I watched this comedy Taxi (2004).  Have a good feeling of the Manhanttan. New York is really New York. Very cool.  Very impersonal. 

I am not a civil servant.  But working in a public organization, the culture is very similar to civil servants.  So as a small potato on this subject I can talk a bit.

Civil servants are mostly very busy.  They are in no way slack.  They are not any freer than those working in the commercial.

There is however one major difference between those working in the government/public and those working in commercial sectors:  annual leave.

In the commercial sectors, when you apply for one-day / half-day off in the middle of the week, your administrator would jeer/scoff at you a bit, e.g. "you are taking a day off? where are u having the interview at?"

In the public sectors, staff are usually entitled to quite a lot of annual leave.  We gotta clear our leave before each leave-year ends.  So we all understood we have the needs to take days-off.

In public sectors, staffing are generally more stable than those in the commercial.  But in the commercial sectors, people come and go very quickly.  Recruitments are happening from time to time to look for replacements to fill up the vacancy.  So people are aware of the purpose of taking a day-off ---- must be for trying out job interviews!

I like this theme song very much.  It's a theme song of a current TVB program, called 疑情別戀 (Love Exchange).  The program is full of ambiguous and unfaithful relationships.  In fact, the core theme of the program is ambiguous relationships.

We all know that TVB's programs are nothing more than ambiguous & unfaithful relatinoships, hatred, life & death, etc.  However, I would say that 疑情別戀 is kinda different from the rest of TVB's series.  The most notable point was that, in the past, most programs have its own specific themes ----such as a airliners (衝上雲霄, 2003), forensics (法証先鋒2, 2008), deaf communications (甜言蜜語, 2008).  However, this one is purely about ambiguous and unfaithful relationships.

I wonder how people can still engage in these bad relationships even in their 30s and 40s, whether as a single, married, or divorced persons.  I mean, for unfaithful relationship, it's common for people in 30s to 40s, but for ambiguous relationships, I thought it's for those below 20!  In this tv program, there are:

(1) A married guy loves another woman behind his wife.  (This is ok common in TV).

(2) A divorced woman and a divorced guy, both can't let go of their own previous marriages, enjoys the ambiguous relationship being together.

(3) a man, who had a baby with a woman when they were young, married another woman and, when he is in his 50s now, wish to return to the 1st woman.  That 1st woman, feeling ambivalent towards the man, kinda likes that love & hate at the same time.

But i still enjoy the show! haha.

Thanks for coming to the reunion.  Joshua and Alice indicated to come, but they can't come in the last minute due to some duties.  This is outrageous!  Because we all know this gathering is partly arranged for the welcome-back!  So funny they couldn't come!  (It's ok we can do it next time.)

The place is so small.  We 12 people squeezed into this limited space.  I now learned that carpets are important revenues.  Carpets enables you to sit down (see below), while hard floor deters you from doing that.  You took this for granted when you're in the US.  But you'll see what I mean if you're in Hong Kong, whose culture does not value carpets.

My official office hour is 9am to 5:30pm.

However, I usually leave at 6:30pm due to heavy workload.

Recently I have been leaving at around 7pm, which makes me arrive home at around 8:15pm--- I can't even watch the 同事三分親 programme!

Sometimes I would escape at 5:30pm sharp, and I psychologically consider that as my half day annual leave!  That's how I balance!

It's very tough for these days in Hong Kong.  Very hot and humid.  There's no way to survive unless you turn the air-con on.

I also got a cold.  I saw doctor this afternoon.

Should I turn on the air-con to sleep while I have a cold?  This is very contradicting.  When there are cold air passes by my nose, I very much feel like sneezing...

Although Hong Kong has been returned to China since 1997, there are several thing that "Hong Kong" will remain a separate entity in the world.  I envisage that such separation will remain for quite a long time, unless China put massive forces on Hong Kong to change them:

(1) Mailing / Postal matters

If you look at the United States Postal Service's International Mail Manual (http://pe.usps.gov/text/imm/fh_025.htm), Hong Kong is a "country" in the postal world.  Sadly, some extreme patriots insist that, when you write the shipping labels for the UPS or Fedex, you should write "China" as the country and "Hong Kong" as the city.  This is totally wrong in the postal world.  First, China has its own postal codes (i.e. like a ZipCode in the USA), but China did not assign Hong Kong a postal code.  So for the purpose of shipping, Hong Kong should be seen as a country, instead of a city under China.  If the UPS or Fedex staff were too smart and routed your letters/packages to their China processing center, i'm sure it will cause great delay!  (mailing staff are well trained to treat Hong Kong as an individual country for this purpose.)

