Days of Blunder

I've recently signed up to a Mad Max style online game called--for some reason--Dark Wind. It's free (clue one as to me signing up there), and is a turn-based driving game in the vein of Car Wars.

My gang of anti-social gearheads rejoices in the name The Fighting Mongooses.

I managed to finish first in my first race, largely because the only other human player was reduced to a flaming -- and, crucially "turtled" -- wreck after a head-on collision, leaving me to cruise to victory. The track there was a figure of eight, which was interesting. I was sitting in third after the first hairpin (the NPC cars tend to smash into one another on the narrow straight leading up to it) and thinking things were fine. "Here comes the fun part," says the other player, and it was only then that I rotated my camera to reveal what we were about to try and dash in front of to cross to the other loop of the 8 .. the selfsame churning peloton I'd felt so smug about outpacing only seconds earlier.
The other player came a cropper on the following lap, as we tried to make the cross shoulder to shoulder. I felt a bit bad about that -- we both hit the same two cars, but I escaped with only a fishtail and some tyre wear, whereas his driver lost a limb!

My second race, I only managed second and that again by dint of consistency--the other players raced off ahead while I struggled with the bouncy off-road buggy track. There's a hare and tortoise metaphor in there somewhere, but I won't belabour the point.
More tales of the Fighting Mongooses to come at some point in the future, I imagine.


In the real world, things have been a bit stressful, with me juggling lots of work with indefinite plans to travel at some point. I need to go to Jakarta in either March or April for the pre-wedding course thing one has to do (which will be even more thrilling in a language I barely speak), and I also have to get to my grandfather's funeral, and I don't know when it will be yet... it's all very well leaving time so that far-flung relatives can make it (mostly from Australia) but it doesn't much help us, people, if you don't give us any notice extra.

Still, I'm trying not to panic. It hasn't been all bad. HSBC turned me down for a credit card despite me earning more than twice the required amount (gits), but another provider of the exact same card has kindly stepped into the breach. My old flatmate Paul visited for a week at the beginning of January en route from England to Beijing and slept on my sofa--it was rather nice having him as a flatmate again. Our friend Alex J was also down from Beijing, so we were able to enjoy a bit of a reunion with those two and me, as well as Rudi. On the day Paul arrived (though he missed this out as he arrived 12 hours later than he'd planned, on account of confusing am and pm), we went for tea at the Peninsula, where we were at the next table from Jean-Claude van Damme. JCvD looked, in a word, bewildered.
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Happy new year

2008 is upon us. In a scant six months or so, it will be safe to go back to Beijing, post-Olympics. Well, apart from all the toxic particulates in the air, anyway.

I jetted over to Jakarta to stay with CK and her family, on the 22nd of December. The flight was with Cathay Pacific, which was pretty good. Not as good as China Airlines, though (rolling seatback movies instead of on-demand... the privation!), probably because Cathay has bigger fish to fry than the Jakarta--HK route.

I arrived in time for the traditional new year floods, with plenty of submerged fields visible during our descent to Soekarno-Hatta, but the roads were clear (except where disgruntled locals had set fire to a bridge on the airport toll-road) and the rain was mostly just a reason to occasionally have to shelter under an awning for a while.

Over Christmas itself we went up to a mountain region outside Jakarta called Puncak, and stayed in a rather odd little resort of holiday villas large and small, available in a variety of configurations and styles named after world cities. The difference between the "Monaco" and "Monte Carlo" villas, for example, was lost on me.

The purpose of this mountain retreat (close to the presidential summer residence, no less) was for weather-avoidance purposes, cold and rainy being considered preferable to hot and rainy. Lest the reader become envious, be sure I was not spending Christmas in utter opulence. You may well read "villa" and imagine fancy summer-houses with kidney-shaped swimming pools. These were not quite so grand. They weren't bad, but I was forced to reacquaint myself with washing in the traditional Indonesian shower, which is not so much a shower as pouring warm water over oneself from a small bucket with a panhandle.

