Hong Kong, Part 1

On November 16, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Hong Kong9 Comments

I started this blog in late October of 2011, right before I moved to Europe to live for three years in Germany. Almost every country I’ve traveled to outside of the United States is recorded in this blog because I was writing in more or less real-time. There are three countries I visited before the blog began though. I don’t think I even still have any photos from the Bahamas. Canada was great, and it might get a blog post one of these days.

Then there’s Hong Kong.

Twelve years ago in September of 2008, I went to Hong Kong for two weeks for work. The days were occupied with computer nerdery, but the evenings were mine, and the weekend in the middle. Since it was three years before this blog was started, I wrote about my trip to Hong Kong on LiveJournal- remember LiveJournal? It was never committed to my WordPress blog until now, though, and NanoPoblano gives me a great reason to finally stop procrastinating and recap what I can remember of my time there, with an assist from my original notes from 2008. Past Steven is being helpful instead of being a dick for once.

There’s a lot to share, so I’m going to break it up into five posts. (Hey, my five weeks in Japan became 29 blog posts. Five posts is a breeze!) This post is kind of a rambling mess because I started with about 85-90 photos that I want to share from my Hong Kong trip and then separated them out into specific topics, one for each day. This batch is everything that didn’t fit into one of the other four.

My trip started on September 6th of 2008. I left for the Ft. Lauderdale airport at the ass-crack of dawn, connected in Newark New Jersey, and then it was just another sixteen hours to arrive in Hong Kong. All in all, I was traveling for about 24 hours. My original notes from 2008 say that the captain of my plane was, and I promise this is true, Captain Mike Fortune. What a great name for a pilot!

The biggest problem with this kind of travel, in my personal opinion, is a question of time. On the flight there, I watched Kung-Fu Panda, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and two episodes of Scrubs, plus had a meal- and still had roughly half the flight remaining. Sixteen hours is a long time to be in one of those metal tubes. I have trouble sleeping on airplanes, but I managed to doze a very small amount on this one, so I wasn’t completely wiped out on arrival.

After dealing with customs and passport control, we took a reasonably short airport express train ride to Tsim Sha Tsui, in Kowloon, and then on to the hotel.

My room was on the 16th floor, and it was teeny tiny. How teeny tiny, you might ask? I took this photo from the doorway of the bathroom near the main door of the hotel room. There was a bed, a desk, a chair, some tall windows looking down onto the neon-drenched city, and not much room for anything else. I had to keep moving my suitcase out of the way for the entire time I was there.

Once checked in, I needed to change some US dollars into Hong Kong dollars. There are three different banks authorized to print and distribute their own designs of Hong Kong dollars, alongside the Hong Kong government. This means that my bills did not always match each other in appearance- for someone used to the uniformly green all-the-same-size bills the United States uses, this was eye-opening. I did like the vibrant colors on that tenner though.

A quick note about food in Hong Kong… I appreciated that instead of water as a normal beverage with my meal, tea was always on hand. I also liked the omnipresence of chop sticks. And the hidden drawer in every table in some restaurants for other cutlery was genius.

A few nights before the trip ended, we had dinner with our Hong Kong colleagues at a local restaurant. The table was round, and they set an enormous lazy Susan in the middle, then they kept bringing food in waves. We spun the thing in the middle to serve ourselves. I tried Jellyfish, which had the taste and texture of crunchy cabbage. And I tried Thousand Year Egg, which was so-so. It looks awful, but the flavor isn’t a big deal. I also tried duck, but I could only stomach one bite of that- I saw them carving it, and it still had a bill. Luckily, I was rather buzzed on Tsingtao beer at the time.

Speaking of foodstuffs that squick me out, at one point the group got lost during lunch and we walked through an open-air market. The place was filled with pungent things- they had fish, eels in a basket, hanging meat, and foul-smelling vats of stuff that I dare not even describe. Just ew.

They had a silverware drawer built into the table. Genius!

I think this was my first time ever having a Tsing Tao beer. — They had a silverware drawer built into the table. Genius!

We used taxis several times going to and from the office. The red taxis were in the urban centers, and so we saw them close to the hotel in Kowloon and wherever the biggest crowds were. The green taxis are for new territories and we saw those when we were near the data center and office, away from the main city. There are also blue taxis in Lantau, but I didn’t see any of those.

