guam Kmart way back when, I know this was, at least in the 1990s, a true statement. Because of the vagaries of trans-oceanic shipping, the store has a huge warehouse floor built under the main sales floor. Kmart is as crowded as ever, and even sells groceries now.


Thanks to my friend Val, who I used to work for at the Pacific Daily News, we found a good deal at a hotel in the tourist district, which allowed us to walk to dinner most nights. In turn, walking to dinner allowed us to drink more beer and wander back home rather sliding behind the wheel and menacing Japanese pedestrians. Walking to dinner also allowed us to ponder just what kind of strip joint calls itself Wet Kitty. I mean, are the strippers all whiny and complainy, like Mister Tanaka was the one time I had to give him a bath?


We ate like we were American again: Mexican, Italian, Subway (the one time I went to Subway in Manila, well, was the last time I went to Subway in Manila) and, of course, the Hot and Spicy Spam Fried Rice at Shirley's, an extremely popular local joint along the lines of a Denny's or Perkins.


Like elsewhere in the USA, it is elections time on Guam. Elections on Guam bring about a proliferation of billboards unlike any I've seen elsewhere in the States. The primary election had been held just prior to our arrival on island so while there are probably a few less billboards now, most of them will probably stay up well beyond the general election.


With a rental car, we were able to tour the entire island, including the bay at Umatac (where Magellan landed back in the 16th century), the old saltwater swimming pool at Inarajan (where, to nobody's surprise, I tripped and fell on the coral limestone structure in the background of this photo), Asan Beach (where American marines and soldiers died in droves while recapturing Guam from Japan during World War II) and the Rotating Pope in Hagåtña. John Paul II rotated only briefly while I lived on Guam; he now appears to be facing the cathedral in Hagåtña more or less permanently.





When the sun finally came out, we had an awesome view of Tumon Bay from our hotel room. Thanks again, Valerie!


Best of all, I was able to see loads of friends at the newspaper and at the Lutheran Church of Guam, as well as a good friend who went to grad school with Dad back in the 1960s and a former coworker who is now working for TSA at the airport and recognized me while screening my suitcase.

The Micronesia Nostalgia Tour 2006: Palau

Welcome to Greg and Shelly's Micronesia Nostalgia Tour 2006, where vacation took us to our old stomping grounds, Palau and Guam. Shelly served in the Peace Corps in Palau from 1996-1998; I worked on Guam from 1997-2000. It was the first time either of us had been back since leaving. It was good to be back.

* * *

Our trip got off to a rocky start at the airport in Manila, where security officials have taken the prohibition of liquids to the extreme, at least on international flights to the USA. My 1.5 ounce bottle of eye drops was taken at the first security checkpoint. The yogurt which was missed at the first checkpoint was taken at the second checkpoint. We removed our shoes twice. Our bags were searched by hand twice and x-rayed once. At least we were helping George W. Bush win the war on terror. It's so much easier to focus on the potential instruments of terror rather than on the people who to cause terror. Memo to the White House: I'm not planning on bringing down any planes, and neither is Shelly. Tell our allies to lay off a bit, okay?

Once onboard, I settled down and began to enjoy myself, much to my wife's relief. Continental Micronesia has some of the friendliest flight attendants in the world, and it was wonderful to be back in their hands. Plus, redeeming our OnePass miles for travel in Micronesia is without question one of the best value frequent flyer awards around, as long distances and small passenger loads make air travel in Micronesia ridiculously expensive.

Things got better inflight, as the flight deck announced that since we were a bit ahead of schedule, they would be treating us to an aerial tour of Palau. Palau is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and flying over the thousands of islands reminded me of just how beautiful it is.

Palau has changed so much since the last time I visited, starting with an airport that now boasts its own jetway. The last time I flew into Palau, we disembarked via the air stairs and walked across the tarmac. This is not a bad way to enter a country, unless it's raining. I was also interested in seeing the winglets on Continental's 737-800, which reduce drag and make the plane very fuel efficient. I had read about and new they were quite tall, but this was the first time I had actually seen them in person. And this brings to a close the boring airplane-geek portion of this blog entry.

Our itinerary for Palau included a stop at all of Shelly's old haunts. After checking in to our hotel ("We don't have any electricity at night," the clerk told us, "but we can give you a fan hooked up to a generator." This earned us a free room upgrade so they didn't have to run power cords into the less-expensive rooms.), we hit the street and found a book sale benefiting the Palau Association of Libraries. Since several of Shelly's Peace Corps friends were involved in improving the country's libraries, we stopped by and bought a couple of used paperbacks.

Further down the road, we discovered that Koror now has a Mexican restaurant. A decade ago, the ten-year-old in Shelly's host family referred to tacos and burritos as "Taco Bell food," because he had only seen it on TV commercials -- and when Shelly made tacos in the kitchen.

It turned out that the hotel we were staying at was owned by the guy who publishes one of the country's three newspapers, Tia Belau. Shelly dug right in.


Our first full day in Palau took us to Carp Island, a rustic resort island that caters to divers and, therefore, leaving the island mostly to us non-divers during the day. Carp Island also gave Shelly the opportunity to pick up some smoked fish from Yano's store in Koror, which the island dogs enjoyed as much as we did.

What goes well with smoked fish? Chunks of taro and raw okra fit the bill.





Not too far from Palau -- at least not in Pacific Ocean terms -- is Yap, one of four states in the Federated States of Micronesia. Yap is known for its stone money, huge, round carved stones, invariably with a hole through the center. Much of Yap's stone money, which still has value in the Yapese economy today, was quarried from Palau and carried on outrigger-style canoes hundreds of miles to Yap. Carp Island has two pieces of stone money that never made it Yap, including this one.

Being a small island, Carp has its own power supply. The sign nailed to the building makes it seem a bit grander than it really is. (It's hard to read, but it identifies this building as the Carp Island Power Plant.)


Our last order of business while waiting for the boat to Koror was the construction of this luxurious ocean-front sandcastle. Shelly was in charge of the design, engineering and construction, while Greg handled the excavation and landscaping duties. We were hoping to make a killing on its sale, but then the tide came in and changed our plans.



Our trip back to Koror was sunnier than our trip to Carp had been, so the boat driver took us on a brief tour, including a trip through the rock islands -- lumps of eroding, forest-covered coral limestone -- and the beaches where Survivor Palau was taped.





After the extended beach time at Carp, we spent a day roaming around Koror, eating SureSave fried chicken...




...and going to Palau's new national aquarium, which has done a great job of putting fish in what seem to be very natural environments. One of the displays features Palau's stingless, freshwater jellyfish, which evolved from stinging, saltwater jellyfish after being trapped in a lake in the rock islands. I believe it's still possible to swim with them, though neither of us have done so.



One of the more astonishing sites in Palau is the new national capitol building, which was due to open just after our visit. Built in what can only be described as an American style, the building is gorgeous, but feels out of place in Melekeok, on the rural island of Babeldaob.





Next up, Guam!