At Christmas Eve, we went to midnight Mass in a large church that's part of a sort of retreat complex with an attached monastery. It was here, amid a congregation of a couple of thousand, that I achieved what I think is my largest scale only-white-guy-in-the-room moment to date.
To get there, you proceed up a winding road through a village (paying several small tolls en route, which seems pretty common around there) and then up a hill, punctuated with stations of the cross, before you reach the auditorium-like church proper. It's not exactly somewhere you'd happen across by accident.

Crowds were big on Christmas Eve, as you'd imagine. You had to get there early, and pre-Mass entertainment was laid on for the waiting throngs. I think I did OK with the Indonesian-language Mass itself. The hymns were easy enough to interpret, though I put this down to the rather generic lyrical content of hymns worldwide.

We returned to Jakarta by the afternoon of Christmas Day, much to the concern of little Nikki, CK's niece, who was anxious to get home and thus to the presents.
We stopped off for lunch at a restaurant in the town of Cimory which is bizarrely based around dairy products. Not all the food, you understand, but they have a shop that sells yoghurt and fresh milk and that sort of thing. And the playground has a Frisian cow theme. It's exotic foreign food in Indonesian eyes.

Nikki was then further dismayed to discover that not all the presents were for her.
I got her a drawing set and a Lego ambulance, which as tradition dictates ended up being put together by adult males--her dad and his brother-in-law.

(I got shirts, cuff-links, a dressing gown, chocolate, that kind of thing. You know. Luckily, I had learnt the Indonesian for "cuff-links" the day before (it's 'manset') so I was able to say thank you properly.)

Post-Christmas it was the usual round of malls -- Mangga Dua, Artha Gading, the other one -- stocking up on new clothes, formal shoes for work, knock-off PSP games (5000 rupiah each!) and so on. I briefly considered buying a low-cost and low-quality bass guitar, but didn't have room in my luggage. I don't want to spend too much on one, since I don't really play it, but I do want to get away from recording bass parts on a guitar and then digitally dropping it an octave. It just sounds a bit odd sometimes.

I also unfortunately got a bit of a bad stomach around the 29th or so. More unfortunately, CK told her mum, which led to extreme fussing. (Note to self: anything you say in the house will be repeated to everyone else...)

We went for tennis on the Saturday morning. Now, in this I had been misled. When they said "do you want to play tennis?" I thought they meant we'd go and, well, play tennis. Not go and have tennis coaching for a couple of hours. Still, I gradually remembered how to hit the ball vaguely where I wanted (after an eight-year hiatus) and scored a couple of points in the doubles game we eventually played. Doing anything with my right arm was a bit of a struggle for the next 24 hours, though.

New Year's Eve featured dinner at Sizzler's, who were woefully unprepared for a rush of customers, and the food wasn't great when it arrived. 2008 was heralded by some increasingly out of control fireworks nearby. CK and I had to settle for New Year hugs, since kissing in public is Not Done in Jakarta. In fact, on the way back to the car, we took advantage of the darkness therein for a bit of the old kissing, at which point the alarm went off on the car next to us. Even the motor vehicles are against public canoodling!

I flew back on January the 1st, feeling rather glum. I am not terribly happy to be back in Hong Kong, but what can you do?

Musical

So for some reason I submitted a song to an online forum thing. I'm quite pleased with the reaction, which described my vocals as "like a mumbly, gravelly David Bowie", although I admit the 'mumbly' part might not be a compliment.

On the other hand, at least one person didn't realise the lyrics weren't all in English, so maybe that's where that came from.

Argh

Managing editor's Post-it note: Does this mean Oxford University? If so, let's make it clearer.

Original text: "Buchan was educated at Oxford."


At Oxford. Not in Oxford, you daft apeth. At Oxford.
So just to be annoying, I've amended it to be specifically Brasenose College.

On another front, though, I've just gone along with changing 'tales', used in one paragraph of a back-cover blurb, to 'stories' "because the book's title includes ...'and other stories'". Is it stupid? Yes. Can I be bothered to explain why? No.

The woman has a tin ear for language.

Who do I have to kill to get out of Hong Kong?

I don't like Hong Kong. It's boring. There is nothing to do except buy things. The low, low prices on electronics are lovely, granted. But I think it's easy to tell why so many PSPs have been sold here. It is dull. Why have so many malls when they all sell the same stuff, anyway?

