In retrospect, scheduling a holiday to Hong Kong at this time was probably not the smartest decision possible. Between the H1N1 fears and the bad weather, our experience left much to be desired, but we still managed to have an enjoyable time overall and got to know Hong Kong more. Part of this was because it was a last minute arrangement and we were originally supposed to go with a tour group including older family members to Taiwan, but it was cancelled and my wife and I had to decide where to go on our own during our scheduled holiday time. And so to Hong Kong it was, including a day trip to Macau as pictured above.
What I mostly learned about Hong Kong is that it’s one huge contiguous crowd of people! Having never been to HK or even any part of China before, the sheer number of people was staggering to me. And all of them constantly walking briskly and purposefully from one place to another too. Indeed, one evening spent in Causeway Way on the day before the Rice Dumpling Festival was nearly standing room only on the streets. We met up with a couple of friends from high school who showed us the ins and outs of living in HK. To get a restaurant table, we had to get waiting tickets from four or five different restaurants and see which queue was the shortest. At the longest queue, the number currently being served was 61 while the ticket we had was 161. Between this sort of thing and the need to constantly walk between bus and MTR stations since hardly anyone actually drives in HK, I see that Hong Kongers get much more exercise than Malaysians.
Just because I haven’t posted a frivolous picture in a while, here’s one that I picked up from QT3. I have no idea what is going on or where this is, but you really have to wonder whether that lone driver there is brave or recklessly heading towards something everyone else is desperate to avoid.
Came across this funny image of the Bible on QT3 a while back. I’m not too sure where it was originally from though. The thing about humour is that in order for the joke to work, it needs a grain of truth in it.
Anyway, I know I haven’t been writing much for my own blog lately. I think I’ve written more and more interesting stuff as comments on other people’s blogs and on LYN than on here.
In other news, check out this article in Slate magazine, “Does Religion Make You Nice?”. It’s not very kind on atheism, but makes a fair point about the importance of building communities.
It’s been a bit busy at work, so here’s a quick post on something that I found last week. It’s the world’s tallest LEGO tower and it was built in the Legoland Windsor theme park in the U.K. out of 500,000 LEGO pieces. It’s a pretty awesome sight, though after reading the comments section I discovered that there’s actually a steel pole running through the middle of the tower, so that kind of feels like cheating. There are more photos at the original site for anyone who’s interested.
Here’s a series of funny Chess pictures that I found in a thread on LYN. There’s plenty more where those came from. It’s cheap but amusing nevertheless.
I’ve reinstalled Team Fortress 2 and I’ve been playing it on and off, mostly on the Malaysian Bolehnet server and some Singaporean servers. It’s especially funny to play on the Malaysian servers and hear people trash talk while joking about Anwar being online playing.
The above picture appears to be a TF2 engineer sentry made entirely out of Lego. I shamelessly stole it from the Lowyat forums.
Yeah, reposting a funny picture found in another blog is uncool, but I couldn’t resist, considering that Wikipedia is one of my favorite sites. Original credits to the Language Log. Apparently this is a photo taken of a menu of real restaurant in Beijing. Read the end of the post for a link to a “Wikipedia” brand of bread in China. I guess there’s nothing that the Chinese won’t copy.
