Not dead yet!

1) Yeah, I took a long break from blogging, and broke my streak of posting every month. But, hey, when this started in 2005, blogs were the big thing. And yes, I should be on Tumblr by now, or something else, but this blog is old and trusted, so I need to stick with it.

2) I officially now have permanent residency. Which means I a) no longer need a work visa b) could run for office here and c) am eligible for a whole lot more stuff from the government, like living in public housing (if I made a lot less money) and more of the annual kickbacks when the government runs its usual surplus. (Last year, I missed out on getting $6,000 HK free from the government because I was not a permanent resident. I have met people who grew up in Canada, were 25, and had never been in Hong Kong before, yet they were eligible for the 6k because their parents or grandparents were Chinese and from Hong Kong. They visited HK for the first time just to get their ID card and that money.)

3) And I now have lived in Hong Kong longer than I did Chicago, by my account. I moved to Chicago in May 2008, and left in October 2005. I now have been in HK for 7 years, 2 months. Weird.

4) I will be living in the Kennedy Town address for two more years. One thing I have learned in the latest round of negotiating a lease: Never, ever trust someone until they sign an agreement. Last year, the person I rent from said she valued having a steady tenant more than anything. And this year, that did not matter; all that matters was getting a lot more money out of me. This, after she agreed to a three-year lease but backed out of it the day we were to sign and only signed a two-year lease. Was I disappointed? Yes. Do I expect to be here in this apartment after 2 more years? Not so sure.

5) So why did I stay? I still have a pretty nice place at below the market rate. The sad thing is, my rent has gone up a lot more than my pay at my full-time job, a constant complaint in Hong Kong. It's weird to think that soon, I may be priced out of what is a local neighborhood.

6) That said, gentrification is going on full-steam here. The Wall Street Journal pimped my neighborhood recently. Chain restaurants (well, outlets of local gweilo-centric chains) are opening here; the latest is to be a version of a crappy Mexican restaurant that was in Soho. Heck, I was walking home the other night via the street behind my apartment, and found a bar had opened up while I was away on Christmas break. It said it was "British fusion," which I view as meaning somewhere that took a template and will have no soul and be closed in a few months, unless they eke out a 2% margin. But I find it strange a bar can now open a block from me and I don't even notice it anymore.

7) That said, there still are constants in my hood. 7 years later, I still go to the same laundry place, run by the same old couple. My local vegetable stand is still there, 2 years after I first started buying local veggies and fruit there. And I still have not been to the wet market in my neighborhood, 7 years in. It's like a badge of honor now.

Chicago!

1) Just finished another trip back home. This is what, my 10th or so trip home, I think, since I left? Some things are the same: I still want to go back to Map Room in Chicago every trip. Other things change; I have not been to Hot Doug's or seen a Cubs game for 2 years now. I no longer head to Delilah's, my old favorite bar, either; part of that, I think is the Hop Leaf and Map Room are more suited for someone of my elderly age. And while I always will love the city, things change too. When I go home now, I want to spend more time in Wisconsin, chilling with family. I want to help cook and grill out at home. I realized something in this trip: while I still will visit Chicago when I go back, I am scaling back how much time I spend there. It's natural; relationships change, friends have kids, other friends leave. It's life.

2) What does not change: Me schlepping back beer. 210+ pounds of beer, and two-thirds of that just for my beer customers. I only wish it was all for me.

3) That said, I do love how when I get off the plane, I can avoid the long line for foreigners and just immediately line up and go through the resident line in 2 minutes or less, with the automated turnstile for ID card holders. It makes it even more fun when you see mainland residents lined up, for some reason.

4) I come back to even more gentrification; another French "bistro" has opened in my neighborhood, though my first stop for food was not there, but the new Vietnamese pho (noodle soup) restaurant in my hood. I am adapting, it seems, to Asia, even if I still do not dig Cantonese food.

5) At our beer business, we are adding a full-time salesperson. In a meeting yesterday with 3 partners, 2 of them were Chinese, and one was a gweilo. The two Chinese partners said that if we hired a salesperson, it would be better to hire a westerner. Since we sell American and Japanese beer, it is better to have a Western face, they said; it would give our company more credence. In fact, the Westerner would automatically get more meetings than a Chinese salesperson would, even if the Westerner only spoke English, and not Cantonese or Mandarin. Chew on that thought!

6) In two months, I could be a permanent resident. Eeep!

