Hi. Bye.

So, I'm moving house tomorrow & dragging it on throughout the entire weekend no doubt cos that's just the kind of person I am. Dudes are coming to move my stuff tomorrow night (a time-demolishing 4 boxes + 1 suitcase - really, what do you give the man who has everything...?) & then I'll have officially moved other than my housesitting duties of coming back here to make sure the mould hasn't become sentient & no one's decided to start using this place as an ashtray. Anyway, so that means that I'm not going to be having Internet for a while which means even less updates to this ol' blog right up in here. Devastated. I know. I know.

Oh, also, I went to MGMT last night. A concert in Hong Kong. Crazy times. Photos will follow. When I'm back on the net. But I can't really do this right now as I've got to pack & it's already 9pm.

Okay, so like. I won't make this awkward. Bye. Back later.

Rrruuggbeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*hic*

As predicted by many many people, the time lag between my blog posts is getting slowly longer. Believe me people this isn't due to me becoming bored of the the blog, I still love these surrogate conversations I have with you all, it's just that my life is pretty much all about work at the moment. And unless you want the world's most mediocre food blog, I've really not got a whole lot else going on in my life at the moment. having said that however: Saturday was a whole lot of fun.

The rugby 7s tournament is a BIG DEAL in Hong Kong. For a place that by-and-large doesn’t give a crap about sports, the effect is pretty dramatic as the whole of Causeway Bay gets turned upside down when this event comes to town. It is exciting when your city hosts an international event, I’ll give them that, like how Melbourne has the Melbourne Cup & the Grand Prix, Adelaide has the Fringe, and Alice Springs had that family day that one time in the 80s where Kevin Bloody Wilson was there. Classic. But even so, there is something a little different about the 7s that helps it stand out from your ordinary social/cultural drawcard. And that is the hundreds upon thousands of pissed expatriates descending upon the place dressed in the most crazy array of fancy dress costumes you’re ever likely to see in one place at one time.

Now Hong Kong stadium isn’t big. I know this isn’t the football capital of the world or anything, but I honestly expected a city of nearly 8 million people to have slightly more seating capacity that the 15,000 that this little dome holds. I mean, you’re talking about a very impressive Victoria Park in Collingwood. But the horde of clowns, cops, Indians, Fred Flinstones, Lego Men, bees, caterpillars, Spongebobs, superheroes, rockstars, ladybugs, ladymen, & every other conceivable whacko costume that flock to the place on the three days of this tournament defies belief and all sense of good taste and somehow manage to squeeze themselves all into to this teeny thing.

Generally, the majority of the ruckus is confined to the South Stand. By the time I rolled into the stadium at 12pm it was waaay too late to get a seat in there as the queue reached almost the length of the ground & had a big sign up saying “3 hour wait”. We did a quick survey, pooled out intellects, & came up with a very reasonable ‘f*ck that’. 

Yep. F*ck that.

So, wending & weaving our way from stand to stand, dodging batmen & the ever-present, effervescent & horrifyingly ubiquitous Carlsberg girls along the entire Eastern end we realised fairly quickly that there was not a seat to be had on the whole ground floor. Well, there was nothing for it, we had to take to the 2^nd tier stand. Via escalator of course. I mean, this is Hong Kong after all: world’s greatest escalator market. We popped out of the dugout into a pleasantly sunny & relatively quiet stand thinking this was our lucky day. Three seats in a row. Bonus! It became immediately apparent however, that this was due to the no alcohol rule we’d somehow bypassed. Dammit! Now, we had to sneak our jugs of beer past the security girls like minors. Oh well, we were still happy & still drank beer. Not so much the families around us who are amazingly like Mormons at a sports event: That is to say, sweaty & horrified at my foul language.

Bit of explanation is probably required at this stage. I didn’t just go to a dry stand, spray beer all over everyone then start yelling about how the French are C*%#$! No. Firstly, I said that about the Canadians, not the French. And secondly, it’s because Australia ran out only minutes after we’d finally sat down & started getting thrashed by these guys straight up. An insult! Now, I don’t really know a thing about rugby & I sure as hell don’t have anything against the Canadians. But I mean, COME ON! They’re not famous for their try tally are they?! We were supposed to be annihilating these mongs & here we were having rings run around us. And with only 7 minutes to a half, I was getting very excitable. Okay, I am exaggerating a bit, but it was pretty nail-biting stuff, seeing the Aussies cop so much punishment in a period of 3 minutes. But all’s well that ends well. The green & gold stemmed the deluge of tries & juuuuust managed to scrape in at the end.

