Typhoon Nuri Closes in on Hong Kong

We're currently in a T9 warning here in Hong Kong, and we're planning for a direct hit by Typhoon Nuri sometime in the next hour. The center is currently 20 km southeast of Hong Kong, and is heading northwest at about 14 km/hour. For the weather geek who sometimes reads my blog, you can find a history of the typhoon warning system in Hong Kong here.


(We're the "*" that is practically underneath the typhoon.)

It hasn't been too bad yet, at least from my 8th floor vantage point. I went out around noon for an hour's walk and found Wan Chai nearly deserted. 7-11 was open, as was the supermarket and a few restaurants. You would never believe this was Wan Chai at noon on a Friday. This neighbourhood is one of Hong Kong's busiest, with a dense mix of retail, commercial and residential buildings. Buses and trams have stopped running, there is hardly anyone on the streets, and there are just a few taxis around.



It's gotten darker in the 3.5 hours since then, and I'm thinking it's about time to wander back downstairs and see how windy it is. I came back soaked last time, and it really wasn't even raining that hard. But I think that will change as the day goes on, at least looking at the radar. It does appear that the worst part of this typhoon is yet to come, after the eye passes.

Hong Kong is at the center of this screen shot, which was taken a bit after 3 this afternoon. The satellite image doesn't show this typhoon as having a well-formed eye, so I probably won't get to go outside during the eye passage to look up at a clear sky, as I did when Supertyphoon Paka hit Guam in 1997.

Back in Hong Kong

I've been researching and writing feverishly for the past month - something like 48,000 words over the past several weeks - to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. As such, I am now well-versed on corporate legal issues from Canada to Chile, and pretty much every country in between.

The writing was in preparation for a six week business trip to Hong Kong, where I will now edit the chapters of six or seven other writers who have been covering the rest of the world, and coordinate the editorial content of a book which last year was close to 1,500 page.

It's great to be back, and I'll write more. I'm horribly jetlagged right now, but wanted to post a few photos of my home for the next six weeks.

Dining room

Bedroom

Closet

Kitchen

The kitchen is nice. It has a dishwasher, microwave, small refrigerator, lots of cupboard space and full set of pots and pans, but no rice cooker, which seems odd (and inconvenient) considering I am in China. I will see if I can scrounge an extra from any of my co-workers for the next few weeks.

Shelly and I were wondering what kind of view I would have. We guessed, mostly correctly, that my view would be of the neighboring buildings. The floor plan, which we checked out ahead of time, shows four windows, plus one in the bathroom, so I thought there might be a chance of catching a corner of a good view out of one of those windows.

What I got was not even as good as a view of the buildings across the streets, though I can see those, too. If you've been reading this blog for long, you might remember a photo from shortly after we moved to Hong Kong of the building across the street from us in Happy Valley shrouded by green fabric stretched over bamboo scaffolding. I now know what that view looks like from the inside:


Also out my kitchen window, I can see one of the workers' water bottles. I'm thinking I should refill it in hopes of making him wonder how it got refilled, but neither the rope holding it nor my arms are long enough.

A Brief Trip West

Posted by Shelly

We recently traveled west. Greg flew to Iowa to visit his parents and I went to Colorado to visit mine.

While in Colorado I baked with my niece and nephew. We made Beach Cupcakes. [Recipe: Make a white cake. Add food coloring so the cake is a nice tropical ocean blue. Fill cupcakes ½ way, place a gummy fish is each cupcake, top with additional batter. Bake. Mix white frosting. Add food coloring to half of it so it matches the cupcake. Frost half of each cupcake white and half blue. Put crushed cookies on the white frosting (to represent sand). Fold bubble gum into a lounge chair, put on sand. Add a gummy life safer or gum ball as a beach toy. Top with a cocktail umbrella.] While certainly not the most delicious cupcake I have ever eaten, we had a fun time making them.


After a few days, Greg arrived in a van his parents have been trying to sell for the past year. They graciously lent it to us in exchange for our trying to sell it in Maryland. My parents are in the process of downsizing and since the new house does not have a formal living room, they agreed to let us have their dining room set as long as we came and picked it up. It took several hours to load the van, but eventually everything fit.




On our road trip across the country we stopped in Lawrence, KS (where we met), visited friends from Hong Kong that retired to a town in Missouri with a population of 322 people, and enjoyed a great Indian dinner with cousins in Ohio.

Romania

A few weeks ago, we returned from a holiday in Romania. We've each written a bit on our visit.

