Under the Baobab Tree

It's Monday morning in Hong Kong and I will be headed to the airport shortly. But first I must tell you about what I did on Sunday -- I took the ferry across the Pearl River Estuary to Macau, the former Portuguese colony to the east of Guangdong, and spent the day wandering around the tiny peninsula.

I did this because we lived in Portugal on two separate occasions when I was growing up (1977-1979 and then 1987-1990) and because we also lived in a former Portuguese colony in West Africa called Guinea-Bissau (1981-1983). You could get pretty decent Chinese food in Lisbon and one of the reasons was because Macau was still a Portuguese colony at the time. So it wouldn't have been right to come all the way here and not take the one hour ferry from Hong Kong to Macau to check it out. Most of the people who heard about my plans thought I was nuts.

Of course, the day of my Macau trip was the one day when Hong Kong and it seemed the entire Pearl River Delta were socked in with thick fog. The tops of all the skyscrapers in Hong Kong disappeared in the fog. One could barely make out Kowloon across the harbor. It was not a cheery morning. The Macau Ferry boat itself was a large, modern jetfoil catamaran. You have to go through immigration to take this ferry and then the ferry operators give you assigned seating on your catamaran. Very civilized. They assigned me a seat all by myself by the window. I was the only Caucasian on the boat. During the ride, the ferry people come through and offered hot noodles. I noticed signs everywhere that said "sterilized after every journey." I took a picture of a sign that said "Sterilized Carpet."

The ride across the estuary was fascinating. Huge freighters appeared out of the fog while we were still on the Hong Kong side; we got pretty close to some of them. Then the route threaded between the many hundreds of "outlying islands" that surround Hong Kong. Most of these islands are uninhabited and rise steeply out of the water -- pine trees and windswept bamboo on the tops and steep slopes of quartz straight down into the water. Occasionally an island had a lighthouse. Because of the fog, we could only see the islands closest to us. The more distant islands were little more than gray smudges. About halfway across the estuary I got a text message that said Welcome to China! It was from China Unicom which must be the cell phone carrier in Guangdong. It explained to me how to make a long distance call from China and then said Enjoy Your Journey in China! Then, as we got closer to Macau, I got a text message that said Welcome to Macau! This one was from SmartPhone Macau, and it also told me how to make a long distance call.

I got to Macau and immediately took a taxi up to the Fort (Fortaleza). Macau is a series of little hills on a tiny peninsula and at the top of one is the old Portuguese fort with cannons and battlements. I could see absolutely nothing because of the fog but that actually made it seem rather Portuguese. I spent a lot of my childhood climbing around on Portuguese forts in the fog and the rain so this seemed appropriate. The fort was absolutely mobbed with Chinese. And it was beautiful. Bougainvillea and jacaranda trees and fig trees and rubber trees and lots of hanging flower pots and cobblestones and cannons. I took approximately twenty-seven thousand photographs. In the middle of the fort is the Museu de Macau which I also visited. They insisted on taking my temperature before they'd let me in -- swine flu prevention. They have a great machine that takes your temperature without touching you. Amazing. The museum was amusing. It starts with a comparison of Eastern and Western civilization which is clearly designed to demonstrate the superiority of Eastern civilization. E.g., Picts running around in bear skins scratching runes on stones compared to Chinese wrapped in red silk robes, writing poetry and inventing the astrolabe. This exhibit also described Christianity as a "Palestinian religion" which I thought was wonderful. Later on there are fabulous photographs of old Macau and fascinating maps of the South China Sea in Portuguese. Macau was clearly a beautiful place -- once. Now, not so much.

The Portuguese gave Macau back to China in 1999. Since then, Macau has become the gambling center of Asia and in 2006 Macau surpassed Las Vegas in gambling revenue. There is a Sands and a Wynn and an MGM Grand and also some homegrown casinos. That part of town is built on land fill and is frankly, hideously depressingly ugly. The fog and rain didn't help. So I tried to avoid it and instead walked the cobblestone streets down from the Fort, past the ruins of Sao Paulo church of which nothing but the facade remains, and down past the old Senate buildings. The facade of Sao Paolo's has the normal Christian images but also two massive palm trees, a fabulous dragon, and some other tropical tree. The steps down from there to the Senate plaza are reminiscent of the Spanish Steps in Rome -- hundreds of steps covered with Chinese tourists leading to black and white tiled sidewalks just like in Portugal. The old Senate buildings are painted in pastels -- yellow, green, pink and blue. The square still had Christmas decorations up and Chinese New Year decorations were on the way up so it was all very festive and gay. The black and white tiled sidewalks were wonderfully Portuguese with emblems of sea creatures. Crabs and starfish and sea urchins. I tried to take pictures of them but they were always covered with people.