7) Somehow, the construction zone behind me still looks the same to the naked eye as back in June. I have no idea what is going on.

Clearing the air

1) I never thought I would be thankful to be back in the air of Hong Kong, but I was two weeks ago. I made only my second trim to Beijing, and again it was after the end of the Olympics. I got to hang with some dear friends, try some great microbrews made in Beijing and see, finally, the Great Wall up close. Too bad I landed on Wednesday afternoon, and only got to the wall on Thursday, when it was already kind of hazy, with visibility limited to about 1 to 1.5 miles. The day before, it was clear, I was told.
But by the time I flew out on Saturday, it was way, way worse; the air actually tasted like there was dry cement floating through the air. On days like this, my hosts said, they just stay inside all day because there is nothing else you can do. And when I landed in HK, with its only slightly polluted air (at least compared to Beijing), I can't believe how happy I was.
2) That said, Beijing has a lot going for it. We biked for 30 minutes on Friday night to the microbrewery, which is in the middle of a hutong. We then biked home drunk, with no problems. The city has big, wide sidewalks, and you can easily walk from bar to restaurant to home. The city just feels more ..... neighborhoody than Hong Kong, if that makes sense. You can walk from place to place to place, no problem. You can commute with your bicycle. And the food? It's great, with lots of different styles of Chinese cuisine, including Yunnan, the spicy cuisine from the area near the Laos/Myanmar/Vietnam border. Heck, we even found a shop run by an American and his Chinese wife; he is a former snowboarder/chef who now runs a beer shop in Beijing with three Rogue beers on tap. (The shop also sells organic herbs and spices and salt; fixed-gear bicycles for young hipsters; and glass pipes for smoking whatever you want.) If the air was clean all the time, Beijing would win as way better than Hong Kong, hands-down.
But there's the rub: it isn't nice a lot of the time, mostly because of all the power plants that burn dirty coal in China. It's hard to like a city when you can actually feel the particulates you breathe in.
3) Favorite site: Visiting Wonderland, the abandoned amusement park. It's mostly like the linked article, but now all the corn has grown up around the castle and the wire skeleton for the building. Oh, and there are squatter sleeping in some of the buildings too. And the local residents won't let you get in to visit it, but if your driver will drive a quarter mile down the wrong way of an off-ramp, you can get there now problem. Which means driving normally, this being China.
4) I forgot how fun it can be to be on a bike, cruising around a city.
5) That said, I am now inclined to stay in Hong Kong for a while. Looking at the US and its economic state is just depressing now. And now that I have permanent residency coming up, HK is looking more and more viable for the long-term. Speaking of which, I now have lived in my apartment for a longer time than I ever have anywhere, and I wouldn't mind staying here a while longer. The expected noise of the construction behind my building has never really started, so why not?
6) Plus, now there is a decent Vietnamese pho restaurant in my neighborhood, and a French bakery is to open soon. If only there was a good beer bar.....

Lean to the right

1) Last Saturday, we had a little party of 250ish people for my little side venture. I woke up in the morning to some of the worst haze in a long time. I found out a few hours later it was because of a typhoon coming from the east; when that happens, it sucks all the pollution from west of HK into it. That was also the first time I had heard a storm was nearby, but because they never do anything, I thought nothing of it.
On Monday, about 2pm, we heard they might be raising the sever-weather flag to a T8 around 6pm, which means we should leave work. Sure enough, at 5:55, it went up (The government usually waits until the average workday ends to do stuff like this, when public transportation is at peak capacity anyway, making it easier for people to get home). I wandered down to the bus stop near work (just to the right of the photo above; the orange strip is the bottom of a bus), saw my umbrella crumple in the wind and got soaked as I waited for the trip home.
Around 11 pm, they put it up to a T9 flag, only the second in my time here. Sure, no problem; it was raining hard and very windy, but no problem. I fell asleep around 11.30 at night, then woke up at 7 am to find out that they raised it to a T10 about 12.45 am; it was then one level below a super-typhoon warning.
And the end results? The next morning, there were lots of down branches everywhere, some standing water in low-lying areas and lots of broken umbrellas everywhere. I couldn't get a cab on my street that morning because a tree fell down and blocked the street feeding into it. But damage was kept to a minimum.
Oh, and you can see what it did to the trees at my bust stop in the photo above. East is to the left, west is to the right.

2) And, less than 48 hours later, you never would have known a typhoon came through. Every sidewalk was washed off and swept, all debris was clear and it was back to normal. This city amazes me sometimes. If this typhoon happened in the US, debris would be there 6 months from now.

