A Burger and a Salad After a Long Day at Work

I'm glad that TPR is being so helpful to you and I'm glad that you've made the decision to come to Taiwan. We'll be closer and besides you'll be makin' that bacon. You've got plenty of time to prepare yourself physically and mentally.

I worked till a little before 8 today and decided to treat myself to a burger at the Japanese burger/coffee shop called Freshness Burger. I pass by it almost everyday to get the minibus home since it's right in front of the bus stop and I've seen several branches elsewhere, but I've never eaten there. I think the name put me off at first, I thought it sounded weird, but today I decided to give it a try. At first I was thinking of getting a regular beef patty hamburger but instead I decided to go more healthy and chose the mushroom burger instead. I got 15% off using my student card and snapped some shots while waiting for my burger.

This is their little ketchup and condiment stand. The spherical light says 'World Spice' and the bottom looks like a retro fridge.

The 'Yucha soda'. It's soda with honey citron mix at the bottom. My piano teacher once gave me honey citron tea mix, it's kind of like marmalade but it's good for making hot drinks, especially when you have a cold. It tasted pretty good as a soda.

Maybe next time I'll try the regular hamburger, apparently the beef is 'healthy hormone free 100% Australian'.

The salad and drink, looks awfully empty without the burger. I was too hungry so I ate the salad first while waiting for the burger.

The mushroom burger! It's literally a large mushroom the size of a meat patty in a burger. The onions were sauteed just right, it smelled really good and the onions were really soft. The mushroom was big and juicy, I hope it had enough proteins to substitute for the beef!

It's so hot and juicy that it steamed up my camera lens...

My stalkerish view of the bus stop.

Hope you enjoyed the burger as much as I did.

Back to food...

Back to my regular material. Today's lunch was 米线 with 水饺 and broccoli. It's supposed to be in Yunnan style and it's been one of the regular dishes at 美心 along with 四川 style spicy noodles. I think it's one of my most veggie filled meals lately.

My dinner looks a little sparse from this angle, but you know I'm a sucker for omelet rice. The chicken steak and tomato sauce wasn't bad either.

Just a few random thoughts as well, often on the MTR I see people playing all kinds of games on their DS, PSP, iPhone or other device. Before it used to be that the DS and PSP dominated the handhelds being played but lately the iPhone/iPod touch are starting to dominate. Sometimes it can be annoying when people are so focussed on the game that they lack awareness of their surroundings, playing as they walk or blocking doorways while they play. Gadget owners in Hong Kong generally fall into two types. The cheapo who uses old Nokia phones from the early years of mobile phones and those that change there phone every few months. I forget the exact figures, but an average person in Hong Kong will change their phone probably around once a year. Today I saw a person who probably falls in the cheapo category, he was using an old Palm PDA with black and white screen to play Bejewelled. I think he was playing the demo version as well since he kept restarting the game. I guess this disparity reflects the class gap in Hong Kong well, but somehow Hong Kong seems to chug along just fine. Crime is relatively minimal and despite the stressful nature of Hong Kong I think most people are generally happy.

I hope you get all of your questions answered about TPR, hopefully I can catch you in the morning.

I Love You

On pain of making a corny blog I titled the blog "I Love you". I don't have any food photos for you today since I didn't have anything particularly yummy. Instead I chose a few pics to post up before I slept.

Lookie, it's a heart I drew for you a while back using a red light and long exposure settings (15 seconds if I remember correct) to get the effect right. It took a few attempts but I liked how this one turned out best.

One of my favorite pics from the trip, makes me feel all warm inside.

Finally, a fun photo. You already know I like this one but I wanted to share again.

The end of this post is a little random but I was reminded by what my friend Vincent posted on Facebook, "Whatever He says to you, do it". He didn't quote where it's from, but it's from John 2:5, when Mary, mother of Jesus, tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them to do. This Sunday, our guest speaker for our sermon, who once taught our Pastor in seminary, argued that this is the most wise and most important advice imparted by anyone, in the whole of history and the universe. I hope that this will hold true for both you and me. If you have time you can listen to the sermon --> here.

