Naturally some charming christian fundamentalist groups are calling for the whale to be executed. Oh wait, only a person can be executed, animals are slaughtered. In some ways, I can understand this perspective. The whale in question has “attacked” 2 previous trainers in the last 20 years, so it could be considered a threat to human life. But here is where we insert a great big “however”.

However.

First – It’s a fucking whale. It’s not a dog, or a cat, or a domesticated creature. how the bloody hell were you expecting it to behave? The fact that there have been only three incidents so far is the truly surprising part. Humans have taken this creature out of the wild, held it as captive entertainment for 20 years, and taught it to do tricks for its supper, a situation which in itself raises many moral questions. But its a damn whale, the things weigh up to ten tons and their natural habitat is sea water. How the hell could anyone expect a ten ton water dwelling animal to understand or care that it is hurting a human?

Second – That someone has died through accident or chance is always a sad thing. But that trainer not only knew she was dealing with a huge dangerous wild animal, she knew it was one that had been aggressive or dangerous to individuals on 2 previous occasions. she knew the risks, and she did the job anyway. If it was for the fame or the cash then she took a gamble and lost. If it was for the love of the job (which by all media accounts it probably was), then I very much doubt she’d want her pet condemned to death.

One tabloid has actually quoted a christian group as claiming they want the whale stoned to death. Em, what? Am I the only one who wants to know how they actually intend to go about this? Seriously, if that request were granted right now, how exactly would they implement it? Stand beside his tank and roll boulders in? somehow drag the whale out of said tank and throw rocks at it? I won’t even go into the part about the biblical quote condemning the owners of the whale to death too for not having it killed the first time. Frankly, this sounds like blatant journalist bullshit to me, because I do not think even rabid christian fundamentalist groups are stupid enough to propose this, and I think they are pretty damn stupid.

Only self-aware conscious life forms can bear responsibility. If the whale is one, then keeping it in captivity has been a serious crime. If it is not one, then the death was not its fault, and furthermore there is no reason to believe that any whale would not repeat these actions – in fact to the contrary, many whales have. Waiting until it happens to say “oh, this whale must be dangerous” is like waiting until someone falls into the tiger enclosure to conclude that this particular tiger is dangerous. Either this is accepted as a peril of the showing of wild creatures, or organisations like Seaworld are simply no longer allowed to operate. Frankly, I think I am in favour of the latter.

Everyone has heard “A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs, a woman will pay $1 for a $2 item she doesn’t need” – A neat little phrase which nonetheless fails to include my roommate’s mother, who will spend $30 on 100 x $1 items that we will eventually use up at some point, because they were on sale at Costco. Too often imagined value is a real problem, the hunt for a bargain is sufficiently compelling to encourage us to buy things we wouldn’t bother owning otherwise, and we end up with a three foot stack of paper cups. No really, we do. There is one beside my fridge. I have bought items of clothing I have thrown out a year later having never worn, simply because I could get three of them for a fiver. But as I become a grown-up and continue doing my real job in the big bad world I have slowly kicked this habit, and discovered a whole new way of being fiscally stupid.

Cartographer once asked me why people buy designer handbags. The cause of the question was a particular designer handbag which aside from its maker being Chanel entirely failed to be in any way noteworthy, and was being sold secondhand by someone in her place of employ. The only answer I could give her as to why anyone would want this unremarkable piece of leather was that it was – to anyone who cares to know about these things – Chanel couture. Theoretically meaning it is a classic and timeless accessory, suitable for use at all occasions and times of life, actually meaning it cannot have cost less than a thousand dollars as couture items never go on sale. Grasping this with her usual intelligence, candour and utter disregard for things that make no sense, she posed the question of whether this was then only a slightly more subtle way of pinning hundred dollar bills to your hat, and I had to admit she was irrefutably correct.

I have no objection to paying large quantities of money for beautiful things. I myself have something of a weakness for designer shoes*. I can see the value in a rare or difficult design, or in a perfectly cut suit, or a distinctive dress. As I gradually earn more I find my objection to paying a lot for something I want dissipating somewhat, but thats not a reason to assume something that costs less is inferior.

There is an innate tendency in the human mind to conform to an accepted concept of value. The aphorism that something is worth what people are willing to pay for it is not entirely accurate when thus phrased, what we should be saying is that something is worth to you what you would be willing to pay for it. To me, some things are just not worth it no matter what the rest of the world thinks. Which is why I will never own a Dior handbag, an antique desk, or a house in Dublin city, though I certainly wouldn’t mind owning all 3. Unless of course I become a millionaire, at which point I imagine my interpretation of value will change.