Then I started trudging back to the ferry. All the restaurants were closed because it was Sunday so I couldn't get the Portuguese food I was looking for. I thought I'd find the Mandarin Oriental instead and have tea before going back to Hong Kong. I walked and walked and walked. Then I consulted my map. I walked some more. I passed every hideous casino. More walking. More map looking. No Mandarin. I walked so far I gave myself shin splints and wore off all the cartilage in my hip joints, I'm sure of it. I managed to twist both my ankles and I even fell down once (which is embarrassing when you're all alone and the only non-Chinese person around to boot; people think you're drunk or something). Still, endless walking and no Mandarin anywhere.

It turns out the Mandarin in Macau has closed and no-one, not even the Mandarin in Hong Kong where I am staying, bothered to tell me that the guide book is wrong. AAAARGH. So I continued shuffling with my cartilage-free hip joints and ruined shins to the ferry. I slept all the way back to Hong Kong.

My final act yesterday was to eat a bowl of wonton soup at the hotel. I am proud to say I can now eat a bowl of slippery noodle soup with chopsticks and not get too much of it on my clothes. This is a vast improvement from dinner at the China Club the other night when I kept shooting peanuts and things accidentally at Patti Walsh, sitting next to me. I think I may even have gotten a baby bok choy in her hand bag by mistake. She was very nice about it -- she said in fact the silver chopsticks at The China Club are the hardest ones to eat with in all of Hong Kong because they are so slippery. This is such a well-known fact that mean-spirited executives will take job candidates on interview lunches there just to see how they manage. The Mandarin chopsticks are pretty slippery too -- made of mahogany or something -- but I did okay!

And that concludes my first trip to Asia.

Labels: Macau

posted by Anonymous @ 3:23 PM 0 comments

The Hong Kong Productivity Council

Yesterday we did what we actually came to Hong Kong to do in the first place -- give a three hour presentation to the Hong Kong Productivity Council on US Consumer Product Safety Commission regulatory issues. I am no stranger to giving presentations but this one was unlike anything I've experienced in my career so far.

The HKPC is essentially the trade association for Hong Kong manufacturers -- toys, electronics, art supplies, sunglasses, lightbulbs, you name it. They are funded in part by the government, in part by the Hong Kong Green Manufacturing Alliance and various other other industrial trade associations in Hong Kong. They occupy a building in Kowloon that looked like a student union building from the 1970s -- lots of open spaces and curved walls and exhibit space. The stage was massive and our powerpoint displayed across four floor to ceiling screens. We had name tags that came with corsages of pink flowers, as did all the VIPs who seemed to be various toy magnates and other industrial luminaries. Everyone had assigned seats (I was between the head of the Hong Kong Toy Manufacturing Council and a representative from the Hong Kong Federation of Industries). The event began with "souvenirs and photographs." Each of us were called up to the stage in turn and presented with an crystal "souvenir" engraved with our name and something extensive in Chinese. The English said "Thank you for your contribution to our seminar on the US Consumer Product Safety Commission." We had to stand with our crystal souvenir for photographs with the head of the toy manufacturing council, then we had a group photo with a lots of other people wearing pink corsages, then more photos -- and this was all before we even gave the presentation.

After the presentation we went on a tour of the industrial exhibits in the building -- mainly so that they could take more photographs. We stood in front of a mural of trees that represented Green Manufacturing. We stood in front of, and then inside, a concept car that had all the different parts of the automobile that are made in Hong Kong on display. We played with the car parts and giggled. More pictures. We stood in front of the signage of each contributing member to the seminar for photos. We stood out on the street in front of the HKPC logo for more photos. Then we went with everyone who had a pink corsage to a massive, extensive, formal Chinese celebratory lunch at a restaurant inside a humongous Kowloon mall. Again I sat between the head of the toy council and the lovely lady from the Federation of Industries. Contrary to everything I have ever heard about Chinese officialdom, we all giggled helplessly during the meal about everything. My Federation friend was wearing pale yellow and I was dressed up like a cherry blossom in a pale pink frilly number so we talked about that a lot. A LOT. We talked about how boring it must be for Hong Kong people to travel to the rest of the world. They nodded vigorously. We laughed about a lot of other things, murky and inscrutable. Terribly jolly -- terribly. Again, not really sure exactly what I ate except I know I ate a cabbage and fish soup that was excellent and a dessert of sago cream with grapefruit that was also excellent. Oh, and Peking duck in there somewhere.