Australia playing the ball out of their own try line.

The final result. Hey, a win's a win right?

So anyway, I’m sure you’re dying to know about the costumes. A large portion of the photos that I ended up taking were just shite as I was a bit spaz by 5:30pm. It’s remarkably difficult to keep your phone/camera hand still while you’re simultaneously yelling “look at that” and waving a beer around. But I will start with one that was taken a little earlier in the day. From the dry stand no less. So I didn’t end up asking this bloke why he decided to dress in a full Batman costume & then cop out of partying down because he wanted to sit with his plainclothes wife & kids, but it didn’t stop me musing on it. Did he get in trouble in the car & he wasn’t allowed to drink with his buddies? Was he a fetishist that just wanted an excuse to wear his favourite sex suit in public? Was he a simpleton & dressed like that all the time? Who was this mystery man behind the mask? And why, if he went to all the trouble of getting dressed up like Batman, could he not be arsed shaving his face? I couldn’t work it out.

Unshaven Batman watches match intently.

Unshaven Batman BUSTS the guy taking photos of him!! Oh! Nothing gets past unshaven Batman.

Oh, & just before the photo jam: One more sad, lonely looking bastard in completely the wrong costume. Bees are happy, hardworking & very social, right? Wrong.

Depression Bee: Bzzz...sigh...bzz

People! People! Friends??!!? 

No...

Alright, now stories from the South Stand:

Devo Man - Awesome

Best shot I could get from this angle 

A sea of booze

A sailor chick ensuring the sea stays boozy 

About as close as I could get to the freakshow unfortunately 

What's that leopard costume guy doing...?

iPhone zoom sucks

We sneaked around a bit & got pretty rad seats by the end of the day. Check some of the ground-level ‘action’. They were great seats.

See?

Rugby actually did happen believe it or not. There was more to do than just drink & spot bizarre costumes. Like, marveling at the hilarity of a 6 man scrum:

Get in there boys! Don't worry about the point, just grunt heaps!

So at around 7pm, the day finally wrapped up after several dozen games, many thousands of litres of beer & Pimm's, & a whole lot of yelling & laughing. Last game of the day was played by tournament favourites (& eventual winners) New Zealand. Being a small guy, you just stop noticing how monstrously large some dudes are after a few years, but these guys were BIG.

Mountains that can run.

And finally, once it had all finished, feeling a little disappointed with the photos so far, I decided to get a medley of the sloppy remnants staggering away from the stand after the final game. I just kept my camera more-or-less still & let them fizz past me. Rubbish photos, but they give you an impression of the level of messy exhaustion the day ended up with.

Next year I promise better photos, some video footage, & at least one story about drinking beer out of at least one unusual vessel.

The Peak

Having arrived in Hong Kong in a bit of a whirlwind, it's all finally beginning - only now - to sink in that I don't actually live in Australia anymore & that I have a new home for the moment. With that in mind I decided today that by far my favourite place (having explored a massive 0.5% of the island) is Victoria Peak.

Like almost everywhere in Hong Kong it's prone to crowding & is covered in shops selling all sorts of crap from statuetes of dragons to shoes to novelty stop signs, to the Bubba Gump Shimp Co. monster prawn cocktail. It is however, the greenest part & the quietest part of the city I've been too and for this I love it hugely. Also, the run up there is brutal & so you feel all tough once you're done.

Also: The View. Yes, it's important enough to capitalise & no it nothing to do with Whoopie Goldberg.

As hastily promised weeks & weeks ago, I've strung a bunch of photos together that I took from the peak of the Peak & turned them into a panorama. Well, actually, Autostitch turned them into a panorama, but I had to do all the hard work like pushing buttons & sitting & downloading &, oh it's all very complicated. But anyway, I've done this amazing thing now & it's actually turned out cooler than I thought it would. Check it:

Actually, I would recommend clicking this pic as it's pretty uninspiring just sitting here like this...

