2012 London Olympics

The 2012 Summer Olympics in London, United Kingdom are days away, with opening ceremonies set for this Friday, July 27. I don't know about everywhere in the world, but hype is incredibly low here in Hong Kong. Maybe it's the come-down from 2008 in Beijing, maybe it's the lack of general sports interest in this culture, maybe it's that people aren't that interested in the Olympics in general. However, I am super interested in the Olympics and in fact, this blog originated as an Olympics blog. Regretfully, I have not really been following the buildup to these Olympics as well and am entirely oblivious on the state of many interesting sports.  Still, I think I can outline why I'm excited for these Olympics and what I will be watching for.

1. London will be the first city ever to host the Games three times, having acted as host city in 1908 and 1948.  It is without doubt one of the world’s premier cities in so many aspects, and has been for the entire modern era. Of course, this does not guarantee that the Games will run smoothly nor that the city will escape criticism, and it seems there are just as many infrastructure concerns with London as there were with Beijing (though less than there were with Athens).  There are worries with the traffic, the Athlete’s Village, the volunteers, security (London has been victim to terrorist attacks this decade) and even the logo (which has garnered incredible public disapproval and a few bizarre controversies). I think hosting an Olympics is an open invitation to ticky-tack international criticism and that most of these complaints will hopefully fade away after the Opening Ceremonies.  The city has undergone much redevelopment and renewal, with the Olympic Stadium being built in a formerly derelict part of town, hopefully springboarding the way to a vibrant post-Games neighborhood. The London Shard, the tallest building in the European Union and engineered by my company, Arup, opened in early July.  It's not the same hyperdevelopment of a city as it was for Beijing, when the subway doubled in anticipation of the Olympics, but it's some serious infrastructure overhaul.
2. Interesting sports.  A lot of people complain about the Olympics and how there are all these stupid, silly sports that you only see every four years.  The truth is that every athlete who shows up in the Olympics is absolutely ridiculously impressive, and it's your job to recognize. If a sport looks wacky, it's cause it's unfamiliar to you. Sports take a long time to learn, even to watch, and it always strikes me as humorous when American sports talk show hosts, who only ever watch the big 4 American sports, are suddenly made to comment on swimming and beach volleyball.  I wrestled for three years in high school and saw Freestyle Wrestling at the Olympics, and had to go back for more the next week in order to understand what I just saw.  To be able to appreciate sports takes time and study, like appreciating fine art.  Track and field times mean something to me, hence I enjoy watching it on the Olympic stage. Swimming times are meaningless to me, and hence all those different Olympic events turn to mush in my brain.  Most Americans thus just intensely follow the basketball team and then idly amuse themselves with the other curious sports.  If you really want to get into the Olympics, I would recommend picking a sport you are interested in but don't know much about, get to know the athletes and follow it throughout the Games. 
3. Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps.  The two biggest stars of the 2008 Olympics are back, but no longer guaranteed for gold.  Bolt owns the 100m and 200m world records with staggering times of 9.58 and 19.19 respectively, but hasn't gone full speed in these intervening four years.  He was beaten by 22 year old Yohan Blake in both events in the Jamaican Olympic trials. It is very hard to repeat in the Olympic Sprints (Carl Lewis was the last in 1984 and 1988) and Blake, who owns PRs of 9.75 and 19.26 himself, may very well be the world's next sprint superstar. Still, Bolt lit the world on fire in Beijing and has something special inside him that maybe only the biggest stage can bring out.  He's still just 25 and well within his prime. Meanwhile Phelps is coming off 8 golds in Beijing and 6 in Athens and really doesn't need to be here. He's 27, absolutely ancient in his sport, but will still compete in seven events in London. He's not expected to win seven golds this time, but if he wins any, he'll further establish himself as an Olympian for the ages. He is two medals away from equalling a Soviet gymnast for all time Olympic medals.
4. USA Basketball.  They should win the gold.  If they don't, that would suck. End of story.
5. The Opening Ceremonies.  This will not be the extravagant million performer affair that Beijing's was, but it will feature a short film of Daniel Craig as James Bond! The UK has long stated they won't do anything as expensive as China did, for very good reasons, but they can still put on a great show. So much of the world has been profoundly influenced by British culture that a performance celebrating the history and traditions of the Isles will hopefully be able to affect many billions worldwide.
6. Underdog stories and politics. This is what makes the Olympics the Olympics. It's Saudi Arabia sending women competitors for the first time (namely Sarah Attar in the 800m and Wodjan Ali Sejar in judo). Now every competing country will be co-ed. It's Afghanistan sending a female boxer in Sadaf Rahimi. It's Iran stating that it's athletes will face Israeli athletes after forfeiting in past Games.  It's even Greek triple jumper Voula Papachristou getting kicked off her Olympic team for tweeting something racist against Africans in Greece. The Olympics are a microcosm of our world, of our greatest problems, our greatest inspirations, our possible hopes and solutions.  It's where the places you come from, the name of the country on your back, matters and yet doesn't matter.