Then they sent us to a jade market so that my two male colleagues could buy gifts for their wives. I was the consultant but I was not very useful nor was I in the mood for it, considering I was still dressed up like a cherry blossom with my foolish pink corsage, lugging around my unwanted crystal souvenir in the tropical humidity in my pointy shoes -- all I wanted to do was put on blue jeans. One of them would say "would my wife like this?" and I would respond, "I don't know, what does your wife like?" Etc.

That was all exhausting, as you can imagine. But then the best night of my Hong Kong trip began. My lovely friend who is the co-head of our technology practice in the Hong Kong office and I set off on an adventure (I had since put on blue jeans) to pick up a Burmese kitten that was arriving for her from Sydney at the airport. We had her husband and son in tow. Our first job was to find the cargo terminal at the airport which was no easy feat -- it is abbreviated HACTL which sounded rather like something the Burmese kitten might hack up on the kitchen floor. As we were driving out over the Calatrava (or Calatrava-esque) suspension bridges that connect the various islands, the airport called and said, essentially, "Your kitten is here, are you coming?" My friend said back, "yes yes! We're on the way! Thank you so much!" We found the cargo terminal and walked past massive numbers of pallets of cargo destined for various places. I thought -- ha! These are the very products I was discussing this morning with the Productivity Council -- here they are actually beginning the supply chain! As my friend maneuvered through the bureaucracy in Cantonese trying to find the kitten, her son and I tried to identify the commodities on the pallets and their destinations. The best thing we found was a pallet of lightbulbs going to Tblisi, Georgia on Air Guinea. Cathay Pacific cargo planes roared overhead, forklifts beeped all around us. Her son is 14 and made it quite clear that he had never had a grownup suggest this sort of game before. Eventually, after carting little pieces of flimsy paper from one window to another, dodging forklifts and industrial equipment, paying cashiers piddly sums hither and yon, etc., we were ushered into a bright white room and the kitten was "released." She was adorable -- a lilac-colored Burmese who had flown 9 hours from Sydney and really wanted to come out and play. Everyone, including the HACTL employees in their hard hats and overalls, stopped among the forklifts and clanging sounds of things and clustered around the kitty carrier and said things like, "aaaaaawwwwwwwww! wook at the wittle kitty!" Or its Cantonese equivalent. It was lovely.

Then we drove the kitten back to my friend's apartment which is in the Mid-Levels on the way up to the Peak. This was my first experience in a private home in Hong Kong. She has stunning views and her home is beautifully decorated in the Chinese style -- lots of red and dark wood. Alex was very proud of his room and showed it to me and presented his music collection and I asked him questions about his organizing principle for his CDs etc and then her son went and got me a glass of red wine and some dolmas (my friend's husband is Greek) while everyone else was huddled off with the kitten getting it settled. We spent an hour or so settling the kitten and paying attention to the original cat (Atticus) who was sulking in the kitchen and then we went off to SoHo for dinner.

In Soho, we rode, as a family, what is called The Escalators. This is a Commuter Escalator that takes office workers from Central up to the Mid-Levels and is, literally, an escalator that goes on for miles and miles with stops at important thoroughfares. It's fabulous. You can look in store windows and apartment windows and everything as you pass long. I took pictures -- my friend took pictures of me, I took pictures of them, etc. It was excellent! Every major City needs a Commuter Escalator. We hopped off at some British sounding road and wound through the old winding streets of the Soho district which is packed with amazing restaurants of all types. The place was buzzing on a Friday night -- everyone was out for a lovely meal and a stroll. We went to an Italian place that felt as if it could be in San Francisco, or in Italy itself, or in New York -- a tiny tiny hole in the wall with maybe 6 tables and amazing food in a space that was architecturally miraculous for clinging to the mountain and perching on the winding road all at the same time.

