What March Madness looks like from the other side of the planet

On Sunday night in the U.S., Kansas and North Carolina played in the Elite Eight of the NCAA basketball tournament.

On Monday morning, I watched the game live.

Right now, Hong Kong is 12 hours ahead of the east coast, meaning a 4 p.m. tipoff in St. Louis equals a 5 a.m. alarm clock for me. It's a little surreal. Hong Kong is a bustling place; some nights it doesn't seem to sleep. But by 5 a.m. on a workday, it's pretty quiet. As I set up my laptop in our living room, nothing was moving outside except the gentle waves on Victoria Harbor.

It was an exciting game. Yet at this hour, and with Mrs. Blog fast asleep in another room, yelling, cursing or even whacking my forehead was a bit to boisterous. I resorted to sending frustrated e-mails to friends in the U.S. who were watching the game too.

If you squint really hard at the upper-right-hand corner, you can see me in my living room.

But the quiet was also helpful. During timeouts, I could look out the window at the lights across the harbor, watch the sunrise start to paint the edges of the sky, and take a deep breath. (It also helped that I planned to go back to bed after the game, meaning no coffee and a lower heart rate)

In the end, Kansas pulled off the upset, beating a UNC team with perhaps a half-dozen future NBA players on its roster. And as the sun rose, I took a deep breath and smiled: KU was going back to the Final Four.

Of course, that means I'll be awake again early on Sunday morning.

A dream crashes to earth

Last week, I saw a video of what appeared to be a guy living out the fantasy of every aviation dork: he strapped on wings, started flapping, and took off. I was ready to post, in glowing terms, about what that meant to this particular aviation dork.

But then I learned another bit of information: the whole thing was staged.

Bummer. Because as you can see above, the (CGI) stunt looked pretty awesome. Oh, well. It's only a matter of time, right? Until then, a guy can dream.

Movin' on in

At this point, I have been in Hong Kong a month. Some things have been remarkably easy--getting our HKID cards, for instance, was not only free, but literally just a matter of waiting in a couple of lines. Other things have been joyous discoveries, like realizing that not only is the Thai place across the street better than any Thai you've had in the last three years (looking at you here, Abu Dhabi), but a meal costs less than a U.S. movie ticket.

There has been plenty of exploration, both literal and metaphorical. Mrs. Blog and I have literally been from one end of the island to the other, plus a few extra islands, and most of the travel was in search of a couch.

Our original living room seating, before we got a couple of chairs (not pictured).

That proved somewhat frustrating. It's not that there aren't lots of furniture stores, but more that the couch we wanted did not seem to exist at a price that would not look out of place on a new car. Then we found one, but it wouldn't fit in our elevator. Eventually we bought a custom-made piece, which sounds extravagant but really isn't, because everything is made in China.

And wait a second, that's where we are! So problem solved.

But living in China--even the Special Administrative Region, which is quite special indeed--is not without its challenges. Shopping for anything, not just couches, can be an adventure if you go at the wrong time. And basically, "wrong time" means "anytime when most people are not at work. Go at noon on a Saturday and you just might find yourself surrounded by a few thousand of Hong Kong's 7 million people.

Throwing elbows for... sponges, I think.

The good news for us, though, is that we have several grocery stores, malls and markets within a 10-minute walk of our front door. In fact, with minimal effort we could get inside one mall without ever going outside.

Abu Dhabi had a lot of malls, too, though, so I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. It's not like these malls were created because people needed places to go. It's more like almost every doorway at street level leads to a shop anyway, so it makes sense to concentrate them in massive vertical spaces. Hong Kong is a hive of commerce.

That said, it's also a city that knows how to have a good time. The food here is phenomenal--we ate at the world's cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant the other afternoon, spending perhaps US$20 for a dozen delicious dim sum dishes. There are bars all over the place. And a massive race track in the middle of the city, at which we spent an evening enjoying cold beer and colder luck.

Foreground: horses. Background: skyline. Not pictured: HK$10 bet on a losing horse.

To sum up: Hong Kong is an amazing place, with all the energy, excitement and frustrations of a big city. We're right in the middle of things, even if our apartment is not. And when we finally DO get that couch, we'll have something to look at:

Victoria Harbor, and behind it, Kowloon side.