This is rather a moot point. I'm about to sign another year's contract and possibly move to a permanent position, so I'm in HK for a while yet.

I am, however, seriously considering moving off Lamma Island. I went for it originally because the island is genuinely quite nice (green, no cars, etc.), and because the rents are lower, which meant I could afford the deposit with the money I'd brought from Beijing.

There's a snag, though. The inhabitants. Not the Chinese, or Filipinos, who have their own peccadillos but no more so than anywhere else in Hong Kong. It's the white (mostly British) expats. I thought the "oh hey, isn't China amazing" and the work-placement crowd on the mainland were bad enough. The financial bods around Central are slightly more annoying, but it's only like being in the City of London. No, the Lamma expats are a category higher in the unpleasantness stakes. And at least on the Island, you won't bump into the same people all the time.

To be fair, most of the white people on Lamma are fine, going about their business like everyone else. Including myself, I'd hope. It's the visible and vocal minority that are the problem. What's referred to in HK as FILTH--Failed In London, Try Hongkong.

They're drunken, drug-fuelled pseudo-colonial failures with a penchant for violence. And I don't like being near them. I don't like having someone knocking on my door at midnight on a Sunday asking if he can hide in my flat while a gang of these white-haired (because they're always white-haired, with a clippered hairdo) louts scouts around the village looking for him to give a kicking to. I don't like the aggro I get just for talking to Chinese people in bars. I don't like being told "my mate wants to fight you" because "he doesn't like new people".

They might seem interesting in Graham Greene novels, but they really aren't. They're just dicks.
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Random notes

I never did get round to posting anything about my trip to Indonesia. For now, suffice to say that it is very hot in Jakarta, and that I now think I get why LA is described as being impossible to get around in without a car. I mean, intellectually I understood the concept before, but if LA's roads are much like Jakarta's - though I suspect they're in better repair - then it really is difficult to walk anywhere, and the buses don't seem a great plan either.

Jakarta's roads are packed with tuk-tuks, smallish motorbikes and, for the moneyed, 4x4s. Owning a big Nissan Landgrabber or whatever isn't quite as much of an anti-social move in Jakarta as it is in Hampstead. The roads' disrepair does make them rather necessary. Then, of course, the extra wear and tear caused by heavy 4x4s most likely makes the roads harder to maintain. I'd say it was a chicken-and-egg scenario but I suspect the roads weren't too hot even before the 4x4s turned up.

In more news about me me me, it looks like CK will be able to join our trip to the Macau GP after all. I just have to fork out for her plane ticket today. Unfortunately, that's more use of my credit card, a debt I've been trying to get shot of for about three years now.

A friend recently asked me "why don't you pay it all off, isn't the interest really high?" Well, yes it is high, but if I had the money to pay it all off in one go, I wouldn't have had to use a credit card in the first place. Adding insult to injury, I applied for a loan from HSBC in the UK to pay it off, so that at least I'd be on marginally smaller repayments. They turned me down. Bastards.
So they think I earn enough to pay off Amount X at a higher interest rate, but not a lower one. Interesting. I'm going to talk to HSBC Hong Kong, but I'm not entirely sure it's worth it -- HSBC's personal loan rates are more or less the same as their credit card rates anyway.

I hate money.

Vroom Vroom

Just schlepped all the way out to Cheung Sha Wan to pick up the tickets for the Macau Grand Prix! (Hey, "schlepped" is in the Firefox spellchecker dictionary. Interesting. And "Firefox" isn't.)

Woo yay! And I was only 45 minutes late back to work after lunch.
I did a quick search for the company in Gmail so I could write down their address--my first contact with them was waaay back in 2004, for the 51st GP. Well, third time lucky -- me and Rudi remembered the 53rd was on last year too late to get tickets, try as we might (I didn't even try to go to the 52nd).

Anyway, we're there for the two race days, slightly better seat (Grandstand A) on the Sunday. now we just need to make sure we book ferry tickets in advance, and try to book a hotel room at inflated prices.