And we had a fabulous meal -- we talked about everything imaginable. Books, wine, the son's future educational aspirations, a planned retirement home in Penang, the struggle to always Do the Right Thing in life and most especially in work, the virtues and drawbacks of Hong Kong as a place to live, comparisons to Singapore where they had also lived as a family, etc. It was wonderful.

I felt so lucky to have such nice friends in such an interesting place who let me join them fetching a new pet from the airport, and I was so impressed with how they were raising their son to be such an interesting young man who could more than hold his own with the grown up conversation, and I thought how remarkable that I even know my friend considering I had never been to her city before ever in my life, and that what a strange day it was that began with corsages and crystal souvenirs and photos in working class Kowloon within sight of mainland China and ended with a fabulous meal in a super cosmopolitan Italian restaurant on the side of a mountain that rises out of the South China Sea.

posted by Anonymous @ 3:07 PM 0 comments

Kowloon is totally different from Hong Kong. It's like Newark is to Manhattan. Or Mohandeseen is to Cairo. Or Setubal is to Lisbon. Or Nantes is to Paris. Industrial, working class, not posh. But still fascinating in its own way. We ate lunch at the Intercontinental which is right on the harbor and has stupendous views of Hong Kong and Victoria Peak. It reminded me of eating pigeons at a restaurant we used to go to on on the Nile in Cairo. The glare off the harbor was harsh and we watched squinting out the plate glass windows at the gray industrial life of the port of Hong Kong and the occasional Chinese junk pass back and forth. Our partner had been born and raised in Kowloon as the son of a man who runs a local Chinese brokerage company and he was very proud of the working class background of the neighborhood. He ordered our food for us -- courses and courses of Japanese food that included sea cucumber (tasty!) and yellowtail fish with slices of jalapeno peppers and some kind of remarkable shrimp number and endless other things.

Then he drove us to a meeting we had with a Kowloon toy magnate. An ancient old man who we were meeting with through the services of a liaison company called, appropriately, The Bridge. We picked this man's brain about how he thinks the Hong Kong toy manufacturing industry is dealing with the new US regulations on toy safety. We learned enough to conclude that an awful lot of people in the Chinese toy industry are crooks. Yes. Very unlikely that the Chinese government censors will let us say anything about that in our presentation tomorrow. Sigh. The weirdest part of this meeting was that it took place in a conference room absolutely packed with toys. We sat on replicas of ancient Chinese chairs as Zhu Zhu pets and Spongbob Squarepants dolls stared maniacally at us from the walls. At one point in the meeting, an invisible breeze upset a Zhu Zhu pet and it fell, silently and in slow motion, off the glass shelf and landed as if in a time lapse movie on the plush carpeted floor. Everyone paused, turned to look, and then went back to business.

But the best part of the day was back to Hong Kong for dinner at The China Club with five our partners here. The China Club is amazing -- a four story private club on top of the original Bank of China building which is a fabulous colonial affair made of white stucco and mahogany. The China Club is straight out of the 1930s -- dark uneven hardwood floors, soft yellow lighting, the faint smell of mothballs and mold like one's grandparents' house might have smelled, warm breezes blowing down the halls through the mullioned windows, damask-covered arm chairs, creaky furniture, rooms opening on rooms opening on rooms, a dining room that reeks of tropical flowers to a point that is almost, but not quite, unbearable, waiters serving gimlets and Peking duck on silver platters, a long bar designed like an old ocean liner, a big creaky, mothbally library filled with early 20th century hard back books and leather-backed chairs, one of which was Winston Churchill's favorite. And an amazing rooftop bar with views over everything including the new Bank of China building, which is the I.M. Pei building you see in pictures that has the giant white triangles on it. The walls of this club are covered with modern Chinese art. Which is arresting. Not an inch of wall space is unadorned. Some of it looks pretty Maoist, some of it looks like that Mexican painter Botega, some of it looks like Van Gogh, and some of it looks just plain contemporary. There is an acerbic portrait of Prince Charles wearing a comedy mask, for example.