The sermon is on March 14th and is given by Ronnie Stevens titled "The Wedding Feast at Cana". I just realized that I can now also go back and watch the sermon I missed on Valentines day, I'll watch that tomorrow morning perhaps. I love you, I hope I can get some rest tomorrow and spend some time with you.

Lazy Post II

Lazy Vlog

Went swimming again today. The air was a little cold but the water was warm. Did the frogstyle again. Talk to you tomorrow.

Lazy post

Boo. Today's post is a lazy post, since I celebrated the end of the work week with a meaty gaming session. It's 3am, it's late and I should sleep soon. You get another videolog since you didn't get to see me much today...

Today's Youtube vlog

This post is kind of all over the place, but I've also discovered a new way to watch/listen to music on Youtube, it's a new function called the 'YouTube Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool'. It's kind of like a smart electronic DJ that will select the artist you search for and other related artists and songs and create a playlist. It's kind of like Pandora, except you get the music video and you can also directly modify your playlist. You can check it out at www.youtube.com/disco

Saw this one from the car blog I read...

Saw this when I got distracted uploading my videolog. I think we heard it in your car. I like the song. The video is also trippy. Listening to it on my headphones makes me happy, the sounds really come out clearly.

Short Videolog

The Game I've Been Playing Lately

This post, however unlikely it seems, is for you. I feel like videogames are sort of my arena and are my little world when I don't get to talk to you at night, so I thought I might share my little world with you.

You probably didn't know but there is a social network for games where you can play with friends. It's called Steam and it's very popular. Many of the computer game publishers publish their games on the network and you can buy and download them, instead of the traditional format of buying the games in-stores and on CD/DVDs. I haven't bought many games but one of the games that I've been playing lately is called Team Fortress 2, it focuses a lot on team work. There are two teams and usually the objective is to steal the enemy team's intelligence. The basic rules are that there are two bases, yours and the enemy's. The two team colors are red and blue so the bases are also colored accordingly, as are the characters. There are points where you can pick up packages to replace lost health and lost ammunition. After you consume these they are regenerated after a fixed period of time. The main goal is to collect the intelligence from the basement of the enemy base and return it to the basement of your base 3 times. Whichever team does this first wins. You get points for killing enemies, healing people, capturing the enemy intelligence and defending your intelligence from being captured. At the beginning of each game you are spawned in a 'safe area' where the enemy cannot enter and you can replenish your health and ammunition indefinitely. You can return to the safe area at any point. When you are 'killed' you are 'respawned' after a set period of time depending on the specific rules where you play (the details of the rules can be changed). Killing the enemy only has the advantage in that you slow them down slightly from capturing your intelligence and your team mates.

You can play as many characters:

a heavy weapons guy: he has a strong machine gun but he walks very slow. He also has a lot of health to compensate for his slowness. Russian nationality.

engineer: he builds stuff to help the team, these include automatic sentry guns, teleporters and resupply for ammunition and health. American nationality (midwest accent).

medic: he heals people. After healing people for a long time he can charge up an invulnerability ability, which he can employ to make the person he is healing invulnerable to enemy fire for a short period of time. This can be a great advantage when you need to storm the enemy base and get rid of many enemies or the engineer's sentry gun. German nationality.

spy: he can cloak to become invisible and he can destroy the engineers buildings, disguise as the enemy and backstab people (which instantly kills them, but only works when you sneak up from behind). Seems like the coolest character but people quickly start becoming paranoid and start shooting their own people because they think you're the spy. Once you get shot by the enemy your disguise is revealed. It's not easy being a spy. French nationality.

