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| First Day in VietnamHappy holidays! i'm having my warmest Christmas in my whole life this year -- spending 8 days in Vietnam backpacking with a few colleagues. We're getting up in 5 hrs for boat trip up Mekong River tomorrow but before i forget i needa put down a few thoughts in the past 8 hrs i've been in this country
1. Vietnam is a mini China
- Vietnam is a communist country
- Vietnam is market economy
- The Vietnamese government "logo" (or whatever the thing/pic/symbol that appears on the cover of your passport) looks exactly like China's, only with 1 star as opposed to China's 5.
- Vietnam's Asia's 2nd fastest growing economy, second to China
- Vietnam's GDP per capita is USD600, 60% of that of China
- Vietnamese Customs officers are dressed no different than Chinese "gong-an". Brown suit, green collars, brown straight pants.
- Ho Chi Minh City airport smells like the check point on the China side along the HK-Shenzhen border, especially the bathrooms
2. Customs people are interesting
- more on this later
3. Motorbikes rule the streets
i've never seen so many motorbikes in my life. They roam the streets like water gushes in a bursting river.
More on this later
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| Hi allAlright it's been 2 days shy of a year since i last wrote anything
here. This entry shall be a short one since i still got work to
do. Working from home, but it still sucks when u have to work on Sundays
Anyway, everything's been fine. Been travelin' back and forth btw hk
and shanghai these days. Had dinner with a few CF folks last night -- 5
of us, not a large crowd, but large enuff that we actually graduated
from cornell in 4 diff years. Johnny's in hk for vacation, curtis is
pulling all-nighters as usual, prudence just started school, justina's
been staying more in hk these days. Sat at the restaurant for a good 4
hrs. i prolly chugged down a few gallons of tea.
Aspire to post stuff here more often. Was never used to writing open
public blogs. Guess i'll be more motivated if i get a few comments from
anyone who happens to venture across my site :)
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| So this time around, it's an email from Ben that's bringing me back to
updating my xanga site. Apparently according to Ben the school
administration has decided to put up some "man-height, red colored
arches big enough for two people to squeeze through carrying the slogan
open doors open minds" on campus. I'd love to see a picture of those
edifices. From the way Ben described them they should make quite an unsightly scene.
So I'm back in HK after 2 weeks of training in Beijing. Colleagues are
pretty chill, but one thing i've realized is that my Mandarin
definitely needs some brushing up. A couple times I cracked up the
whole gang when trying to say something in Mandarin but ended up
mispronouncing the words making it sound like a totally different
thing. And on the first few days I even had trouble tellling the
cab drivers where to go. Apparently it was either my accent or
the driver had some hearing problem, with the latter case being highly
unlikely cuz it happened every time I was taking a cab back to the
first hotel that I stayed at, that after I told the driver the name of
the hotel, he'd stare at me blankly as if i were speaking an alien
tongue, not knowing how to respond until I showed him the hotel address
in words, then he'd appear almost to be like "Oh, THAT place" then with
a slight grin in the face and mumbling a few words that I couldn't
comprehend and which was probably something along the lines of "this
dude must be a honkie", embark on a ruthless, reckless Formula-One like
dash down the highway, zigzagging its way in between Mercedes, Audis,
BMs and "Hongqi (red flag)s" and within seconds arriving at the hotel
with me sweating all over, clutching firmly to the door handle in one
hand and the seatbelt if there were one at all in the other. I'm
doubtful if I'll ever dare to drive in Beijing unless if I'm driving a
tank.
To that end, I'm glad to be back in HK.
In consultants' speak, i was "on the beach" in HK the whole past week,
ie not having been staffed on any projects yet (or "engagements", or
"studies") For one, consultants love using lingo that people from
outside can hardly understand. Our first week of training was called
BCR, standing for Basic Consulting Readiness. The second week was
called NAT, or New Analyst Training. Each of us is assigned a mentor,
or whom we refer to as a DGL, developrment group leader. People leading
up engagements are called EDs or DCS, and consultants in general are
called CSS, while there are CSSA and some other codenames for other
staff. Maybe some day I'll be writing my xanga entries in acronyms that
only consultants will understand.