3) It also meant there was no construction behind me for a day. It has not been bad, but they now are doing more jackhammering and piledriving, and they start right at 8am on those days. It sounds bad, but you are used to that in HK. And they don't do it all day long, but for a few hours. I have had friends who have had it start at 7 am and go on next door until 9pm. Nope, there are no noise rules here.

4) Random, possibly permanent, food appearance in the grocery store across the street from me: Johnsonville turkey sausages.

5) Random, not permanent food appearance in an upscale store: Fresh flour tortillas for a good price. From France. Go figure.

6) Observations while running a business. The small businesses pay on time and are easy to work with. It's the chains who try to whittle you down to nothing and want 6 months to pay.

7) I am missing my favorite music fest, Fuji Rock, this year due to work commitments. On the upside, I get to see Wilco when I am back in Chicago in September. Score!

8) 3 months to permanent residency!

Permanency

1) Well, it had to come to this at some point: I am filling out papers to get permanent residency. It doesn't mean I'll be here forever, but like many, I came here 6.5 years ago, thinking I would be here for two years. And now, I am filling out papers that will change my status here; I no longer will need work visas (so if I quit my regular job, I could work at Starbucks if I wanted); I am eligible for more government benefits; and most importantly, I am eligible for more take breaks and kickbacks if the government continues to give out freebies every year because their tax coffers overfloweth.

2) Speaking of, the side business is booming, and we signed up for a booth at the biggest restaurant expo in the city; it cost us about $4500US, but we get half of that back via a government grant once the show is over. Why? They want to encourage small businesses to grow, and are doing that via incentive programs. Ah, the benefits of living in a healthy economy!


3) I was having drinks and food with a friend last night who is debating whether to leave Hong Kong; his choice is to go to grad school here or in Ohio. Even if he does stay, he wants to get out of his neighborhood, which is too gentrified, he says. And how that is bad.
Sure, I agree that construction is bad for your well-being. But I had to disagree on the others. More restaurants? More transportation options? At some point, you have to realize that the good old days sometimes were the bad old days. Gentrification isn't automatically good, but it isn't automatically bad, either. Sometimes, a better quality of life is appreciating what you have in your hood, whether it is old or new.

4) I realize, strangely enough, that the longer I am overseas, I am reverting more and more to how I communicated when I first came over here: emails. Not Facebook. Not other social media. But that old-school, modern way of communicating. What that says, I have no idea. Maybe that I am a curmudgeon.

5)

June construction. Still no major jackhammering, but it is starting occasionally. What you do not see, is just to the right, with the yellow container on the bottom, they post a big sign every day with the temperature, to warn the workers. Usually 30-34 Celsius. (86-92F).

6) After 6 years, I have realized the only plants I really am good at growing are ferns, because they are unkillable. 

Handling the heat

1) There are a number of friends who still get angry at the little things here in Hong Kong every day. Yes, I still curse under my breath when I get stuck behind two meandering people who block an entire sidewalk. But long ago, I learned many ways to cope with it: Staying at home on my days off, avoiding the stressful areas of Hong Kong, like Causeway Bay, unless necessary, or the easiest, just not letting it bother you. After this long, if you let every little thing get to you, you implode. Plus, it could be my age is making me wiser, too. That said, I loved this t-shirt I saw someone wearing a few weeks ago. 

2) The downside of my new, expanded beer side business is I have very little free time anymore, especially with a summer of hell looming at my full-time job. I don't get to go to the beach as much anymore on my days off; I do business calls. But as I was taking a walk the other morning - yes, one of the advantages of living on the far edge of Hong Kong island is you can go for walks on quit(er) roads is I realize how much I do love this island some days. I love going for walks and seeing huge cargo containers swing by just a few hundred yards away in the shipping channels. I love seeing weird stuff, like layered cemeteries built hundreds of yards high in a hill. I love being able to stop for a water at the stalls that sell flowers for the relatives who clean the tombs there. I love seeing all the little engineered terra-forming they have done on this island, with the little stepped creeks they build to prevent landslides. I love that in my house, I can view a huge hill outside one window, and part of an ocean on another. I love that I can walk downstairs at night, if I want, and get a spicy tuna roll or grilled ox tongue at my Japanese restaurant. I realize, hopefully, I may be here a while. I miss the US, sure, but the greatest thing about Hong Kong is meeting a ton of people. That, and the fact there is a grocery store across the street from me. 