Posted by Shelly
Romania is filled with churches, monasteries and roadside altars. The churches were primarily Eastern Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic. The oldest one we saw went back to the 1300s.


This Episcopalian church from the 1500s supposedly has the wife of the head mason buried (alive) in the walls. Local custom required masons to buried a loved one alive to ensure the success of their work.


This monastery in Maramures was the most beautiful site I saw in Romania. However I wondered why the only people we saw in the monetary was two nuns.


We also visited the "merry cemetery" in Maramures. From 1935-77, local craftsman Stan Patras carved all the grave markers reflecting the life of the person who died. It is also accompanied by a short humorous poem. Since Stan’s death, his apprentice has continued the tradition making about 10 markers per year depending on the mortality rate of the village.




Roadside crucifixes were at the entrance of each village.


We were surprised to see how much written Romanian we could understand.


We didn’t have much trouble communicating, but there was one disappointing dinner. After arriving in town one night Greg went searching for an Internet café and ATM and I went exploring. I found this great looking beer garden that was grilling meat. It smelled really good. After Greg and I met up again we wondered back to the restaurant and ordered the first thing on the menu. We read enough to tell it was a mixture of meat and salads. I assumed it was a mixed grill. We waited and waited and no one came out to grill meat. I started to wonder what we had ordered. Eventually our food came. We ended up with 2 giant platters of pork fat, cold meat, hummus, babaganoush, cheese, red peppers and tomatoes. This was not far from what we were eating for breakfast and lunch most days, and was definitely disappointing.


On our last night, we finally did found some delicious grilled meat.

* * *

Posted by Greg

Lonely Planet has a page in its Romania guide devoted to driving. It’s a classic pro and con argument: One author says there’s no reason not to drive in Romania, the other says you’re crazy for even thinking about it.

Our initial impulse was to rent a car and drive around Romania. We’ve driven in a lot of interesting places where driving isn’t nearly as easy as it is at home – the Philippines, where traffic can be daunting; Japan, where it’s not easy to decipher road signs; Ireland, where roads are narrow and twisting; Palau, where the asphalt is made with crushed coral and very, very slippery when it rains. Then we read the No! Are you nuts? section of Lonely Planet’s driving debate:

“Driving in Romania is more treacherous than I’ve seen in 40 countries. Indeed, I strongly discourage it for visitors. … Despite the country’s on-book driving regulations, in reality the situation is lawless. The prevailing belief is that racing along at the very edge of disaster is the pinnacle of skilled driving. Romanians routinely risk death just to gain three seconds on their journey, even if they’re just going to church.”

If that doesn’t give you pause, I don’t know what will.

This single page made trip planning a challenge. I mean, we’ve driven in Manila, Tokyo, New York and Washington, for crying out loud. Could Romania really be that bad? But words like treacherous, disaster and lawless kept looming, bringing to mind our impending deaths.

In the end, the diverse range of places we wanted to visit dictated that we would rent a car. Some digging on the Internet found a car for €293, a princely sum given the weak dollar, but nearly €100 cheaper than the next-best deal.

(We chose Romania, in part, because the country isn’t yet using the euro, which meant it should be cheaper than traveling in the euro zone. In the end, while lodging was fairly expensive, the Romanian leu did turn to be a better currency for us dollar-denominated travelers. The rental car was the only thing we paid for in euros.)

Trip planning was still a challenge, though. If the roads were really as bad as what we had read – both in Lonely Planet and on the Internet – we weren’t going to cover very much territory. We decided, in a decidedly non-Shelly-like decision, to plan the first day’s drive north from the airport near Bucharest, see what the roads were like and then plan from there.

We’re roughly three hours from five different airports, and four or so from a number more. There is a small airport in town, but it’s almost always hundreds of dollars more to fly from here than from Washington, Baltimore or Philadelphia. The best fare we found to Bucharest was a Delta non-stop from Kennedy airport, so our week began with driving through all of Delaware and most of New Jersey, then across Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens to the JFK long term parking lot.

Jet-lagged driving is always a challenge, and if Romania was really going to be as challenging as we had been led to believe, I really needed to get some sleep on the flight over.

I got precisely none, leaving me ready for bed about the time we landed in Bucharest.

Diet Pepsi, fortunately, is readily available in Romania, so fueled with caffeine, we headed north to Râşnov, about four hours north of Bucharest. I was ready for action, steeled for rough roads and prepared to race along at the very edge of disaster.

And I didn’t need any of it.

