Thursday, June 19th: Getting to Hong Kong

When we arrived to our apartment in North Point we were greeted by the congenial Mr. Chan, who showed us to our apartment on the 16th floor. I knew it was going to be small, but for some reason I was still surprised by how small! My bedroom in Wichita is bigger than our entire apartment! We also have a bathroom, kitchenette, and “closet” area. Proportionally speaking, it was ironic to find that the largest thing in our bedroom is the massive flat screen TV with only 4 Cantonese channels. I am actually glad that we don’t have a wide range of TV channels and that I can’t watch TV or Netflix movies on my computer out of the US. Otherwise, I would be very tempted with all of my free time on my hands!



Eric, Kenneth, and I decided to walk around our area of town and find somewhere to eat dinner for the night. As we walked outside of our apartment towards the main street, my senses were taken aback by several things. First, our side street outside of our apartment reeked of a “fishy-fish” smell. Secondly, about 25-50 yards from our apartment were multiple rats scurrying around! Fortunately, this would be our first and only rat sighting!

The main street was lined with neon-lighted signs in Chinese characters that none of us could understand, but eventually we came across the same hole in the wall Chinese restaurant that Eric had eaten at during his first time to Hong Kong.

Catching up

So even though we haven't been posting a lot on our blog, we have been documenting our trip fairly well. Melinda has been writing a lot of stuff offline that we are going to start posting. Keep in mind that much of this has been written gradually over the course of the past few weeks. Enjoy!

Saturday in the City

OK, so this blogging thing is much tougher than I expected. Actually, that’s not true, I knew that it would be difficult to consistently devote time to documenting our adventures. More appropriately, I should say that my poor time management skills have completely lived up to expectations and the quality of my blog has suffered immensely. Whoops. Realizing that I have skipped a few weeks, here is a quick recap of yesterday’s activities…

After spending Friday night strolling through the Temple street night market looking for a cheap tripod and a particular Jimmy Choo knockoff purse, we got around a little later than expected on Saturday. When we finally ventured out, we made our way to the Tourism Office at Tsim Sha Tsui where Melinda signed up for some of the Cultural Kaleidoscope classes. She took 2 classes last week, and really had great time learning about jewelry and tea. More to come from her on those topics in the not too distant future.

From there, we set off in search of a few tailors that I had heard about: Raja Fashions and David Fashions. Both stores run pretty slick operations. In addition to making bespoke suits in HK, they make frequent trips to the US, London, and a few other hot spots, to visit old customers for repeat business and find new customers. Although they can make suits in as little as 2 days, I’m hoping to spend a little more time with them to get a high quality suit that I really like. After flipping through swatches of fabric for almost an hour, I settled on a navy blue with subtle pinstripes. I didn’t pull the trigger on the suit yet, though. This week I will spend some more time looking through various styles to make sure I know what I’m talking about when I talk through the style that I want. It’s a pretty interesting process that is pretty fun if you like clothes and don’t mind taking a little extra time to really figure out what you want.

The next stop was intended to be a nice dimsum meal at Maxim’s in City Hall, but the restaurant was booked. We found another restaurant in the area, though, as well as some great views of some of the buildings downtown.

Hong Kong at night is a pretty amazing sight. To get some more great views of the city, we took our first trip up to Victoria Peak on the Peak Tram. The tram has been in operation for around 100 years, and climbs at a 45 degree angle up the mountain. Here’s a picture of the train at the station.



It’s a pretty cool ride, and the view at the top is even cooler. I got to put my new $12 tripod to the test, and although I definitely have some more work to do on night photography, I was pleased with the results.



OK - enough for now. Like I said, we'll try to do better. Also, Happy 4th of July. Kind of crazy, but this is our 2nd year in a row celebrating the 4th of July overseas. Last year we were in Bora Bora on our honeymoon, and this year in Hong Kong.

Skyline

This blog has been short on pictures so far, so here is one we took tonight of the skyline. Pretty amazing sight. More to come on our adventures in the next few days.

Flying to HK

Well, we are finally settled in Hong Kong after several months of anticipation and preparation. None of that preparation came close to preparing us for the brutal trip over. We left the Westing Peachtree, our hotel in Atlanta, at 7:45am with our travel partner Eric and arrived at our apartment almost 25 hours later.

Our first flight from Atlanta took us to Newark - a quick 2 hour jaunt up the east coast. As we descended into EWR, we got a great view out the left side of the plane of the NYC skyline, which is one of my favorite sights from an airplane. It's such an impressive sight, and I can never get enough of it. When I was flying in and out of Laguardia for 7 months in 2007, I made sure to always get a window seat on the left side of the aircraft because it gave great views of the city both arriving and departing.

Another great part about the NYC skyline is seeing the Statue of Liberty. I'm sure it will be more meaningful on my return trip, but none the less, it was a cool reminder of what we were about to leave behind. Don't worry Lady Liberty - we'll be back. I look forward to seeing you again in August.