Scout: he runs really fast, he usually steals the intel but his firepower is weak. His main strategy is to hit and run to slowly wear down the enemy. American nationality (with a Boston accent)

pyro: shoots fire, is resistant to enemy flames. He's pretty fast on his feet and is good for close range attacks. You can check for spies using your flames, when an invisible spy gets lit on fire he become visible. Your flames will continue to damage the enemy until they are put out by themselves, until your enemy is submersed in water or when you are healed either my the medic, items or by an engineer's building. This guy wears a full flame retardant suit, no one has any idea what his nationality is because his voice is muffled.

soldier: shoots rockets. He can either be a close range or far range fighter. His rockets are great for dealing with sentry guns or heavys since they deal a lot of damage. American nationality.

demolitions: shoots mines that explode on his command and shoots grenades. Arguably the most overpowered class. Since it is hard to aim grenade they do a lot of damage, but a lot of good players have already mastered the art of shooting grenades so they can be deadly. Using mines he can also be a very tactical player. He is a black Scottish man.

sniper: he can shoot people from afar. If you hit people in the head, the payoff for the difficulty of the shot is, of course, that you incapacitate the player. Australian nationality.

You can also talk and communicate, I usually just type shortcuts that allow me to communicate quickly, I find it weird to speak on my mic with strangers. The game tries to foster team work and usually the team that works well together and communicates best will win. The game regularly updates every few months with new 'maps' (locations to fight) and weapons for each of the classes. Each update is free and you can play the game indefinitely. The game also has an 'achievement' system where you can earn achievements based on your performance. This makes the game more social since you can share the list of your achievements with friends.

You can find my website with my achievements here -->Clickity click

You can also see how many hours I've been playing, about 2 hours on average for a weekday. Although this is much less than what many players play on other games, say World of Warcraft, I'd probably want to spend a little less time in the game. Also, unlike World of Warcraft there is no monthly fee, so I won't spend a fortune playing this game.

Just wanted to share my little world with you. I hope you gained some insight to my gaming habits. If you clicked on the website you'll see that currently my favorite character is the heavy weapons guy (aka the heavy). Each class has a different nationality and everyone, except the pyro, has a little video exposing their charcter. My character is dumb witted but powerful guy who loves nothing but firing his gun, he even named his gun Sasha. He has a strong Russian accent. The game makers have an interesting sense of humor. You can find the character expose videos --> here.

Even though you might not relate to the game the videos are quite funny.

Photo Overload!

My noodle bowl in action! I actually didn't have this today, I took the photos earlier but didn't get the chance to share.

My lunch today, 烧肉饭. It's a little fatty but it's a good small portion. Got my meat, carb and veg (yes I know, I should eat more veg).

On one of my walks today I headed to the lotus pond, next to there was a little pool of koi. Unlike the poor koi in Hawaii these aren't overfed. I took advantage of a man feeding the fish to take a nice photo of them all gathered around the food. I know you don't really like fish, but aren't they pretty?

Last but not least, dinner time. I had 上海排骨担担面. It came with 菜肉包 which is lightly fried after being steamed. Yummy meal. It's not as spicy as it looks! The black stuff isn't soy sauce in case you're wondering, it's 辣酱 with 黑醋. I like to dip my 包 into it.

Food Adventures

My food adventures today started once I got off the bus on the way home. I usually take a green minibus to Central then take the MTR home. I can pretty much take any bus going out of HKU, but I prefer to take the 28 minibus, because it's very slightly cheaper and it's fast. Getting home later is actually a relief for me because I get to miss the large rush hour crowds.

Remember this pic?

Today I took the 22 minibus, which drops me off at a different spot in Central. This is the first thing I saw when I got off. [edit] You can see the Emporio Armani sign in the reflection off of the store's window.

It's a place that sells...salads. I was wondering how this place can stay alive in Hong Kong, but then again it is right in the middle of a trendy upper scale business district/shopping area where Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Brooks Brothers, Coach and every other imaginable luxury brand name is. I'm sure they can manage to get their fair share of trendy health conscious consumers. I like the sign, it's made up of salad bowls. It says 'New York - Hong Kong', such is my cynical nature that I thought that this was a clever marketing ploy, but after checking out their website and an article in NY Mag it appears to really be founded in New York. Not sure many other places/franchises boast being set up in Hong Kong second after being started in a different place. It'll be interesting to see how long this place lasts in Hong Kong's tough real estate market, although I'm pretty sure the markups on salads are pretty high.