The real problem arises when you let other people’s judgments of value become your own. That handbag is worth two thousand dollars, this house is worth six hundred thousand, or the most ludicrous of all – that diamond is worth five grand (I could rant about the stupidity of diamonds for days). Know what you really want, and never let anyone else tell you the value of anything.

*It has been my considered decision that spending $500 on something because I really like it is perfectly justifiable as long as it is my $500. In fact I can imagine few better reasons.

“Bad Science” does not seek to champion reforms in scientific methods so much as attempt to give the layperson an understanding of what makes a method or a study scientifically good or bad (good or bad meaning reliable and relevant results versus meaningless noise). People accept a shocking amount of tripe purely on the basis of  “a study” without understanding anything about that study or how it was conducted. A close friend of mine pursuing a career in medical lab science is constantly ranting about the complete ludicrousness of journalistic spins on studies, complete lack of background, and an immediate adherence to the most dramatic possible interpretation of results.

I have ranted before on this blog about the astonishing willingness of individuals to accept blatantly ridiculous facts as gospel (“we eat spiders in our sleep” being my favourite example). Sometimes I think we accept these things because they are so damn stupid, not in spite of it. The logic runs something like: “Science proves amazing and unbelievable things all the time, like that the earth revolves around the sun or we are all made of tiny atoms or that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Therefore, amazing and unbelievable facts which I hear must have been scientifically proven by someone, or no-one would ever believe them. Yey, spiders!”. Yeah. Right.

What Bad Science attempts to disclose is not what to think, but how to think. How to logically evaluate the conclusions that have been drawn from a given set of facts, and to reach not only your own independent conclusion, but an understanding of why another conclusion might be lacking or indeed superior. While I am all for expressing my opinion and hammering it home with a blunt instrument if necessary, this book definitely goes one better.

One of the most worrying trends in the modern world is the easy acceptance of unsubstantiated conclusions as scientific facts because of buzzwords on a par with the flux capacitor, and the assumption that all studies are done with the same level of professionalism and rational thought.  So please,  don’t be one of the people who think somebody once conducted a scientific study on nocturnal spider consumption. Display some motherfucking ability to reason. Read this book if you are not sure how.

Which goes part of the way to explaining why I ended up stuck at the bottom of the approximately 7 steps up to my apartment, completely incapable of transporting the large flat-packed bookcase I had in my possession as far as the apartment door. You could get the rest of the way toward said explanation by taking into account the fact that I have quite probably never in my life looked at anything that fits indoors and thought “nah, I can’t lift that”.

Now, I know I am not Batman, but I have always been able to figure out a way of moving heavy things. Whether by shuffling them along the ground, dragging them,  rolling them, lifting them a few inches at a time, or whatever else presents itself as a potential solution. I have flown with 3 suitcases and a bag despite having only 2 hands, I have re-arranged large items of furniture like beds and wardrobes many times. So I assumed, despite barely being able to maneuver this thing onto the trolley at IKEA, that I would figure it out somehow.

Em, no.

First off, the damn thing was 7’ long and fucking heavy. I tried lifting and dragging, no dice. So I managed to get it upright, and then laid it horizontally on the stairs, where the top came about one and a half  steps short of the highest point. So with a mighty effort and looking ridiculous, I crouched down and pushed from the bottom and it gradually crawled upwards. Theoretically, this would have been a perfectly rational if rather foolish looking method of getting it up the stairs. Except that just as I thought I had it, everything stuck. There was a lip on the top of the stairs over which it would not go. Letting go to run up and pull it that fateful inch over was unthinkable because it would slide back down, pushing it from below was impossible. I collapsed in a mildly amused but desperately frustrated heap, and wondered what the fuck I was going to do if I could not get the damn thing out of the hall.

I would like at this point to say that desperation is the mother of invention, and that I devised an ingenious and McGuyver-worthy way of getting the damn thing into my flat. But that would be a giant lie, because what actually happened was that I realized my neighbor was at home, and feeling rather silly I enlisted his assistance in the moving of said heavy thing.

I may have set back the feminist movement by 20 years.

The theme of today’s post is essentially “bugger this for a game of soldiers”. Today I found out how long a green card takes to get. No wait, sorry, I should clarify that. Today I found how long a green card takes to get if you are not married to an american, related to an american or winning the green card lottery. In other words today I found out how long it takes to get permission to work long-term in america based solely on what you would actually be working at in america. Just so you know, it takes considerably longer this way than any of the above, which appears to me to fly in the face of all logic and good sense.

