Date night

Friday was just an overall awesome day. Started well with a chocolate cupcake breakfast (first time I can recall having cake for breakfast!), work went well, and the day ended with a magical date night with the special man in my life:  Thai and Vietnamese dinner followed by drinks in a sky bar overlooking Hong Kong island.

xoxo 

Local Beauty

The stance on beauty and skin products is so very different here. Not different in a bad way, just different from Western views.

 Some examples I can think of:

- People want white skin and skin whitetening cream is readily avaliable in the local stores.

 - Umbrellas are a common sight too, not for the rain but for sun protection.  

 - The skin care product adverts around the malls are all showing excessively smiling Chinese people with flawless white skin, not tanned or bronzed like in Europe.  

- Also strange products for skin care are available, like silk cacoons as face cleaners.

Eyes on the Island

Today I worked from the Kowloon Bay office and was struck by the amazing view over Hong Kong island, what a clear day.

Hong Kong Traditions

Opening a local bank account to save the international transfer fees was next on the To Do list.  Result? Fail. Rules are Rules: That is what I learnt today about Hong Kong - don't try ask people to step out of the rule book (good news is that days later I got it sorted out after digging around for the 'right' documents).

Photo of the day is of the special cakes that are sold ahead of the Mid Autumn Destival coming up 1st and 2nd October. Two egg yolks plus lots of dough and sugar makes these cakes one big calorie bomb.

Dim Sum Lunch

First day back in the Hong Kong Tsing Yi office started with a wonderful lunch that my Tsing Yi colleagues treated me to - Dim Sum followed by dessert of Dou Fu Fa.

My colleague pointing out the Chinese words for it (83)

Arriving in Hong Kong

After a 24 hour delay due to technical failures with my first flight, I am happy to have landed in Hong Kong safely.  The delay and waiting did give me a chance to fully slow down after a busy 2 weeks before; I have firmly concluded packing up a whole house and moving boxes into storage is not for sissies.

This was my second visit to Hong Kong and so the concept of the bustling city was not new.  Knowing what to expect this time I dived in head first and was pleasantly surprised to find that things were not as hectic, chaotic and stressful as my first visit. Now that I knew my way around my first week was very calm, comfortable and relaxed. Happy to be here!

When I arrived in HK I was impressed again at the HK airport efficiceny - train into centre of town leaving every 10mins, payment with a swipe of a transport card, no queues. And clean, cool, fast. GO HONG KONG!

The below sign is from around the area where I'm staying in Kowloon, right near the Airport Express station.