This was also my first time in a city where people drive on the left instead of the right. The city streets were clearly labeled so that stupid Americans wouldn’t be hit by cars as they looked the wrong way while crossing the street. This particular photo is a bad example though, because this was a one-way street.

We used the train quite often over our two weeks because using taxis exclusively for a dozen people gets really expensive really fast. Every time I see the MTR logo on the front of a train, I immediately assume they’re Psi-Corps. (Yes, that’s a Babylon 5 joke.)

We changed it up a few times over the two weeks, but for the most part we took the train from Kowloon to a station closer to the office, and then a taxi the rest of the way.

This sign made me laugh. — Our afternoon train.

After work, the group would go explore the city or strike out for dinner. This is a walk along D’aquilar Street, a tiny winding road with stairs alongside- it’s steeply uphill. Restaurants, bars, and clubs dotted the length of the street. The night of this photo, we ate at Al’s, because the canopy boasted the world’s best burgers.

A visit to D’aquilar Street on a subsequent night found us in an Australian restaurant, where I tried kangaroo meat. It was a little springy.

On one of the nights, I ate at a really excellent Irish pub– their corned beef and cabbage was delightful. I have found that in most cities around the world, there’s usually an Irish pub.

Three more pictures, and then I’ll wrap this post up. The first is just a random guy walking across the bridge as seen from our taxi on that first work-day. I saw a lot of people carrying parasols to protect them from the sun- this is a very good thing It was toasty-hot the whole time we were there.

On several occasions, I saw t-shirts with things on them that contained amusing bad translations. I saw one girl with a shirt that said Snatch, another with a shirt that said “Wide Love,” and yet another with a shirt that said, “I rove you.” But the best one so far was this girl’s shirt- it’s a recipe for something. I’m curious whether this was a deliberate thing or if she just saw English text and thought it was cool in the same way that Americans sometimes get things with Mandarin or Kanji on them just because they look neat.

During a bus ride across the island on my way to Thursday’s post, I saw a lot of fascinating things. This cemetery in particular was fascinating- the plots are so close together that for it took me a moment to parse that this was actually a burial ground.

Last but not least, a delicious blackcurrant soda called Ribena. When I had this in 2008, I thought it was a uniquely Hong Kong sort of thing to drink, but I have since learned that Ribena is actually a British product. The UK had transferred control of Hong Kong over to China only eleven years before my visit, in 1997, and there was still a great deal of British influence to be seen.

A short bulleted list of observations about Hong Kong that don’t really fit with any of the photographs:

The chocolate in Hong Kong is better than the chocolate in the US. They import a lot of it from Singapore and Vietnam, and I think the cocoa levels are just higher than they are in the US. I had similar chocolate experiences in many other countries. The US just doesn’t do chocolate well.
I saw quite a few American chains in Hong Kong. I ate at a McDonalds once, in the first week, when I was sick and needed to just eat something and down some Panadol and sleep off a fever. The McDonalds burger tasted the same, but the cheese was sharper. French fries are french fries no matter where you are; they were identical. I tried to take a photograph of the menu at Starbucks and I was politely asked to leave before I could take the photo. Twelve years later and I’m still not sure what that was about. I also saw Outback, TGI Fridays, Burger King, and, oddly, Popeye’s Fried Chicken in Hong Kong. I read somewhere that KFC does more business in China than in all of the United States, so I can kind of see where that’s going.
7-11 deserves its own bullet point. The 7-11 density in Hong Kong is HUGE. Walking to dinner on one of the nights, we must have passed one 7-11 every fifty yards. And they take the Octopus Card, which is excellent- the Octopus Card is the metro card for the MTR train system. You can recharge it, and it works in every train station, every 7-11, some other stores, and some vending machines. The Octopus Card was the single smartest purchase I made on this trip- it made a great many things much, much easier.
The street hawkers were pushy and numerous- I was offered massage, luggage, “copywatch,” custom tailoring, hashish, and pretty girls. I’ve never been in a city with pushier people selling things on random street corners. This is one area where I definitely prefer being back in the US, where I’m completely ignored on street corners.
Speaking of pushy and weird, I went with some of my coworkers to the local equivalent of a strip club, and it was nothing at all like a strip club in the US. For one thing, there were only about five or six people visible, and there was a slightly older woman who kept trying to get me to buy drinks for the girls. Looking back at this with the insight of hindsight, I think “buy drinks for the girls” might have been code for something very different. The whole experience was kind of uncomfortable and we didn’t stay long.
After that, we went to a local friendly gay bar, and someone there asked me if I was Dan Savage. While I do not see even the slightest resemblance, it was a flattering question because let’s face it, he’s a good looking dude.
I really enjoyed the sound of the city when I was going to sleep. I was sixteen stories up, so it was mostly muffled, but it was soothing to have the sound of other people nearby, to hear the low rumble of traffic. Looking back in hindsight, this might have been one of my first times sleeping in a large city.

