been quite a busy week

after arriving in Hong Kong International Airport on Sunday afternoon, I was waiting by the conveyor belt when a staff approached me and asked if I was still waiting for my luggage. He told me that my bags have been delayed and are on the next flight from Heathrow. At first it crossed my mind 'it better not be a repeat of September '04' (when BA lost one of my checked luggage that contained my geography coursework and souvenirs from Tokyo), but then when the staff assured that they would delivered the bags to my door, I thought 'someone is going to take my 40kg bags for me, score.' So I just walked off with only my hand luggage. And so they did, at around 2100, while I was sipping mango margarita in a bar at Elements (a giant shopping centre in Kowloon), the suitcase and the bag were dropped off in my living room.

Met Dad's american friend (whom he met as a student at CUHK), who is now a college professor in Iowa, and had drinks at Elements. Greg took one of his students, Adam, and his wife with him. It turns out Greg knows Prof. Ian Reader (professor of japanese religion at Manchester). Anyway the next two days (monday and tuesday) Sam and I took Adam around town. It's his second visit so he's already seen the typical touristy sites. Yesterday we took him to TST, then Mongkok where it rained like hell; surprisingly I enjoyed the part where we walked around Apliu Street market and then had dinner at the streetside siu choi wong (小菜王). We ended the day at a pub on Knutsford Terrace.

On Tuesday we were supposed to go to Macau. Then the typhoon came along so we couldn't go. After lunch we went to the exhibition centre and had a look around the comic/anime fair. That was actually quite fun - seeing all these otaku and weird people cosplaying. After that we trekked all the way to Quarry Bay (on the tram - took a zillion years to get there) and went into the film archive, only to be disappointed by the exhibition-under-construction. So we went back to Central and walked around Pottinger Street, had egg tarts and iced yin yeung. Then took the escalators to the mid-levels, where we sort of lost directions and took a bus to take us back to sea level. It was already rush-hour so we couldn't go to Sheung Wan and look at the old buildings and hoi mei shops. Ended the 2-day 'exploration' with a shanghaiese dinner at Elements.

Never realised how boring HK could be - especially when it's raining. I wish Adam was staying in HK a little longer, then we could have taken him to the new territories and the outer islands. We had thought about going to the museums when it was raining, but then come to think of it, we've got some crappy museums here in HK. Wish we had something like the V&A, the british museum, national gallery and the NPG. Seriously, I'm missing London already (it's only my third day back!), and its weather. Yes, the weather. I hate this heat and humidity, and the bloody typhoon.

Wednesday evening, it was around half ten when I checked my inbox and found an e-mail from the Embassy of Japan in London. In the next second I saw the words 'awarded' 'scholarship' 'congratulations'. I couldn't believe my eyes. And then I saw 'Osaka University', a little set back...obviously I'm thrilled to have been awarded the scholarship, but for months I had been imagining my life at Kyodai. Anyway, I love Osaka, too. And it's really close to Kyoto anyway. So - YAY! I'm feeling good this is definitely one of my greatest achievements (okay we'll shush about the fact that there were only 3 applicants for a maximum of 4 scholarships - hey I did beat the other 2 guys from Cambridge though, makes me feel a little better - me being the only student awarded the scholarship from Britain).

The law internship started on Thursday. It's an unpaid work experience and lasts for six weeks. I'm now working at Exchange Square in Central. Considering it's an international law firm based in the US, the HK office is very tiny, with only 5 lawyers (1 partner, 1 counsel and 3 associates), 2 secretaries and 2 interns (incl. me). I haven't been given much work/responsibility yet, since I'm a non-law student and don't know much about law. But I did, on the first day, get to attend a meeting with an important client and listened in to a conference call with lawyers and accountants in London! This project the firm is working on now is quite exciting, but obviously I can't say anymore here 'cause of the confidentiality agreement. Even though I'm only shadowing and all I've done so far is a lot of document reading, the internship is quite challenging (the partner says I'll be given an assignment to do soon - a presentation to the lawyers in the office!) as I have to spend a lot of time reading things that I have never seen before, whereas in my previous work experience, although I was given actual work to do, the work then was repetitive and a bit boring, not challenging at all. I still need to think carefully whether I really want to go into law after graduation, because there are a lot of business/finance aspects to commercial law, which I'm not used to.

It's finally the weekend - the week has been so busy and packed with things that for the first time I didn't feel the jetlag at all! Usually, whenever I fly from London to HK, I would go to bed at night only to wake up 3-4 hours later and find myself wide awake, can't sleep and can only go onto the internet for several hours before watching the sunrise. But this time, I've been so busy I've been having 7-8 hours sleep every night. And now it's Friday night, I can finally stay up a little late and blog. Still, I have many things to do this weekend. For example, have to find out about mobile phone price plans in Japan, write e-mails to my two host families in Osaka and Kobe, go to the local library to take out a book on commercial law (to prep myself), get ingredients to bake cakes...

Can't stay up any longer, Mum and I have plans for tomorrow - shopping at Harvey Nichols (sale up to 90% off!) before a lunch buffet with my aunt at a local hotel.