Today was my last day at my first internship. It was definitely a trip working in an office where I was the only person who wasn’t born in HK or China. I had fun groping around with unfamiliar civil procedure and even more unfamiliar grammar. I loved hanging out with my co-workers over dim sum at lunch, and learned a lot about a culture I thought I already knew very well (turns out I still have a lot to learn). I’m going to miss them!

My roommate arrives today, and my days running around half naked in my apartment (because I could, dammit!) are over.

Tomorrow is July 1st, the anniversary of the handover of HK to China. Nobody needs to work tomorrow, so tonight is a huge party night. Then again, what weekend night here isn’t?

a door off a street off of Lan Kwai Fong 

waiting

I still remember my very first journal entry. I was ten years old, and it was approximately 7:30am. I was waiting at my old elementary school for the big yellow bus to come take me to my new magnet school. My first journal was a small white diary with blue and red pencils and black horizontal lines printed on the cover. I wrote that morning in a very sarcastic voice, about how GREAT it was and how damned lucky I was for it to be raining and cold.

Subsequent journal entries that year would be about S, a boy in my class who shared my bus stop and waited with me each morning. I had the hugest crush on him for two years, but I could never gather the courage to tell him.

I was a horribly shy child, my nose always buried in a book. My fourth grade teacher had to call a conference to discuss with my parents what to do regarding my startling behavior of ignoring everything she said, preferring instead to spend my class time leisurely reading a novel. At the time, I was deeply engrossed in the works of Anne Rice and Gaston Leroux, the macabre content of which greatly disturbed my instructors. I’m surprised I didn’t turn out a goth kid.

It was not until two years later that I moved away from dark stories of vampires, phantoms, and the supernatural, to stories of the interminable suffering of mere mortals. It took me six months to finish the unabridged version of Les Miserables, and when I finally closed the cover of that heavy tome, I felt I knew much more about the sacrifice and inequity of human existence than a girl who had not yet begun to menstruate should know.

Fourteen years later, I am still writing, on this blog and in a tattered journal whose brown, coming-apart cover depicts an ancient world map.

Fourteen years later, it's still raining outside and I'm still waiting for someone to pick me up and take me somewhere safe, where I can sit, bury my nose in a book, and ignore all else.

hanging around  

ocean eyes

Just got back from a junk trip. It’s been raining cats and dogs for the whole week, but miraculously, today the dark clouds parted and the weather was perfect.

Lying in the sun, being rocked to sleep by the slow swaying of the boat, listening to the waves wash up on the nearby shore, I thought: I don’t believe I could ever live anywhere that is not near the ocean. All my life I’ve never lived more than half an hour away from the sea. I can’t count the times I’ve held my breath, waiting for the exact moment the sun disappears in a golden sliver over the horizon.

When I die, I want it to be in a beach house, where I can listen to waves crashing. I want to have sand under my fingernails and salt in my hair.

Tramming 

Yesterday, I went in to work for a half-day, and then came home and took a giant nap. Woke up at 6:32 pm and took the tram over to a Churrascaria in Causeway Bay, where we all stuffed ourselves. HK$150 (around 20 bucks) for all-you-can-eat brazilian BBQ AND all-you-can-drink San Miguel. Yum!

The rest of the night involved drinking. I narrowly avoided the same fate as last Saturday by convincing a friend of mine to drink most of my Flaming Lamborghini. I'm feeling surprisingly un-hungover for a Sunday.

open-air market stalls near my apartment 

lost: beautiful friend, reward if found.

ever lose a friend by accident? when you have no other friends in common, and one day one of you loses their cellphone, and *poof*

someone just found my blog by googling "nadia richardson." nads, is that you? lost track of you awhile back and missing you like crazy. email me one of these days if you ever find this site googling yourself. remember khi and kenny rogers and that hill we always used to drive to to watch the sunset blazing...and that crazy night in someone's apartment with red bull and microwaved you-know-what, and jigga, and jb, and that girl with the big boobs who walked around topless all night? and campus pub, and dancing to "sweet home alabama," and driving to tijuana and having lobster in puerto nuevo and getting stuck at the border crossing in that ghetto-ass bus? sigh...always wondered what happened to you.

i should write down everyone's numbers one day, in a big book. a real phone book. pen and paper.

you know you drank too much last weekend when...

You find yourself in the position of having to send the following email:

Hi,

Okay, here's the deal. I was very, very inebriated Saturday night, and I have absolutely no recollection of meeting you, or talking to you, or giving you my email address. Consequently, you seem a complete stranger to me (even though I realize I may have actually had a conversation with you that I am now no longer able to recall). The realization that you weren't a friend of a friend, or even a friend of an acquaintance, surprised me because I was faced with the fact that had I not been out with a group of very kind and responsible people, horrible things could have happened to me and I would have been too drunk to even notice. I'm not saying you're horrible or anything--I just was kind of freaked out to realize how drunk I was. In any event, I have a boyfriend. He's not the jealous type, but since I don't remember you, meeting up with you would be like going on a blind date. I hope you understand. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, and wish you the best in all your endeavors, romantically and otherwise. Have a great week!

