I'm sitting here on my flight back to the states as I type. They actually have a laptop charger on the plane, so I'll get to use the laptop for the remaining of the flight.
Yay!
For those who have already heard, the reason I went back to
Hong Kong was because of the passing of my grandma in
Hong Kong. I decided to fly back for the funeral so that I could keep my parents company during the stressful time they would endure in
Hong Kong. Leaving from work for a week is generally difficult because of busy it gets over there, but luckily my boss was extremely understanding of the situation and I was able to fly to
Hong Kong without worrying about work for a short period of time.
During my trip I got the opportunity to reunite with a lot of my relatives and long lost cousins. I don't ever recall having 90% of my cousins unite together at one place all my life. As my Uncle Francis pointed out, it is actually quite sad that most Chinese families don't have regular family reunion events. It remains a question why it takes something like the death of someone in the family in order to unite everyone together in one room.
It was quite an experience seeing all my cousins again. Of worth noting, I got to see my
cousin Cindy from Victoria, BC for the first time since over 12 years ago. Gee, basically she was 13 and I was 15 back when we saw each other. Prior to that I had only seen her perhaps twice, and so it was quite strange to meet up with her during our adulthood. Since our age is so close to each other, it was surprisingly effortless trying to get along with each other. And since we didn't really know anyone else in
Hong Kong, we pretty much became each other's buddy during our stay. Cindy and I had many great conversations about life, food, fashion and family in general and it was very refreshing to catch up with her. It's like having a little sister that I never had to whom we could share about our issues openly without worrying about being judged. It was also great seeing my other six or seven younger cousins whom I had never really hung out with in the past. In some way I felt a natural responsibility to spend some time with each one of them, get to know them, and really provide a role-model type image to them as an older cousin.
Argh I feel like an old fart.
One of the biggest sacrifices when deciding to
go to Hong Kong for the funeral was the inability to watch the Super Bowl live with anyone. Fortunately I found out while in
Hong Kong that Cindy was actually a psycho sports fan, and so we decided to get up at the crack of dawn to watch the game at some sports bar in
Lan Kwai Fong. Oh man I don't think I'd ever waken up at 6am to
go to a sports bar and drink lots and lots of beer while I watch football. That was definitely one of the highlights of my trip. Well, sort of. The game kind of sucked, and they didn't play any of the
Superbowl commercials there. :-(.
Overall, I'd say I had a great trip. As opposed to spending all my money on new clothes, I ended up spending most of my money on food, drinks, and foot massages. Oh my god foot massages are SO AWESOME in
Hong Kong. It only costs about $13
HKD for one hour of intense massage. I went to this foot massage place four days in a row and became a regular there. I even took Cindy there twice and I think she's addicted too!
Haha.
Hmm let's see what else I did while I was there. Oh! Katie, Ada, Cindy and I went to
Lan Kwai Fong on Saturday night. Cousins reunite! We went to this yummy
Spanish tapas place called La Bodega and we proceeded to go to Dragon-i, Drop, and Yum la for more drinks after. It was great.
I really wish I could be there a bit longer to catch up with my other friends such as Anita's brother, sister, and some of my old classmates. Unfortunately I only had 6 days there, and I had to spend the majority of the time with my parents and my grandpa.
Hopefully I'll get to go on a real vacation soon! It's unlikely though since my wedding will be in June, and I'd need to save up some more vacation days for the honeymoon. Oh well.
Update (11 hours later): Uh. The flight is running 2 hours over its intended arrival time. Looking at the GPS imagery, it looks like the pilot has decided to fly all the way up by Alaska and then going down south past Vancouver, Seattle, and then finally to San Francisco.
WTF mate?
Pictures
are now up!
