And Christmas is not a Christmas w/o gifts. Buying a gift for a special one takes much more patience and time, and money. Esp. with my partner who already bought all the stuff she liked right at the moment she liked it, there isn’t much she liked but hasn’t been bought. Still I found some and bought at last. It came out a bit expensive but.. well at least I gotta buy something she likes. On the other hand I got a wallet this year. I realized that actually it’s rather tough to get what I really want. Say a belt. The design can’t be too simple, otherwise why need to buy a branded one? It can’t be too brand-selling. I am not promoting for them. I want one that has a design in it - and it has to look nice. Is it hard? Maybe. Yes I’m picky.

This year our dear company has a mandatory gift exchange. Everybody seems to hate gift exchanges except me. I dunno why people hate it. What’s so hard to spend like HKD100 freely w/o thinking? You can buy anything from everyday goods, entertainment, decorations, gadgets, to even food. Yes I picked food at last. Spent a 100 bucks buying some ultra-expensive Japanese apples at nearby high-class supermarket “Vole”. A HKD30 may not be too special, but hey you get something to eat at least. I got a 5-in-1 chess set w/ Mahjong etc. Well it wasn’t too bad.

The gift exchange was part of my company’s annual Christmas event, which this year was hosted on a a car ferry recycle. Christmas party was usually hosted w/ loads of good food and wine. This party came out w/ lots of left food, forced drinks, un-welcome drinks, bits of laughter. I say our Christmas dinner standard just rolled back to our 2004 standard. And then I had my Christmas’ Eve dinner. It was a tough one to choose, as someone said she must have a non-forced Christmas menu. How easy. I imagined 99% of western-food-alike restaurants (i.e. ones that “claimed” to serve Western food, including HK “cha chang ting”) will force you to pay extra to eat in their venue. So instead of celebrating and eating in the western way, we had Japanese food. It was good and of course we paid extra than usual to eat - just to make that as a “feast.” Yesterday (25th) I had my first steak cooking at home, with a really great slab of steak bought @ Taste. Things can’t be too darn wrong w/ good steaks, except that I should’ve cooked a bit longer. My another trial of creating salads, using easy components w/ rockets, parma ham, some brie cheese, with a touch of vinegar / olive oil. Yum!

I want to end this post w/ the idea of Christmas. Many people didn’t know Christ wasn’t born in Christmas. It was in fact the birth of the Sun god, which conquered the darkness in ancient Roman myths. Somehow people hooked up the birth date of Christ to that god and celebrated nonetheless. In fact it’s really hard to see Shepherds around during winter times otherwise the sheep would’ve died in the wild (some even claimed he was born in June). Search for “Christ born” and you see loads of information on that. No good conclusion as to when Christ is really born, but many of us celebrate for whatever reasons anyway. Merry Christmas and hope you have a good new year.

In the old days I often hate how my camera didn’t do well. I used to rely on its “idiot” mode to shoot pictures. I know the camera can do more (just a bit more) but still I haven’t really tried my best to use it. I just blamed it for not knowing what I wanted. So I looked for a new camera, that could capture things better EVEN with my old method. Now thinking about it, sometimes I think my whole concept was wrong and I should’ve learnt to better handle cameras in general but, oh well I got a newer LX3 at last.

LX3 provides lots of features. I tried to skip the manual (as most people in this universe do) and just try playing, until I realize there are so many features that I don’t know and I must check the manual. Maybe I’m just a detail-oriented person - I must know all the possible features of my cameras. By itself, esp. when turning the mode into iA mode (stands for intelligent auto mode), and shot at whatever you feel like, it’ll try its best to “see” what you are shooting and change the mode as well while shooting. It’s very cool esp. when you just don’t wanna think and shoot, or when you want to ask some strangers to help you take pictures and you don’t want them to CARE anything but shoot. It’ll do macro, day/night scenery, day/night people, plus prob. a few more scenes. Those ones mentioned are good enough in general.

And then there’s the problem. My camera is being marketed and seen and praised by many as “one of the best DCs in the market.” indeed if you go to flickr and search LX3 I’m sure you’ll find hundreds of great shots there. Enough said. While I was happy using the “idiot” mode on the first few trips, the pictures are not bad: they produce a good color with right tone, temperature, etc. But somehow it wasn’t right. Later on, when I checked closely at the menu, I realized there’s a most powerful feature in the camera that I haven’t used. It’s called the Film mode. Sounds like more for movie but it’s actually more like a pre-set Photoshop setting (like changing the color tone in some cameras) to change the contrast, brightness, even color (by a little) of the picture. Take a look at these 2 examples I took while checking out the apes @ Sabah:

I was playing with the double-mode feature, which it’ll capture two modes for me (though the stupid thing is thing it’s not taking pic once then save in 2 modes, but taking pic twice instead). The left was using the standard mode, which the color, in fact, is quite close to the actual color, but it’s flat, uninteresting at all. But look at the right-side. With the dynamic mode, where the picture is in higher contrast, more saturated, the green stands out so green, and the blue sky has its color depth clearly.