I really haven't followed these Olympics enough to write a great preview, but that's why I'm excited to watch. I know that something unforgettable and momentous will happen. I hope that nothing tragic will happen.  I also hope that in the pureness of athletic competition, the world will come closer together than ever before.

Great Polyglots - 通晓多国语言 －les grandes polyglottes

Those people who have heard me ramble and read this blog probably know that I'm obsessed with languages, as well as people who speak many of them. Over time I have amassed a list of famous people who speak many languages, and as I can't find a list as similarly comprehensive on the web, I figured I'd post it here.  I put admittedly too much worth in the ability to speak multiple, as it is something I find awesome but am not particularly good at.  The list of great people who were monolinguals is perhaps more impressive than the list of polyglots, so it's important not to get carried away.  Still, I found creating this fun and hope you enjoy and find yourself inspired.  I judge people's greatness by their contribution to humanity and their lingustic aptitude by the quantity, fluency and diversity of their competent languages. This means that people who are famous only for knowing many languages (see Emil Krebs) are not included.

Historical:
Throughout time there have been some people who did great things while speaking many languages. They get their own section here because it's hard to tell from books how well these people spoke their languages, whether history has embellished their legend, and there are no rarely youtube clips available of them. 

Among the best are:

Otto von Bismarck -, the statesmen who founded Germany and spoke German, English, French, Italian, Polish and Russian Cite

Nikola Tesla - The brilliant mad scientist who basically popularized electricity spoke Serbian, German, Hungarian, Italian, French, Czech, English and Latin.

Thomas Jefferson - The third American President was a true polymath who notably crafted the Declaration of Independence. He knew English, French, Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek. His Spanish is questionable (I read that he claimed to Sam Adams he learned Spanish on a boat voyage from the US to Europe).

Tenzig Norgay - The famous mountaineer who together with Edmund Hillary became the first humans to summit Mount Everest spoke either Sherpa or Tibetan natively and fluent Nepalese. He also could converse in English and Hindi.

Ho Chi Minh - The Communist dictator who led North Vietnam actually only spent the beginning and ends of his life living in Vietnam. Classical Chinese and French were part of his education. Birth and death sandwiched an interesting travel life, which he began by working in the kitchen of a French ship. He subsequently spent significant time in France, US, UK, USSR, China and even Thailand. He married a woman in Guangzhou who was unable to see him after he became leader in Vietnam. Besides his native Vietnamese, he could speak French, English, Russian, Cantonese and Mandarin, and gave interviews to the western media in French.

Friedrich Engels - The philosopher and political theorist who managed to help create Marxism without getting his name added onto the theory, supposedly spoke 20 languages.  Documentation is hazy, but I think we're talking English, German, several other Germanic languages, the Romance languages, tons of Slavic languages, Arabic and Persian. 3

Black Beaver - This Delaware (tribe, born in Illinois) trapper traveled all across the American continent in the 1800's, back before there were road trips. If he's less famous than everyone else on this list, it's because the history most of us has read has so largely been written by Westerners.  He spoke English, French, Spanish and about 10 Native American languages.