Next up, Victoria Peak and the Kowloon waterfront!

Have you ever visited Hong Kong?

37/52 (and 16 of 30!)

Don’t feed the flamingos.

On November 15, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home19 Comments

Welcome to the halfway point of Nano Poblano! Since most of my posts are either long-form or very photograph heavy, I thought it would be nice to take a beat at the mid-point of November to reflect on how well we’ve all done keeping up the posts.

I’ve been reading loads of things from new friends this month, as they push through their own Tiny Pepper challenges. If you’ve got some time to read new things, take a moment to look at some of these fine folks– you won’t regret it.

I genuinely thought I would have less to talk about because my usual adventures have been completely stifled by the pandemic. It turns out that I have enough tiny adventures to completely keep this train moving.

Speaking of trains, it has now been 100 days since I arrived in Arlington aboard the AutoTrain. One hundred days in my new home, and I still haven’t found a sofa. Or tried all the restaurants I want to try around here. Or met any of my neighbors, really. After one hundred days in Arlington, I’m still exploring and learning my immediate surroundings.

Which brings me to the photo…

I stumbled across this while simply walking around the neighborhood. I was coming back from the store, and I decided to take a slightly different path than normal. I was thinking I might find a slightly more direct route.

My slightly more direct route actually took me between a couple of condo buildings. In the middle of the path, there was a pedestrian roundabout filled with some small plants, a little tree, and… three plastic flamingos. The “please do not feed the flamingos” sign tickled me so much I actually stopped and went back for the photo.

I love signs that exist solely for the joke. This really appeals to my sense of whimsy.

What’s the silliest sign you’ve seen around?

36/52 (and 15 of 30!)

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center

On November 14, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn The D-M-V11 Comments

One of my favorite parts of the Smithsonian is the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The Udvar-Hazy is a part of the National Air & Space Museum, but it’s not on the National Mall. The National Mall has limited space, so in 1999 they had the brilliant idea of putting a giant hangar near Dulles Airport in Virginia and filling it with all kinds of cool stuff that wouldn’t fit in the main Air & Space Museum.

If you have a long layover at Dulles Airport, this is a GREAT way to kill some time. Fairfax Connector operates a bus from Dulles to the Udvar-Hazy Center every hour. The trip takes less than fifteen minutes, and it only costs a few dollars.

They’ve got hundreds of fascinating historical aircraft, as well as a restoration hangar where they can work on several airplanes at once. This is a BIG place. They have Felix Baumgartner’s capsule, ultralights, stunt planes, dirigible cabins, and so much more. They have cool space stuff like the Gemini 7 space capsule. They’ve also got an SR-71 Blackbird. And an Air France Concorde. And the freaking Enola Gay.

And they have a Space Shuttle. Guys, this place is SO COOL!

There are four space shuttle orbiters left, after the tragic destruction of Challenger and Columbia. The remaining four are all retired into museums. Endeavour is at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California. Enterprise is at the Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum in New York. Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. And Discovery is here, at the Udvar-Hazy.

I’m not likely to ever see Endeavour because I have no interest in going back to Los Angeles. I’ll see Enterprise next time I’m in New York for work, post-pandemic. Nikhil and I went to the Kennedy Space Center this summer and saw Atlantis. (Editor’s note: I thought I had blogged the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex, but I don’t see it here. I’ll have to come back to write that post later because the spacecraft on display are amazing.)

I mentioned Lorrie’s weekend visit back in my post about the Air Force Memorial. That same weekend, we drove out to Chantilly to see the Udvar-Hazy, and to get some quality time with Discovery.

An STS Orbiter is a very, very large thing. Larger than you might expect. The rockets at the back are just insanely large. Until you see them up close, it’s difficult to describe the immensity.

I call this photo “Lorrie looks at Shuttlebutt.”