Speaking of lasting in a tough real estate market...The local Jollibee's, a Filipino fast food chain specializing in fried chicken, has been around for ages. I can remember them from my early childhood so they must have been around for about 20 years. They have a great strategic position right outside one of the Central MTR station exit. On Sundays Filipino domestic helpers get a day off and so Central/Causeway Bay/any public park becomes their place of refuge. A Filipino friend of mine from the States was shocked to find so many domestic workers in Central on a Sunday, they pretty much take over the parks there. It's a big contrast to the crowds of office workers, bankers and other suits that roam the area on the weekdays. The Jollibee's, in addition to being right outside the MTR station, is near a building where there are many Filipino goods shops too, making the place even more strategic. Every time you leave this MTR exit you can smell the heavenly fried chicken. I want to try their chicken, but I haven't had the chance yet.

More fast food back home after the MTR, you probably know the Japanese Mos Burger chain from the branches that they also have in Kaohsiung. They have special burgers around every month or so. Past ones have been a shrimp burger and a pork katsu burger. They also had an anniversary burger, which looked pretty plain but it was pretty cheap and looked yummy enough. The special now though is octopus burger. Only 19 dollars too (US$2.44), if I was more into octupuses I would try it. Mmmmmm...

More octopuses are on the way to increase/decrease your appetite! After my dinner of course. I love me some curry and Japanese style hamburger steak. Plus I got my veggies for the day.

Japanese seem to like to wrap things in omelets. Key example below, takoyaki wrapped in omelet, looks like overkill. Maybe I'll try it if I ever need to gain weight?

Here are the workers doing their best to make the best fresh takoyaki (it's kind of hard to slack when everyone sees you). I wonder how many octopuses this stall consumes every day...

That's it for today's food adventures. Be sure to check in for more foodings and random thoughts.

Vitasoy Machine

I finally took some pictures of the Vitasoy machine with all the different pictures on the drink boxes. Click to expand to see them in all their glory, it was kinda hard to take the photo though because of the high contrast between the bright lighting and the darker cans and boxes so only some of the drink boxes are clear. Which one do you like? I picked out one below for you.

Test

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Sed in nunc quam. Sed tincidunt magna et justo venenatis viverra. Aenean arcu orci, lacinia ac hendrerit ac, euismod at eros. Duis odio lectus, pulvinar eu tristique in, malesuada ac elit. Nunc ligula dui, posuere sit amet tempor eu, mollis a felis. Cras eros purus, imperdiet a gravida sit amet, molestie id mi. Nam lorem est, ultrices in egestas vitae, molestie nec enim. Aenean eget sem nec augue tempor commodo. Nullam eget ipsum non felis gravida cursus vitae eget velit. Sed ac orci sit amet lorem pellentesque hendrerit. Proin eleifend volutpat nulla, nec aliquet erat vehicula ut. In vitae tincidunt turpis. Sed sodales, sem at lacinia porta, erat lectus pellentesque tellus, eu tristique lacus ligula vitae justo. Nulla facilisi. Proin sem dui, dignissim sed pretium non, dignissim sed quam. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Etiam aliquet dui ac ipsum sodales at congue purus iaculis. Suspendisse nec sollicitudin ipsum. Fusce euismod nisl at elit gravida pharetra.

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Alice in Wonderland: Mini Review

So I only missed a few minutes of the movie and I managed to catch when Alice's husband to be proposes to her. He's pretty funny, in a pathetic way. I liked the movie for several reasons: 1. Tim Burton's imagination 2. Helena Bonham Carter 3. Johnny Depp 4. Minor characters who I recognized. I liked the reinterpretation of Alice, it was darker but not too dark. I think my major complaint was that the 3D often didn't feel very 3D. I read a little about the making of the movie and instead of shooting directly in 3D the artists would later put the different parts of the shots into 3D layers, but each layer seems a little flat so it doesn't feel like true 3D. The movie might have been better off as a regular 2D movie.

Here are a few of my favorite actors/voice actors that came up in the movie, and a comparison to other roles they played.