Gandhi - Sources aren't totally clear but the great Indian non-violent peacemaker spoke Gujarati natively and could understand Hindi, Malayam, Telegu, Kannada, Marathi and English.

John Paul II - The great Pope spoke Polish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, German, Russian, Croatian, Ancient Greek and Latin and used them extensively on the job.

鄧麗君 (Teresa Teng) - The famous Taiwanese singer, whose 月亮代表我的心is probably the most famous Chinese song nowadays, spoke Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien natively.  She definitely spoke Cantonese, English and Japanese proficiently, spending considerable time in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and the United States. She recorded albums in these languages, but also sang songs in Indonesian, Vietnamese and Khmer.

J.R.R. Tolkien - I never met anyone on this list, but I'd bet that the creator of Lord of the Rings is the one here most obsessed with languages.  He was a professor on English Language and Literature, and in terms of modern languages, he could speak English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Welsh, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, Greek and Serbian to different extents and was familiar with Finnish.  However, he also extensively studied tons of ancient languages, including Middle English, Old English, Gothic, Lombardic, Old Norse, and Medieval Welsh, and was a foremost academic on the Germanic languages.  He also invented many languages, notably Quenya and Sindarin, two Elvish languages spoken in Lord of the Rings.

Sir Richard Francis Burton - Wikipedia calls the Captain a British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. That's a lot of hats to wear, and "according to one count, he spoke [an ungodly amount of] 29 European, Asian and African languages.  To the best of my reconstruction, these included English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Portuguese, German, Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Persian, Sindhi, Pashto, Telugu, Sanskrit, Toda, Jataki, Swahili, Harari, Icelandic, Amharic, Fan, Egba, Hebrew and Ashanti. His exploits were numerous and legendary, including exploring the Great Lakes of Africa and making the Hajj.

Jose Rizal - To me, Rizal's life is the most impressive out of anyone in this list. Jose Rizal was a multiracial Filipino national hero who worked as an eye doctor (earning degrees from Madrid, Paris and Heidelberg), writer and revolutionary. His whole life story is fascinating and he even lived in Hong Kong for a while.  I've found contrasting statements about his languages, but my best guess are: Tagalog, Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, Malay, Ilokano, Bisayan, Arabic, Chinese (probably Cantonese, Mandarin and Hokkien), Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Sanskrit and Latin.  He could have and probably would have learned more, except that he was tragically executed by the Spanish at the age of 35. 1

Living:

Ok so these people's language lists are far less impressive as the above legends of yore, but you might know them better.

Shakira - The Colombian singer speaks Spanish, English and Portuguese fluently, and sings the 2010 World Cup theme song (Waka Waka) in all three.  She is also of Lebanese and Italian descent, and speaks a smattering of Catalan, Italian, French and Arabic. 

Jackie Chan - The Hong Kong mega Kung Fu star speaks Cantonese and Mandarin fluently, and English with a typical strong Hong Kong accent. Apparently though he speaks a bit of Korean, German and Japanese and American sign language, although I was only able to find clips of the Korean.

Novak Djokovic - Tennis is a very international sport and lots of tennis players speak many languages. Roger Federer speaks German, Swiss German, French and English (all flawlessly), and two-time Grand Slam winner Marat Safin spoke Russian, Tartar, Spanish and English. Djokovic gets the nod as the current world #2 and speaking Serbian, English, German and Italian, some Spanish and French (you can find youtube clips of him speaking French).

Serge Ibaka - The young Thunder Center who averaged 3.5 blocks per game is kinda a beast. He grew up in the Republic of Congo, moved to Spain following a traumatic Civil War, then came to the US.  He speaks Lingala, French, Spanish, English and Catalan and can block shots in an additional six.

Wang Lee Hom - Alexander Wang was born in Rochester, New York to Taiwanese immigrants but supposedly didn't grow up speaking Mandarin 1. He started studying in college (I don't believe him). Well he went to Taiwan for a summer, got discovered, and is now one of the biggest pop icons in all of Asia. There's a youtube clip of him speaking English, Mandarin, French (high school study), Cantonese (started studying after acting in a Hong Kong film) and Japanese. As our life stories are pretty similar, I am holding out hope that I can speak that well when I'm his age, and become a mega Asian pop star.