There is entertainment during the meal (again, we did not do our own ordering and I really can't say for sure what we ate other than that it was voluminous) that includes a performance by The Tea Man who has a teapot with a spout about six feet long. He twirls the pot around his head and neck and arms and sometimes pours a little tea into some cup set strategically about the stage and he stomps and dances and pours. Then there is The Egg Noodle Man, who comes and beats a pile of flour vigorously and ceremoniously into a pulp on a block of marble and than somehow, like magic, produces egg noodles from it without the help of any knives or other machinery. I was sitting next to my partner Patti who is a laugh-riot and she got very excited and kept saying "ooo! the magic part is coming! the magic part is coming!" Then there was the speak-easy singer -- a creature most impressively arrayed in red feather regalia who seemed to be female but who Patti swore "is really a bloke." As you can imagine, a lively conversation ensued about that at the table with all the male partners taking turns asserting that the singer had just winked at him so it MUST be a female. Patti and I said that this feeble evidence didn't really prove anything much, did it? And our partner Will said, possibly a little too loudly, "well in Asia you never can be sure, can you?"

The general theme of our meal at the China Club was unbridled gaiety. My partners just LOVE living in Hong Kong and about every 15 minutes someone said something like "Isn't Asia just the most amazing place?" Some of them, like our host Satpal, have been in Hong Kong for decades but are still thrilled by every moment of it. My new friend Patti moved there from London only 5 years ago and is trying to break it to her family that she may, in fact, never return. Dinner at The China Club was like going back in time to the roaring Twenties. It was fabulous. I don't think I shall ever forget it.

I noticed to myself that people here seem very happy. It occurred to me that maybe they are happy because unlike us, they are not worrying about China. They ARE China. Good economic news from China is GOOD here. This is the free-est economy in the world and they're right in the middle of it -- all the benefits of the rise of the Chinese economy with the benefits of the Special Status Hong Kong enjoys. I realized, particularly when driving around Kowloon, that perhaps we've had it all wrong in the U.S. They really don't care much about us and our stupid regulations. They are busy buzzing and hammering and tapping away on engineering feats we can only imagine and making money hand over fist. You can do literally anything here in Hong Kong except the winter sports, I've decided (they even have a Hong Kong Jockey Club), and then I'm told you just hop on a plane to Hokkaido to get your fill of Olympic-quality skiing.

Perhaps, in fact, Hong Kong, is ------- the Center of the World.

Labels: China Club, Kowloon

posted by Anonymous @ 2:54 PM 0 comments

I started my day in Hong Kong today eating the best mango and smoothest yogurt I've ever had. I felt like Julia Child in that scene in Julie & Julia when she has her first sole meuniere.

I walked outside my hotel and became instantly lost. It was embarrassing how short a time it took. I turned right at the Gucci store thinking I would walk around the block but within 30 seconds I had literally no idea where I was and didn't recognize a single building and couldn't even tell which direction was which and I actually started to get dizzy. It as as if I had fallen through a wormhole. My hair had poofed out into an afro from the heat and humidity and was getting in my face so I kept whipping my head around to control it which only added to the dizziness. I remembered my guide book's advice which was something like "No human being has ever gotten lost in Hong Kong (humph) but if you manage it nevertheless, just look up and head towards the mountain." So that's what I did.

At the base of the mountain, which is, oddly, right next to the Gucci store (how did I miss it?) I started up Battery Park Road. This is the road the British built to haul their cannons up the mountain. I walked up through rubber trees and mango trees and fig trees and found myself standing in front of a sign that said "The Anglican (Episcopal) Cathedral of St. John Welcomes You." Very surprising to see the Anglican emblem here in a forest of rubber trees. The Cathedral is beautiful. A small stucco building painted a lovely pale yellow set in beautiful gardens right next to the old French Mission building that is now the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. The inside of the cathedral is airy and cool and beautiful -- tropical hardwood pews and carvings and huge vases of tropical flowers and cool, slate floors. Outside in the tropical garden some old Chinese people were doing Tai Chi. A lot of the inside of the Cathedral is dedicated to the British regiments who defended Hong Kong from the Japanese in WWII. There is a plaque dedicated to the Duke of Edinburgh. There are also beautiful needlepoint kneelers made by various British ladies over the years. It reminded me a lot of a Presbyterian Church we once visited off the main square in Cairo where we sang Abide With Me for a young British woman's funeral. She had been a secretary at the British Embassy in Cairo and had died suddenly of a heart attack jumping into a swimming pool in the heat. Being in St. John's Cathedral in Hong Kong made me want to sing Abide With Me.

