Category Archives: SpikeLife

Posts about me

I’ve Lost a Friend

For me, sometimes the mere act of writing a blog post is enough and I don’t feel the need to hit the “Publish” button. I wrote this on Friday. It’s still very much in my thoughts, no matter how much I try to distract myself with other stuff. So I figured I’d come back to it and share with everyone.

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I have mixed feelings about writing about this. I don’t have any special insight or anything unique to offer about this. But …

The guy who was my best friend in high school died yesterday. Cancer. He leaves behind a wife (whom I’ve known as long as I’ve known him) and two kids. His battle with cancer took years, much of which were spent in extreme pain. I’m told that he gave up on the cancer medication a few months ago, perhaps giving in to what he saw as inevitable. I don’t know. I do know that when his wife sent out an email at the beginning of the week saying that he was back in the hospital, I didn’t have a good feeling about it.

Jimmy and I were inseparable for three years. He’s the guy I spent every Saturday record shopping with, the guy I went to all those concerts at the Fillmore and Madison Square Garden and all those other places with. We went to the movies together and we went to Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam war together and did road trips to Florida together.

I guess it’s kind of like the Springsteen song Bobby Jean – “we liked the same music, we liked the same bands, we liked the same clothes; we told each other we were the wildest things we’d ever seen.” As a matter of fact, a lot of the musicians I like, I heard them for the first time on his record player.

There were some differences between us. I was an only child; he had an older brother and sister. I came from an apartment in the Bronx; he lived in a brownstone just off 5th Avenue in the 70s. But that was never noted; there was no “class difference” between us that I was aware of. Probably we spent every weekend together. Usually I’d stay over at his place during the weekends, especially if we had concert tickets.

Here’s a memory I probably shouldn’t share but what the hell. One day his father walked in on us while we were smoking weed in his bedroom. I almost had a heart attack but Jimmy just held the joint up and asked his father if he wanted some. Later, there would be summer days sitting on the rooftop – him, his parents, his brother and his wife, his sister and her husband, passing joints around and letting the days go blissfully by.

I also remember, many years later, when his first son was a year or two old, being down in Florida and for some reason deciding to teach the kid to do a Ricky Ricardo impression, which he nailed. I think they decided to keep me away from the kids after that.

He had these antique swords hanging on the wall in his bedroom. We used to get stoned and then have sword fights. I’d always lose. I think there were more than a few weekends when I’d go back home on a Sunday and my parents probably wondered about all the scratches on my arms and legs.

High school finished, college came. I stayed in New York and later went to Boston while he went to Washington D.C. There was no Internet, no Facebook, no mobile phones – we stayed friends but slowly drifted apart. On the other hand, it was at a party at my place that he hooked up with the girl he ended up marrying – well, we’d known her for years, but I think that was the night they first noticed each other in a romantic sense. Actually his wedding and mine (well, my first) were just a few weeks apart. He moved to Florida, years later I moved to Hong Kong. He had two sons and a thriving business down there.

The last time I saw him was, I think, two years ago. It was probably the first time we’d seen each other in 15 or 20 years. I was in New York visiting my mom and he was in New York for medical treatments and we spent an afternoon together. He wasn’t much for internet stuff, for writing emails or for being on Facebook. So we had a lot of catching up to do. He was still the same Jimmy that I knew from all those decades before, even if the cancer was taking its toll at that point.

Yesterday morning, soon after I got to work, I got an email from a mutual friend telling me the sad news. Of course I’m probably only feeling 1% of what his family is feeling but I spent the entire day feeling shell shocked. I went to lunch at a nearby bar in Wanchai and there were a few people there getting toasted early in the day and I really wanted to join in and blow off the day and not go back to the office. But I didn’t drink and I did go back to work. I suppose last night it would have been easy enough for me to head back to a bar and get wasted but I wasn’t in the mood to be in a place filled with loud music and happy people. I medicated myself by doing some shopping and then went home and tried to fill my evening with distractions.

I sent an email to his wife telling her the minor role I’d played in their getting together. She wrote back to say that it was funny, the rabbi had asked her how the two of them started and she couldn’t remember but then she got my email and remembered the party and that night.

Look, I know this is nothing unique. Everyone loses friends. And people die sooner than expected, sooner than they “should.” This is the first really close friend I’ve lost – and it won’t be the last. It’s been years since we were close, decades even, but I feel this gap that’s opened up with his loss.