Obviously all the crung in the corners is due to my lazy photo snaping technique, but you get this idea. This is the Hong Kong side, so we're looking North across Hong Kong, Victoria Harbour, & Kowloon getting lost in the background in all the smog. This was taken on a really crappy day, so I'm hoping to get a good one hapenning at some point in summer if I can actually bear to haul my arse up 523 stone stairs in the blistering heat.

I really wanted to get the whole 360 degree thing going on, but unfortunately the software keeps crapping out as there's mountain (hill) to the east & west of this shot so it doesn't like the continuity or something. One day, I'll work it out so you guys can print this off at home, roll it up & tape it at the ends then stick your head inside it & then pretend you're in Hong Kong with me. Until then, you'll just have to deal with this.

Looking South across I-don't-even-know-what to Lamma Island.

Lamma incidentally is the home of Hong Kong's only Olympic gold medallist. Some bird who won the windsurfing out of nowhere one year. Clearly I've not done my research on this, but that's how the story goes.

Now that I'm on a roll you're going to get one more panoramic shot, which is the view from my boss' apartment balcony. I posted these photos a week or so ago, but they were all in a big long clog & didn't make a whole lot of sense, but they actually look kind of cool stuck together like this.

See?

Alright, enough of that panoramic business. Today, I obviously went for a run up the Peak again as I keep bloody talking about it. But today was a little bit special in a way. No, not because Ken decided he had stomach flu & ran like a girl, but because it was misty as hell. And not just misty as any normal hell, but I'm talking like clouds that ganged up with some smog & then decided to invite mist along to the party. It was seriously like running through the set of Monkey Magic. So cool. Also, there was some serious Sydney-quality jungle humidity going on. You know the kind that is warm but not hot, & humid but not wet, but still....really humid. Very strange day. Very awesome. So that first photo up there? The panaoramic of Hong Kong side? This is what it looked like today:

Sydney weather. London visibility. Hong Kong, yo.

Actually, that is pretty much the exact same shot as this:

No, really.

The mist was awesome. Growing up in Darwin meant I rarely saw mist, so I'm amazed by this. Photos are evidence of my amazement. I wanted to put up a video as well, but it doesn't work for some stupid reason.

Path to NOWHERE.

The peak of the Peak.

Muh-Hist!

 There's my Vitamin D. It's out there somewhere...

Road's closed.

Alright, hungry now. Laters.

I would like to make a deposit of several golden doubloons my good man, what what. *replace monocle*

So Hong Kong is this fancy futuristic, global banking hub with bling telecommunications, glittering glass towers reaching into the sky, billion dollar investment bankers swanning about the place blocking out the sun with their Independance Day spaceship-sized egos, & the ability to move just about every currency on earth in the blink of an eye. Yeah? A place where fortunes so huge are made that the expat classifieds have more used Porches for sale than coffee tables (no, really). Right? So I ask you then. Actually, screw that, I'm going to look up & ask the heavens. Why?! Why in the name of all that is less than 1000 years old is the primary form of payment for any significant item still the personal cheque?! WHHHHYYYYYYY?!?!?!


I cannot think of a less dodgy method of exchanging goods than the phrase "yeah, cheque's in the mail..." Which, to be truthful, is probably a totally legitimate & utterly common transactional phraseology on this weird little island. I've been writing cheques lately. *Cheques*  I feel like I'm ripping someone off when I'm doing it too, as it's just such an unbelievably arcane method of payment. Honestly, is the home of the Triads that trusting of people?

Let's be serious. Working for a bank can really give you some idea of the havoc that can be wrought with an iffy check. Like, real fun & games. Example: present the cheque, then get a call from the bank querying it, then be all "ooooh yeah, sorry about that, I'll just transfer the money across, silly me!", then don't do it, then get another call & make up another lie, then start ignoring their calls for the whole awesome weekend until finally they realise you're just a great big lying jerk & by the time they roll into your house to repossess it you've totally thrashed that jetski you 'bought', had a kickass time doing it & then they just sigh, shrug their shoulders & decide it's too costly to take your to court so just leave you the hell alone. Well, that & you'll never write another cheque again, but whatever. At least you've still got the memories, right? I mean, cheques. Really? Come on people. You walk into say a fish market, or even better, a brothel - a ha haa - with a cheque & see how far you get before you find a size 11 wellington / boot up your rectum.