Driving turned out to be a big disappointment, at least from the perspective that I was in for a challenging week. Sure, some of the roads were a bit rough, but most have nice, smooth surfaces. Sure, passing on a busy two-lane road can be stressful, but this is no different than anywhere in western Europe. And, sure, the slow-moving horse-drawn wagons do tend to slow things down a bit. But none of this was a big deal. Romania is nowhere near the most challenging place I’ve ever driven.

Having a car allowed us to get to far-flung nooks and crannies of Romania that we never would have seen on a train. It got us to the “merry cemetery” near the Ukraine border. It got us to an odd resort town near the Hungary border. And it got us to a memorable drive on Ceausescu’s impressive Transfăgărăşan Road, Romania’s highest asphalted road.

We got on the road just after climbing 1500 steps to the ruins of what is considered, by many, to be the most authentic “Dracula’s castle” in a country that is lousy with things named after Dracula. (Most places labeled as Dracula’s castle or the Dracula hotel or the Dracula restaurant have, in reality, nothing to do with Dracula. But the castle ruins near Curtea de Argeş are said to have been the home of Vlad the Impaler, who was the inspiration for Dracula. [Vlad’s surname was Drǎculea.]) It was probably because we had just climbed 1500 steps, but we somehow missed a fairly important sign on our way up the mountain road.


The road was spectacular. Twisting and winding through miles of pristine pastureland, through tunnels and across soaring viaducts and through a rushing river, full of spring snowmelt. It was on our way up the mountainside that we encountered not one but two different flocks of sheep being driven to their summer pasture. One particularly large flock had at least five shepherds and a dozen dogs, blocking the road until traffic came along, at which point the shepherds and dogs would clear a lane of traffic for the car.


The higher we got, the more spectacular the scenery. Trees become scarce, water cascaded down over the road and traffic thinned out, especially traffic coming down from the peak.


A few more twists and turns and we found out why. A passing motorist rolled down his window and warned us that the road ahead was closed. Around another turn, the road narrowed to one lane as an enormous, 7-foot-high snowdrift blocked one, and eventually, both lanes.


We turned around, found a place to stop for lunch, and then drove two hours back down to the bottom of the mountain.

Where we saw the sign reading “închis.”

Closed.

A Visit from Family

Lisa, Shelly’s sister, visited for a night in April. We had dinner at the marina and then took a quick tour of Ocean City's boardwalk. The next morning we drove into DC together. Lisa went off to visit grad school friends while Shelly and Greg stocked up at the Asian grocery store and then met some cousins for dinner.

I Dream of Taxes

Tomorrow is April 1, which means that tax season is nearly over. I felt a distinct uptick in business today, as I was busier in the office than I have been anytime since mid-February. This is good, as I'm only really making money when I'm with clients. I like this time of the tax season because the returns tend to be more challenging, forcing me to actually use my tax knowledge rather than just punching in numbers.

The downside to this time of year is that my dreams tend to involve numbers and W2s.

Back in the US

We returned to the US early in January and have settled back into life on the Eastern Shore. Here is a brief summary of the past few months.

Greg and Fat Choy returned to the US together and Shelly followed a week later. While Fat Choy adjusted well to the motel, our friend Laura's house (where we lived for two weeks) and ultimately our house, she was not a good in-flight companion. Just moments after the wheels left the ground in Hong Kong, Fat Choy found her carrier's fatal flaw and popped out of a velcro opening and headed up the aisle. Fortunately, Greg had his eye on the bag and quickly followed, grabbing her and, with some effort, folding her up and stuffing her back into the bag. Thankfully, she quieted down as the plane reached cruise altitude, only to resume yowling as it began its descent. Fortunately, there was only a change of planes in San Francisco and a non-stop from there to Washington, or it might have been an even longer flight for Greg and Fat Choy than it was. She has adjusted well to the colder Maryland weather. She still sleeps under the blankets with us, but is happy to spend her days on the two porches watching the neighborhood birds, squirrels and cats pass by. We (hopefully correctly) have been thinking that Fat Choy would happier if she were to have a feline companion, so we went to the Humane Society on Saturday and picked out Meatball, a 10-week old kitten that we brought home last week.


So far, they seem to be getting along, after a couple of days of lots of hissing and posturing by Fat Choy. Most of the hissing has subsided and while they're not best friends yet, they are currently enjoying a mostly peaceful coexistence.

Shortly after returning to the US, Shelly transferred from the international department to the purchasing department. Other than regularly working 11 hour days she really enjoys her new position.