Well, I’m not going to end this with anything like “at least his pain is over now”. I hope his family is okay.

The Insanity of my Internet Network at Home

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While people living in the urban areas of Hong Kong are enjoying 1 gigabit per second fiber connections, I can’t even get a land line where I live. So here’s what I’ve ended up with. I’m posting this with the thought that maybe someone can give me an idea on how to improve or simplify the set up. I’d post a diagram or drawing of it but I don’t have the Photoshop skills or Visio, which would be really good for this.

So I first acquire my Internet signal via a 4G USB modem made by Huawei and subscribing to SmarTone, who seem to have the best network where I live.

From there, I run into two issues. The first is that inside the house, the signal is weak. I can get a 4G signal outside the house but not inside. The second is getting the signal from that device to all the devices inside my house.

So I found a router from TP-Link into which one can plug a USB modem. It sits on a table on my patio and sends out a WiFi signal. The signal is okay once inside the house, but only really good with line of sight. I can’t run an ethernet cable from that router to inside the house because that would mean leaving a door or window always open and there are just too many insects here.

So inside the house I have a WiFi extender. This picks up the signal from outside and gives me a decent strength WiFi network on the ground floor. The extender sits on a windowsill with a direct line of site to the router.

Then I have to get the signal upstairs to my home office. So I have two Powerline thingies and they actually work quite okay.One is downstairs next to the WiFi extender, the other upstairs in my office.

But the WiFi is weak in our bedroom and non-existent in my office. So I have another router up here. Line out from the Powerline into that, line out from the router to my desktop PC and a strong enough network upstairs.

So you got all that?

4G USB Modem
Router
WiFi Extender
2 Powerline things
Another Router

I suppose I could have gotten one of the Powerlines with WiFi capabilities but I didn’t think of that at the time – and maybe one of these days I’ll pick one up to get rid of #5 above.

Now my desktop PC registers an average of 10 Mbps (via Speedtest.net) and sometimes 15 to 20 Mbps.

All PCCW offers for fixed line internet around here is 8 Mbps. And much like landlords are allowed to advertise 500 square foot apartments as being 700 square feet, I’ve never gotten anywhere close to 8 Mbps from PCCW in my previous addresses, more like 5.

So actually, as crazy as this set-up is, I’m actually getting faster speeds than if PCCW somehow figured out how to get a line to my house. Go figure.

Beertopia Hong Kong 2013

Yesterday I attended Beertopia Hong Kong 2013. Actually I was hired by the event organizers to shoot the afternoon session. However, I enjoyed it so much that I went home at 5 PM, picked up my gf, and then returned for the evening session just because I was enjoying it so much – and I’m not much of a beer drinker.

(Photos will follow on Spike’s Photos soon.)

So here’s the deal. The event was organized by Jonathan So. Jon’s from Toronto, lived in NYC and decided to put together a craft beer festival in Hong Kong. He did the first one last year at Western Market in Sheung Wan. It was so successful that he needed a larger venue for this year’s event and so it was held at the West Kowloon Promenade. It was my first time going there and it’s just great that there’s this lovely park and event space right on the waterfront, just a 10 minute walk from the ICC and Elements mall. Clockenflap was also held here but I was unable to attend that because I was traveling at the time.

I didn’t attend the event last year and didn’t look at the web site for this year’s event so I didn’t really know what to expect. Watching Jon brief the vendors and staff before the gates opened, I was immediately impressed by how well he seemed to have thought through everything. There were plenty of toilets (a must for a beer festival, eh?), plenty of security guards and arrangements for keeping the area clean, even as the number of empty bottles was piling up. There were two sessions, one running from noon till 5, the other from 6 till 11.

I’d say there were roughly 25-30 booths there. Two rows of booths featured somewhere around 100 different craft beers from microbreweries around the world. Of course the U.S. and Europe were well represented, but there was even a booth from a restaurant and microbrewery from Shanghai and another from Korea. Cider was also well represented, with at least 10 or 15 varieties on hand.

Of course if you’re going to go with “gourmet” beer you can’t have run-of-the-mill food to go with it. Most of the food booths were from companies that do home delivery and catering rather than having restaurants. The most popular booth seemed to be the one from the guys at MeatMarket.HK, serving up a hearty steak sandwich on a seriously crusty baguette. There was a stand called Flying Brats and I asked the guy where I could buy his sausages (I got one of his bratwurst and finished it in seconds) and he told me that with rents being what they are, right now it’s simply something he’s trying out in events such as this. Only two actual restaurants were represented among all the food stalls – Brickhouse and Koh Thai. Another stand that I enjoyed was one that was serving brownies that were made with stout and bacon.