Ugh. I might as well go with it. I just...I...ugh. Yeah, f*ck it. Whatevs. Man this place is odd sometimes. It's like East meets West meets the late 70's but somehow in the future. Actually, that just described Kill Bill. But anyway, you get the picture.

Aghast whine over.

NB. Just as an aside disclaimer to ensure I continue to live & breathe as a man with gonads intact: I do not go into brothels under any circumstances, with or without any form of payment known to man.


Fish markets are okay though.


For buying fish of course.

Look who's all up in tha hizzouse!

Or, if I release my hand from my crotch & turn my phat pants the right way around: 
I finally found a place to live.


Yes, it is true. My time as an even bigger nomad than usual is drawing to a close. Again. For at least 14 months. I fina-frigging-ly managed to find myself a place that wasn't in a building full of cigarette-smoking gangster snakeheads physchos, doesn't smell like chinese medicine that's being boiled inside a chicken, doesn't smell like someone has just blocked the crapper with a boiled chinese medicine chicken, isn't on an island only accessible by magic carpet or 80 US dollar luxury ferry, has not one, but two apparently working lifts, isn't being constantly buffeted by neon lights, crowds of billions of shoppers, or the sound of 72 jackhammers, 8 thousand cars, nine cranes, a cement mixer, two fire engines & a partridge in a pear tree at all hours of the night, & that a cat could probably be swung within at full arm extension if one was inclined to get ones jollies in that sort of fashion. In short, it's not entirely awful.


So, what have I got from the A-List?

• A roof (excellent)
• More than 500 square feet (just, at 540)
• A bedroom that isn't a bed that will never get out again in one piece
• A built in wardrobe

I'll give you a second to deal with that. I know, right. Whoa. Okay, ready? Let's continue:

• A kitchen that it's technically possible to cook in
• a wall-mounted flat screen tv
• decent sized couch
• a little, weeny dining table
• reasonable(ish) views of the city
• other furniture that is necessary but too GD boring to list
• a non-skanky bathroom

And almost as importantly, what have I missed out on (mostly also from the A list):

• Proximity to a train station (this blows a bit, but it really does take 5 mins to battle into & out of the train stations, so whatevs, there's a bus. I'll cope)
• A rooftop. Sadness.
• An in-house gym (moderately common in a city that is 98% apartment living)
• An oven (only a stove-top)
• Power outlet in the bathroom (this is evidently more luxurious than Liberace's underwear in Honkers for some reason. And why do I care? Why do you care? What?! Fine, so I blowdry my hair. You got a problem with that? Take it up with the style council. See if I care...)

Take a number ladies.

So let's muse for a tick on apartment living shall we? This is something I'm not hugely accustomed to coming from Australia. I mean, we've all seen apartments, we've all got some friends that live in one, most of us have lived in one. But Hong Kong really is a whole different tin of soup when it comes to apartment living. You know when you're a kid & there's a certain toy that is just the be all & end all? It's all you want & you're all like 'hell yes! Gotta get that Barbie', or GI Joe or whatever? Then one day you see the dude that works at Toyworld shlepping an entire crate of them across the floor & just tossing them on the shelf & that's the first time your little brain ever says to itself, with crystal clarity: Holy Shit. That's alotta Barbie. Well, that's the kind of feeling I got when I first started to take in the number of apartment buildings on this little island.


What I'm trying to say is that everyone here lives in an apartment. Seriously. If you live in Hong Kong & you live in a house, then you could have probably bought Antigua for about the same price & you most certainly do not live in the city. There's a lot of really, really nice apartments here built (& costed) for the ultra wealthy. But they're still apartments.


Check this little glob of photos out that I've taken from my boss' balcony of his 'hood. Imagine an episode of neighbours in this joint. By the time you'd reached the end of character intros, it'd be time to introduce the grandkids. I wanted it to run left to right, but I'm too lazy &/or inept to get it to happen here.

That's a whole bunch o' peeps.

And not one of those buildings is commercial. They're all someone's houses. Daaaaaaaaang. So next time some dreadlocked jerkoff starts mouthing off about how apartments are killing Brunswick just give them some photos of Hong Kong & tell him or her to lodge them firmly, but cautiously, up their arse.