Viggo Mortensen - Aragorn is of Danish descent on his father's side and American on his mother's side. He grew up in the US, Denmark and Argentina and as a result, speaks English, Spanish and Danish fluently.  He can also converse in French and Italian and understand Swedish and Norwegian and some Elvish (one of these is a joke). 

Daniel Bruhl - Inglourious Basterds was great for its use of European languages as a plot device, and Christoph Walz shone for his impeccable German, French and English as well as Italian (which he does not actually speak). However it is another actor in the film, Daniel Bruhl (who only speaks German and French in the movie) who is the real polyglot.  Born to a German father in Barcelona, he speaks German, Spanish, Catalan, French and English fluently.

Madeleine Albright - The former US Ambassador to the United Nations and the Secretary of State and current Georgetown Professor of International Relations was born in Czechoslovakia and grew up in the UK, Switzerland and US. She speaks Czech, English, French and Russian fluently and can read and speak Polish and Serbo-Croatian.

Mohombi - The Swedish-Congolese singer is mainly known as a one-hit wonder for his 2010 hit "Bumpy Ride." I really like his sound though, which reflects his diverse upbringing, and hope he produces more quality songs.  He was born in Kinshasa, Zaire (modern day Democratic Republic of Congo) to a Congolese father and a Swedish mother, and moved to Stockholm when he was 14 to escape the Civil War.  He definitely speaks French, Swedish, English, Lingala and Swahili but claims here that he speaks six languages. The 6th one may be Spanish. Interestingly he has also collaborated with Moroccan-Swedish producer RedOne and Kenyan-Norwegian singer Stella Mwangi.

Hamid Karzai - The President of Afghanistan who has plenty of controversies to his name, graduated university in India and is well-versed in Pashto (native), Dari, Hindi, Urdu, English and French.

Aung San Suu Kyi - This amazing woman's life is very well-documented but amazingly I could not find comprehensive information about her linguistic skills.  She definitely speaks Burmese and English fluently, and studied French and Japanese (brushing up on them during her home confinement). She was also noted for being good at foreign languages and lived in India and Nepal, graduating from university in New Delhi, so who knows how many other languages she can converse in?

Christopher Lee - No not me, but the legendary British actor who became famous for portraying Dracula and has recently played Count Dooku in the Star Wars pretrilogy and Saruman in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy over a 60 year career. Lee grew up partially in Switzerland and speaks English, French, German, Italian, Spanish fluently and is moderately proficient in Russian, Swedish, and Greek. He has acted in English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, French and German.1

So that's what I've compiled so far and I hope to add to the list, especially the contemporaries, and am open to suggestions. I also somehow have 3 Lord of the Rings references! I was unable to find an impressive polyglot who didn't speak English!

EDIT:
I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know much about her life until her passing in May 2014, but she's truly an amazing individual and polyglot.
Maya Angelou - While best known as a great American writer and particularly strong African-American female literary voice, Maya Angelou was also a dancer, actress, playwright, journalist, civil rights activist, sex worker, film director and professor. Touring Europe as a member of a Porgy and Bess opera show, Angelou started picking up the languages in her host countries. She later worked in Cairo and Accra as a journalist. In those locations, she picked up French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Fanti.

