The Sad Loss of a Weekend

It is Sunday night, and by the grace of God, I am home, having narrowly escaped another day of unadulterated concentrated stress.

This is not in my job description, but I ended up having to work from like 7 am to 12 am Friday and Saturday, and half a day Sunday (originally full day but I escaped), in order to entertain 6 Professors and their families (total of 15 people).

I think it's going to take pages if I explained in detail, so I'll just list out in point form some of the things that have happened. I suggest you skim over or pick and read, because it's going to be boring if you read it all.

Summary
Some people are amazing. Not amazing!-amazing, but outlandish-outrageous-amazing.


Friday : "Scrambling"

- I got a call at 11:15 am thurs night but I didn't pick up because I was on the phone with my boyfriend, which is perfectly normal. The next day, my boss exclaimed that he called me but I didn't pick up. Excuse me, but was that supposed to be a complaint? Like, was I supposed to be on standby 24/7? Did you TELL me to be available at all hours? (I later got made fun of, and was the scapegoat for everything that went wrong afterward in Mandarin...so I barely understood... but I won't get into that or it'll fill another page)

- one guest complained he had a hard time checking in (of course, all eyes turned to me but it is SO NOT my fault because I am 100% confident in the clarity of my instructions)

- setting up the guests computer for a presentation was a enormous frenzy of activity that I really don't want to get into .. anyway, the only thing you need to know is that two IT people and a person from the general office were in there helping

- "the table's too small!!!" ... "that's the biggest table we have." "that's ridiculous!!"

- the itinerary says "Free Time" on Sat, which begins in the afternoon. one guest exclaimed that he wants to go to macau, with me as tour guide. (Here are the problems with that: 1. I know nothing about macau. 2. I have no training in touring. 3. I am seriously prone to getting lost. 4. Ill be a girl alone with a man in another country. 5. It's going to encroach into my really really precious weekend.)


Saturday: "Harrowing Demands"
- before saturday, it was friday night and I was worried sick about one person who didn't contact me yet. I couldn't sleep. I finally got a text message from him that they were on their way from the airport, saying everything's ok. The next morning, turns out he had a difficult time getting in. (all eyes on me. -__- )

- they added a coach+driver to the itinerary, and changed the time again. the driver was understandably 7 minutes late due to last minute changes. (people seemed agitated and my boss was like "where's the bus??????????????????????" all eyes on me)

- at the security gate they wouldn't let us through since I haven't gotten a chance to register the above vehicle. 3 minute delay but the way they acted it seemed like 30 min.

- I was supposed to babysit some kids at the playground but they wanted to sleep. I went to play piano in the music room instead. Best part of the day.

- many many many sudden change of plans - will not get into that. Because Sunday is the epitome of "sudden change of plans"

- they discouraged the guy from going to macau.

- Went to eat dinner at boss' house. I impressed everyone with on piano ^__^ All of a sudden, a surge of interest in who I was and some respect.


Sunday: "I need to go pee"
- today was supposed to be ocean park for everyone. I bought everyone's tickets already, pre-ordered, being proactive.

- macau guy convinced 5 people to go with him. a waste of above tickets.

- the actual stopping route went like this, as per the barking of one lady (you can imagine what happened in between because I'm not going to type out the details, but let's just say I feel really really really sorry for the driver and I apologized and complimented him afterwards): HKUST visitor apartments (stop) -> entrance (stop) --> another apartment along the way to HKUST (stop) --> BACK to HKUST entrance (slow, not stop) --> going slowly along a minibus route (slow) --> minibus stop (stop) --> macau ferry terminal (stop) --> ocean park (final stop)

- the planned route is this: HKUST -> ocean park

- along the way to macau ferry terminal, one child wailed that she had to go pee REALLY REALLY REALLY badly. she finally went in a bag.

- the highlight of it all is the aforementioned barking lady said, "it's your weekend. you can go home. I can take care of them." I gladly passed all the information I had about the rest of the day to her.