Which is a fantastic & almost hypocritical segue into my next topic: Gentrification. There's a lot of very shitty old buildings being pushed down in Hong Kong & replaced by new ones. This way, if you could get a time lapse camera over Victoria Harbour, rather than see the city grow outwards, American or Aussie style, you would see it slowly sprouting like a freaking neon pot plant. This is partly a way of keeping the place looking nice & attractive, but more than anything is all about a) squeezing maximum benefit out of the same square mileage, & b) being able to build an apartment block where there is already water, sewage, phone & electricity. Evidently - from the piddly amount of research I've done on the topic - getting essential utilities to a new site on Hong Kong island (a bit that isn't protected by National Park status) would cost a developer around about the same kind of money that they could sink on feeding Africa three times over. The end result of this is of course that developers erect these monstrous structures that reach some 50, 60 or 70 stories into the sky to house the ever-growing Hong Kong population over the top of ever-shrinking tracts of earth.


Now some might say this is not a bad thing. And as opinionated as I am, I'd be inclined to agree to a certain extent. Old buildings that look like massive toilets go, new buildings that look like massive...well, buildings, arrive. It is at the very least, almost certainly the greenest option. But there is however, one thing that I can't abide about the kind of modern structures that are so often built to house a very generic swathe of people from across the globe. One of those things that architects, town planners, designers landscapers & all those other twats seem to think is the essential finishing touch to any new structure. Corporate bloody art. Some of the *rubbish* that you see around this place sometimes even puts Melbourne (A dedicated corporate art fetishist - don't believe me? Just get on the Eastlink) to shame. My personal favourite though. The pièce de résistance. Is this:

W. T. F.

I don't know what it's called, but I've dubbed it 'Man about town'. And it's clear that whoever commissioned it is now picking up rubbish on Lamma Island for the rest of their career. Enjoy that image until next time.


Also, next blog. I think I might get all crazy & actually put some photographs of my self doing things. You know, instead of just putting up two page diatribes about stuff with a photo of a tree. Anyway. Talk then.

Melissa Etheridge has NO idea...

Ate a curry last  night.

Oh my goodness gracious me. I ate a curry last  night.

There’s a fairly rad little restaurant in Happy Valley called Chapel. No idea where the name comes from given it’s an Indian restaurant in China, but whatevs. It’s still good. They’ve got very awesome garlic naan – always a winner – a really tasty fish curry, lots of choices on the menu, & a happy hour that runs all day until 8:30pm. (Where else but Happy Valley?). They also have The Truth. The Truth is not a meal, it’s an emotion. It is exactly like someone dosing you with LSD while simultaneously punching you in the face & gently stroking your hair. So you read the warning: “Very hot. Only for a select few, etc. etc.” And what does a white male think? ‘That’s totally me’. So the bloke next to me obviously felt the pinch in his pride gland worse than me because he went for it & ordered up the dreaded lamb vindaloo. It came out looking pretty damned angry. It was a deep ochre red, like wet clay & was almost bubbling with the amount of energy it was barely containing. But I ignored & happily munged away on my fish curry, enjoying the hell out of it. Dinnertime conversation ensued & as I was drawing near the end of my excellent meal I realised that I was now sitting next to a sweating, catatonic husk. “How is it” I asked. “h o t” came the stilted response.

Whoa. Sounds nasty....My curiosity took about 7 seconds to muscle its way right into my frontal lobe & start marching up & down banging a drum & bellowing AlabamaAlabamaAlabamaAlabamaAlabamaAlabama! “Gah! I need to try this stuff, gimme some.” So I spooned a great big gob of lamb with plenty of curry sauce onto my plate & got a bit more rice ‘to help with the spice’.

Now I’ve never swallowed a tear gas grenade before, but I’m absolutely convinced that I know exactly what it feels like. Anyone ever been hit in the face with an exploding can of capsicum spray? I have. How about being sexually assaulted by a rampaging herd of frothy, meth-head gibbons? Yep. Done it. Had your entire oesophagus tattooed with fire by an off-meds Michael J Fox? Hurts. I should know! In short: This. Shit. Was. Hot. And as the initial blast recedes & all you can hear is ringing in your ears, & the slow rolling kettle drums of the impending nuclear fallout that some call an aftertaste, somehow, through the sheets of white, flashing pain & torrent of steaming eyeball sweat you swear that someone is playing the intro to Dr Who on the wall opposite you.

Silence.

A few seconds pass.

“Ha ha. Are you okay man? Hot enough for you?”

