HK 2009: Photo Montage

I decided to make a photo montage of my touristy HK photos cos for one thing, I got too lazy to blog. And another, I heard Lady Gaga's Just Dance the other day and it reminded me so strongly of my HK trip that I felt that I had to represent my holiday alongside the song.

The reason for that is purely due to Masie being in a Lady Gaga mood and so that was the music thumping through the apartment every night after we got home and checked out our day's worth of photos.

Other HK-esque soundtrack is Genki Rockets' Heavenly Star which was the new thing on my iPhone at the time and accompanied me walking along the streets of HK.

My blog is turning into a photo montage blog haha...

15 Aug 2009 - Our Wedding

We got all our photos back and Chen-Po made a photo montage tonight. :)

Here it is, enjoy!

Some Alone Time with the TV

I've just finished having tonsillitis and am back to work after two weeks of leave. During my time off, I mainly lay on the couch and absorbed lots of TV. I know more about mid day Australian TV that I ever did in my whole life. Here's my observations:

• By channel surfing, you can pretty much almost always land on a show, any show, that has some form of cooking or food related subject. I didn't really help matters much by putting on old episodes of Iron Chef when I happened to chance upon a time slot with no cooking shows.
• Oprah Winfrey is super annoying and rude! She cuts off her guest while they are talking by making what she seems to think are 'witty' comments and the idiot audience seem to love and lap it all up. In truth, her comments are mostly stupid and loud and repetitive.
• Oprah Winfrey audiences truly have nothing else left in their lives besides living for Oprah. On one episode she just announced the title for her show and the audience went absolutely crazy! Like rock concert, jumping around, crying type crazy! I have suspicians that it's fake, maybe they have a person holding up a big card saying "Go Crazy", like when they have the "Applaud" or "Laugh" signs when filming sitcoms.
• ABC and SBS really has the best news. Channel 7, 9 and 10's news is so crap. Why does George Clooney voicing a fox in some movie make the headlines? And OMG, what was with the big Harry Connick Jr blow up? It wasn't even a big deal!!

Here are some ads that are super annoying!

• iSelect ads, the chick in the ad is so damn annoying! She just seems so stupid and the little rhymey things she says are so annoying!
• That Super Funds ad that have the people putting their hands into a diamond shape. I hate the song in that! I was fine with it, until one day, it just very suddenly got on my nerves.
  
• The ad where there's some loser dancing in the rain and then some van stops in front of him and lets out some girl who starts dancing with him. I don't get the ad at all, something about traineeship. It's just stupid, non informative and non persuasive.
  
• The new government ads about calling 000 if you start having heart attack symptoms. Its way too long and slow. It would scare or depress a lot more if it got its message through a lot faster. And in all the time that it takes for that ad to play through, it should at least tell you a lot more about how to detect heart attack symptoms.

Those are the top 4 for the moment. I'm sure if I made the effort, I could think of a whole lot more.

My best pick of shows for mid day viewing:

• Antique Roadshow!!! I have no idea why...but its just so interesting..
• Ready, Steady, Cook. This is some secret guilty pleasure of mine, where it seems pretty damn lame to watch but yet its sort of funny sometimes and fun to watch anyway. I have high tolerance for any show that has food in it. Yummm
• Insight. This is similar to Q&A but you get the chance to hear from more different people. It's really interesting to hear about an issue from all the different perspectives. Definitely one of those makes-you-smarter shows.
  

Thanks to my TV time, there's nothing in the world I can't cook. In my head, that is...

Amazing Sand Animation

Someone sent this around work today. It looks like the performance of one of the contestant for Ukraine's Got Talent show. I hope she got 1st place, its really a genius work of art!

According to my Russian colleague, this animation depicts the events of WWII on the Eastern Front between June 1941 and May 1945. The words at the end reads "You're always next to me".

The Thing About Money

Yesterday I spent one of my $6.99 Big Fish Games credits on Plants vs Zombies. I spent about 5-7 hours of careful consideration before I made up my mind about this purchase.