But I had to press on to the Peak Tram -- a wonderful wooden

Labels: Hong Kong, Lugard Road, Peak Tram, St. John's Cathedral, Victoria Peak

posted by Anonymous @ 2:29 PM 0 comments

• My flight was exhilarating and reminded me again why I love United so much. We flew from Chicago to HK straight over the top of the globe. Our pilot told us we were 600 miles west of the North Pole and then we came down across the entire Asian continent, over Mongolia, straight down to Hong Kong. We made no turns at all on our flight until got to the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong (Canton) Province.



• My seat lay flat down to 180 degrees and I slept as comfortably as if I were in my own bed, just without the cats. The only things that disturbed me were a bump of turbulence when our airplane crossed onto the Eurasian landmass below the Artic circle and another bump of turbulence when we hit the Gobi Desert. I woke an hour before landing to a bowl of steaming hot noodles and some Oolong tea.



• The in-flight map was a Google Earth map (newly renovated airplane) so you could zoom in and see the vast wasted expanse of the Gobi Desert and Mongolia, or the rocky, mottled coast line of Southern China down to every last underwater rock and wooden pier. Southern China looks beautiful from the air -- bright green with a jagged, mountainous coast.



• The Pearl River delta in Guandong Province is also beautiful and mountainous and green and very unexpected. The new Chep Lak Kok airport at Hong Kong is out on one of the outer islands that is so mountainous it makes the Big Sur coastline in California look small and docile. I am so surprised at how dramatic and beautiful and tropical everything is here. I had no idea, but then again, I'd never really thought about it much before. Which is shocking. Huge sheer rock cliffs plunging straight down into the green sea, dotted occasionally with super huge container ships that look tiny next to the coastline. The South China Sea is jade green and the mountainous coast is covered in lush tropical foliage with sudden rocky outcroppings. It's like the Caribbean or the South of France only on steroids.



• When I landed at the airport, the mountains around it were purple and pink in the dusk.
  I was greeted by a "handler" from the Mandarin Oriental hotel who drove me through the humongous beautiful clean airport (largest in the world, I'm told), crowded all around with huge purple mountains, in a cart and whisked me through immigration and customs and put me on the express train to downtown (several islands away). I was not expecting this nice Oriental man. He called me "EGAN! Kimberly Katherine!" the entire time at top volume (each time staring quizzically at the big piece of paper with my name on it), which made it hard to keep a straight face. He handed me a card when he put me on the train that was printed in English and Cantonese and that told anyone who found me astray to return me to the Mandarin Oriental -- I refer to it now as my "Paddington Bear" card. It also has preprinted requests for taxi drivers, in both English and Cantonese, -- "Please take EGAN! Kimberly Katherine! to the Peak Tram!" for example.



• The train into Hong Kong was beautiful, sleep, modern, and very quiet. Like the Heathrow Express only much more beautiful. It reminded me once again that Dulles, JFK and O'Hare are among the only major international airports not served by an express train to downtown.



• Public announcements here take a long time because everything has to be said in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.



• I met my colleague at the restaurant bar at the Mandarin. He had arrived from San Francisco earlier in the day and had made the idiotic move of getting me a visiting office in our offices here. I told him I had NO INTENTION of setting foot in the office, thank you very much.



• I ate a huge steaming bowl of Wonton Soup that was like no other wonton soup I have ever had. There was actually no soup component to it at all. Big pile of very tasty noodles, mounds of wontons shaped like meatballs in it, and four or five strips of sweet and sour pork thrown in for good measure. If you wanted liquid in your "soup", you could pour a little bowl of soy sauce and a little bowl of a mysterious reddish brown viscous substance on it and tried to slurp it all down gracefully with chopsticks that were made, as far as I could tell, from mahogany. With this, I drank a ginger-orange-hibiscus infused golden yellow non-alcoholic beverage called a Young and Beautiful Lady. Very appropriate, I thought for EGAN! Kimberly Katherine!



• Our hotel is right under the big colonial cobblestone walkway up part of the big mountain to the Peak Tram. So tomorrow I am going to venture up there to the top, through the botanical gardens and the old English churchyards and whatever else I find. That is all I have on my To Do list, other than to also try to find the Giant Bronze Buddha known as Tian Tan. He shouldn't be too hard to find (210 feet tall or something -- see right) and have dinner tomorrow night with a client.

Good night!

posted by Anonymous @ 9:26 AM 0 comments