The space part of the Udvar-Hazy has some displays pertaining to pop culture and how it intertwines with our space exploration. There are items from Babylon 5, Star Wars, and Buck Rogers, among others. There’s also a hero model used in the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You don’t ever see it in the movie, but there’s a bunch of little things glued onto the model in various places to give it more detail. Like trucks, and mailboxes, and R2-D2, seen in the photo below. (Here’s a fun pop culture trivia- there’s also a small R2-D2 on the deck of One-Eyed Willie’s pirate ship in The Goonies. That little droid just gets everywhere.)

For some reason, there’s even a tiny model of the Space Shuttle in the Space Shuttle’s wing, complete with tiny people. I love miniatures, so this was extra fun for me.

I took hundreds of photos in the Udvar-Hazy. If I showed the rest of them inline like this, the post would be insanely long. Instead, I’ll just throw 78 of them into a gallery!

Have you ever been to the Udvar-Hazy Center?

35/52 (and 14 of 30!)

Inside The Pointy Obelisk

On November 13, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn The D-M-V13 Comments

Long time readers of my blog know that I absolutely love tall things. Whenever I get into a new city, I generally like to find the tallest thing around and climb it. I get a little bit King Kongy, albeit from the inside. If it’s got an observation deck, you’ll observe me wanting to go to there.

When I arrived in Arlington in August, however, the Washington Monument was closed to inside visitors. It had only just reopened in September of 2019 after a three-year renovation to the elevator controls and security screening area and then had to close down again six months later because of Covid 19.

As you might imagine, I was incredibly stoked when they announced that it would reopen on October 1st, even with a limited capacity. In order to visit now, you have to get a timed entrance ticket from the recreation.gov site. A very limited number of tickets would be available each day, and each group would only get 10 minutes at the Observation level. They opened the Monument on schedule, and I tried a few times a week to snag one of the precious few visitor slots for each day that I might be able to visit.

On October 28th, I was finally able to snag a slot for the following day, soon after I finished my work for the day. I was incredibly excited to finally get to go up inside the Monument.

I wasn’t paying attention to the weather, though. Hurricane Zeta had just made landfall, and all the leftover rain was coming our way– it was slated to rain all day long, including well past the end of my time slot to visit the monument. I briefly considered not going at all since I would be trudging through rain and the views would be hampered, but after a series of should-I-go-or-not coin flips, I finally grabbed a rideshare to the National Mall. (Normally I would go via the Metro, but my workday and the visit timing were too close together, and I needed a slightly more direct route. I took the Metro home afterward.)

I don’t need to talk about the two shades of marble again, do I? I just talked about that the other day.

By the time I arrived, my feet were wet, and I was well and truly damp despite my coat and umbrella. You can’t quite tell in the photo above, but it was raining. It was raining a lot.

One unexpected benefit of going to the Washington Monument in the middle of what’s left of a hurricane, however, is that there was nobody else there. No tourists, I mean- the staff of Park Rangers was all there, waiting at the entrance of the security area for visitors. I was the only person visiting, though. I went through security in moments, and they let me into the lobby, past some VERY large metal security doors, to the elevator.

I was alone in the elevator, and after a moment I reached the observation deck at the top. There was nobody with me except for another Park Ranger, so I had all of the windows to myself. In hindsight, I really should have taken pictures of the observation deck’s interior to show how I had the place to myself- that’s never going to happen again. It was kind of magical.

Anyway, here’s what I could see out of the little slot windows at the top of the monument. Visibility was hampered by all the rain, but I could still see quite far. Looking East, I could see the National Gallery of Art on the left, the National Air & Space Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian on the right, and all the way in the distance, the United States Capitol. The Library of Congress and the Supreme Court are back there too, but the rain made those nearly invisible.

Facing South, I could see the Tidal basin and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. The Tidal Basin is where they have the Cherry Blossom Festival when it’s not a pandemic year. I still need to visit the Jefferson Memorial; I haven’t been there.

Continuing my clockwise walk around the top level, this is the view toward the West. The World War II Memorial is in the foreground, then the Reflecting Pool, then the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. On a clear day, you could see the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial from here, along with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. I could not.

Lastly, I looked to the north. That big round path around grass is the Ellipse, and sitting behind that is the White House.

Here’s an obligatory selfie of me pointing toward the White House. I promise, that’s what I was pointing at.

