Happy Halloween

We hope you all have a great Halloween with your family, friends and wee ones.

The Ballet Is In Town

Today I tried to snap a few photos of Ingrid in her costume at Hong Kong Park.

Ingrid's 1st Pumpkin

Trick or treat...we may be 40 floors high but we have a jack-o-lantern and candy. Any kid who actually makes it to our door deserves more than one piece of candy.

Ready For Halloween

Well, it's no Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Patch but the Halloween display down at the local supermarket will have to do for this one year old. I (Lizzie) have been searching for some Halloween magic here in Hong Kong but the locals haven't really caught the enthusiasm of the holiday. Our apartment building on the other hand is doing its best to cater to its many western occupants by decorating the lobby with scarecrows, jack o'lanterns, huge spiderwebs and scary what not. The building is holding a Halloween bash and Ingrid is getting in the spirit by readying her costume. The party is to be held on the ground floor roundabout where taxi's are usually busily shuttling people to and fro.

Happy Valley

Hong Kongers are absolutely barking mad about thoroughbred racing, and the Happy Valley racecourse is the epicenter of their passion. Get this, between Happy Valley and its sister racecourse in Sha Tin, the yearly turnover on gambling is nearly $15 Billion! Big, big business, and its no wonder because the facility is absolutely massive. But the Hong Kong Jockey Club is a non-profit organization (an oxymoron for HK) that is also HK's largest taxpayer, funding much of the city's infrastructure and social services.



It was a blast, and a must for all of you who come to visit us. The races are exciting, there is plenty of beer and food, and there are all sorts of diversionary games to grab your attention. One booth has a game of skill where the quickest person to saw through a 2x2 wins a stack of drink coupons. Drunken people with saws! Beer courage prompted Lizzie to give it a shot, thinking her family's construction lineage would lead her to victory. She did a great job, and earned some drink tickets for her sheer grit.

Fun night. And we actually won thanks to Wonderful Blessing's victory in the 8th race. With our net worth dwindling away in the stock market we've found the racetrack is clearly the safer way to fund Ingrid's college education!

Jumbo Restaurant

Against our better culinary judgment we rolled the dice and decided to take in the lunch buffet at Hong Kong's venerable 'Jumbo Floating Restaurant' sitting in Aberdeen Harbor. Its name describes it perfectly so there is no need for further description. When you step off the ferry and enter the main lobby you see the photo's on the wall boasting Queen Elizabeth, John Wayne and even Tom Cruise as happy diners. I was actually surprised not to see Bill Clinton missing from the wall -- no man has more foreign country restaurant photos than he.

The food was nothing to write about but we really had a good time with the whole experience. Very campy, very fun.

Tokyo Tsukiji Fish Market

I was just in Tokyo for a brief business trip but did manage to check out the Tsukiji Fish Market. Its the largest wholesale fish market in the world moving more than $6B in fish every year and employing over 60,000 people! It really felt like they all showed up to work the morning I was there as the place was a hive of activity with forklifts and motorized buggies shuttling product to and fro. I get the feeling that the locals see it as sport to run over tourist toes so you've really got to watch yourself.



The action centers around the live tuna auction and in order to get there I had to leave my hotel at 4:30am. The tuna hall had 200 or so huge frozen specimens spread out on the floor. Wholesalers walk the floor, poking and prodding the fish to determine freshness like an old lady squeezing avocados in a grocery store. Probing to determine muscle tone and skeletal girth, I guess. I was still sleepy but was quickly awakened as the auctioneer stepped to his pedestal, rang his bell and began taking orders. The process is a low tech open outcry auction, surprising given the high prices these babies trade for (the record price for a single bluefin tuna is $180,000). With those prices you'd expect there to be guys in suits and flat screen trading monitors instead of smelly guys in rubber boots carrying clipboards.

When the auction is over the tuna are dragged off to the individual market stalls where they are sliced into slabs and distributed throughout the western hemisphere where it ultimately lands on your sashimi platter.

Tokyo Warning

I just returned from a business trip to Tokyo where I saw this warning sign plastered on the inside of an elevator. Now I don't read Kanji, but this sign translates to "Don't let the elevator doors close with your dog on one side and you holding the leash on the other...." Click on image to get an enlarged view.

Don't Count Them Out!

UPDATE: Bummer, they lost.
7-0 with 7 outs to go, but Ingrid never lost faith. Things were looking bleak but she still wore her little Red Sox shirt, the one Da Da purchased for her in Boston last November. She's hoping for Sox World Series victory #2 in her sports-spoiled 13 month life, not knowing that generations of Sox fans have perished in crushing frustration under the Babe's curse. Living overseas, she isn't able to get the games live on TV so she's a prisoner to MLB Gamecast on the Internet where she must frantically refresh her browser to see the game's progress. She was going wild with each refresh as the Red Sox made their run at the Devil Rays.....not quite as wild as she did last year when at age 1-month she refreshed the browser and e-experienced Stanford pull off the greatest college football upset ever in knocking off USC.....but she was going wild. Go Beckett Go in Game 6!

Absentee Vote Already In!

Cracks forming in HK housing

Hong Kong's real estate market has been en fuego over the past several years, but major cracks are now forming. Witness the slashed prices in the window advertisements of these rental agencies -- as recently as 3 months ago the market was still white hot. How quickly things turn, chalk it up to the global financial meltdown. Can't say I'm playing the violin the local landlords who've been holding would-be renters hostage for far too long. Their turn to bleed.

Creepy

She's sleeping...

Bangkok

We spent the final day of our holiday in bustling Bangkok, a far cry from quaint Chiang Mai. It has an advertised population of over 8 million people but many believe the actual figure is double that amount. It is big and congested and smoggy and ugly and nasty to the eye, but at the street level there is an electricity and buzz to the city that is unmatched in much of Asia. There is something for everyone, for better or worse (mostly worse), and you want to go back but you can't quite put your finger on the reason why.



Some advanced scouting led us to score an awesome room at a cheap hotel with a big deck overlooking the Chao Phraya River with a direct shot view of the magnificent Wat Arun. The setting was like something out of a Bourne movie, a place where I'd be trying to meld into the scenery only to have my handler at the CIA ring my cell phone asking me to do just one more job. "How did you find me here? I thought I told you I was retired," I'd say.



It rained most of the time we were in town which worked out perfectly because we had a nice deck from which to observe the weather while tipping back a few Singha beers. The clouds did break long enough for us to take a private twilight buzz in one of the many chartered long boats that run up and down the river. We hit the docks and brokered a smokin' deal for a 30 minute ride along the river. The rain had clearly double pumped our boat captain who'd used the weather as an opportunity to start his night of boozing, abundantly clear as he ambled down the pier with puffy face and beer in hand to shuttle us away. We lived.


Bangkok traffic is among the world's worst, so much so that all traffic officer's are trained in midwifery and deliver hundred of traffic jam babies each year. So with a mid-morning flight we made certain to get up and out early, yet we were still stuck in terrible traffic and frequently detoured at odd points. Our driver seemed agitated. Looking out the window Lizzie and I both noticed a heavy police presence. And there were yellow shirted Thai youths all over the place. It wasn't until we'd returned to Hong Kong that we realized that Bangkok was in full scale anti-government pro-democracy riots that had claimed the lives of several people. Wild times on our trip to Thailand!