3) On the walk back, I saw this next to an industrial building near me. The other thing about Hong Kong is the fastidiousness of the city. Even on the remote roads, a government worker sweeps the sidewalks of leaves and dirt every few days. Public trash bins are emptied every day. And they replace them regularly, too; the shot below are a bunch of bins waiting to be put into service. It's nice, sometimes, to be in a city with some money to keep it in good shape. 

4) I still am waiting for the full-on construction to start and make my life hell. The shot below is not much different than last month, though you can see the ground floor of the building next to mine. Check out the bottom right of the picture; the owner has created an outdoor patio with high walls. I never see anyone outside, but I would kill for a space like this. Strangely, in Hong Kong, no one wants these spaces as much as you would think; I knew a couple that was renting an upper-floor apartment in Wan Chai, about 600 square feet, for $10,000 HK a month, I think; they rented half the rooftop, about 400 square feet, for an additional $1,000 or $1,500 a month. It was theirs alone to use for parties, bbqing, morning coffees, etc. Sure, it was unusable in the rain, but I would love a situation like that in my building. 

5) The next big thing, it seems, in restaurants here is Mexican food. A high-end, hipster restaurant is opening, serving Mexican food, and they want our beer on draft. Score!

6) Speaking of, the beer scene has changed here. Two years ago, we could not get my favorite bar, the Globe, to buy our American beers for $17 HK a bottle with my first beer venture. Just this week, they agreed to carry some of our Japanese beers for $27 a bottle. The market is booming here for beer, and that's good for us.

The month or so in pictures

Hanging in, barely, for the once-a-month posts. For those of you still there, I'll try to keep it up and more, but the new beer business is taking up nearly all of my free time. 

1) Ah, Japan. I will always love visiting you, even if it means I also find Thai products in stores there that make me laugh. Like porn coconut.

2) This movie poster was in Hong Kong for the movie translated as "Love in the Buff." It was on buses and kiosks all over Hong Kong, and the common belief is the graphic artist did know that using that font would make it read in English like "Love in the Butt." Love hurts!

3) So does either falling onto a track while you are distracted by your Ipod's music, or by .... ummmm....sending out an invisible force beam at the other person with an Ipod?

4) Ah Japan. Your use of pandas in advertisements knows no bounds.

5) This was the scene on the waterfront near Baird Brewery in Numazu, Japan. If there is one way to explain how orderly and neat Japan is, it's this shot of what passes for a scrapyard there. Even the scrapyards there are organized with a still-life quality to them.

6) The hotels in Tokyo may be tiny - as in 120 square feet or less - but they do want to give you the ability to make your toilet colorful and stylish.

7) I was in Japan for about 6 days. I spent four of those nights at my favorite bar, Ushi Tora. Every night, I got to meet Luc, a French-Canadian brewer who plans to move to Japan in the fall and start a brewery in conjunction withe the Ushi-Tora owners (one of whom is in the back left). Luc graced us one night by opening a bottle from his current brewery of something I had never heard of before, a black imperial saison beer; only 100 were made. It was awesome.

8) On another beer note, I finally tried Dark Lord, an imperial stout brewed by Three Floyds, my go-to brewery in the US; they are based just outside Chicago. They sell this beer only one day every year, but some was available at Crafthead, a bar in Tokyo whose owner knows the Floyds. A friend and I tried a bottle of Dark Lord at a crazy-expensive price. I never could find Dark Lord for sale in Chicago, but I found it in Tokyo. Go figure.

9) A shot from the construction site behind me. Still no problems from it; No real noise or pile-driving yet. It makes me happy, yet nervous at the same time. 

10) More news in the gentrification of my hood: Now you can constantly get some cheeses across the street from me at the grocery store, including camembert and other things. Up until a month ago, cheeses, outside of processed slices, were just a random appearance. 

11) So in the photo above, #9, you see a gray building on the left. That is the left of a hotel that finally opened last fall after sitting unopened, yet seemingly finished for a few years. The strange this is now there are a lot of people speaking Russian in my neighborhood right near there; my guess is they list this hotel in Russian travel agencies. 

12) I just got done participating in Hong Kong's first microbrew festival. It was waaay busier than expected, to the point of being chaotic. One booth ran out of beer 4 or so hours into it; we overstocked and made it to the end. It could be people just checking out a new thing to do, but based on the reaction of the people there, and the real sampling going on, this may bode well for this city when it comes to beer.