Alan Rickman's voice (it's Snape!)

The flirty Helena Bonham Carter (looking better back who knows when on the left) as the red queen

Matt Lucas as tweedledum and tweedledee: You probably don't know him but he's a British comedian from the series Little Britain. The humor's a bit coarse but I still find it funny. Here's one of the more tasteful skits, he's the fat one in the wheelchair.

Stephen Fry: Another British comedian. He used to have a show with Hugh Laurie (House!). He's the cheshire cat.

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[edit] Comments about the actress who played Alice: The new actress was pretty decent, she was suitable for the role. She wasn't amazing but she played the famous lines well enough. [spoiler] At the end after Alice comes out of the hole she wakes up and realizes that she should decide her own destiny, decline the marriage proposal and go to Hong Kong to help continue her dad's shipping business. I thought it was an interesting ending, I'm sure the audiences here appreciated the little detail at the end with a chuckle.

Vitasoy + Poker + Today's dinner

Vitasoy

For their 70th anniversary Vitasoy is celebrating by producing specially designed cartons designed for giving as gifts to fellow students/family members/etc. . I got one from Ph.D. since she was trying to get a particular one for her hubby but instead she got the one below instead. She didn't want to give it to her hubby so she gave it to me instead. She gave another one to RA as well since it wasn't the design she wanted. It just so happens that both were suitable for us, mine is below...

Poker

I took a photo before I left. I was lucky since the battery ran out after I took the photo. My winning hand should be on the table! In 锄大地 2 is bigger than the ace. Four cards of the same number is the biggest hand you can play and when no-one can beat your hand it's your turn again. I played four 10's (beating four 9's), a 2 and a pair of 8's. RA, on the far left, is leaving for Beijing as you probably know. You probably recognize Ph.D., 2nd from left. We were at pregger's house, she's the shortest one in this picture.

Today's dinner

I had dinner at 大家乐 with my dad. I had fried spaghetti chinese style. For my drink I had hot Coke with lemon and ginger. It makes it feel more like an herbal tea and for some reason it did not taste overly sweet like hot Cokes I've had before. My dad had Shanghainese style 排骨饭 with soup and some pickles and a boiled egg.

Videoblog! + Song

Hopefully by the time you wake up the video will be available. It was actually good timing for me to post this video up since it's late and I should sleep early. Please listen to the song too, I like it, I'm not sure if you listened to it or not but I sent it to you earlier.[edit] Since my video didn't work please find the link here My youtube videolog

My New Underwear

As an added bonus you get to see me in the underwear you gave me, I wore it today. So that you didn't have to get too much of a surprise, here it is as a link.

It's me!

More Udon!

More udon pics for you. You don't often get to see noodles being made but here you can pretty much see all the steps. Kneeding the dough, rolling it out, powdering the sheet and folding it up and finally cutting it to the udon thickness. I took a nice angle of the shop in the food court, the counter selling the food doesn't look as nice as this guy's noodle making booth. I had the curry pork cutlet rice with the udon set. The curry and rice was ok, next time I should just stick to the udon.

Lesson on how to make links

Hey boo, I've realized that you haven't linked the links that you copy and paste here. It saves me a little bit of time if I can click the links in your blogposts instead of highlight it, copy, paste it and hit enter everytime I want to use it. The following is a quick example of two ways you can add an active link. You need to do this for your blog but obviously when you write e-mails or send links using IM the links are instantly made click-able and active.

1. Easy way

Select your text that you want to be made into a link, then click on the 'Link' button in the edit bar. The button is between text color and alignment and looks like two links in a chain. A pop-up item will come up asking you to enterl the URL, then you can paste the link you want. There should only be one 'http://' in the link otherwise it will not work. The easiest way to make sure it works is to preview what you wrote and click on the link to open in a new tab.

2. Techie way

Did you notice the 'edit html' button next to the compose button? You can make a link using step 1 then click on 'edit html' to look at how the code looks like. Feel like a techie yet? The code will look like something below, but with <> brackets instead, and will be displayed on the site like the link below.