And then I took many shots during the sunset there:

Again I used two different modes to capture the dawn. This time dynamic mode, on the left, seems too high on contrast but may suit some people’s taste. On the right I used nostalgic mode, which seems to fit the theme well too. It’s no surprise to everyone that these modes make you look / feel like a professional all of a sudden.

And then I start to think: these pictures are so FAKE! In reality, the color we see is just close to the standard mode I show above - very pale looking picture. Aren’t we supposed to just capture what we see, factually? Or should you consider it as an art and get whatever produced by your camera (given the colors don’t quite match to what you see), and/or fine-tuned it via Photoshop? I really don’t know. It does feel great that the dummy DC can produce such a fine product w/ minimal effort, yet it gives you the freedom / capability to use your professional way (w/ support of RAW etc.). Given that I’m very pleased with this camera.

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Many like me have a question, asking, why why why people of republic China, why do you enjoy duplicating goods? To me such phenomenum explains 3 things: 1) they resemble a little child who failed a test, sneaked the test copy of a perfect grade, photocopied it, and showed it to his/her mom saying “I did it!” i.e. sense of pride in a short term; 2) “Since the factory is here, people are here, instead of just producing the world-quality goods for them (the sourcer), why not I use the evenings to put my labels on?” i.e. buckets of wealth in a short term; or 3) These westerners are stupid enough to use 1 bucket of milk for 1 bucket of money, why don’t I mix 1/2 of milk, 1/2 of milk-look-alike, to produce 1 bucket of money? i.e. tons of wealth in a short term, risking life of everybody. It’s not difficult to find the 3 categories of people above.

You may say greediness is not a exclusive term to Chinese. But I think the key factors that make Chinese people so unique at this 21st century is that, we have loads of geeks who want to jump categories above. People often say if you study more, you will get out of proverty. Realty shows that life isn’t as simple as it says. Some people look dumb, but they earn lots of money. Some people are smart, who might’ve studied a lot,  but they earn little from teaching, doing factory jobs etc. How do these geeks have the “face” to talk to their elders they earn little from their so-called “professional jobs” (which could be better than avg.), and hard to compare with some dumb guys who only had to hook up w/ gov’t officials to be successful?

And the 2nd point is that, China is a huge place with tons of people, and people are born to have business mindset. Look at this: if I am scientist that as a recipe to create fake eggs. These fake eggs only need $1 instead of $5 real eggs a dozen to produce. Selling it for $10 to this city A with 2 million population, even if only 1% of people buy my eggs, I get almost 180k profit instead of 100k - that is, 20k for 180k! Then I could flee to hsing tao, take a beer and on my boat to another place in Canton, get a new identity and play the same trick. And think of this nation as a whole, we have TOO many people many, eating 1 egg will take just few days of their lives, but it’ll ultimately keep our race a better place in the future bu taking out the poor ones…
So do these scientists thought, I would’ve imagined.

China is so unique to keep these life cheaters alive and growing. Not until gov’t does more and more control, which westerners hate and love us even more, there’s no better China unless the whole poor generations are dead and the new ones cannot imagine how bad life could be. “We’ve been poor enough! Time to do something!” should be the voice of many in China.

• Conversation International
• Doctors without Borders
• National Geographic Society
• The Nature Conservancy
• Save the Children

To say the truth I knew little about all these organizations, except “Doctors without Borders”, which it has steady promotions in HK (and asks for donations as well). I know “National Geographic” as well obviously for its TV and books. For the rest, I knew little about them.

Obviously this is more of a US-thing, where most of these organizations are US-based. It’s natural though, for a US website to donate the funds there.

So put aside my vote for awhile, I am more interested on the votes. Not only after voting, I get to see the result, which you can see it now:

As you can see, ones that deal w/ people are consider the most needed for many, even though this is a travel site. Given it’s a travel site, I thought people would pay more attention on nature conservations organization but why is this not the case? I’m not trying to offend anymore but to me, human as a whole, needs less attention than the World itself. The reason? If you look at the trend of # of human growth, it’s scary, and definitely we as human are going to make huge impact on the rest of the things. It’s not so to say that we shouldn’t cure/save people, but as the population itself is already a bigger problem, that’s supposed to be the more direct problem to me, at least. So this result proves 1 thing, that we as human do try our best to live together. That’s a good thing, but the bad thing might be we should care more about ourselves first before caring others.