Shaul Ladany
The incredible academic/Olympian/survivor Shaul Ladany is not as well known as he should be. Ladany was born in 1936 in Belgrade to Jewish parents.  The city was bombed and conquered by German forces, and Ladany's family escaped to Hungary. However he was later captured and sent to a concentration camp in Germany. He was one of the few survivors, a fortunate beneficiary of a deal in which foreign Jews bought for the lives of 1000 prisoners. His family eventually immigrated to the new state of Israel following the war, where he went to university and eventually did his PhD in Industrial Engineering in Columbia. He somehow got into race walking and became the best Israeli walker, competing in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. He had just finished his race and gone to sleep when Palestinian terrorists invaded the Israeli compound, and he was one of only 6 Israeli athletes to survive the attack - his second incredible escape from a Jewish-targetted attack in Germany. Among his incredible and inspiring life, he spoke Serbo/Croatian, Hungarian, Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, English and French. His linguistic life story is written below:
http://www.le-mot-juste-en-anglais.com/1995/01/linguist-of-the-month-of-september-shaul-ladany.html

My life in Hong Kong

So I don't post here nearly as often as I'd like now, and I only recently realized I have posted very little about what my day-to-day life is actually like here. Part of it is because my day-to-day life is consistently very busy, part of it is that I've really settled in here. When my stay in foreign cities had an expiration date, I'd take note of everything that was different about that place and write about it and try to capture all those details and feelings that I might later forget.  But as my stay here is indefinite, I come to accept that this is my life and sometimes forget to marvel at how unroutine my routine would once have seemed.  Most of my friends now are based here and are generally not hanging on every word I utter about Hong Kong. But without ado, a really candid summary of my life in way more detail than anyone wants:

1) Work
I have a job at Ove Arup here, a rather large engineering company that does so many different things we have to sort them out into groups and assign these groups letters and are close to running out of letters.  My group is called Building Sustainability, formerly Building Physics, and we do a number of things but mostly modeling out designs and using fancy software to see how good those designs are. Some teammates do a lot of work with green building certifiers like LEED and China Green Building Label but my subteam mostly builds 3-d models of developments using specific software and then try to "mesh" it into a workable crystalline structure and then run some hightech computational fluid dynamics over the development. At the end, if we did everything right, we might be able to see how wind flows through the development, or how hot the place can get, or how thermal dynamics affects air flow.  If it sounds very complicated it kinda is and you should be really impressed that I do this, but in reality I understand very little of what I do and have to basically follow a lot of instructions and trust that smarter people than I discovered the laws of physics, programmed them into these softwares, and then told my bosses how to use them.  Though my firm is British, the staff here is 90% local and my sub-team entirely local except for me. At some point a few months ago my team decided to talk to me only in Cantonese and that has primarily stayed true.  We are supposed to get in at 8:30 and work til 5:30, but most people get in around 9-9:30, and then leave anywhere from 6:30 to never. I think my average leave time is 6:45. Wrapping up past 8pm is not uncommon, although I'm lucky that my worst nights have only been around 10pm.  Cultural miscommunication is often an issue, sometimes language related, sometimes not.  Work culture in Hong Kong takes a long time for westerners to figure out, and as someone without much experience with work culture anywhere, it may take me a particularly long time to figure out.

2) Ultimate
I play ultimate a lot here, basically whenever its available. I've touched on this in a previous post but I'll reiterate and expand here.  In DC, there are so many ultimate options. There's 7-8 pickup games during the weekdays, as well as Georgetown practices and scrimmages and multiple leagues to join year-round.  The summer leagues are stratified into four levels, and it's hard to count how many club teams there are in the area. Here I know everyone who plays, whenever there's a game or pickup, and probably who will show up. The players are composed of maybe 60% ex-patriates, mainly from Canada and the US but also Australia, UK and Europe. The other 40% is local with a few mainland Chinese coming in and out.  A couple committed players from Shenzhen will actually cross the border and take an hour and a half plus trip to play weekday games at the higher Hong Kong level.  Anyway very quickly I melded into this community and made countless friends, and even won an award for Best Newcomer of the Year.

