I am back !

Well, it has been a long time since I last posted anything to this blog and I have too many reasons to justify the absence…However, none of these reasons can be valid since friends and family (those who read this blog) should always come first and hereby I promise to be a little better at this thing going forward.

Early to mid-October I moved out of the temporary apartment from Tsim Sha Tsui (in Kowloon) and moved into my permanent home for the next (at least) 12 months. The apartment is located in a massive complex that contains 6 towers, each of them over 70 floors. With each floor hosting 8 apartments. Well, you do the math. It is practically a small village. It is on the eastern side of Hong Kong Island, a few minutes from the subway in an area called Sai Wan Ho. It takes about 33-35 minutes to get to work, about 9 stops on the subway and a few minutes walk on both sides of the journey. My very limited amount of personal belongings and my furniture has not arrived yet from Toronto so I am still living without kitchen appliances (forks, knives, plates, glasses) and currently only have a wardrobe and a fold-out futon in the apt. My time will come though… The place is very decent and provides plenty of room for visitors so please come and visit. I cannot think of one person who reads this blog that would not enjoy this city.

Work is still work, I am slowly getting the hang of it. The systems are very similar to the ones we used in Toronto but some connections and routing is quite unique. We also deal with many other brokerage firms to gain access to many local exchanges so it’s been neat to be exposed to these things. We do support our Australian office as well so many times we have an Australian co-worker from Sydney calling us for help but then we get the developers involved that are located in Culver City, CA to discuss a connection to Singapore or Japan. So a Tuesday morning 8am outage in Australia is actually a Monday 1pm outage in Culver City. Sometimes these time zones are mind-boggling….

On a much lighter note, last weekend I traveled to South Korea and spent a lovely 4 days in Seoul. It was a great experience to see the Olympic venues from 1988 and learned a lot about the Korean War and the conflict between the North and the South. That, however, will be further discussed in another blog entry.

Meanwhile, check out some pictures from a hike we did this past weekend to Repulse Bay via the Tai Tam Reservoir area. Who would think that with a 10 minute bus ride from the busy streets of Hong Kong one can experience clean air, beautiful views and great nature? There are many trails on Hong Kong island and I have yet to discover most of them. So if there is nothing happening on a Saturday, there is always hiking to do. The weather is great here these days, constantly around 26C-28C. It never gets too cold around here so let these pictures serve as further enticement to attract a few of you guys towards this part of the planet for a visit.

Hiking pictures from Repulse Bay


On a side note: Congratulations to those who ran the New York City marathon this past weekend. Most of us know that it takes huge dedication and commitment so hats off to Roger and Lynn (as always) Well-done guys!

Stay tuned…