I asked for this from my employer about 8 months ago. I wanted them to start the green card process, because I wanted to have some sort of fallback should the arse fall out of the job market again and I find myself not only without employment but without a right to reside at my address anymore. It is one thing to abruptly lose your job and another to abruptly lose residence of a country 3000 miles from your native one. It would be not only disgustingly inconvenient but frightfully expensive to rectify. So the request seemed like a sensible one.

At the time the process was described to me it seemed a tad lengthy but potentially very worthwhile. 6 months of PERM (aka: the can-we-replace-you-with-a-citizen test), a year of waiting for PERM certification, another year to process the application for a green card along with an adjustment of status in order to extend my visa. So at best, this process takes 2-3 years. What escaped me at the time is that this is merely the timescale involved in _applying_. The backlog of people waiting for the aforementioned verdant immigration card is a minimum of FIVE FUCKING YEARS. So that means, as of right now, it will take a good 7 years for me to actually get one of these. If during that time I am let go or change jobs, the whole process crashes and burns and has to start all over again.

My current state of mind can be summarised in 3 words. Fuck. That . Shit.

But my most rigidly adhered to rule in recent years is to never make a New Year’s resolution. Firstly, it’s a completely arbitrary day, and so I refuse to conform to such a ludicrous convention, mostly out of sheer contrariness. Secondly, any resolution not important enough to be made as soon as you thought of it is clearly not going to be adhered to and is a damn waste of time and effort by definition.

So I hereby declare some January 19^th resolutions which I have just thought of and decided were important. Ahem.

• I will save some fucking money. I have a habit of spending everything I earn in a great big happy flow of joy and whatever-I-feel-like-ness. This is not a long term plan.
• I will fly less than I did last year. This would be really easy for most people. But I think even I can keep it under  50,000 miles in 12 months

Not exactly lofty aspirations, and admittedly rather vague, but the more specific versions that contain actual numbers are in my head. Of course these are just the new ones, there are perpetually ongoing resolutions like “try to drink a little less”, “go to the gym more” and the ever popular “stop being so chubby”. But essentially, these are the plan.

I will be interested to see how this progresses. Oh, and happy fucking new year everyone. Ain’t life just grand?

I’m not really partial to sun holidays. I have only been on the classic package holiday once at the age of 16, and that was with my family and therefore by definition of limited adventurousness. Since then I have always taken an approach to holidays that crams in the most places I have never been, things I have never done or seen, or friends I enjoy hanging out with as possible, ideally a combination of all of the above. However I realized that this time around, I was quite likely to need a bit of a post-excitement break, and as it turns out that was a pretty good call.

I spent all of my London time trying to meet everyone I know, all of my HK time trying to simultaneously do cool stuff and refrain from losing in my lunch in one of two unpleasant ways, and all of my Japan time trying to do cool stuff while somehow figuring out how to read signs entirely written in Hiragana. Basically what I am trying to say here is that I was pretty damn busy. So when the last leg of the holiday arrived I was eminently relieved and delighted that I had chosen to spend it in Hawaii.

You go through several phases when you get to Hawaii. The first goes something like – “whoa, this is stunning, I want to live a beautiful carefree life of freedom and sunshine here and leave the rest of the world behind forever”. Phase 2 consists of the dreamy daze in which you plan your future life of surfing and hiking and a crappy job you don’t have to care about because all you need is food and a place to sleep.  Phase 2 lasts until about a day before you leave, at which point you move to Phase 3, which goes a little like “if this were possible, everyone would do it. Actually I don’t really like being poor. There are no real jobs here, everyone is a damn scuba instructor or a hotel receptionist, and even if I could work remotely this bloody place is in the most inconvenient time zone imaginable. Damn”. This is followed closely (in my case) by the logic that I shall simple have to become rich enough to go to places like Hawaii frequently. It can probably safely be said that everything I want in life boils down to “I’ll be needing some more money for that”. On the plus side, at least my goals are straightforward.

On the whole, I loved the place. It is completely, stunningly, unswervingly beautiful. Ok, the scenery is perforated by the occasional large mall or highway, but fewer than you might expect. Honolulu is fairly populated, but the only other Island I was on (The Big Island – what a great name) has a few small towns and a whole lot of empty space. Though this may be something to do with the active volcano. Which brings me to another salient point – it has fucking volcanoes. Volcanoes! Nothing more need be said on the matter.