Tournaments are big highlights of my calendar here and bear only a casual relationship to tournaments in the US.  In college, just about every tournament I went to involved renting a car and driving to some remote grassy part of the east coast where we could get plenty of field space.  We would stay at the most plebian of roadside motels, fitting 7 or 8 in a room back when our club was low on funds. We would play 4 games amidst one bye against mostly anonymous college competition, then head out and hang out with our team.  Here in Asia, ultimate communities only exist around the major metropolises. Even a slightly smaller city like Xiamen or Chengdu don't have an ultimate scene, and the smallest place that I've heard hosting a tournament is Bali and Jeju Island in Korea. Instead, people find ways to fit tournaments in Bangkok, Beijing, Pnomh Penh and here in Hong Kong, and players fly from all over the continent to partake. For our tournament in Bangkok, I met someone who came in from Dubai, and in a hat tournament in Hong Kong, one of my teammates actually timed his vacation from Washington, DC around this tournament.  Imagine players convening from Canada, Mexico, UK and France into New York and playing in a tournament within the city limits. For someone familiar with the US scene, this is unfathomable.

Anyway there are only so many tournaments and only so many players within this continent that you get to know many of regulars right away, and then see them again a month later in a different country. The community is almost exhaustingly too interesting, featuring players from too many different countries speaking too many languages with too many great stories to share that I find myself sometimes afraid to meet any more people, because I know I'll want to learn all about their fascinating selves too.  On a whole, the ex-pats are a lively combination of adventurous and well-cultured, but unpretentious and unentitled for after all they all play this fringe niche sport.  The locals too share these same exact features, for they've gone out of their way to discover and pursue a sport completely foreign to their country.

Through this community I now have multiple friends in places I haven't been like Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Seoul.


3) Neighborhood
I live in a pretty lively neighborhood right by the Prince Edward MTR station.

The area can be considered part of the bustling Monk Kok area where many local restaurants align the street level and a notable street market attracting many tourists. That's not a huge part of my life, but they do sell fresh fruit and random useful items which I do utilize semi regularly. I live right outside a remarkably large food stand, selling everything from pig's liver to squid to waffles. I usually order dim sum style beef balls.  Next to that is a ComeBuy, a chain bubble tea stand.  This is notable since bubble tea has been one of my favorite things in the world for the last three years, and in DC I had almost no opportunity to get it. I would go way out of my way to go to the one little restaurant/bakery in Chinatown that sold half decent bubble tea for $4.50.  This place sells much larger and much better bubble tea for $14 HKD, less than $2 USD. Within my immediate vicinity is also a nice bakery that makes great Chinese buns and several super markets and convenience stores. I had thought that the nearest supermarket was a 5 minute walk away, a considerably closer proximity than I had in any of the 4 locations I've lived in DC. However I was wrong. There was actually a Park n Shop on the 2nd level directly across the street from my house, where I can go from checkout to my room in under 3 minutes.  All other daily services like laundry, haircut, clothing stores, electronic stores, flower markets and coffeeshops are within a 5 to 10 minute walk, a result of the sheer density of the malls and stores. 


There are dozens of restaurants within that same walking radius, and among them I have sampled many typical Hong Kong "tea restaurants," congee restaurants, dim sum, Thai, Shanghainese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese as well as McDonald's (which I go to here but never in the states). The average dinner at many of them will be under $40.  That's the thing about prosperous cities in formerly developing countries - you have really expensive areas and really inexpensive areas.  In the states, the range is much narrower and the cheapest places are often immigrant areas.  There's a large recreation ground near me where we happen to play frisbee, with fields and a small playground. Lots of elderly people walk around on the fields, sometimes doing slow motion tai chi, sometimes using the strange exercise machines in the playground.


There's a strip of bars in the neighborhood, which may have influenced my decision to settle here, but they are so far removed from any bar experience I had previously had. These are true local bars frequented almost exclusively by local Kowloon dwellers, most of them are smoky rooms with multiple karaoke TVs (featuring a random smodgepodge of English songs), dart boards and dice games. Few places allow you to just sit down and order a beer - you usually get a bucket of beers and "nuts", a small plate of tasteless fries that usurps away $25. There might be some bars that will have TVs occasionally on sports, and some places qualify as lounges where you can sit and chill, but for the most part a Westerner would have no idea what to do inside one of these establishments. Western bars exist in Wan Chai, Tsim Sha Tsui and of course, Soho and Lan Kwai Fong.