(2) Education qualifications

Now, if you look carefully at some American universities' entry requirements for foreign students, sometimes they would specify what qualification in your country would be equivalent to the U.S. High School level.  Take the UCLA as example, you'll see that they treat Hong Kong and China as two very separate things (http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/Adm_in/othcntry.htm).  Hong Kong has its HKALE;  China has the Sr High School Grad. 

The above may seem very ordinary/normal/common sense for you, but if you think deeper, the brand "Hong Kong" will remain to stick out from China.  The above examples are touched on everyday living.  These are perhaps some of the most visual things in the world about Hong Kong.  People not only read news but they also see how mailing and education set a separation between Hong Kong and China.  Well...after all...we're in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region!

I just watched this one: Waiting in the Dark (2006) featuring 田中麗奈 and 陳柏霖.  The Chinese title for the Hong Kong edition is 看不見的秘密.  So touching and, to some extent, meaningful. Must watch.  For an abstract, see the University's library catalog on this movie: http://library.ln.edu.hk/record=b1592388.

Today is also a public holiday for the anniversary of the establishment of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).  Hong Kong people generally do not have a strong sense of being a national (國民), citizen (公民), resident (居民).  These also intertwined with ethnicity...etc.

Before 1997, under the British's administration, we have no citizenship.  (One may argue our citizenship is "BN(O)". But hey, others are ok to call themselves American citizen / British citizen / Japanese citizen.  And hey, would you call yourself a BN(O) citizen?!  I learned that we're officially "British subjects" back then, but would you call yourself like that!?)

After 1997, we're suddenly conferred upon the identity of "Chinese nationals".

In my mind, I'm a Hong Kong permanent resident, not so much a Chinese national (中國國民).  If you look closely at your Hong Kong Identify Card, what does it say there?  In English, it writes, "Hong Kong Permanent Identify Card".  In Chinese, it's literal translation is "Hong Kong Permanent Resident Identity Card" (香港永久性居民身份證).

So where does it say I'm a Chinese national?  my Hong Kong passport does.

I'm also holding (and renewing) my BN(O) passport.  I keep saying in xanga again and again that a passport is something more than just a travel document.  It's not just the convenience that it offers you, but it's about whether you honor the history and identity of yourself.

(In fact, even if you talk about travel convenience, BN(O) does have edge over the HK passport, if you look very closely.  Maybe I should come back on this later.)

Cassandra's Dream (2007) is a movie full of ironic happenings.  The 2 brothers were killing a person for money, yet, after killing, one of the brothers got mental problems.  He couldn't sleep every night just to have the killing scene flashing in his mind.  After much things happened, one brother accidentally killed the other one.  It's really nihilistic and making me "o" mouth.

Apparantly, I am watching movies less frequently than before due to heavy workload.  Recently I get off from work (Tuen Mun!) at around 7-ish at night.  Very tired.  I'm just a mashed potato, not even a "small potato" at the University.  However, this week, I have been tasked to do something that is more like the "gravy" spread on the mashed potato.  I am to revise all University salary scales so as to reflect the recent Civil Service's salary adjustments.  (You probably noticed that all government funded Universities in Hong Kong have delinked their salary with the Civil Service's, but the Universities will still follow the Civil Service's pay raise most of the time.)  Gazing at the salary points and salary amounts in the Excel and doing fine-tune adjustments, I am eventually doing something very intimate to everyone at the University.  They are salaries after all!

I love Stanley:--

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I went to Stanley with Meow today.  Thank Meow for coming with me again and again and again. (I think guys don't mind going to the same place to eat or tour as long as the place is really good; somehow girls don't like repeating places for whatever reasons.) 

Anyway, I like Stanley because of the folloing things:

(1) Stanley gives you an atmosphere of Santa Monica Beach or equivalent (such as the 3rd St Promenade or San Francisco Fisherman's Wharf).  There are lots of Chinese/non-Chinese locals and tourists.  If I may repeat, it's like a "Santa Monica" in Hong Kong.

(2) I love the Stanley Market.  The Stanley Market is generally referring to the area that stands many individual stores, which are really door-to-door, very packed.  The Market area is therefore crowded with multi-ethnic people shopping around in this place selling multi-ethnic things (clothing, gadgets...etc).  I even saw a Brookstone equivalent selling so many gadgets!  Meow bought a flip-flop that we believed is protective to her feet.

(3) Stanley is so not Hong Kong!  It's so different from the brisk and busy city in Kowloon or the HK Island.  It's really like a holiday getaway.  Well...I treated it as a getaway place --- no airtickets needed; just take a bus from Central or Wan Chai.  Stanley has everything from beaches to restaurants to shopping mall to post office to the Promenade.

Now that Meow and I have been abroad for some time, we may view things with the LA and HK perspectives.  Stanley has a bit of both, so we really liked it!