So I have covered the scenery, which is most definitely worth looking at for hours on end. The weather is perfect, and varies very little from season to season. The food is your standard American tourist fare, tastes good, doesn’t cost much, and comes piled so high it might fall off the plate if you look at it too hard. You have some obvious additions like fresh seafood, and the local beer is also pretty decent.

The entertainment varies from snorkeling, to parasailing, to watching the smoke pour from a live volcano to firing automatic weapons, and those are just the healthy activities. Personally I spent a lot of my time just enjoying being somewhere beautiful where I could swim and lie in the sun (by which I mean lying in the shade but being warm anyway – my skin is so pale it practically glows in the dark). I did manage to fit some activity into my relaxation though, parasailing, snorkeling and volcano-gazing being the highlights. I would go back in a second for an indefinite period if I had the chance, which hopefully I will again some time. This place goes firmly on the list titled “reasons to live in the US”

Hawaii appears to have changed my thinking forever about holidays that involve a beach, and I am grateful to it for opening my mind. And for having really nice trees.

As I type I am riding the bus to Narita airport, which our hotel diplomatically calls the “Friendly Limousine” I find it hard to begrudge them this exaggeration for two reasons, firstly that I am literally the only person on said bus, and secondly because the hotel itself is stunningly gorgeous and exceedingly swish. I am also rather amused by the scrolling information sign “For Narita airport. Please inform the driver when you see a suspicious thing and a suspicious person”. Japanese English is just brilliant.

This week has been amazing. I have had an absolutely fucking kick ass time, and learned many things, including but not limited to the following:

• You really need to speak Japanese to be in Japan. Seriously. I am accustomed to being able to fumble my way round any number of countries by guessing, pointing, speaking English, speaking a fragmented version of some other language, or just plain dumb luck. Not so in Japan. Tokyo is reputed to be one of the more gaijin-friendly places, and even here people rarely have more than a couple of words of English. Even getting a taxi is a problem as place names are only recognizable in Japanese to the majority of people, which to any European is a series of unintelligible squiggles. I consider myself a fairly seasoned traveler, and Tokyo was occasionally entirely beyond me.

• It is not as expensive as I thought it would be. Don’t get me wrong, its fucking expensive. But compared to London it is not in any way out of the ordinary. I’m told it has normalized to the west a little in the last decade or so.

• Japanese people are crazy.

• School uniforms are some sort of fashion. Kids will actually dress in them on weekends to go to places like Harajuku (kind of like Camden but with cutesy anime characters instead of goths)

• Karaoke in those little rooms that you rent is possibly the most ridiculously amusing thing ever. And you can get unlimited drinks for 2 hours there. Clearly not that many irish people have been frequenting them or they would have learned the error of their ways by now

• My friend the german is really fucking awesome. As is his Korean wife, who was delighted to discover that irish people are not, in fact, all that religious.

• Japanese beer is really good.

• When you buy horrendously awful  porn in Japan it comes not just in a brown paper bag, but a brown paper bag with a picture of some cute puppies on the front. And a poem. About puppies. I wish I was joking.

• There is no tipping in Japan. As someone who has lived in the states for a year and a half this is really, really weird.

• The train to Kyoto is $300. This is why we did not go to Kyoto. I found this outrageously expensive until I discovered that the train to Kyoto is an express train that takes 2 hours, whereas the bus takes about 13 because Kyoto is in fact very far away.

• Tuna are really very big

• I am really quite tall

• Japanese women dress even better than New York women. Its really quite impressive. I think I saw maybe 2 chicks looking less than perfect the whole week. And I am pretty sure both of them were doing it on purpose.

• I cannot buy clothes in asia. With the exception of a giant pair of Hello Kitty sweatpants, absolutely nothing fits someone with an ass as eh, western as mine. Sizes run from XXXS to M if you are lucky, and a size M jacket doesn’t fit over my shoulders.

• Cell phones work on all public transport (subway, bus, train etc), but you are asked not to use them as (and I quote) “they annoy the neighbours”.

• Foreign phones do not work in Japan. Not because roaming isn’t turned on, not because they suck, but because japan does not seem to make deals with foreign telecoms companies. So much to my surprise out of the 4 phones I had on me (blackberry, G1, Nokia Irish PAYG phone and Siemens UK PAYG phone) not a single one of them worked.

• It can piss rain for 5 solid days in this bloody country. But its hard to stay mad at Japan

• Mount Fuji is incredibly beautiful

• Hot springs are an absolute must do. They separate women and men, everyone goes naked, and you lie around watching the sun set over the mountains. Stunning.