My vote is purely based on my philosophy of “help” defined above. So the top 2 you see are gone from my list. National Geogrpahic is actually backed heavily by US gov’t so it’s out too. The Nature Conservancy says in its website that “We work in all 50 states and more than 30 countries…” so this is a US-based organization (not just based in US but you can see it works mainly in US), so this is out (and no wonder it has more votes than the other 2 nature org. So I voted the one who merely got 6% vote. Too bad.

That is what a plan is about. A good plan actually. One that brings you not only a dream to proceed to the next step, but a step to foresee the consequences.

A plan better be known when to execute. And we need a timeline. A timeline usually involves many deadlines. The dealines tell you “you are dead” if you couldn’t make it. Make sense?

But then we always make up reasons to change our plan, delay our timeline. We say “oh it doesn’t work out that well we’ll change it to something better.” Is that something better, or worse? And the question we always ask is, will we reach our goal if we really follow our plan. i.e. do we trust our plan? Life is full of doubts, or surprises.

In such fury times, people/news/government keep saying we have to claim ourself down. We have to behave sensibly. We should think rationally. Yet the economy is going down. The dollar is going up and down. People get worried more and more. Banks don’t even trust each other. Can we still trust our plan - will it reach our goal?

When someone steps up and tells me: yes I do. I was shocked. But then it was a brave decision. There are few people who could act like that - reality tells us these people either end up being a hero, or a loser. Some like me prefer become neither a hero nor loser. Some think they need to keep their plan, take the chance, or risk, in order to reach their goals. I cheer for them.

For food, I think we HKese eat like 50% of stuff from mainland China. Or more? I would imagine 90% of all food products in restaurants use China’s stuff. Things like:
Bread, jam/seasoning/sauce, butter, beef/pork/chicken (canned or fresh), vegetables, eggs, noodles/rice, fruit, paper (as part of the pacaking), WATER!
are all from China! Even though you try not to buy those really old-style ®Q China-branded food from China, but more and more brands setup factory there so you cannot avoid at all.

In another words, I would say - WE CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT CHINESE PRODUCTS! But WE MAY DIE WITH CHINESE PRODUCTS, so HOW CAN WE LIVE WITH CHINESE PRODUCTS? I’m sure we can. Just be confident that: the probability of dying < the probability of not being healed. In case we eat something wrong, w/ the latest technology we are likely to survive, but just just in shorter timeframe probably because the cancer rate gets higher, but that might be okay.

Seriously I didn’t plan to come here. I didn’t plan to have a trip per month. But after two emails, I was being informed to come here for a 2-day meeting, plus a day that I can spend here. Great.

Besides the 630-wakeup, 830-to-430 meeting with a tie and an always-awake attitude, 12pm-lunch with McDonald’s, 6pm-dinner, for 2 days it’s a really hard time there. I won’t say it’s a waste as I only had 1 hr to really do my part, but the time would’ve been better spent with Internet but not there, and there’s only 1 thing to do - listen and have a drink.

And besides all that, Beijing did give most of the people a better feeling. The streets were less crowded and messy. They are cleaner definitely. The city is well-built. Subways are world-class. High-rises are everywhere. The sky is sky-blue. Let alone the beautifully-designed Olympic stadiums and its surrounding. Does that mean they are world city now?

It depends on how you consider one as world city. It’s definitely large. I can barely sense the “®Q” (outdated) feeling anymore. People are tended to be more educated. Still… Even in hospitals the washing basin lacks soap - not even solid ones. In a so-called 3-star hotel, the room floor looked unclean. The hotel restaurant didn’t look clean - I found a fork w/ egg-like stain on it. Many times I found front-line employees only care/respond on up to its position - it won’t care/answer anything else. People still don’t do much line-ups to take bus. Let alone the poor logistics in Olympics - no taxi station (took us 1/2 hr to walk out of the area to find a taxi. Seriously), no easy-to-find ticket booth near subway, lack of food choices inside the Olympics area (I could only find a rice box w/ beef for dinner… yes and do they care for ones who don’t eat beef or no meat at all?). Security is run by volunteers - yes volunteers!