- But anyway, even after I escaped to eat lunch with my boyfriend whom I haven't seen all weekend, I got 15 phone calls, made 10 phone calls, and 5 texts.

You know, I wish I could upload pictures here (including one fat boy clutching 2 DSs in one hand) , and put big fat arrows next to each head with descriptions, but I shall resist engaging in such indulgences.

Questionable if I get a day off to compensate. In all honesty I think I deserve about a week off. But like, REAL work at work is really busy too.



Speaking of fat boy, I saw a kid buying ice cream at seven eleven. He ran out of money on his octopus card, and starting ranting to himself when he was forced to put it back. It was for his own good....one less ice cream at a time.

A Really Really overdue Chinese New Year and V Day entry

This entry is to declare that I'm still alive, and also for the sake of posting because I haven't in a long long long time.

I saw some 55 kCal instant noodles at a cosmetics store. I bought it due to curiosity (and okay fine, I don't deny the marketing appeal). I have a picture, but I'm too lazy to fiddle with my phone right now so it's not uploaded.

During christmas 2009 I was wondering why everyone wasn't as hyped up as people usually are around holiday season. (In Canada, everyone is looking forward to christmas half the time.) Anyway, I now know why the discrepancy. It's because something better is around the corner in Feb. So this year, I got a groundbreaking, astonishing 40 red pockets (lai see). Meeting relatives you never knew you had is a strange but nice. Meeting potential relatives (boyfriend's side) is also strange but nice. OMG I'm so excited about Easter. Three days off!!

It's a...tiger? (next to my nearly complete MG Justice Gundam )

Answer: a bear in tiger camouflage.

That's supposed to look like me... and it actually does. I can now be found in HK streets, permed hair and in red glasses, holding a nokia n5800 and looking dazed.

Then my phone broke down for a week.

Anyway, as my lack of posting would indicate, I've been really really really preoccupied. I think it may be another lag before my next post.

Cannibalism in Action

This is Turtle Jelly in a container with a turtle eating turtle jelly. With a smile on its face I must point out.

My dad is now complaining about how he missed seeing how the elephant got caught by the lion on TV because my mom went somewhere in the house in the middle of cooking dinner... The conversation goes something like this:

Mom: *walks away in the middle of cooking to look at new clothes she bought today*
Dad: The celery is getting overcooked
Mom *ignores*
Dad *takes out the spatula*
TV *ROAR*
Dad *dashes out to see the elephant being consumed by the lions* aaaaaaah I missed it!!!
Mom: Whatever, they always show the lions eating something on TV
Dad: No, not an elephant!! It's always a bambi or something! Why did you abandon the cooking? You can always look at clothes later.
Me *standing over the frying fish* -__-''


After many excessive dinners later (some of which are because of work...we get a lot of guests, and of course we have to take them out for fancy lunches and dinners), I am back, bloated and feeling kind of heavy around the middle (I'd rather the heaviness go to my butt, because apparently that's healthy.), to report:

1. I took a professor from harvard (also pres of the american microbiology society, so very important person, I again don't know why my manager trusted me with this) to the peak so he could 'sight see HK', but we got lost on the twisty way to the top. But it's not my fault. The prof who offered to drive us there didn't know the way but insisted that he's gone before. On the way, we visited SWIMS (swire institue of marine sciences) HKU's coastal laboratory.

I also recently discovered that my manager's coastal laboratory at HKUST (Uni where I'm working at) has a really pretty view too, and a seafood restaurant-esque laboratory to boot. There were starfish, sea urchins, and mussels in these really large bins. (Yummy. Oops, there goes someone's experiment!)


Research Staff Quarters. Looks pretty, but gets very wet and humid in the summer.

The foggy road of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.


Seafood restaurant Lab ("coastal marine laboratory") at the edge of the ocean, about a 15 min walk from my office.



2. I'm really tired most of the time.

3. I regret checking my work email at home just now (I don't even know *why* I opened outlook). My manager, who is now out of the country, happily unleashed a torrent of work on me. Now I don't feel so good...

