Night time

At 8pm every night for 20 minutes Hong Kong puts on a symphony laser/light show. It involves most of the large sky scrapers on the island. There is music and the lights and lasers sync up with that music.

It was like watching the buildings come alive.

This boat, called a "junk" came in to dock after the light show finished. We can do a harbour tour on it for the light show. A long time ago the whole harbour would be filled with junks such as this one. Nowadays there are only a few. This is the first one I've seen.

It's quite a spectacular city scape, at night and during the day.


A short sample of the end of the light show

The Peak

On Saturday we heading to the island again to do some sight seeing. It was a nice clear day so we decided to take the tram up to "The Peak", a lookout behind the city. The peak tram has been in operation since 1888 so it's cultural as well.


It took about 8 minutes to get up to the top and gave us some impressive views. There were also houses and apartment buildings the whole way up. I'd hate to have to walk up everyday.

The view from the top was great. We got to see that Hong Kong was not actually that big at all. What you see here in this picture is about it. You could probably walk from one end to the other in 2 hours.


There was a Madame Tussaud's Wax museum at the top. Hey look it's Jacky Chan!!

Here is a panning video of the view.

Life at School

Here is our school. It's surrounded by a lot of apartment buildings where many of our students live. The view the other way is of a mountain and trees, so it's kind of nice.

The native English teachers had to pose for a picture after the birthday party.


Jill hard at work making popsicle stick houses. When you open the door you'll see the students picture. Awwwwww, how cute. This is our work areas where we spend all afternoon preparing.


Here is a my class during play time, I have more kids hiding somewhere. And a Chinese teacher somewhere too.


LUNCH TIME!!! It's not so bad, it all Chinese style food. Some of it is really good like the bbq ham and sweet and sour pork. We usually get 2 main bowls of something, a bowl of rice and a bowl of vegetable and beef soup.

Thursday's lunch was mushroom/cucumber beef and ginger fish

Friday's lunch was spicy cabbage and beef with ginger as well as mushroom chicken wings and another dish of some green veggies, kinda looked like bok choy. I'm pretty happy with it. Especially since it's free. 7 of us full day teachers sit around this kid-sized table in kid-sized chairs and eat together out of these communal dishes


This week we've had a few kids out with swine flu so they were gracious enough to give us all masks to wear.


Dr. Brian is going to teach everyone how to be a ninja today~!

We would just wear the mask in the morning when we're teaching then take them off before lunch.

Here I am playing with the Japanese twins. They got angry because I was too heavy. The students are not exclusively Chinese. Along with Japan, we have children from Pakistan, mainland China (they speak Mandarin, not Cantonese), and the UK.

Stanley - Southern Hong Kong

We took a bus ride south of the city to a small town called Stanley. It was a bit touristy, there were lots of western restaurants and upscale shopping. We spent the day walking around and checking out the market.

This is the Murray House. Built in 1844. Probably named after some guy named Murray. It's a museum now. Or possibly named after some guy named Museum.

Then it was off to the market for some shopping.

Some cool chinese containers.
Almost bought this but couldn't think of a place to put it.

Other than that, we found a great bookstore and had a nice bus ride around the island.

So as some of you may already know. Tai Chi is a very common form of leisure activity here in Hong Kong and in China. It's a great way for old and young to do some stretching and exercise. It's kind of like Chinese yoga. It's very common all over the city in the early morning before it gets too hot to see a large park or square full of people all in unison going through the routine. There are also different kinds. Earlier in the morning we first see this group. Mostly made up of older women doing some sort of Tai Chi with umbrellas.

This pic was taken from our apartment window:

It's really interesting to see. We usually pass them in the morning on the way to work.

Now I think when they've mastered the umbrella, they get to move onto the swords. Usually after the umbrella group has finished their workout, a smaller group of people, usually men, go out with ceremonial swords and do similar routines with them.

I took this pic from our apartment too. Sometimes there are a dozen or so people doing this. Today it was just one man practicing with his sword. Perhaps there were more people coming.

Typhoon Day!

In Korea we experienced many typhoons, but we always had to go to work, no matter how bad they were. I remember taking a set of clothes and a towel in a plastic bag, heading out into the storm, getting completely soaked, and having to dry off an change at school. They were so money-oriented that they didn't shut down for anything. I hated typhoons.
Well, Hong Kong is different. When the typhoon reaches a certain level, businesses have to shut down. Yesterday we waited all day for the typhoon to reach that level. It finally did ... at 4:45pm. Yep, we left a full 15 minutes early. Lovelier still was waking up this morning with the typhoon still at level 8 (meaning no work). I couldn't get too excited though, as it was forcasted to drop to a lower level by 10 am. The practice is that once it drops to the lower level, employees have to return to work in two hours time. I felt for sure we'd have to work this afternoon.
As luck would have it, our supervisor just called to say we had the full day off - what a treat!
I now love typhoons.