Today I spent $4.50 on a croissant with cream cheese. It took me a 30 second walk down to the kitchen to see that there were no bowls available for me to use for my cereal to convince me that I should get a croissant.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent $229 on a Cue spring jacket. It took me about 30 minutes of browsing and trying it on, though I had been idly dreaming of getting a new jacket for a couple of weeks prior to that.

Around the same time, I spent $3.99 on Sally's Spa, a time management game for my iPhone. It took me about 4-5 days of thinking about it, playing the demo, trying to find free alternatives before finally taking the plunge.

I've probably spent more time playing Sally's Spa than I have wearing my new jacket. No thanks to crazy Melbourne weather for that. It's spring now, Melbourne Weather God, not winter!! It should not be 8 deg and hail in the middle of the day in spring!

Money is a really funny thing, isn't it?

25 July 2009 - Pre Wedding Photo Shoot

We organised to have a pre-wedding photo shoot with our photographer Reinar in order to get used to each other and to have some nice coupley photos. We started the shoot at about 3 in the afternoon at the apartment. We didn't think he'd be wanting to take photos there, in my mind it was just convenient to meet there and for him to check out what the lighting is like there. But he started setting up his equipment and that's when we all thought, hmm maybe we should have tidied up a bit. My mum was especially appalled! :)

After the apartment, we proceeded to go around the whole city and ended the day at about 7-ish. It was lots of fun and I really love the photos! Here's a montage of my favourites:

The video has downed the quality of the photos, so check them out in their all their photographic glory here.

If you wanna see more of Reinar's work, check out his flickr site and also his new blog.

Sunday, 14 June 2009: Marriage Registration

Chen-Po and I got legally registered at the Old Treasury Building. The ceremony was at 11.30am. We had booked a small 8 pax room to do the signing and vows and invited exactly 8 people to celebrate the day with us. However when we got there, the celebrant told us we could use the big 50 pax room. It was a much nicer room, big and bright so I was really happy about that. The ceremony was really short and simple and was over in about 10-15 minutes. Here's a photo montage of it:

Photos can be found on my Picasa site.

After the ceremony, we went to Dragon Boat on Lonsdale St for a Yum Cha lunch and ate a lot of food. After that, Chen-Po's Mum, Wen-Po and Uncle Gordon took off. The rest of us decided we were dressed up too fancy to waste the rest of the day so we went down to Sofitel for some Tea and then later drinks on Level 35. We had a Japanese dinner and finished the night with soft serve cones from Maccas.

So all in all, a very lovely day with a LOT of food. Thanks to everyone who shared the day with us!

Hong Kong 2009: 10th May

So back to blogging about my HK trip. :) On Sunday, 10th May, we went to Lamma Island. Ueli's colleague was having a BBQ and so Ueli invited us along too. We took a ferry from Hong Kong Island to Lamma Island, which took less than an hour.

Here's the view that greeted us after we got off the ferry:

From Hong Kong

I think Lamma Island is really very pretty. Not even the big, huge power plant chimneys stopped me from going "Awww pretty!"

From Hong Kong

I really liked Lamma Island. For me, it seemed very much like a place I would like to retire to when I'm old (or when I'm young and rich). There are no roads and therefore no cars on Lamma Island. Everyone walks or cycles everywhere. The main street is filled with seafood restaurants overlooking the oceans, souvenir shops and convenience stores.

From Hong Kong

We walked along this main street to get to the beach where earlier that day, they were having dragon boat races. Here's some along-the-way photos:

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

We finally got to the beach. Here's the photo of the view I got when I turned to my left:

From Hong Kong

And to my right:

From Hong Kong

Lol :)

We saw a drum group playing near the beach:

From Hong Kong

And here's something that seemed so bizarre to see in the middle of a path:

From Hong Kong

Here's the view we got from the top of Ueli's colleague's house, where we had the BBQ:

From Hong Kong

We were there til past 10 and then took the ferry back to Hong Kong Island. We had coffee at a place on the top of the IFC Mall. Here's a pic of Two IFC:

From Architecture

After that, me and Masie strolled our way home, stopping by to have a long chit chat in one of the parks.

It was a really nice day and it was really lovely to see a part of Hong Kong that is so different to how its often depicted in movies.

Here's a final Lamma Island pic:

From Hong Kong