4. I'm really tired most of the time. Oh did I say that already? I want to crochet, cook, play some piano (wow how long has it been???), and read, but no time to do peaceful things like that...

5. I'm waiting for my hula hoop. My colleague bought one for me from China and promised to bring it to me during work.

Lunar new year falls on Feb 14 this year. An explosion of candies, chocolates and other confectionery are found in supermarkets. I love pretty packaging.

Rip off! It says "Mixed Nuts" but if you look carefully, they're rice cracker bits, green peas, seaweed and the occasional peanut.

HK's Education Culture

My dad is a non-conformist, and thankfully so. I dislike doing what everyone else is doing (they're probably just giving into marketing or believing something the government said) or thinking what everyone else is thinking (ie "education has salvific power" as Mr Tall, expatriate blogger from Batgung so eloquently put it. In fact most of this article's sources come from that blog.).

Quoting dad in reference to the stock market and the methods people use to raise their children: "Most people are wrong. If you follow the sheep herd, you can't succeed."

I found a genius article that further support his argument of "if you're not born with intellectual capacity, there's not much you can do to expand it". Ok fine, I reworded it from "if you're stupid, you're stupid". He criticizes the mentality of "more difficult is better" when chinese moms are impressed by schools that teach at a more advanced level. If it's so simple why not just enroll everyone in a higher grade?

*Gasp* Not everyone's IQs are cut out for college: "Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them."

I like this quote:
We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

And it doesn't matter if your IQ isn't sky-high! "What's Wrong With Vocational School?
Too many Americans are going to college."

Because of society's (in particular HK) overrated view on education, there is academic inflation in which babysitters might need a degree in Education.

And finally, this article, the author of which is from the Ivy Leagues, humbly reflects on the disadvantages of an elite education.

I must quote him:
One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more.

I am disgusted by 'my kid is better than your kid', 'so-and-so's daughter is going to (insert name school)' talks over dim sum at yum cha by a bunch of 'see lais' (middle aged chinese women notorious for being loud, opinionated and nosy).

And Mr Tall, HK expatriate blogger, provides an excellent summary of the HK education mentality and situation, which explains why salaries for fresh grads have plummeted and have not recovered yet. As I'm in my early 20s, I feel and see this situation, and the bleakness of those still struggling to worm their way into the career world and into a decent living so that they can forge a family (which means buying a house, and since housing is so expensive, that's very stressful....but that's another post altogether).

My dad encourages me to go to school to learn. That's why I'm doing a Masters... I don't put my faith in it elevating my salary or necessarily and automatically entitling me to my dream career. It might do all those things, but that's not the whole point.

The older you get, the smaller you feel in light of all the issues you see in the world.

Christmas

It's been soo long since I've last blogged and I can simply chalk it up to being occupied from day to night.

It's not perfect but I must say I am enjoying life.

I've taken a strong liking to potatoes until I heard on a radio show while in a taxi, that each spoonful had like 45 calories. Or something scary like that. I don't remember the exact numbers but I think I had about 4 meals with potatoes in it that week.

Hence: Salad-soup diet after all the gravy and potatoes.






I also had a record breaking amount of chocolate.

I wanted to talk about global warming in this post but nah... too lazy, and plus, it's time to go out again.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

A theoretically really really horrible morning

I don't even want to begin to explain why, but I have two pairs of glasses with vastly different prescriptions. I can say vastly because my eyes are THAT bad.

Neither pair is correct. One is significantly better than the other and enables me to get through life okay, but it unfailingly slips down my nose and is therefore very annoying.

So I got new ones, but they haven't arrived yet.

This morning, I was really really really sleepy (background information: yesterday was my birthday so I took the day off despite having started only a week before, blissfully enjoying life. I walked through the whole day though, and plus 'that time of the month' began, which generally makes one more achy and tired). I was wearing the bad glasses, the pair with prescription way off, probably by 400 degrees. My world was blurry.

