Wednesday 25 February 2009

And the "No Shit, Sherlock" prize goes to...

...Sina.com, which tells us that "Sea gypsies live nomadic, sea-based life".

Sunday 15 February 2009

The Run

On Friday last week we decided to go see some comedy with some Aussie friends. There aren't many comedy clubs in HK, but TakeOut Comedy seems to be one of the better ones - and, even better, they had a comic coming over from New York. Al Ducharme and his wife Bernadette Pauley were pretty good, although I think it was all old material - whatever, it was lots better than the local comics...

Anyway, at dinner beforehand we learnt that one of the Aussie friends, Jo, had a spare ticket for the Standard Chartered 10k run. There is a full marathon, a half marathon (both of which actually go through a road tunnel under the harbour for a mile or so!) and a 10km run which goes along half the north side of the island and back again. So, being a little crazy, Sarah decided to take up the challenege.

Sarah did a great time of under an hour. That's a pretty good time, and is fantastic given the crowds, and that Sarah had to stop a number of times while people in front stopped to have their photo taken, chat with friends, get out their mobiles etc... You can see it's still dark - the race started at 6am because it goes down the main island highway so they need to get it back open again before everyone wakes up and goes shopping.

Thursday 12 February 2009

Nei hou

Ross and I went to our first Cantonese lesson last night (after several false starts courtesy of the YWCA) so now I can say good morning, hello, my name is Sarah, and I am British. The good news is that the way to say UK (ying gwok) is very positive - ying has heroic overtones, while gwok means country. When you use the correct tones of course. America, (mei gwok) means beautiful country, and Australia (ou jau) means round-ish continent. New Zealand is a complex, almost transliterated one, which I won't even attempt to replicate.

I think (hope) we'll get the hang of the tones over time, they sort of make sense until you start trying to say something!