ElisabethV

For the most observant of you, you will notice Easter was, like, months ago. Well, let's imagine for a second that we travel back in time and we are still in March, and I've just come back from the Easter week end, m'kay? Soooooo, "LAST" week end was fab, I sampled at last the Great City, the Great Palace, the Great Wall, the Great Food. Yes, I was in the beautiful city of Beijing, on a week end trip with Linda, an equally adventurous HK friend whose memory proved to be a life saver, as you will discover later on in the text. (Suspense, tadadah). We arrived in our beautiful little bamboo garden hotel on the Saturday afternoon and spent the afternoon simply walking around. On the map it looked like we were slap bang in ... read more

An old Chinese proverb says : For Chinese New Year you should head off to Macau for a Police concert. Well who am I to resist the tradition? I thus spent a couple of days in Macau, which is a small group of islands an hour away from HK, by ferry ride. If you are super posh you can also go there by helicopter, which is super fast and glamourous (given my already glamourous life in HK I felt it was time to do things a bit more normally). Macau used to be a Portuguese colony and you can still see some remnants of this. Street names are in Portuguese, sometimes bearing names of Portuguese big shots. The architecture is most fascinating, with many streets of multicoloured low rise colonial houses. Walking through the old colonial ... read more

WANTED: A tall 90-floor tower. Usually found on the waterfront in Hong Kong. If anyone has any information on its whereabouts please contact us. So basically the sun has not been shining that much (and it's cold) and on some days when I wake up I can't see the IFC2 tower which is just in front of my bedroom window, and usually quite unmissable. And it's cold! Did I mention it's cold? :) ... read more

My mind is buzzing with the excitement of learning a new language: Cantonese! We had our first lesson this week with my colleagues. The teacher is a little bit unconventional because she is... Norwegian! Yes a little bit unusual you might say but actually it makes perfect sense. Who better than a foreigner can understand how difficult it is to learn a language? She has been living here for 18 years and according to a mutual friend her Cantonese (and Mandarin) is excellent. For anyone interested in fun and good Canto classes in HK here is the link: http://www.happyjellyfish.com/ A basic question: what is the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin? China is a huge country as such there is no one language known as "Chinese". There are many different regions throughout the country where people speak ... read more

This is it, 2007 has come to an end. It's been a year full of changes and travels. In the past 12 months I have visited: Brunei Cambodia China France Hong Kong India Japan Laos Malaysia Singapore Thailand The UK Vietnam Visited is a big word for some of these as sometimes it's been more like passing through. At the moment no forecasts yet on wether 2008 will be as active. On some level maybe for the size of my carbon footprint it's better to keep the travelling a little more local! On Dec 31 the New Year's partying took place at the place of my friends Ria and Josh. We had some amazing food, the company was fun and we even saw the fireworks. I think the fireworks were not as big as they will ... read more