Along with booths featuring beer games and beer lectures (!), there was the main tent, featuring almost non-stop music from 10 bands, most of them booked by my friends from the Underground. The afternoon set opened with the Joven Goce Band, a particular favorite of mine, and closed with an energetic set from Canadian band Van De Kamp. How is it that I’d never heard of these guys? Well, they’re not only Canadian, they’re from Quebec, and mostly sing in French. The evening show included other local favorites including The Sleeves and Thinking Out Loud.

About 1,500 people attended the afternoon session. They were expecting 3,000 for the evening session but I think they got more. Obviously there was much more of a party atmosphere at night – so I’m glad I was shooting during the afternoon when it was less crowded and more relaxed but also glad I went back to hang out there at night.

Negatives? Very few. I think at night the area around the food booths was too crowded. Trying to move around was like moving through a human car wash, as Robin Williams once called it. There was this point as I was trying to make my way to a particular booth that I could just sense the lens cap coming off my camera – and indeed it did. It was way too crowded and also too dark for me to try to search for it. Argh. Despite this one personal inconvenience, I’d say that the crowd was remarkably well-behaved.

Also, since I was working in the afternoon and driving both sessions, I was looking for something non-alcoholic to drink – and that was not to be found. I had to exit the venue and walk about 20 yards down to a bank of vending machines to buy bottles of water. To be fair, I don’t suspect there were too many others there looking for water or Coke, but I should mention that there were more than a few parents there with children and I don’t know how they coped when the kids got thirsty.

Overall, it was a really great event, well run, well attended and a great venue. I hope there will be a lot more events at the West Kowloon Promenade and I know that when Beertopia returns next year, we’re going to return.

(I’ll be processing my photos from the event today and will post some on Spike’s Photos later in the week.)

Some of this and then some of that

I haven’t been posting much lately because I started a new full time job last week. There’s quite a bit to learn and I’m trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible, so that’s occupying much of my time.

Still shooting though. This weekend I’m booked to shoot the afternoon set of the Beertopia event. Lots of beers (that I won’t be drinking because I’ll be working – and probably driving) and 5 bands. Still some tickets left so you should check it out.

Regarding my daily commute – what I’ve settled on is taking the bus into central Tai Po and then taking the 307 bus which runs direct from Tai Po and stops just two blocks from my office. Traffic or not, as long as I have a seat, it’s actually quite stress-free. I read or watch TV on my iPad and the time just goes by. But there were a couple of days when I didn’t time things right and didn’t get a seat on the bus. And trust me, 45-60 minutes standing on a bus is far worse than standing on the MTR, in no small part because of the lack of skills of many HK bus drivers. But I think I’ve got it figured out now.

Now that I’m in Wanchai every day, I’m spoiled for choice when it comes to lunch spots. It feels as if there are hundreds within a two block radius. Some of them I know, many of them I don’t. I have yet to find a favorite. What I really want is a half-way decent burger and nearby the choice seems to be McD’s or order something not on the daily specials menu from one of the western bars. The cheapest vaguely decent set lunch in a bar seems to be at Queen Victoria – $58 for some food and a drink, no service charge. But lots more places to explore.

PCCW – After I got last month’s bill charging me for land line service that I no longer have – because they are unable to provide it for me – I thought I’d gotten customer service to see things my way. Wrong. They charged my credit card, even though they said they wouldn’t, and have now billed me for another month of non-existent service. I called the hotline and got someone who was incapable of understanding the issue. She told me that a manager would call me within two days and of course that didn’t happen. I also wrote to the customer service email and got an equally vapid response that was roughly, “It seems that you want to cancel your service. So you must call our hotline.”

Quick question for other WordPress bloggers out there. Do you use Akismet? If you’re blogging on WordPress, odds are you are. Akismet filters out spam comments. It used to be incredibly accurate. In the past week it seems as if tons of spam is getting around it. Of course my blog is set so that all comments require moderation before getting posted but that still doesn’t seem to stop the spammers, most of whom are easily identifiable. So has something gone south with Akismet? Or is it just me?