4) Living

Life was super exciting for my first two months here.  I was living my dream in one of my favorite cities I'd ever been to, speaking multiple languages, meeting lots of new people from many countries. The novelty has been slowly dying down since then and now I no longer see new places, eat new food or meet new people on a weekly basis. Instead I'm doing laundry, buying groceries, spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning a perpetually dirty apartment and generally being exhausted. Hong Kong is a lightning fast city with perhaps the world's most efficient transportation, and as a result it doesn't waste time. It's gotten to the point where even though my commute is 15 minutes long, I rarely go 3 minutes out of my way to the ATM.

This is by far the longest I've ever lived abroad. It's the first time I've been gone so long I've needed to find a local dentist and doctor. I've needed to figure out the right way to do things instead of putting up with an imperfect solution because I'll be going home in a few months. While I speak a lot of Cantonese in my Kowloon neighborhood and use a lot of local businesses, my life is still far from local. Above is an example of a minibus route that took me a while to get over. Minibuses are buses that follow a route but stop only when you tell them to, and have routes written only in Chinese. It's hard to adjust to a busing system in any new city, but the challenge in Hong Kong is particularly intimidating.  As a result I stuck a lot to the quite legible map of the MTR, which may be the best subway system in the world

I don't cook quite as much here as I would in the states. It was a large part of my life in DC, between finding Chinese groceries, experimenting with various dishes, and inviting friends over for dinner parties. Cooking was once a three or four time a week occasion - now it's a once a week occasion, not counting ramen.  Though I know longer have to struggle to find my Chinese sauces and ingredients, I rarely have the time or even the kitchen space to make use of them. When you get back from work tired at 7:30, you're rarely in the mood to cook and eat at 8:30. What more, cooking is a significant cost saver in the US, but it actually costs money here! Eating out is so cheap and none of the meals I make are simple enough to be that inexpensive. The real reason to cook at home is to avoid the unhealthy oils that you'll find at just about any roadside restaurant.  That said, I do eat plenty of ramen here and it is oh so good.

Finding cool places to go is often an issue. In DC, I would pass by restaurants or bars and notice they seemed interesting, or hear by word of mouth of a place, or through Yelp. I could easily sit on a bus and spot a cool restaurant, and then gather with friends later that week to try it out.  There's none of that here. So many of the cool places in Hong Kong are not at the street level, because this is such a vertical city. There could be this an amazing hot pot restaurant located at the 15th floor of an abandoned-looking building in Yau Ma Dei, and you'd have no way of finding out just by walking by.  It's all word of mouth or OpenRice, Hong Kong's amazing restaurant app. In addition, my feeling has been that Hong Kong is not a place of distinguishable establishments. There are great restaurants all over the place, but few of them have captured me with a sense of uniqueness and the feeling that I couldn't get the same stuff right across the street. Perhaps this will change as I get more familiar with all the restaurants - I still go to chain restaurants without realizing they're a chain. However, I do know that whenever ex-pats bump into each other and realize that they've both spent time in Beijing, they will inevitably start listing off bars and clubs from the city. Beijing is full of memorable bars with quirky character. Hong Kong? There's little room for character in a glossy packed night club charging $500 for cover in LKF, and the places in Wan Chai have all the ingredients of lower class seediness without any blue collar charm. The whole feel of the place is actually quite cool, and on a whole the nightlife in the city is great. Somehow though, it fails to produce any defining establishments for me.

5) Traveling

So far, all my trips since I've arrived here (which is a trip in itself) including - Kaohsiung, Singapore, Bangkok, Guiyang, Beijing, Shanghai and Osaka - have been for either ultimate tournaments or to see friends.  That's a fair amount of traveling, but it's been actually surprisingly easy and affordable. Hong Kong is well situated for exploring Southeast Asia and East Asia.  Lots of flights go in and out of Hong Kong, and most of them are short. The longest flight of all these trips was to Singapore, a mere four hours. There is simply so much to see in this part of the world, and I've actually only been to two new countries since I've arrived (Taiwan, Japan).  Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia are all nearby and unexplored wonders for me.