The continuing saga of the not-so-secret J-20

Mrs. Blog and I are settling into our Hong Kong penthouse in the sky (OK, apartment halfway up a high-rise), which is excellent news and something I plan to write about when I have a bit more time. The NCAA tournament is about to start, too, which is also excellent news and a sign that I am about to trade some sleep time for basketball time—thanks a lot, guy who invented time zones.

All this settling in, though, means I now have a tiny bit of time for one of my favorite pursuits: gawking at airplanes.



That’s the new Chinese J-20. It really does look like a movie prop, doesn’t it? Slick. Although the more experts have gotten to look at it, the less stealthy it would seem to be. Check out the size of those big, radar-reflectin’ canards!

What's in a name?

The answer really depends on what you're looking for. If you're like me, and just got assigned a Chinese name on your business card, you're looking for the characters that make up that name. A simple proposition, right? Yeah, there it is on Google, "most commonly used Cantonese characters"… oh, wait, there are 3,000 of them.

Google translate: also no help.

This is no knock on Google; Chinese is an enormously complex langauge with characters rooted in all kinds of things, from direct visual representation of their meanings to phono-semantic compounds, which I'll let you go ahead and look up on Wikipedia. There does not seem to be an easy way to translate a proper name, even though all the characters in my name allegedly mean something.

And since the Internet has failed me and I only have a printed version, I guess I'm left with simply describing it to you.

In Chinese, my name is (Cross With an Upward Carat Next to Upside-Down Capital T With Small Extra Crossbar Halfway Up) (Cross With No Top and Upward Carat and Apostrophe Next to Top Hat With Two Stripes) (Gently Curved Upward Slash Crossed by Upside-Down, Backwards Capital L).

Pleased to meet you.

Making a splash

Mrs. Blog and I enjoyed a leisurely walk through Victoria Park this afternoon, soaking up some Sunday sunshine on my last day before I start my new job. Our destination was a small pond in a corner of the park--surrounded today by strollers and picnickers--designated for… racing remote-controlled boats.

And not graceful sailboats, either. Souped-up powerboats that zip around the course so fast they toss a spray of water onto giggling passers-by. At one point there were five guys with boats there, but because they were always taking them out to fine tune (or repair), only two craft were ever in the water at the same time.

I told you they were fast. And I told you they had to be fixed a lot… like that boat that suddenly stopped running at the end of the video. That led to this:

Rescue mission.

And while he was fixing his boat, another racer showed up with something a bit slower, but definitely showier. Note the helicopter on the aft deck, complete with spinning rotors:

Note to readers: A remote-controlled aircraft carrier or battleship would make a great birthday present. Just saying'.

Oh, the places I've been

Good morning, Readers of the Blog. You have no doubt noticed yet another gap in my writing in this space. That's because Mrs. Blog and I pulled up stakes (i.e., checked out of our hotel in Abu Dhabi) and left the Big Sand for the Big City.

I'm typing this in Hong Kong. Specifically, in a serviced apartment in a neighborhood called Causeway Bay. Outside is a sea of people and neon, and I love it.

We're going to the sheep restaurant because it has such a great sign.

But it was a winding road to get here, people. From the 'Dhabs, we made a four-day trip to Beirut--an amazing, cosmopolitan place in which bulletholes and RPG-riddled buildings share streets with upscale boutiques and bars. Then it was back on tourist visas to Abu Dhabi for a couple of days. Then it was Doha for a half-day (nice museum, terrible taxi service, frustrating airport), then Hong Kong for the Chinese New Year.

Boom. (photo courtesy Mrs. Blog)

And THEN we went to New Zealand for two weeks for a much-delayed honeymoon. We visited some dear friends, I jumped off a bridge, we cruised through an unspoiled fjord that looked straight out of a Peter Jackson movie, we hiked up to a glacier face, we kayaked in the waters of the Tasman Sea, we rode a jetboat.

For those of you keeping score, the day we arrived in New Zealand we had been to five countries in a week. That's a personal record that I don't think I'll ever break.

Now we're settling down to the business of starting work and finding an apartment. We spent nearly eight hours pounding the pavement with a property agent yesterday, and although we arrived home with achy feet, our heads were also full of plans, dreams and furniture layouts.

We might be staying in one place for a bit, but the adventure continues.