Me & My Internet – Argh and Sigh

Warning – semi-heavy duty geek post ahead.

No, this is not another post bitching about PCCW. I’ve basically resigned myself to the fact that I’m not getting service from PCCW for six months … or a year … or a lifetime.

Not having any PCCW can yield some odd reactions. Like today, when I was at the US Consulate. I handed in a form. I’d written down my mobile number. ”Don’t you have an alternate number you can give us just in case?” Nope. No office number. No land line. I could tell from the look in the lady’s eyes that she didn’t quite believe me but decided it wasn’t worth it.

Anyway, trying to get the Net stuff squared away at home.

The first step was getting the 4G USB data modem from SmarTone, because their network is so much better than PCCW’s or 3′s where I live. The problem with that was the reception inside the house sucked. So a friend gave me a 15 foot USB cable and I could open the door and stick the modem outside. The problem with that is that I live in an area with more than its fair share of mosquitoes and other flying beasties.

I solved that by getting the TP-Link TL-MR3420, a wireless gateway that gets its signal from a USB data modem rather than an ethernet cable. I could leave this out on the front deck, relatively sheltered from sun and storm. And then I used a WiFi range extender inside the house to get the signal to my PC.

This left one final problem. I had set up the third bedroom to be my home office. But the third bedroom is one floor up and in the back of the house. The signal from both the gateway outside and the range extender in the living room was almost non-existent up there.

Since the range extender is old, slow and has an internal antenna, I thought I might do better with one that’s newer, faster and has external antennas. So I bought the TP-Link TL-WA830RE, which has two external antennas – and then bought a couple of auxiliary antennas that could screw in but get stretched out to several feet away.

First I configured and tried out the new range extender in the living room and it all worked perfectly. So then I moved everything upstairs. And things fell apart.

TP-Link’s software isn’t the greatest. From day one it was telling me that the signal strength on the gateway was 0%, even though I was getting a decent 4G signal. For the extender, it was also giving me inaccurate readings. With the extender in my office, it couldn’t even find the gateway. (And my iPhone could. Go figure.) I tried putting the antennas on the window sill. Nope.

So then I moved the router out into the hallway, long ethernet cable back to the PC, antennas stretched out to the master bedroom door, where they could have a view of the front of the house, albeit one floor up from the gateway, blocked not just by a wall or a floor but also the balcony. Here it was telling me the signal strength was varying from 10% to 20%.

As I moved things around, trying out different spots, I’d lose the connectivity quickly. Maybe I’d get a minute or two before losing my Internet connection. And for those brief times I had it, it was insanely slow. We’re talking slow on a range of download speed of 50 Kbps, per SpeedTest.net.

At that point I thought, well, I could get a 50 foot long ethernet cable and put the extender in the master bedroom, next to the window that faces front. But since I wasn’t getting a great signal 10 feet from the window, I wasn’t sure what being right next to the window would do for me.

So everything moved back to the living room, everything working reasonably well, and my gf is trying not to moan too much about how I’ve cluttered up the room again.

One quirk of the TP-Link range extender. It takes the same name as the wireless gateway even though it has a different IP address (of course). The problem is that if you’re connecting to WiFi, then you don’t know which device you’re actually connecting to. The range extender works in half duplex mode rather than full, so it’s slightly slower.

I know. Thrilling stuff. You’re all on the edge of your seats waiting for the next chapter in this never ending saga of torment and boredom.

My Brain Seems to Have Stopped Working

This weekend I finally started in on all the boxes stacked up in the two storage rooms. On Monday, my back was killing me and I figured, “Now that I’m just a quick trip to Lo Wu or Lok Ma Chau, I can zip over to Shenzhen for an afternoon for a massage and the whole sauna thingie.”

Then I had a thought, better look at my passport. Sure enough, my 3 year China visa expired in January. And Americans, unlike many other nationalities, cannot just show up at the China border and get an instant visa good for a day or two.

So off to town, first to get pictures for a new visa, and then over to China Travel Service (yeah, they charge a bit, but they have a branch in Tai Po, saves me going to Wan Chai). I get there and the lady gives me the forms and flips through my passport and says, “Oops, you don’t have any blank pages!”

So today I jump on the bus for Central figuring I’ll go to the American consulate and get new pages added to the passport. I could have checked the web site before heading into town but nooooo, I know everything already, right?