Around 3pm EST, we settled into our seats on the Boeing 777 headed to Hong Kong. The TV screen in the seat in front of me showed our long voyage that would take us up and over the North Pole and down into China. When I went to India in 2006, I endured a 15 hour flight sitting next to the lavatory. This trip was much better a) because I wasn't next to the bathroom b) because I had someone to travel with and c) because of Continental's video on demand system that let me watch several different movies rather than running the same 1 or 2 movies every few hours. All in all, the flight went relatively well. I even got to look out the window at the North Pole (or somewhere close to there), which was pretty cool. It was very white and looked pretty cold, in case you were wondering.

When we landed in Hong Kong, we didn't have any troubles getting to our place. The airport was relatively quiet, our luggage came out quicker than it does in Wichita, we walked right through customs and onto the train. After getting off the train at Hong Kong station, we caught a cab that took us to our apartment. More on that later - time for some exploring now. Kowloon - here we come.

Starting work again

Tomorrow is the first day of work again. Although the HR and technology orientation that I will go through in Atlanta should be reasonably familiar, I find that I’m still anxious about this first day of work. Maybe because in a few days, I’m going to be traveling half-way around the world and working in a (very) foreign culture. I am extremely excited about the opportunity, and can’t wait to settle into our apartment. First, however, I’m going to land in Atlanta, meet up with the other guys working in this international program, and have dinner with them while watching the Lakers game.

Leaving Los Angeles

Warning: Semi-Long blog post coming right up.

OK you've been warned. I’m actually writing this note (after a considerable absence from this blog) on the plane to Atlanta, where I will begin my internship tomorrow morning. The last several weeks have been rather hectic, however, and I wanted to take some time to recap before digging into the details of our upcoming adventure.
Fortunately, we found a Wharton MBA student to sublet our apartment in Los Angeles for the summer. She is very nice and reminds both of us of Melinda in some respects. We couldn’t have been happier with the arrangement except for one small detail – her internship with Hulu started on June 1, and my classes at UCLA finished June 4. We ended up spending our last 1.5 weeks in LA staying with our wonderful friend Priya in her amazing Santa Monica apartment overlooking the ocean. During our ‘homeless’ stint in Santa Monica, we discovered several of the amazing restaurants along Main Street, including Le Grande Orange, the Urth Café, and Shoups (I recommend the Vinnie Breakfast Sandwich, named after Priya’s boyfriend Vinny).

After a wonderful stay in Santa Monica and a few stressful last days at school, we packed every cubic inch of our car and headed out. As we prepared to leave, we saw that the van from the A-Team movie was parked across the street. Little things like that kill me about LA.



After taking my pic with the van, we set off for Vegas, where we met up with some friends celebrating Randy Loerke’s final days of bachelordom. A few laughs and lost dollars on the roulette table later, we carried on to Flagstaff. The road from Vegas to Flagstaff took us over Hoover Dam, and we stopped to take a look at the remarkable engineering feat. Melinda had never seen the dam before and was thoroughly impressed. I look forward to visiting in the future when we can spend more time and take some dam pictures. That’s right, I really am Clark Griswold.

The smell of the pine forest in Flagstaff made me even more excited to travel on our way to New Mexico where we would spend the next few days at the cabin. First, however, was a trip to the Frontier, our favorite restaurant in Albuquerque, where we met Uncle Bart and my cousin CJ for some green chile. Over lunch, we bored CJ and Melinda with what I found to be an interesting discussion about Bart selling the Kinney Agency the week before. It sounded like a very good situation for Bart and the company as a whole – as Bart said, “Grandpa Kinney would have been proud.” The Kinney Agency plays an incredibly important part of my life story. In many ways, I think that Grandpa’s work founding the agency inspired my interest in the business world. Although it is sad to see the Agency itself change hands, I am very proud of the efforts of my Grandpa and Uncle Bart to build such a tremendous company that has meant so much to our family.

The cabin was the next stop after the Frontier, and we spent two great days there. Despite the unseasonably warm temperatures, we had a great time in our favorite place on earth. A dinner with our friends Carol and Annelle King was particularly entertaining. The Kings were nice enough to introduce us to Coconut Bliss ice cream which we absolutely loved. It is a non-dairy, organic, fair trade, yada yada ice cream made from coconut milk. We thought it was delicious, but I wouldn’t rank it above the delicious sopapillas at Rivera’s in Pecos.

Following our stay at the cabin, we set off across the plains for Wichita. Ever since I started working, I have had fewer and fewer opportunities to make the drive from KS to the cabin. Every time, I find that I truly miss the wide open spaces of northeast New Mexico and southwest Kansas. Perhaps its because the drive is associated with being with the cabin, but for some reason, I love that drive every time I have the opportunity to take it. On the way home, we stopped for an hour to talk with my Grandpa Norton and his wife Barbara. We’re pretty sure they think we’re crazy for embarking on all of these adventures and most days I think they’re right.

At 10:15, we rolled into Wichita where we spent the next several days resting, seeing family and friends, and packing our bags. Time for another adventure.