Welcome Back to Hong Kong: The Typhoon Edition

I have returned, yet again, to my beloved city to spend another year of teaching, good food, crazy adventures, and great times with people I care about. As great as this summer was, its beyond nice to finally feel like I am back to my second home. It was last Friday evening that I landed, so this post marks almost exactly a week that I've been back in Hong Kong. The first day back I slept, and slept, and slept. My life was made up of periods of sleeping for 10 hours, and then waking up for 2, (at the most), and then sleeping again.





Heidi convinced me to come out on my second day, on an attempt to normalize myself, and to meet on of her Aussie friends who was visiting. In addition to eating the fabulous egg tarts in Tai Po, (jealous Mom?), and seeing her great folks, we got to catch up on all those moments that we missed; those moments where you wish your friend was right over your shoulder so you can look at them, and make some joke that only the two of you would understand. We had plenty of those moments that day, and plenty more to come soon enough.





A couple of days later, Harina brought dinner over that she and her mother had made for me, which was the sunshine of my day. How often do people cook for you and then bring it to your place? Thanks Harina! We ate delicious Pakistani food and had Heidi and Ben over. I really need to learn how to cook that fried bread and the curry she made for me. I love curry!





The past few days I've mostly spent with Erin, running around our old haunts like Fu Tai, Gold Coast, and the little communities near town center, earning looks from people that seem to shout "What are you doing here? Are you lost?" Which also culminates in a strange look of respect at points when they see that I clearly know where I am going, and that I am not a overwhelmed tourist. Those are some choice ones, where you really feel at home in a strange place, despite not speaking the language and being functionally illiterate.





Right now, at this very second, the big piece of news occupying my life is the status of typhoon Nuri, which just made landfall. All day the Signal 8 flag has been up, and it's expected that the Signal 10 will be hoisted later tonight, which is the highest one, and it means that the typhoon, is going to pass directly over Hong Kong. So far its just been windy and raining, but maintenance has seen fit to protect our windows by doing this. Seriously though, I think that if a typhoon decides to descend on Hong Kong, its going to take a little more then tape to hold together our windows on the 9th floor. I'm looking at it like mother nature decided to put together a show, or sorts, to welcome me back. I don't expect things to really get bad, like Florida in a hurricane, but it will be interesting to see what happens. And I also love big storms like this. My security guards knocked on my door to make sure that I had food to get through the day because they didn't want me leaving the building. To come upstairs, and attempt to communicate through my 5 words of Cantonese, was very sweet of them. I adore all the staff here.




A big CONGRATULATIONS is also due my fantastic older sister Emily, who was just admitted to grad school at Johns Hopkins!!!!! She's worked so hard for this and she really deserved it. I am so proud of you Emmy! She's going to kick quite a lot of academic ass. Seriously folk, she's that awesome, and she is going to do amazing things.

What a welcome back to Hong Kong......