• I have said I judge a place on its bathroom facilities, Tokyo wins both best and worst in this category. The hotel room had a toilet (whom we affectionately dubbed Timmy the Robo-toilet) that did everything from warming the seat, to making a flush noise so people can’t hear you peeing, to providing three different types of water jet to clean you after you have completed your activities (in case anyone cares, I do not recommend “oscillating spray” but most of the others are ok). The nearby subway station however, had a fucking porcelain hole in the ground.

• The Tokyo Emerging Science Museum has, amongst other awesome things, robots. Robots which you can drive. Robots are cool.

• Tokyo went through a phase sometime in the 80s of building imitations of western landmarks. So this week we saw an imitation Statue of Liberty (smaller than the real thing) and an imitation Eiffel Tower (bigger than the real thing).

• The Japanese are _incredibly_ polite. They thank you profusely for your custom, they bow when they are handing you your change, and they present you with their card using both hands as if it is some sort of award. Presumably all the while thinking you are an ignorant westerner with the cultural awareness of a dung beetle, but they are very nice about it all the same.

• When you get a bus to Narita airport, they do an inspection at the airport entrance to check you have your passport. At least I think this is all they check, they didn’t even look inside it when I waved it at them.

• The Japanese seem to quite like the French. Which seems odd, because as far as I can gather almost no-one else does (Sorry FGs :) Sad but true)

My flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo left at 10.30 in the morning and went via Tai Pei. Unfortunately, I just could. Not. Sleep. I lay awake trying to doze off pretty much all goddamn bloody night, turned the air-con on, turned the air-con off again, had this dull headache-y feeling that just wouldn’t go away, and felt generally like ass. I must have dozed off briefly though, because when I finally opened my eyes to FG2s alarm going off, I realized there was something odd happening, they weren’t opening properly. As it turns out this is because my eyelids were puffed out like ping pong balls and looked utterly ridiculous. I put this down to not sleeping enough, took some painkillers and had tea with the fabulous FG2 before she went to work. I then finished packing, got my shit together, and headed for my flight. Hong Kong has a truly marvelous feature, which is that you can check in your luggage in the main station before you take the train to the airport, something that all major cities should most definitely adopt as it is made of win. Having divested myself of my cumbersome baggage I then made my way to the airport train, feeling slightly odd, but not unwell enough to think anything of it.

As I boarded the plane I noticed that my wrists had a strange looking rash on them which I could have sworn hadn’t been there a few hours previously. This became slightly more alarming in Taipei where I noticed it had morphed into a solid red lump on each arm and become rather itchy, and about half an hour before we landed in Tokyo I woke from a snooze to discover that it now speckled all of my arms, and from the feeling of most of my upper body had made it to my torso. At this point, I was forced to acknowledge that I was having a full-blown allergic reaction, and that it was getting worse. Not only this, but I had it leaving china, source of half the world’s potential pandemics in the last several years. Nothing engenders paranoia like someone leaving china looking like they have early stage leprosy. In fact if this had never happened before I would have been pretty damn freaked out myself. Fortunately, I am familiar with this one.

I am allergic to a variety of things. Most of these are stupid and easily avoidable – bubble bath, certain types of fabric softener, aniseed. Some of them are more serious – I am heinously allergic to penicillin for example. Yet more of them are the subject of some uncertainty – certain additives in food colouring which I haven’t narrowed down really, a few types of sweetener. I very rarely come across the latter in the EU because EU law covering food additives is fairly restrictive, and frankly I rarely come across them in the US because I don’t eat the kind of crappy sweets the US generally has to offer. This particular reaction has only happened once before when I was 16, and I had to eat about 15 packets of M&Ms to induce it (yes, 15. I really liked m&ms and I have a tendency to over-do things)

In any case, I was in neither the EU nor the US, I was in China, a country that sells cartons of milk that say “made with real milk” on the side. In fact I am fairly certain the milk in my tea that morning and the previous night was the perpetrator of my blotchiness, but despite the fact that it had been about 12 hours, things continued to worsen. By the time I had gotten through customs (while hiding my arms and trying to look healthy) I could tell it was all over my legs too. By the time I finally found Cheese (the person, not the delicious foodstuff) and went back to the hotel (a tale in its own right) my entire skin was one huge red lump. It was everywhere. My face, my neck, my feet, even the palms of my hands. I felt cold but my skin was on fire, I had a fever, and I was in fucking agony. I had been working myself into a rage at Cheese for ludicrous airport based inefficiency, but I was incredibly glad he was there, because he found a 24 hour pharmacy and got me the antihistamines without which I think I might have thrown myself off our 18^th floor balcony rather than continue to scratch my own skin off.