Well we had a very sudden thunder storm hit us. Sunday was more humid than the past few days and I think that is a prime ingredient for thunder and lightning. It rained a lot too. The lightning was constantly striking every 2 or 3 seconds and it went on for about 2 hours. It was pretty cool. Here are two pictures out our living room window.
I also shot a short video:

Trying something new

Well this past week came and went. We've past our 2 week mark, it doesn't sound very long but it's almost 2% of our contract time. On Friday after work Jill and I went for a walk around our neighbourhood. Our goal was to go to the public library and get library cards.

Ta daa:

We've been pretty good about eating at home during the week. We eat lunch at school then I cook something for dinner here. We're trying to stay on a budget. On the weekend however we are eating out a bit more. Mostly because we're out anyway exploring. I found a nice Turkish restaurant for lunch and had no problem ordering but for dinner we went to a local Chinese noodle shop and were confronted with this:

The server didn't speak much English but we managed to communicate that we wanted noodle soup with chicken. We were quite confident that we ordered correctly and were happy with what came.Each bowl cost about $2.50. When paying the bill the server had written on a piece of paper in English more of the menu with some of their specialties. They include: Beef Brisket, Beef Tendon or Beef Honeycomb Tripe, all in either a broth or a curry with either thick rice noodles, noodles, rice vermicelli or rice. Next time we'll be able to try more and be a bit more confident with ordering.

Sunday was spent heading down to Victoria Harbour, and across from Tsim Sha Tsui to Wan Chai. On the mainland side, we first hit the Avenue of Stars and saw the walk of fame. We saw the starts of some famous Hong Kong actors like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

The harbour gave very impressing views of the Hong Kong skyline.

This clock tower used to be the final destination of the Oriental Express that started in London, England and ended right here in Hong Kong.

The Star Ferry used to cross the Harbour.

Hong Kong's Tram, in operation for over 100 years.

Well that was the weekend. We've had great weather the whole time we've been here as you can see from the pictures. It's been great. We'll see what the coming week brings.

I hope you've all enjoyed the blog so far. Sorry the posts have been long, we've done quite a bit in a short period of time. We'll try to update the blog at least once a week and maybe more if something interesting happens. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy writing it.

We had a very light week of teaching. We went to the school on Monday to meet the other NET (Native English Teachers) and get a brief orientation of the school. Everything checked out and it was great talking to the other teachers. That night we went out with our principal and another Chinese teacher to a very nice Chinese food restaurant and had way too much food. It was all delicious and we got to take all the left overs home.

With our time off before teaching we managed to get a cell phone and do some more exploring. Wednesday we were at school doing some orientation and helping in the classroom and Thursday and Friday we were on our own. Sounds scary but just wait, let me tell you our schedule. We arrive at 8:30 and help the kids arrive and have breakfast. They do that and play until 9:00 when my kids go outside to play in the playground for 30 minutes, then it's inside, bathroom and ready to study. We teach for 50 minutes, then it's snack time and bathroom break again and then another 40 minutes of teaching then they can play for 15-20 minutes until it's time to go home. By noon we're pretty much all done. Lunch at the school has been decent. We get a soup of some sort, it's been good so far, and two main dishes with a bowl of rice. The main dishes have been Chinese style and have been hit and miss, I'd say 70% of it has been really good and 30% I could pass on. I do however look forward to lunch everyday.

We both looked forward to the weekend and had a very busy two days of walking around most of the busy little areas in Hong Kong. We started off by going to an area called Mong Kok which had many little markets. The first market we hit was the "Ladies Market" it was traditionally for women's fasion but has spread to cover mostly everything an asian market would have.

Jill posing buy some trinkets and paintings. We both really liked the boat in Victoria Harbour.

One of the market stalls.

Some wall decorations.

From there we walked a few kilometers to a temple. Tin Hau temple is devoted to the Goddess of the Sea, which is very popular in Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, no photographs inside the temple.

After the temple we hit the Jade Market. It was filled with....well.....jade. And pearls I suppose.

With all this walking around we had to stop for some grub.

Just kidding, I'd never eat here.

We ate at a noodle, rice place that looked clean and had an English menu.

Can you believe we found another 2 markets, first was the vegetable market.

And our last market of the day was the famous Temple Street Night Market, similar to the Ladies Market earlier.