I mean, I’m not really complaining. I do expect it to be like that. But don’t they think they already upgraded themselves because they could get an Olympics game setup. They did try very hard to dress up themselves, too hard that you started to think - is that called faking? I read a line on subway saying - §Åý¬O¤¤µØ¥Á±ÚªºÀu¨}¶Ç²Î basically means “Giving (seats) is a virtue of Chinese culture.” Come on! Let’s be realistic. Let’s make things more sensible. Instead of claiming that “we are Chinese, we gotta do better to show the world,” just say “as a World citizen, be gentle and responsible.” I really don’t know whether these rigid hard-sell ways of educating its citizen would work or not. Actually yes I don’t really see it working esp. in such short time.

I think everyone has to understand that this is China - a unique low-confidence high-expectation culture group trying to live up in 21st century w/ a huge burden from its unhappy history. It’ll be powerful obviously because, just now w/ a small group of elite atheletes they already beat US in # of gold medals - and first time being the leader in Olympics history. Yes they suck in some sports still. I heard a news in Singapore saying China is buidlings at least 10,000 basketball court these few years and more to come. Can they find an elite team of basketball players to challenge US Dream team 4 years later? I’m sure they can, if not 8 or 12 years. But to talk about raising the standard of 1.3 billion people? It’s still a long way to go, but everyone’s expecting it to happen.

Finally I’m here, at the yet another famous center of South-East Asia. Singapore has been a place of mystery to me, partly because I’ve heard so much but knew so little from there. People say the place is small, boring, unattractive, too clean, rigid, gov’t centered, yet to me, it’s a place with its unique feeling there.

Landed this place late at night around 12, the first feeling is: how come there’s no rapid train back to the city center? How come all taxi drivers are Chinese? How come this place is so clean (believe me I’ve never seen anything really dirty: cockroach, rats or anything, during my 7-day trip)?
What’s good about this place? Food, security, cleanliness, heritage.

Food. I think this is the beauty of SG that most people agree with, is that you get to find great, cheap, accessible, local food in SG. The top flavours, as provided by the tourism boards, are Chili Crabs, Hainanese chicken rice, satay, bak kut teh (¦×°©¯ù), roti prata, rojak, laksa, fish head curry, char kway teow (ª£¶Q¤N), fried carrot cake. It does take time to try them all. I recommend everyone to go grab a booklet called “Makan Delights” from the tourism board to get more info and, they do provide a list of “authentic” places to try them, which is quite convenient. I didn’t try all the stuff, but chicken rice, satay, and laksa are my favorite.

Security. For some strange reasons, Singapore does make me feel safe. Perhaps it’s the rules that are setup in this place? Perhaps it’s the people? Perhaps I haevn’t been to any bad place? OR maybe I haven’t seen any poor people around. It feels much like Canada, except that you don’t get to see lots of beggars around.

Cleanliness. Singapore is not perfect. But it’s really not bad, given it could be a moist, rainy place similar to HK. Its Chinatown is the 2nd cleanest just after Japan’s @ Yokohama. Nothing I see is particularly dirty.

Heritage. Interestingly many cultures are well kept in Singapore. Especially Chinese (because I get to compare with the ones @ HK). In HK it’s rare that the new generations don’t have a (2nd) christian name. We rarely call each other by Chinese names except w/ relatives and close ones probably. But in SG (and Malaysia too) many Chinese kept their Chinese name and do use that when calling others. And shops. In HK new companies enjoy using english names, french words, or just non-Chinese names as its brand names. You hardly could find a shopping mall with Chinese names. But in SG many shops use traditional Chinese names. They use nice calligraphic Chinese fonts as their logos, which for HK many would consider as old-style (®Q). Even for old brands of HK their logos are changed dramatically to make its image younger (see Chow Sang Sang’s logo and you can tell). Its indeed quite old-style that I thought I was back into the 50s of HK. I didn’t check out little India but I assume their culture is well kept there too. And in the downtown areas where the lands are still so expensive, you still manage to see so many old architecture - mostly Chinese and English, standing. Isn’t that rare for us HKese?
But the funny thing I see is, their culture is too well-kept, yet I don’t see how one can tell if someone is Singaporean, i.e. I don’t know what a Singaporean culture is about. Perhaps you can tell a English well-spoken Asian Chinese would prob. be a Singaporean, but it’s not something distinctive. In fact the sense of belonging seems weak to me.
Anyway a nice trip to there. I always thought Singapore was super crowded and dense, but the fact is, its roads are wide; its old heritage is well kept. Too bad HK isn’t as flat as Singapore, otherwise we might be able to preserve more valuable history/architecture.