GEIF ME BEEER! I GNEEED YOGRT!! FGNiiiiiiiiiiiiiii squeak! *slump*

I had two napkins going for about 5 minutes. One for the horror sweats & one for the constant flood of tears. Four tough as balls mouthfuls of this horrendous magma just about burned a hole through the back of my skull & cost me all motor function. And now as I sit writing this, my poor innocent bunghole finally recovering from the shock of the reverse macing that it just copped, I idiotically feel I’ve just been issued a divine challenge.

I’m going to eat fire. I will conquer this nightmare curry & when I do I will climb victoriously to the sun on the broken corpses of the chillies I have bested in battle. Gingerly. And probably with a glass of water handy. And maybe a bathroom in close proximity too. But I’ll do it.

Wednesday Weekend Warriors

So not sure how much I have to say after such a long hiatus. SO much has happened OMG. Actually, that's a lie, bugger all has happened really. Some of the luster has gone off my new adopted home as it becomes more home & less of a holiday destination. I am still 'in between' homes currently, having still not found a permanent address. Perhaps there's an upper limit to the number of houses someone can live in each decade? Perhaps my 44th address will be the straw that broke the camel's back? Only time will tell! In any case for now, I'm comfortable enough where I am for the short term, even if I am typing this from the floor in front of my new desk which is about 2 square feet of tv cabinet space. Comfy! Alright, enough of that, let's riff off some photos.

So, on Wednesday night, for no good reason a number of people from my workplace decided it was an excellent idea to go out & get hosed. Well, there was apparently one reason, which is what is evidently the age-old tradition of Hong Kong Wednesday race night. So after a few preparatory glasses of whatever was at hand, we trundled off half sozzled to Happy Valley to ignore the horses & pound booze. Oh, I'm sorry, to watch the races. The track itself is reasonable enough, but like most specialised activity centres of any sort in Hong Kong it pretty much looks like a themed shopping centre. The booze however flows cheap & long. An excellent combination on a weeknight. There's also a remarkably small number of those desperately intent looking punters. You know, the ones with that look on their face that betrays the obvious hope that this next horse comes home so that they can replenish their kids college fund. Most of the folks in the stand were, although interested in the race, mostly just kind of milling about. Socialising! At the horse races! Well, I thought to myself, seem CRAZY, but I'll give it a go.

Happy Valley general admin, overshadowed by its innumerable associated multi-story clubhouses

The other direction, except obviously taken with a little too much zeal

The crowd for some reason becomes a bit more dense around 9. Odd given the whole shebang shuts down at 10 or 11.

A bad shot made great by the guy in the centre who's giving himself what looks like a mighty facepalm. 

"ARGH! STUPID HORSE!"

And this is just another example of why phones shouldn't work when they detect a blood alcohol level above 0.08.

So the races proceeded at that general pace for the evening. Realising no one else wanted white wine, I was forced to switched to red. Not wanting to mix my drinks, I switched to beer(?), thereby proving my excellent decision making capacity. And then it was that time: What's the best thing to do when you've had a skinful of booze on a weeknight? Anyone? No? Go out & start drinking of course! WOOHOO!!!! Let's go out everyone! I'm indestructible!!!

*scene missing*

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP. One arm flapping crazily while the rest of my body was utterly immobile trying to get to that goddamned phone. No dice. Wishing I was double jointed I threw my weight sideways to shut up that audio-drill only to realise I'd left my brain on the pillow, my stomach had kept going, & that somehow my bed had been smuggled out of the building in the night & stowed on a sailing ship which was now under full sail under some very heavy seas. GnuurghWTFohchristwhattimeisit? Why is my alarm...

...aw balls. I gotta go to work....

Shit.

Ever heard of the Hansard-Quimby method of hangover testing? Well, the idea is that as soon as you wake up you jump out of bed into a full stand & the harder you hit the ground the more hungover you are. Well, I must've been better than I felt because the 'oh crap work' shock pitched me out of bed at maximum velocity & I hit the bathroom doorframe at a full 45 degree angle, spinning me around so that I kind of leaned into the bathroom like I was being pulled by my waist, but with both arms gripping onto the walls I didn't actually let anything except my butt through the door & after a few of those petrifying pre-bike accident seconds where you can't do anything except watch yourself in slow motion, I eventually managed to right myself. Must've looked way hot. But no floor! Win! That or it's just not possible to fall over in a Hong Kong apartment without bashing into something on the way down. It's like the entire house is a handrail for pissheads. I spent a good three minutes staring at the individual veins running through both of my eyeballs. They were so red I was beginning to think I must've slept upside down like a bat or something. They were pretty much a European roadmap. There was even one which I swear ran a six lane tollway from my right iris right across to the far edge of my left eye. Then I did my bit for the environment by having a 25 minute shower, rechecked my still horrendous eyes & having run out of things to stall with, left for work scraping my dignity & sense of value behind me a like a book bag.