After a few minutes looking out the various rain portals and up toward the capstone, I was ready to go back down to the ground. There’s an exhibit level just below the observation level, but it was closed during the pandemic. Stupid pandemic.

I really need to go back on a clear day.

After a brief but lively chat with a friendly Park Ranger, it was time to go back down to the ground. One more very heavy security door and another vestibule, and I was back outside. There was another group of about three people about to go in as I was leaving. Even though it was still raining, I decided to try getting some more National Mall photos- I’d never seen it that empty before. This is looking toward the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial.

…and of course I had to take the “It’s right behind me, isn’t it?” photo. My camera lens was fogged up from all the rain, but there you go.

After that, it was time to walk along the National Mall, in the direction of the Capitol toward the Metro, and on toward home.

Have you ever been inside the Washington Monument?

34/52 (and 13 of 30!)

Getting To Know You

On November 12, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Miscellany10 Comments

Allllllllll the way back on the second day of Nano Poblano, Anyes posted a “Let’s get to know each other” entry on her blog, and it posed a few questions that I thought would be fun to come back to.

What’s the #1 most played song on your playlist?

When I saw this posted by Anyes, I checked the play counts in my iTunes app, and found that “Undisclosed Desires” by Muse was at the top of the list. Well, a non-musical binaural sleep track filled with white noise was actually the most played item, but Muse was right behind.

Here are the top five played (musical) tracks in my iTunes library. It is undeniably a fascinating cross-section of some of the music that makes me tick.

There’s a problem with this list, though. Several problems, actually. First of all, I suffered a library glitch with iTunes on October 5th, 2008. All the data was reset on that day- no song in my iTunes library has a “Date Added” later than 10/5/08, and any plays from the years before are gone. I started using iTunes with my first iPod back in 2003, so that’s five years of play data gone.

Secondly, this question doesn’t specify which playlist. I have many, many, many playlists. Or even which audio source- there is still a CD in my car’s deck, although I’ve forgotten which one- but I used to spin it a lot. Before that, there were mix tapes and soundtracks that got played until they were practically worn out, and I’m confident some of those had more plays than the count on that Muse song at the top of this post.

Third, this question doesn’t take into account things from streaming sources like Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon Music- and you’d better believe I use all three.

Music is life.

I checked my Spotify account, and while I can’t find actual play totals, I can tell what the two most played songs on my Spotify account are. The first is Shriekback’s “Nemesis,” which I love in part because it’s a dance-floor banger and in part because they managed to squeeze “parthenogenesis” into the lyrics and it totally works. The other one is Sam Palladio and Clare Bowen from Nashville singing “If I Didn’t Know Better,” which is an absolute smokeshow of a song.

Clearly, the most played song is flexible, frangible. It can be changed by time, or mood, or salinity, by life events and tragedy or triumph.

Sometimes I just like to hear certain harmonies, certain orchestrations.

I strongly doubt that this has helped you to know me any better.

What is one of your favorite quotes?

I have loads of favorite quotes, but the first one that came to mind when I was writing this post was-

“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” The words were Yoda, but the delivery was Frank Oz. This line is from a four minute long scene on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back which contains a heap of Yoda’s most famous lines: “Do or do not; there is no try.” “Judge me by my size, do you?” “That is why you fail.” These are all lines from the same scene, but the one that always gets me is this one. If this movie is playing on television and I happen to be walking through the room, I will stop dead in my tracks for this line.

I feel like my explanation for why I like this quote so much is inadequate. I do believe in the shining potential of most people, though, and I think it sums that up pretty well.

What sound do you love?

Anyes already claimed rain, so I can’t use that as my answer. I guess I’ll have to go with the sound of a rolling suitcase moving over sidewalk- that roll-click-roll-click-roll-click sound.

My apartment in Germany was less than half a kilometer, about a third of a mile, from the city’s main train station. People would walk past all the time with those rolling suitcases. Since I had no air conditioning, I kept the window open through most of the year, and that rolling thumping noise became very soothing to me.

Now that I think about it, all the other sounds of the train station are soothing to me as well. On a clear, quiet night, the announcements on the platforms were audible from my apartment. I could hear the sounds of trains rolling in or rolling out in the distance.

I loved all of it.

Now it’s your turn. Care to answer any of these questions?

33/52 (and 12 of 30!)

Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV.

Author: Steven