I was a bit slow in getting out this morning and by the time the bus got through the Eastern Harbour Tunnel, I figured I ought to check service hours so that I don’t end up there in the middle of lunch time. That’s when I discovered that the consulate requires you to make an appointment in advance for any passport services, including taping in new pages. And that the soonest appointment is two days away.

At least I got my massage – in Wan Chai, not Shenzhen. (The difference being that I only got a massage whereas in Shenzhen I can do up the whole spa/sauna thing for a day.) The Thai lady who massaged me was so tiny, I think if I passed her on the street I would have thought she was ten years old. ”Are you strong?” I asked. Yes, she most definitely was. I told her I had back pains and to forget my legs and arms and just work on my back and she did exactly that for an hour.

When she was done, I was in such pain that I couldn’t sit up. That’s the way it always seems to be with a good Thai massage. Because 10 minutes later, the back pain I’d had for two days was nothing but a memory.

At any rate, between dealing with the consulate and waiting for the China visa thing, it’s gonna be at least a week before I can do a Shenzhen run.

Settling in to Lam Tsuen

Thanks to all for the commuting tips. The above is my view, which as you can imagine will make it difficult to leave each morning. Even on crappy weather days, I get a view like this:

We’ve spent much of the past month exploring Tai Po. (I should have more photos to go along with this. Maybe another time.) We’ve barely scratched the surface.

The urban part of Tai Po seems to be divided into a few distinct areas. The area closest to us is Tai Wo, which has the MTR station and a small-ish shopping mall that has a crappy Park ‘n Shop, tiny little Fortress, a McDonald’s, a Japan Home Centre and a few restaurants. A few blocks further down, approaching Tai Po Center, there’s a bunch of different sorts of restaurants that we have not investigated. Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, a smattering of western places and a bar called, I kid you not, Chinky Bar.

Tai Po Center, the newer part of town, has a crappy shopping mall, the so-called Tai Po Mega Mall. Anchored by a Japanese department store and supermarket called Yata, it has small version of many of the usual chain stores you find in malls. There’s a dozen or so restaurants, mostly chain shops, and a Starbucks. Beyond the mall, there are two wet markets, one quite average and one that’s a bit more upscale than most, with some shops specializing in imported meats, cheeses and wine. Unexpected. There’s a bunch of dai pai dongs and cha chaan tengs around, a branch of Tai Hing. It’s where all the banks and all the mobile phone companies have branches. In other words, not terribly exciting but sometimes useful.

The older part of town is called Tai Po Market and this is where things get lively and interesting. Tai Po Hui Market itself may be famous for being one of the more expensive wet markets in Hong Kong but the quality of what’s being sold in there is unsurpassed, at least in my experience. My gf and I go around doing a tag-team comedy act – the places we shop at, they remember us when we come back and have started tossing freebies into the bags along with the stuff we’ve selected. We already have 3 or 4 favorite places in there. Oddly, there seems to be more English in the market than in the surrounding restaurants. (Maybe not odd – I would guess that they’re very used to domestic helpers shopping in there, while the helpers wouldn’t be frequenting the local restaurants.) Of course this market has a cooked food center on the 2nd floor and our initial explorations there have yielded some solid meals including a not-horrible Thai place.

Right across from the market is a place called Wah Fai Restaurant and Cake Shop. It is ranked #3 in Tai Po according to Open Rice. Believe it or not, this is a cha chaan teng that is famous for its western style apple pie. (They also do a chicken pie.) It is not the best apple pie I’ve ever eaten, but it’s pretty darned good and who’d expect to find this in this sort of place? I’ve had it both in their restaurant (HK$11 for a generous sized slice) and brought it home. No English menu, which is the norm in Tai Po, but the woman behind the register speaks enough English. (Thanks to McD’s, I’ve long known the Cantonese for apple pie.)

Around the corner is a place called Wah Lap. They’re famous for their brisket and their rice noodle rolls. I love their shui gau – the oversized won tons stuffed with prawns and mushrooms. They’re also famous for their “pineapple bun” (po lo bau), which they sell from a counter facing the street and if you time it right, you can get this hot from the oven. In Hong Kong you typically get po lo bau with enough butter shoved into it to give a heart attack to an elephant. But once you’ve tried it, it’s hard to say no. No English menu here but of course they’re very friendly. I’ve seen some fried noodle dishes coming out of the kitchen that look very tempting.