Happy mid autumn festival to those folks in the US. I miss you all.
Heard that some 16 of you ate dinner at a new Chinese restaurant in
East Hill Plaza Ling Ling to celebrate mid autumn fest. Amongst
all the things that I miss about Ithaca, I think I'm even starting to
miss the Americanized Chinese food at HK restaurant. Kung pao
Chicken, Pork fried rice, the miserable General Tso who's more
well-known for his namesake sauce than his very own person, and Hunan
Chicken which i once misread as "Human chicken" and never dared
to try after that... food back in HK is great, but my philosophy of
dining is, however delicious the food is, at the end of the day it's
the people one is eating with that matters the most.
Anywayz, i hope to get staffed on something that'll take me somewhere
outside HK. Taiwan would be nice for a first project, and I'll be able
to meet up with Johnny Fong there (!!!)
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| Hoolala. It just feels so good to be gettin' up at 7:30 on a Sunday
morning. Why I'd be able to wake up so naturally so early without the
aid of the 5 alarm clocks in my room I honestly don't know, but this is
definitely a day worth commemorating. It's been a long while since I
was last up this early on Sunday, and that was probably after an
all-nighter on Saturday night more than actually awakening to the
chirping of the early birds.
And yes, 3 weeks after Jimmy Eat World's concert @ Barton, I'm STILL
playing their songs day in day out on Napster. Their songs are perfect
for a nice warm Sunday morning feelin' upbeat and cheerful and in for
some vibrant music.
Karen's bday dinner at Chili's last night. Almost the entire hk gang in
my year was there -- reminiscent of the good old, long gone freshman
dinners at Appel Commons. Appel Commons hadn't even been dedicated yet;
it was simply called Community Commons, or more commonly known as CC.
By next fall when us Class of 05 folks are all gone nobody would even
be using the acroynm CC to refer to Appel. Man, so that's it for 4
years.
On a lighter note, one of my roommies Yu Jye just headed out for his
last scuba diving class in Cayuga Lake. The water temperature prolly in
the low 40's if he's lucky. Wait till he gets into the water -- he must
be so wishing that he had whale blubber.
A cappella recording on Tuesday. 4 finals, 3 papers and that'll be it
for my academic life at Cornell. I could definitely feel senioritis
kicking in here. Oh well.
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| Okay, another entry triggered by another person, not T Muk this time but Johnny Fong all the way over there in Japan.
There's nothing but admiration that I have for his courage to jump out of his comfort zone, from turning down the well-paid and comfortable job in HK and deciding to work in Japan instead for a lower pay and obviously the stress, uneasiness and anxiety that comes wth working in a foreign country.
An inspiration for me that I should jump out of my comfort zone too.
Fall break right now, but haven't been very productive at all. I vowed to myself that I would have to at least write up a song or two over the weekend, but things haven't turned out very well. Random tunes keep on popping up in my mind all the time -- I wish there were a program that could transform instantly the songs in my mind to the real, hard-copy, score-form that I could distribute to everyone and ask for comments. Such impulses of tunes just come and go so easily. One moment I could be humming up a random tune that sounds like the very ideal melody for an acappella song, two seconds after I stopped singing i could completely forget about the tune that I was just humming before I could even find pen and paper to jot it down.
Plans for tomorrow: Needa buy a power cord for my computer monitor, Gannett to get a checkup on my left pinkie to see what is that outgrowth of bone that's causing the pain when playing the piano, lunch/CS consulting hours with Vincent, BBQ (possibly?) with CF or dinner with Oat
Another random thought of the day. While I have always considered myself a liberal, a steadfast opponent of the war in Iraq and definitely a member of the group of Anybuddy-But-Bush'es, my advocacy of the outsourcing of jobs, a small goverment, low taxes and my stance that gays are acceptable but same-sex marriages are not have swung me more towards the conservative side, so rather than being able to proudly call myself a liberal, I can only claim that I'm a moderate Democrat with rather conservative moral values but a leftist yearning for changes in areas that don't intrude into traditional moral systems. | | |
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