Text goes here

(a href="http://www.linkgoeshere.com/")Text goes here(/a)

I couldn't find a way to make the text above easier to copy and paste without making it into a real link but you can use the above line by copying it and replacing it with <> style brackets . The real code on your site does not use () style brackets. If this does make sense ignore the techie way.

Typical Hong Kong Food

This is typical Hong Kong meal. Since I don't often eat at local places and I usually prefer noodles I don't know too many restaurants that serve the typical rice dishes that typify real local Hong Kong food. Lately I eat a lot of local food at the University dining place, but it usually leans more towards fast food style 烧味, noodles and international dishes. It's like 大家乐except it's run by a different company, 美心. We actually have two restaurants that are run by 大家乐 but I don't go to them often since one of them is further away. The one that is close by, I go to sometimes, but 美心 is too convenient to give up.

I ate on campus for dinner today because by the time I left the lab it was late and I was getting hungry. The meal was pretty simple but it typifies real Hong Kong food: a main dish, soup, rice and tea. Often there will be veggies too but this meal didn't have any. The main dish today was scrambled egg with char siu (烧肉). The soup is boiled for a long time and usually contains a combination of meat (often with bone), veggies, herbs and carrot. My favorites usually contain carrots, white turnip or winter melon. The main dish and soup were good, but the rice was too hard. Often at fast food restaurants it's easy for the rice to go hard, especially by the end of the day. At lunch though I often see them refilling rice at the 烧味 counter, meaning that it's nice and fresh. Another trick I've seen them use at 大家乐 is to continually add water, but that also runs the risk of making the rice too soggy. In a family style meal obviously there are more main dishes and everyone has their own bowl of rice, and maybe soup.

Japanese Food

As you probably know already, Japanese food is one of my favorites. I think when it comes to food my Cantonese, Thai, Japanese and Italian are probably my best languages, in that order. I'm OK with ordering things in English but the descriptions in English usually leave something to be desired, and a description in another language to me will often make more sense.

In Hong Kong there's a lot of different cuisines but I'd like to say that Japanese cuisine is one of the best done. It helps that I live right next to a Japanese department store, they have a lot of direct imports from Japan, in terms of both food and man power, although lately I think there are less and less Japanese in Hong Kong. I think Chinese chefs grasp the concept of Japanese food pretty well, I think that it helps that Chinese food is not too different.

Among my favorites is of course tonkatsu, or pork cutlet. It can often be done wrong with the meet too thin and the breading over-powering the flavor of the pork. On Sunday for dinner my dad and I went to the restaurant next to the ice skating rink where I think we had our last meal together before you left back to Cali (we had soft shell crab wrapped in rice paper for appetizer and I think you had rice with seafood for your main course). Last time I went I remember seeing a kid order the tonkatsu so I decided to try it out. Tonkatsu with egg, curry or tonkatsu sauce (a thick brown sauce) are my favorite combinations. The egg you see below was just right, soft but not too yolky. A good contrast to the crispness of the pork. The pork was done right too, with big thick piece of pork used. This prevent the pork from being too dry as the thickness retains the moisture. I'm not sure exactly what the red sauce was but I think it was a sweet tomato based sauce that matches with the tonkatsu. The rice was OK but it had some really hard egg white in it. All in all one of the best tonkatsu I've had in Hong Kong.

In our food court, as with most places in Hong Kong, there is a lot of turnover so when the 'steamboat' (i.e. hotpot) shop wasn't doing so well it was closed down and replaced by an udon shop. The place claims to be part of a chain from Japan. They freshly make and cut the udon for you to see (no pics of that, maybe next time). The udon there is nice and chewy. I can't taste the difference much but it is nice to know that the udon is being made fresh. I like udon, it's simple and tasty. Can't go wrong with tempura and udon. Udon is also pretty good with hot pot. It makes sense since the water is hot enough to cook the udon fast.

I don't often eat at fancy places in Hong Kong, especially with my dad, but I'll definitely need to show you the 海南鸡饭 and perhaps some 四川 specialities that they serve at my school.