A few minutes away from there is Yat Lok Barbecue, a roast meat (siu mei) shop that has a couple of branches; this is the one that was visited by Anthony Bourdain. Despite all of the English on display in the window, they don’t have an English menu but the manager speaks very good English. I think the char siu here is as good as Wan Chai’s famous Joy Hing. The siu yok may have been the best I’ve ever had. But the siu pai guat, the honey roast pork ribs that are so reminiscent of the barbecue spare ribs served in the Chinese restaurants in New York when I was a kid, was a big disappointment. Believe it or not, we haven’t tried their most famous dish, their roast goose. Yet.

Further on up the road is one of the town’s two Indian restaurants, Shalimar. It’s okay. They serve ketchup with their papadums and their mint sauce is a shade of green that I’ve never seen before. But it’s relatively cheap and the food is reasonable.

Oddly enough, or maybe not, the old part of town is where most of the bars are. I’ve mostly been hitting a British style pub called The King’s Belly. (Hey, if you’re Irish, bring your passport there on St. Patrick’s Day and you can drink all day for free.) A respectable selection of beers. Decent fish and chips, decent bangers and mash, haven’t tried the pies yet. Their burger is quite okay, but at $138 for an “8 ounce Kobe beef burger,” it’s almost shockingly expensive for Tai Po. But given the lack of western restaurants in town, this could be the best burger in Tai Po. Other bars in town include Soho, right next door to the Belly, and Bobby London Bar, which I’m told has live music some nights and stays open till 6 AM on weekends. My kinda joint.

I found a market street today. A pedestrianized area stretching for 2 or 3 blocks, it was a lot like the Wan Chai market – fresh meat and produce, lots of shops with cheap clothes & housewares, but no Thai or FIlipino shops (a few Indonesian shops though). In the middle of this street is a beautiful Man Mo temple – with a sign in front saying smoking is not prohibited. My kinda joint.

We haven’t tried Lanciano’s yet, the somewhat famous Italian place near the railway museum. And we haven’t gone up to Tai Mei Tuk yet, but I expect we’ll get up that way soon.

There are actually several sections of town we haven’t really explored yet, including the bigger mall called Uptown Plaza that sits about the Tai Po Market KCR station. Well, no big rush. It’s a mall.

There is no movie theater in Tai Po! There’s not much in the way of cultural activities at all, at least not that I’ve found so far, outside of the occasional “show” at the Wishing Trees and the beautiful Kadoorie Gardens in Lam Tsuen. No museums, aside from the Railway Museum.

I’ve discovered that when I really feel an urge for western food or a real Hong Kong style modern mega mall, Tsuen Wan is just a 20 minute drive away. I feel like a country rube coming to the big city when I go there now, as we did on Sunday night, getting totally lost looking for the Tai Po Plaza mall. ”Wow! Gosh! Look at all them purty lights!” “Oooh, they have an Ice Fire store!” Yeah, I know, what can I say?

Anyway, I’m quite enjoying this area. I’m sad on many levels that soon I’ll no longer be working from home and will be spending 2 or 3 hours a day commuting. But there will still be the weekends …

Commuting From Lam Tsuen

I am, believe it or not, starting a new job soon. Aside from everything else, it will mean a daily commute from Lam Tsuen to Wan Chai. Driving is not an option – gas, tolls and parking would easily add up to at least HK$5,000 per month, an insane amount to spend on commuting.

Here are the options I’m looking at, none of which are entirely pleasant:

* Mini-bus to Tai Wo KCR station (yes, I still call it the KCR and not the “West Rail Line” – I’m old skool) and then 4 (count ‘em) 4 trains to Wan Chai. While the three transfers are logistically relatively simple, traveling on the MTR during rush hour has become an increasingly unpleasant experience in recent years at the system is really straining at the seams and barely able to handle the huge number of people reliant on it. I can recall when commuting from Sai Kung last year that when changing trains at Quarry Bay in the morning, crowds were so thick that I’d have to wait for 3 or 4 trains to pass for my chance to get squeezed like a sardine for 15 minutes.

* Big bus to Kam Sheung Road station and then 3 trains to Wan Chai. Well, it’s one train less. If I was to find the bus too slow, the MTR operates a Park ‘n Ride at this station and all day parking here is just HK$30.