More importantly though is that my mind was fuzzy. I could have fallen asleep standing up. As I dragged my feet (which was in a bit of pain due to too much walking the previous day) to the elevator this morning, I heard the wind howl outside, reverberated and amplified in the elevator corridor. At that point I wondered, could music possibly replicate this kind of mood? I mean, there is music about breakups, loneliness, sadness, anger, tiredness, death, regret... anything for this dead-as-a-zombie, I-don't-want-to-go-to-work, it's-cold-and-windy kind of mood?

Out I went, and the wind continued to howl. People of Hong Kong clutched their scarves, mittens and hats as they waited for the bus. (It was actually like 16 degrees.)

I don't know how, but I made it to work without missing some stop in the middle of my 1.5 hr commute.

I sat down in front of my computer, bewildered.

"Meeting." I heard somewhere.

Just one word and that sent me hurtling like a torpedo through the hall and down the stairs. It was 8:55 am and I realized that I was supposed to set up the room and projector for a ginormous 2.5 hour meeting at 9 am.

It was a maze downstairs but I found the projector. I hurtled back upstairs with the projector and luckily had got it set up in time. I had to pee, but no time...

2 hours later I still had to go pee...

My manager sat next to me.... so I had to look like I wasn't hungry, sleepy (was in REAL danger of dropping off any time by then), and needed to pee.

He also introduced me to everyone, but my world was blurry so I couldn't be sure who was who...

Good thing my weekend was good, and diluted out this whole experience.

I will upload pictures of the cutest things I saw on my birthday later (namely decorations in malls, to summarize, but no really! They're REALLY cute!)

First Day of Work

WOOHOO, I got hair extensions!! (will replace pic once I have a picture of myself with it)

Here's where I live and that's where I work... across HK.

I think it's time I uploaded a picture of myself to let you all know that I don't look any fobbier... except maybe, indirectly, the scarf, since it's not cold at all and I'm wearing one like the rest of the HK population, who cower in frozen fear at the slightest drop in temperature...that is not to say I don't mind the cold; I am very much afraid of the cold but I've gotten used to this kind of discomfort back in the harsh heater-less, bus-awaiting days at Waterloo...

My piano and English student (9 years old, but way more intelligent than your average 9 year old) thinks I'm his best friend or something and actually looked betrayed when I got a real job and couldn't come play with him as much anymore. It would have been cute if he wasn't so annoying and kept whining in person and in bold caps through my email "COME TO MY HOUSE EVERYDAY AND QUIT YOUR JOB." So I used this opportunity to teach him new words: "demanding" and "unfortunately". I told him that I was doing something meaningful, like helping people research bacteria from the Red Sea. He was like, "Red Sea? Like Moses in the Bible? I'll remove all the bacteria from the Red Sea so there's nothing to research." Viscous...

I think he's an attention whore, like most kids, especially HK kids. Back in high school, I liked using the word 'beady' to describe little kids' eyes, but I don't think I understood what that word meant until getting here... I don't know why, but kids' eyes in HK are really beady. Maybe it's the intelligence that is brimming in them, due to the steady diet of EPA and DHA, Mozart and other gross music, 'flash card training' and 'swimming and piano and violin and mandarin and math lessons' their parents fed them. But then, they grow up and it's not like they're any smarter because 'double loss' youth seems to be a real problem in HK. Double loss youth is a term that refers to youth who refuse to work because the real world is too harsh (low income, lack of job search skills, no goals, long hours and under-appreciation) and can't study anymore.

It's like, life is full of ironies. I ate a few soggy fries today for example. I didn't eat them while they were hot and crunchy, because they were oily and bad for the skin, but ended up hungry eventually to the point of accepting soggy fries.

So in conclusion, be happy with what you have right now because things could be worse.

Oh, I just realized that the title of this post is "first day at work" but I haven't talked about it... and I'm too tired to. So maybe later if I'm ever in the mood (Probably never).

AH BUT I did go to the cat cafe again! SO CUTE!