So, I could go on about this all day, but it should suffice to say Thursday was a very ordinary chapter in my life. There were a few McDonalds bags on desks when I got in so I wasn't suffering alone, but unfortunately you can't share pain amongst a group. And then, regardless of the fact that there were other mongs like me floating around, for some ungodly reason I got the guilts & stayed back until like 7:30pm as well. Thinker!

So in conclusion, for those about to rock Hong Kong: Happy Valley races yo. Good times.

As for the rest of the week, it's been a whole lot of not a whole lot goin' on. Yesterday was moderately exciting in that I got my first Hong Kong haircut. Boy's hair always needs a week to grow out, so the fact that I look like across between a school kid & a Jack London model (read, 'girl') is okay for now. Especially since that's pretty much what I looked like after my last hairy too. Saw a dude named Jason at a salon in Soho, Midlevels. It was a pretty rad place & this guy had obviously been around a bit being fairly worldly & very cool. Spent the entire time thinking 'this is going to cost me a thousand dollars'. When he was done I was pretty happy with the result & then POW: HK$208! That's like 25 Aussie dollars! I'll definitely be going back there again. Thanks Jason.

Last night, went to one of those Japanese-style five story driving ranges. That shit was pretty awesome. Amazing how much your drive improves when you're shooting off a 4 metre tall platform. Sweet. You can also get some really good chip shots onto the golf buggy as it goes past. Now I know why we had a sand wedge with us. Ha ha, suckers! Payback time! (For those of you who don't know I worked at a driving range for about 18 months & it was usually me that just about passed a kidney every time a ball hit the cabin of the ball buggy). Oh, I also bought myself a golf glove like a total professional. But like a total dick I spent most of the time undoing the velcro, pulling my fringe in front my eyes & doing the faraway fist clench like those tossers from Air. 

They don't have callouses...

But for some reason I didn't take any photos of the driving range. That was a bit gumby. Well, it was fun anyway. Besides, it's timed in Hong Kong, like all you can bash in an hour, none of this $20 for 100 balls business. Very cool. Also, my slice is getting worse. I think I'm going to hit myself with a golf ball one day when it completes a full 360 degree arc. But whaddya do? I'm in Asia, there's going to be plenty more golf practice.

So, then it was off to dinner. Found a Sezchuan place in Sai Ying Pun which is KICK ARSE. For those who haven't tried real Sezchuan food, it's basically what would happen if you were firing pieces of lamb out of a cannon into a spice factory then burned the factory to the ground. It's covered in herbs & spices, & is generally pretty effing hot too. Had crazy good tofu, these wonderful shaslicks that are just like the ones that we always used to get in Beijing after huge nights out in San Li Tun for like 50 Mao each (about 11c) but we called them rat sticks because we had no idea what they were made from, and a chicken dish that nearly made Ken sweat his frontal lobe out through his forehead. Poor bastard looked like he was going to cry. After seeing that, I steered clear of the sauce for the most part. Shit was like eating lava.

So they were chockers when we got there & we had to wait for a few minutes. They've got this cute little kind of Bethlehem flavoured alley outside which they've stupidly turned into a half-arsed waiting room/storage area. Turkeys. It would be all romantic & everything if they extended the restaurant out there. Oh well, I was with a dude anyways.

Funky window in the waiting alley...

See? Romanzo.

A photo of Ken taking a photo of the chicken pot of death. Oppenheimer would have words about this chicken...

So, sorry if this was more of a functional catch-up sort of email, but it's been a while since I've been on the net, so I've got less to complain about that usual. I'll try my best to have a hissy fit about something next time I get on the blog. That way you can all know I'm still my old grumpy, exaggerating self :D

Also, my butt's numb from sitting on the floor. All for now.