First, a personal update, for anyone who cares: Not really anything much changed since the last post. I'm still working in the same place (for now, at least), still living in the same place, still hanging out with (mostly) the same people, still single and trying not to be. Not much else to say about that stuff, really.
And here's a collection of bits and pieces:
- A few weeks ago, I went back to the UK, and to Spain, for a few days. My cousin got married, and they decided quite sensibly to do it on a Mediterranean beach, rather than in the UK. It was a lovely wedding, and a good trip, even if it was a little too short - largely due to the shocking low amount of leave time I get at work now. I managed to stay at both my sisters' flats in London, while they weren't there, and saw a lot of old friends, as well as getting some financial stuff sorted out, and while it was good to be back, it was good to be back as a visitor.
This trip has confirmed for me that London is no longer home, HK is, at least for a while - part of the reason being that this is the first time I've been in the UK since I rented out my flat there, so I no longer have my own place in London - but more of the feeling is that of being a foreigner in London, and feeling like I was home when I got back to HK. My phone worked properly... my Octopus card worked... the money (and the prices) made sense... I am far better at getting around HK on public transport than I am in London, where I always had a car... I just feel more comfortable, more oriented, on the streets.
Spain, in the other hand, felt as much home as it always has done. I was reliably informed - by my Mum, who quite frankly should know - that the first time I visited that part of Spain was some time between being conceived and being born, and I've been visiting regularly ever since. I've been in Hong Kong for almost two and a half years, and I've been to Spain three times in that period. I have an almost Pavlovian reaction to being there, even when seemingly hundreds of my family are there at the same time - it's just so relaxing and so comfortable for me that I can't help but enjoy being there. As I said, the wedding was lovely, and it was one of those times when months of preparation came together, and on the surface at least, it all went very smoothly - in fact, the main complaint people had about the actual event was that the weather was too hot and one or two of the more elderly guests had to pop inside and get some shade and something cool to drink! I am very proud of my little cousin, and impressed by her giant Canadian bloke and his family/friends... - A little snippet of life in HK: my parents bought a video camera for their wedding present, and suggested I throw in a spare battery as my contribution, as well, of course, as schlepping thousands of miles to get there for which I was cited in one of the wedding speeches. It's quite a common setup in HK, but I work on the 24th floor of an office building above a large mall, and there are a number of electrical stores in the mall, so I went into Fortress, which happens to be the closest to my office. I asked the staff for the battery by model number, and they found a similar one, differing only by capacity - but then told me that although they had a drawer-full of them, they couldn't give me a price and couldn't sell me one! It is very common practice in Hong Kong, and probably the most widely-spread form of haggling, when selling electronics, to throw in a bag of extras (e.g. batteries, cases, memory cards, etc.) to sweeten the deal. They only had the spare batteries available as freebies when buying a new camera, and wouldn't sell me one by itself.
- Another snippet: We are currently under a so-called T1 signal, also known as "the standby signal number 1". There are a number of weather signals published by the Hong Kong Observatory - the government agency which does weather forecasts and warnings - but the only interesting ones, really, are the rain signals (which run from amber to red to black) and the typhoon warning signals (which run T1, T3, T8, T9 and T10). The really interesting ones are black rain, remembering that Hong Kong is just about tropical, there is some serious rain here, and T8 or above, which means there's going to be a near miss (T10 means direct hit) from a typhoon. For any Western Hemisphere-based readers, what you call hurricanes in the Atlantic are what we call typhoons in the Pacific...
Last year, there was a pretty near miss from a relatively strong typhoon, but because the heavy weather only grazed some of the more isolated areas of Hong Kong, they only raised the T3 signal, and were strongly criticised for it. There is understandable reluctance to raise a T8 signal, as it effectively imposes a close-down on the city - schools, the financial markets, ferries and most companies stop operating. There was a T8 signal raised a few weeks ago, from a typhoon which had passed HK, getting close enough for a T3, but which then turned around and came straight for us - but by the time it reached us it was pretty weak. The observatory was then strongly criticised for raising the T8 when it wasn't really necessary, so those guys can't really win. I did see one very cynical suggestion that since it was at the peak of the recent instability in global financial markets, someone may have thought that having an excuse to close the HK market a few hours early was rather convenient...