* Drive to Tsuen Wan (probably 30 minutes), find some cheap (hah!) monthly parking there and then it’s just 2 trains to Wan Chai, bonus being that Tsuen Wan is the first stop on its line so I could probably have a seat all the way to Admiralty. But figuring a 30 minute drive to Tsuen Wan, the cost of parking, the time spent parking and getting to the MTR, this doesn’t seem like a reasonable option.

* Mini-bus to Tai Wo, then take the KCR all the way down to Hung Hom and look for some bus that goes Cross Harbor. I have no idea which bus and I’m wondering how long this would take given the massive traffic at the “central” Cross Harbor Tunnel. (Three tunnels, one is massively backed up, two flow regularly, and our inept government has had years to try to sort this out and done nothing, though there is a “scheme” being discussed.) Anyone out there goes this way?

* Mini-bus to Tai Po and then there’s a big bus that goes to HK Island. Kind of an odd route in that it goes through Sha Tin and Kwun Tong to the Eastern Harbour Tunnel (less traffic) and then shoots across the north of HK island, mostly on highway, stopping in Wan Chai, Admiralty, Central and Sheung Wan. I’ve taken this bus during off hours and have gotten from Wanchai to Tai Po in 35 minutes. No idea how slow it would be during rush hours (or if I can even get a seat in the morning) but guess I will find out.

* Red mini-bus? I’ve heard tell there’s a red mini-bus that runs between Tai Po and Causeway Bay. I know where it stops in Causeway Bay but no idea where to find it in Tai Po. One of the oddities of Hong Kong’s mini-bus “system” is that the government has an English language site for green mini-bus routes but no equivalent for the red ones. Anyone know anything more about this bus?

* The Lam Tsuen web site, run by the “Lam Tsuen Valley Committee,” whoever they are, has a mention of what appears to be a private bus, running from Yuen Long, passing through here, and going to Wan Chai. It runs six times in the morning, from 6:35 to 8:00. Five return trips in the evening, but the last one is 6:05, which is probably too early for me, but the morning runs should be okay. HK$22 each way. Need to call and try to find out more.

So lots of options. None immediately jump out as “great” but several look to be at least feasible.

Are there any other options I don’t know about? Anyone know anything about that red mini-bus?

I’m Now on SmarTone and ….

Having resigned myself to the likely fact that PCCW won’t run a wire to my house for longer than I care to think about, I went and got myself a mobile data account with SmarTone.

First things first, I went to the Wanchai Computer Centre to see if I could buy a 4G USB modem at a cheaper price than SmarTone’s. Turns out the WCC was $100 more expensive. What I did see there, that I hadn’t seen previously, was a 4G Router – you put the SIM card directly into the router, as opposed to the router I bought, that has a USB port that allows one to run it off a USB modem.

At any rate, over to SmarTone to get set up. Their signal seems to be much stronger where I live.

You have to admire companies that use technology well. Go to a 3 shop and you’ll see a bunch of people sitting behind desks typing customer info into computers. Go to a SmarTone shop and the staff are standing at podiums. As for info on a product and they whip out an iPad and show you all the details. Sign up with them and they don’t have to type in all your data – the guy used his iPhone camera to scan my ID card and address proof and then OCR software grabbed the details and populated the form appropriately.

And no paper. I signed the contract with my finger on the iPad. No paper receipt. As soon as I signed and clicked okay, the receipt was emailed to me. Sweet.

So once at home, I got everything set up and saw via SpeedTest that I was getting download speeds of up to 20 Mbps. This is huge for me, because in 5 years in Sai Kung I had an 8 Mbps line (which is all PCCW can give me in Lam Tsuen, too) and of course never got that kind of speed in real usage. Mobile data wasn’t an option at either of the places I lived in Sai Kung because I could barely get a 2G signal let alone 3G or 4G.

Well, it’s not all smiles. Because it took me less than 24 hours to hit the 5 gig mark and get an SMS telling me that for the rest of the month – 25 more days – my “priority to access the network” would be lowered but that they guaranteed that my speed would not go below 128 Kbps. 128k? Be still my bleeding heart.

At the moment (12:18 AM) Speedtest is reporting download speed is roughly 6.5 Mbps, down 50% or more from the speed I was getting earlier today. To be fair, earlier today, my village was probably 2/3rds empty with people at work and now could be prime internet time here, with people doing all sorts of stuff before hitting the sack. And, if I’m in the mood to be fair (actually no I’m not) then I could say that 6.5 Mbps is still double what I was getting with PCCW.