Sincerely,
K

view of Stanley from Sunday's hike 

Saturday night:
Met up with my newfound, really chill as hell friends and drank. A lot. No really, a LOT. Red wine barf is one of the most disgusting things in the world.

Sunday morning:
10am: woke up feeling like I spent the night drinking too much and barfing my brains out. realized that's exactly what happened. noticed that the door to my room was closed, which meant the cleaning lady had come in and found me sprawled on the bed half naked. great. texted ben thanks for delivering my drunken ass home in one piece. passed out immediately after.

1:00pm: woke up to find the cleaning lady gone and myself still half-naked sprawled on the bed. took a shower and headed out to go hiking, of all things!

2:30pm: realize that my idea of hiking (leisurely stroll along flat ground) is NOT my hiking buddy's idea of hiking (see photo below). when i breathe out, i can feel the alcohol stinging my nose. this can't be good.

4:30pm: reach the summit of the hike. by now, most of the alcohol has been sweated out and discover that death-defying hikes are a good hangover cure.

5:30pm: sauna.

7:00pm: hour-long foot massage.

8:00pm: back home. sleep like a rock.

Monday morning:
off to observe a court proceeding (stay of execution hearing pending hearing of appeal of summary judgment).

see the small white trail running up the middle of that mountain? i hiked that today. 

Last night I ate sushi and then went bar-hopping, ending up at 3am at a foot massage place in Causeway Bay called Big Bucket. You sit in oversized loungers while soaking your feet in big buckets of hot water. The hour-long foot massage was amazing. I giggled my way through most of it.

Got home around 4:30am and fell straight to sleep. Woke up this morning at 11 and headed to an Indian dance class. It was a lot of fun, and a great workout, even if I danced with the grace of a club-footed drunken penguin.

I found a charming alley right by my apartment that is an open-air market during the daytime. They sell all sorts of produce, seafood and meat. I bought an eggplant, some Chinese broccoli, a bag of shallots, two lemons, a papaya, and two gorgeous tomatoes for about US $3.00. I wasn't brave enough to buy meat from them yet--there are several butchers who hang their meat up on big hooks and slice off a piece for you.

The fishmongers display their dismembered fish on styrofoam trays, expertly butchered so that you can see the fish's heart still beating even as its body lay in pieces.

my bedroom 

it's raining outside and i'm loving it. strangely enough, my friendster horoscope told me to bring an umbrella out today.

i am in the process of listening (or at least beginning to listen) to each and every one of the 3923 songs on my iPod. Right now I'm on number 759. It's The Beegees's "How Deep is Your Love."

On the subway ride back from work today, I caught myself shimmying and tapping my feet, because Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was on. Who can resist tapping their feet to that song? Certainly not I.

Since the jury's out, I will venture to call the verdict: Not Guilty on the child molestation charges, but guilty on the misdemeanor charge of giving alcohol to a minor. Just a guess--I'll be surprised whatever the outcome.

do i look like a terrorist?

Do I?

Because there doesn't seem to be any other reason why my best friends at the Hong Kong Immigration Department would want me to jump through so many damned hoops in order to get an extension of my work visa.

I guess I shouldn't complain though--I'm sure the U.S. immigration process is much worse.

baskets of bricks, macau 

listening to Louis Armstrong's "Dream a little dream of me."

went out to Wanchai yesterday, watched some friends play pool. didn't drink because i have been drinking too much lately. ended up in a very, very seedy bar that kind of freaked me out, what with all the prostitutes and all, so I left. The place just isn't the same when you're not blind-drunk.

the star of a long string of recurring dreams i had last night was grey goose vodka. someone had invented a way to make the label some sort of LCD screen sticker, where geese cascaded down in an endless stream, iridiscent and changing color from white to blue, even bright pink. everywhere i went in my dreams, all night, there was a bottle of grey goose vodka.

sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
but in your dreams whatever they be
dream a little dream of me

defeat.

deeee-licious! 

illiterate literature major

Today was my first day at work. It's so funny feeling like an illiterate fool...I can't read any of the signs posted anywhere, get the "send" and "cancel" buttons reversed on the fax machine, and have to get someone else to type in people's Chinese names for me on documents.

Another thing I am surprised at is the almost universal weakness of handshakes around these parts. I feel like I'm breaking their fingerbones. It goes like this: both of us reach out to shake hands, and while I have just begun a firm, don't-mess-with-me-i-am-small-but-i-will-CRUSH-you shake, I realize that they have commenced the why-you-precious-lotus-blossom-i-am-sure-your-hands-are-made-of-jelly-hence-i-will-emulate-that-consistency-with-my-own-hand shake, causing me to immediately withdraw pressure to compensate for the disequilibrium of handshaking force. This results in a strange, dual-phase handshake on my part, starting out firm and ending weakly. Not a very good impression either way.