Greg is working for his previous Hong Kong employer as a more-or-less permanent freelancer. He is also happy to be back at H&R Block doing taxes. Since there is now a district office in Salisbury, Greg will be able to continue working for them in the off season dealing with the messy tax issues – IRS audits and all that.

In February, Shelly took one last trip for the international department to Mersin, Turkey. Even though it was only a 3-day trip, she was able to spend one day sightseeing. This part of Turkey (Mediterranean Coast near Cyprus) has over 5,000 ancient ruins. She saw several castles and a church located at the bottom of a large crater that was built by the followers of Paul in the 5th century. The food was wonderful – yogurt, goat cheese, eggplant salads, bread (one loaf was 5ft long – like a giant naan – break off your section and pass it down the table), grilled meats and squid. The hospitality was also wonderful.


Two weekends ago, we flew to Iowa to attend Greg’s grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration. There was a tiara, limo ride, dinner for 100 friends and (sadly) false rumors that a stripper had been hired. In addition to attending the party and a breakfast with the extended family, we toured Herbert Hoover's birthplace and presidential museum-library (and his outhouse), wandered around the University of Iowa, visited the first capital (and capitol) of Iowa, saw where Greg was born (and lived for the first few years of his life) and toured Grant Wood’s art studio (where American Gothic was painted). [Secretly, I think Shelly is starting to like Iowa -- G]

The birthday girl

Greg calls on the Hoovers

Shelly pays a visit to the Hoover's outhouse

Iowa's first capitol, in its first capital

This spring we are looking forward to planting the vegetable garden, a visit from Shelly’s sister, going camping, visiting Greg’s brother and seeing their new house and vacationing overseas (Greg’s choice for the destination this year). We will also need to get to the beach – we are only 45 minutes away and our only trip so far was on a cold, blustery Friday evening.

Bali

Posted by Shelly


In October we spent a week in Bali, Indonesia. The first few days were spent at a beautiful hotel on the rural east coast. Other than early morning or late afternoon walks up the coast we never left the hotel property. The hotel was on a rocky beach from where hundreds of local fisherman depart every morning at 4:30am and return three hours later with buckets full of fish (barracuda were biting when we were there). We snorkeled, swam in the pool, read, napped, and enjoyed massages.



After four days of complete relaxation we hired a car and toured the island. We stopped at Tenganan Village that still follows a traditional tribal lifestyle and saw some 14th century cliff carvings at Yeh Pulu.



We spent the second half of the week in Ubud. Ubud is in the middle of Bali and is surrounded by rice terraces. Many artisans live in Ubud and the surrounding villages resulting in wonderful shopping opportunites.

Batik is one of the types of art that is famous in Bali. Greg and I took a batik making class from Nyoman Suradnya, an artist who shows his work internationally. This was my first time to batik since 5th grade art class. First we drew our design on stretched cotton and then we copied our design with melted wax. Next we used watercolors to paint the cotton. Blending is a lot harder than one might expect. The next step involved painting over all the watercolors (leaving the background blank) with a second coat of wax. Then the cotton was dipped in indigo and dunked in boiling water to remove the wax and set the colors. We spent more than 5 hours in the artist’s studio (beautiful open air buildings in the family courtyard).



Bali is 95% Hindu so the local dance performances are based on traditional Hindu stories. One night we went to see the Kecak Dance, which is based on the Hindu epic Ramayana and tells the story of Prince Rama and his dramatic rescue of Princess Sita, who had been kidnapped by the King of Lanka. Perhaps most impressive was the continual chanting of more than 100 men, who clicked their way through an hour of "chak-achak-achaka" sounds. The show ended with a dancer in a trance who ran around through very hot coals.



Both Hindu temples and flowers are plentiful in Ubud. Often the statues of the gods at the temple gates get fresh flowers tucked behind their ears. Offerings are made to the gods for every pot of rice that is made. Offering plates including rice and spices and flowers are put on the grounds and somewhere high up. The high offerings are for the good gods and the ones on the ground are to appease the bad gods. In some instances even the family scooter gets an offering.



75% of Balinese food uses a mixture of about 12 spices as the base seasoning. We took a cooking class at a local restaurant. The chef spent over an hour introducing us to new spices. We made satay, which tastes much better when stalks of lemon grass are used instead of wood skewers. We also made chicken curry, coconut vegetable salad, grilled mackerel, and coconut milk shrimp.