So kids, the moral of the story is: do not drink the milk in China. Of course, Cheese entirely disagrees with this theory, and claims that it is perfectly obvious that I am merely allergic to communism.  Which I suppose would be kind of cool.

Day 2 (as mentioned in the previous post) began twice really. The first time at 6am when I awoke, reviewed my decision to fall asleep at 11 and found it slightly wanting in view of the fact that I was fucking awake at 6 in the morning, and decided that after FG2 went to work I would try for an extra hours kip. Hah. Day 2 had its second glorious beginning when I dragged, and I mean _dragged_ myself out of bed at about 3.20pm. My day was made of fail, as I was too late to do any of the cool things FG2 had told me to go do in her absence, However the evening managed to be a little less fail-tastic, met an irish mate from working in London back in the good old days, and we drank far too much horrible crap til 4am. FG2 cunningly stopped drinking about 5 drinks before we did, thus securing her a place in the non-imbecile hall of fame, a lofty honour which I fear I may never achieve what with doing so many fucking stupid things. Upon getting home and reading my emails, being multiple time zones and miles away from people and things that concerned me  became a problem, and I ended up on a rooftop on the phone til 6am. Unfortunate to say the least, but necessary in the circumstances

Day 3 – death on a stick. Not the worst hangover I have ever had, but possibly one of the worst with which I have ever had to do anything much. FG2 had chosen that morning to move to her new flat, which I suppose was part of the reason for her eminent sensibleness the previous evening. For a full appreciation of the horror of this you merely need to know that is 27 degrees and humid in HK, and she was moving to a 5^th floor walk-up. And for the Americans in the audience, in proper countries that means 5 flights of stairs – not 4, kids. Truthfully I was very little bloody use at this, though I did make a valiant attempt at helpfulness. It is just a pity my sense of duty doesn’t extend to ensuring I was in a fit state for said.

Anyway, I was ILL. Note the capitalization, it is deliberate. I tried to put contact lenses in at one point and received for my trouble such a violent onslaught of headache I nearly threw up. Throwing up was not a problem for the remainder of the day, but I had some other compelling digestive issues which I can only attribute to “being in China” because as far as I could tell I had not drunk or eaten anything the least bit suspect. This did not stop my stomach from mounting a concerted protest however. I was also completely and totally exhausted. This may have been due to the 4 hours sleep, or possibly the fact that my sleep pattern was at that point 7 shades of buggered. Whatever the reason I felt like throwing myself off a bridge so I suppose it was fortunate we didn’t cross any.

Astonishingly despite my complete lack of functionality a lot was done and seen that day, including some beautiful Chinese gardens (surrounded Hong Kong style by a huge elevated highway), an Indonesian meal with some Chinese friends of FG2s, and a sortie to Mong Kok, the technology bazaar type area of Hong Kong.

Day 4 – Our chilled out day of general niceness, FG2 and I went to the market, bought some silly asian crap, drank tea, walked around the frankly amazing docklands area of Kowloon. Took zillions of terrible pictures of Hong Kong Island at night (which makes New York look like a tasteful and understated lighting display, but nevertheless manages in its own way to be beautiful), had a picture taken of us for some stupid amount of dollars, and found Jackie Chan’s star on the star walk, Hong Kong’s answer to Hollywood’s avenue of the stars.

After our stunningly nice day of ferries and beautiful things and Hello Kitty crap, we finished up with a Thai massage before going home for dinner.  Salad from the local shop, with pink champagne from the airport some days previously.  More things I learned in Hong Kong include:

• The reason for the hot water thing – apparently Chinese medicine decided a thousand years ago that hot water was good for the brain, and Chinese people are not prone to contradicting wisdom that has been around that long apparently

• A thai massage is a fascinating experience, in which the person giving it actually climbs on top of you at various stages. At one point there was a small thai woman balanced on top of me on just the points of her knees and elbows

• Thai massages are good after, but they hurt during

• Technology is not that much cheaper in asia than in the states, and its probably worth it to buy something with a manual not printed entirely in Chinese.

• FG2 is a fantastic hostess, and even provided a pre-dinner cup of tea before our fabulous dinner at home on the last evening, a fact which I mention because it becomes something of a focal point in the next stage of my FHoUA.

 Tune in next post for details on how not to leave a country famed for it’s contagious diseases.