In my opinion, “unlimited data” needs to be “unlimited data without any fine print or asterisks.” The only people who benefit from the so-called Fair Usage Data Policy are the mobile companies; certainly not the public.

And if their networks are creaking at the seams because they couldn’t build fast enough to handle all the demand for streaming High Definition multimedia, is that my fault?

I’d also suggest that they need to adjust the numbers for subscribers who either cannot get a fixed line from PCCW or choose not to do so and are using wireless as their sole means of Internet access. I know, it’s probably a small percentage of users (but probably growing) but that should make it all the easier to provide for them/us/me. And honestly, if it’s a choice between HK$220 a month throttled at 5 gig or pay some higher amount, let’s say an additional 50%, for really unlimited data, I’d pay the extra amount.

Setting into Tai Po

(No photos because I’m still on slow internet via iPhone-tethering.)

So we decide to go out for Valentine’s Day dinner in Tai Po rather than venturing to more, um, urban areas. I didn’t want to spend a lot for dinner because money is tight at the moment.

Our first few times venturing into town, we had gone to the area around the Tai Po Mega Mall, which is okay enough but the restaurant choices there are all chain places and seem uninspiring. We’d also eaten in a couple of cheap places nearby – nothing to write about but filling.

The past few days we’ve walked around the older part of town, near the Tai Po Hui market, which is much livelier in terms of people, shops and restaurants. We haven’t explored the market itself yet on the presumption that it was mostly closed for the CNY holiday.

We started off in the town square, walking around and looking in windows. There must be at least 20-30 restaurants in the square and in the lanes leading to it. Mostly they’re dai pai dong or cha chaan teng style places, nothing fancy but good honest spots. The problem is in trying to figure out from the outside which ones would or wouldn’t have English menus. In some cases the windows are just covered with Chinese menus, giving me little idea of what they would serve inside. There are a couple of places with English menus outside – one a “soy sauce western” place with some really strange sounding dishes – odd fusiony combinations of things like crab and “chicken chop” in cheese sauce sorts of things. The other seemed to be a Tsui Wah sort of place.

So finally we figured we’d plunge into the Yat Lok Roast Meat restaurant, a place famous because Anthony Bourdain ate there and featured it on the No Reservations show. The stuff hanging in the window looked fabulous. We walked in and they steered us to the one person working there who speaks English. I asked if they had an English menu and he said no.

So we went to a table. I looked around but almost everyone else had just been seated so I couldn’t point at something and say “give us that.” I ordered a mixed plate of char siu, siu yok and siu pai guat (yes, I know the goose is famous there but will do that another time), a plate of veggies and fried rice. (Later, we’d see other people getting some more interesting looking dishes.)

I think the char siu compared favorably with the one from Joy Hing in Wanchai, the top rated siu mei (roast meat) place in Hong Kong. I don’t know if people rate their siu yok but I loved it – much less fat than usual, which I think is great but I suspect locals prefer it with more fat – and the skin was just an amazing color and texture. The siu pai guat (kind of like the barbecue spare ribs that Chinese restaurants in the US serve) was a bit of a letdown – lots of bone and fat, not that much meat, though the taste was okay.

Anyway, we stuffed ourselves silly there and know we’ll be back.

After dinner, we went walking around in search of a dessert place. No Honeymoon Dessert around there, not that I know of. As we were walking down this side alley, I saw the sign for King’s Belly Bar and recalled that I was told it was the most popular bar in town for foreigners. So we went in there and ordered a couple of drinks.

They were running this Valentine’s Day promo – they take a picture of you with a Polaroid and give you the picture (the guy took a picture of the picture with his iPhone) and then give you a special cocktail for two – all free. Who would say no to that?

I checked their food menu and saw they do fish & chips, bangers & mash, several varieties of pie, burgers, full English breakfast. We met a few other people in the bar, and our quick stop for one drink ended up being 2 or 3 hours and quite a few drinks. Then a 5 minute walk to the bus stop, 10 minute bus ride home. Easy peasy.

So quite liking it here.

One thing I’m searching for and not really finding is something that I can put on my iPhone that will translate Chinese menus or provide a dictionary of Cantonese food names/pictures. I’ve done a lot of searching on Google, installed half a dozen different apps on my iPhone, still can’t find quite what I’m looking for. Any recommendations?