Other than artisans and shopping, Ubud is also famous for the Monkey Forrest. Greg went, bought a bunch of bananas and wisely hid them in his backpack so that he would be able to navigate his way through a horde of monkeys. According to his story, he sat down on a bench and unzipped his backpack just enough to reach in pull out a banana. Before he was able to pull a single banana out, a rather large monkey had climbed on top of Greg's backpack, bared his teeth at Greg and stolen the whole bunch from him. At least she shared.


Not sure where our next trip will take us, but I am already looking forward to it.

Five Years of Wedded (Mostly) Bliss

We celebrated our fifth -- ! -- anniversary last month, and did what all good married couples should do. We went to China.

We initially thought of that Paris of the Pearl River, Shenzhen, renowned for its Wal*Marts and masses of Hong Kong shoppers and factories and, well, little else. So we turned our eyes northward, and headed instead for somewhere that wasn't Shenzhen.

Guangzhou fit the bill, and while its reputation as a prime tourist destination is not exactly sparkling, we found it to be an interesting city to spend the weekend wandering.

We rolled into Guangzhou's eastern train station, where all rail traffic from Hong Kong arrives, late Saturday morning, and, upon seeing an incredibly long queue, immediately abandoned our plans to take a taxi to our hotel and opted instead for the subway, which got us into the city centre, where we then hailed a taxi completely without a queue. The thing about many Chinese cities is that the blocks are incredibly long and the cities incredibly spread out. Factor in that the best hotel deal was not immediately adjacent to a subway line, and we ended up in more than a few taxis. (In retrospect, there's probably a reason our hotel was cheaper than one that was right on the subway line, but I digress.)

We wandered into a Brazilian restaurant for lunch, which, of course, is exactly what you think of when you think of Guangzhou. But this was just the first of many pleasant surprises we found in the city. We spent an interesting hour at the Museum of the Peasant Movement Institute, where I saw what I am quite certain is my lifetime allotment of pictures of Mao. We then visited a museum full of artifacts from the Nanyue King's tomb. If you ever need to see a life-size shroud made out of jade and red thread, this is the place to be. When we rented MP3 players for the guided audio tour, we had to leave a deposit of RMB400 (US$53). The clerk wrote down the serial numbers of each of the four RMB100 notes Shelly left, and we got the same four notes back. It might have been interesting to pay with 20s.

We finally ended up at the Chen Clan's Ancestral Hall, which proved to be quite photogenic both inside ...


...and in the backyard sculpture garden.


Saturday evening, we decided to take a cruise on the Pearl River. While it had the risk of being cheesy and touristy, it also had the benefit of being cheap. We finally found a small "Muslim food" restaurant for dinner, where Shelly had the best (and freshest and longest) noodles I have ever tasted. (Sadly, in my quest for the perfect fried rice, I ordered fried rice. This cook playing with noodles in the front window should have been my first clue to order noodles, not rice. After all, he wasn't making rice.)


Total cost for an anniversary dinner for two: about US$2.50.

Our cruise turned out to be really nice, and very popular. After the traditional Cantonese stampede to get on the ship, we all found out that we had assigned seats. Not that you couldn't change -- the boat was only one-third full, probably because there is so much competition for evening cruises on the Pearl River. There was a continual parade of boats all lit up with neon both in front of us and behind us for the duration of the cruise. I understand why it is such a popular evening activity: Guangzhou was quite fetching from the river, and the water is cleaner than I expected it would be.


On Sunday morning, we headed to the market, which was closed, and then across the river to Shamian Island, which is notable for at least two things. First, Guangzhou seems to have preserved more of its colonial past on Shamian Island than Hong Kong has in all of Hong Kong. This is obviously not really true, but the buildings haven't been torn down to build highways, the old British post boxes are still standing, and the island feels nothing like part of a massive Chinese city.

The other thing Shamian is notable for is for hosting huge numbers of Americans who have come to Guangzhou to adopt a baby. The US consulate is next door to a large hotel, which is apparently where everyone stays while they're in the adoption process. We felt quite out of place when we wandered through the lobby, as we were the only American couple there that wasn't pushing a stroller.


Shamian is also a peaceful place, with few cars and lots of parks to wander through. As we were leaving, a man stopped us.

"Are you here to adopt Chinese baby?" he asked.

"No, we're just looking," I replied, which Shelly pointed out probably wasn't the best choice of words.

I ended up chatting with the guy for a few minutes, and learned that he brings his son to Shamian every Sunday to sit on a park bench and do his homework. "Other parks aren't free like Shamian is," he explained. "And here, I can practice my English."

On our way back to the market, we even found out why the river is so clean. There's a guy who paddles around in his little boat, picking up all the trash floating on the surface.