It's good to be thrown in the midst of law I don't understand. Makes me grope around for similarities and reinforces my own knowledge through comparing the differences.

Today, I drafted a will. I didn't tell them I haven't taken Wills & Trusts yet.

The view from my bedroom window 

Sometimes when I'm wandering around Hong Kong, in some back alley, squeezing papayas at fruit stands and recoiling from the chicken feet on styrofoam pallets set out for sale, or just staring up, up, up at the buildings all around me, I think:

What the hell am I doing here? How did I end up here?

A few years ago I made it a personal goal of mine to constantly push my own boundaries. Law school was a result of that decision, and even though I'm always complaining about it, I can't deny that it's been a real eye-opener for me. The decision to work abroad this summer, instead of going the summer associate route in california, is likewise a product of my desire to do things differently--to put myelf in unexpected situations and see how much I can grow. It's also why I am, at the end of my internships, packing one small backpack and travelling for two weeks in search of whatever in laos, cambodia, and northern thailand.

Sometimes though, I wonder of this wanderlust is not in fact a form of escapism, in which case my perceived courage is instead cowardice at facing up to the inevitable routine I will have to settle in to at some point in life-probably sooner than later.

It's going to be an amazing adventure this summer.

scientists create gay fruit fly

intriguing! read about it here.

home for the next 2 months 

homesick

How much does a man live, after all?
Does he live for a thousand days, or one only?
For a week, or for several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say “for ever?”
--Pablo Neruda

Perhaps I travel as much as I do because I feel that when I am displaced…is the only time I am truly living. Yet, after so much time in different places, where does one place the point of reference from which one is displaced?

Where is home for me now?

Traveling to new places, wandering around cities where nobody knows me…the anonymity makes me feel alive. But I am also struck with a longing for a constant place, one that disappeared somehow between leaving my parent’s house, perhaps stuffed in some cardboard box during a move from apartment to apartment—a place that perhaps exists now only in my heart—a place to call home.

My driver 

Getting off the ferry from Hong Kong, I was approached by a number of taxi drivers and bicycle-with-carriages-behind-them operators offering me tours of the city. One old man was particularly persistent so I ended up paying him HK$50 to take me to the ruins of St. Paul. HK$120 would have gotten me a 2-hour tour of the city, but as I was riding in the carriage, I quickly realized I had made a good decision not to do the 2-hour tour. The poor old guy was sweating profusely and clearly laboring under the effort and the oppressive heat. I could feel the stares of passerby, probably wondering what kind of heartless soul—clearly an American!—would make this poor old man drag her around town in a bike carriage. I wanted to stop him but I didn’t want to offend him, since he was telling me how he had been doing this for many decades. Luckily the church wasn’t too far away. I slinked off the carriage in embarrassment.

St. Paul's 

Ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Macau

The intricate concrete façade looms over the city, standing like a doorway to nowhere. As when visiting all ruins, I am overcome by the mutability of life—how the works of whole communities can disappear. Sometimes over the passing of many years; sometimes in the blink of an eye. The heat of a fire. The roar of a wave.

I am drenched in sweat. I wish I were not wearing a bra—it’s like a sweat receptacle and goes squish-squish when I move. Probably the only time my diminutive boobs will be doing squishing of any kind. Sigh.

There is a terrifying chatter coming from the trees above—terrifying because I know it comes from the collective hum of a thousand giant shiny black bugs that live there. Giant black flying beetles the size of half m closed fist.

The territory was colonized by the Portuguese, and the buildings are a delightful mix of European and Asian. The mosaics on the floor remind me of the undulating pattern on Las Ramblas in Barcelona. Macau also reminds me of rural Taiwan. I wonder if it is because of the mopeds, street food and papaya milk.

Kites for sale in Macau 

book reviews

So far I have read:

Fingerprints of the Gods: Amazing book…long (500+ pages with rather complicated astronomical data and laboriously footnoted) but immensely rewarding and keeps you interested the whole time. Definitely recommended if you liked The Da Vinci Code. It’s nonfiction, and the premise is that a highly developed civilization existed before all known civilizations—it is this civilization that built the pyramids, the sphinx, and macchu-picchu. Sounds crazy, but you won’t think so after you read the section on ancient myths and the geometry and mathematics behind the pyramids. It boggles the mind! I’m convinced.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A joy to read. A book you can pack in your bag and read again and again, the sentences are that enjoyable. The drug-addled ramblings of Thompson are hilarious and the reasoning all too familiar. I wish I would have read this book earlier.