Riiiight.

I found this on my brother's blog, so I did a scan on my own...

Apparently my blog is:



Right.

Note: The appearance of the word "Gay" was noted by the blog-rater website and counted towards this grade.

Apologia.

I'm a little exhausted, so my writing is going to be particularly uninspired, unrevised, and basically dry and explanatory.

...I haven't really had a good chance to post anything in the last week, although, for the first time, I will have to say it's been fairly eventful...at least in a "living in a crazy-ass new city" sorta way...

Let's begin with some observations...

Hong Kong has one striking similarity to the US. It's filled with Mexicans....sorta. It's extremely bizarre to interact with the service industry and wander the streets of Hong Kong, because it feels intensely familiar to the US in the sense that there seems to be a burgeoning, ever present group of Filipinos and Vietnamese women. They are the waitresses in the restaurants, the clerks in the lower end stores, they wear different clothes, and they are noticeably darker in skin ton. On several occasions, I unconsciously identified people I saw on the streets as Mexican or Hispanic...when I realized I was in friggin' Asia, and it made no sense for huge numbers of Hispanic folk to come over here. All I will say, is that the dynamics of brown skinned southern brethren working and living amongst a more light skinned northern bunch is so familiar and so similar to the US that I am constantly surprised.

The one really interesting outgrowth from this population is something like a Sunday picnic for all of these women. Every Sunday, all day, in every shaded area (in covered walkways, in large covered plazas, on stairs underneath the trees, under bridges), there are huge congregations of Filipino women eating tons of awesome looking food, gabbing away, giving each other makeovers, playing cards, or whatever else consumes a lazy Sunday afternoon. Here's a shot I found on the net (because I feel somewhat shameful taking pictures of this phenomenon)...but looking at the picture, I can tell it is the HSBC building, exactly the spot I walked by today. This is what it looks like (times about 30).
To be honest, I find the whole thing to be really wonderful. I know it's the typical American reaction to see ethnic community bonding and partaking in exchange, food, and the pleasure of company as exotic and wonderful...but I really do think it seems like a great phenomenon and great way of life...even if the truth is that each of these people aspires to own their own car, house, and air-conditioner so they can sit at home alone and watch their flat screens. In any case...nice. (It was explained to me that since they are mostly in-house maids and the like, that they essentially have no place to live on Sundays...so they simply go outside and congregate in public because there's nowhere else to go.)

Another observation, which I've probably made several times...is that Hong Kong is fucking HILLY. This is the hilliest, steepest, most treacherously unflat city I have ever seen in my entire life. It is as if the curvature of the Great Wall of China (likely comparison, eh?) in all its mountainess steepness and brutally steep slopes were crammed together as the streets of a 10 square mile city. Besides my typical bitching...I find it insane how much uphill walking I have to do these days. (Buns of Steel eat your heart out.) What that means, in addition to the 99% humidity and 100 degree weather...is that I'm sweating ALL the time. The humidity makes the weather here far more brutal than it ever was in India...

So onto what's been going on....

Monday Night:
The firm took us to a barbecue seafood joint for the welcome party. Nothing spectacular, but it was a nice little get together where I overate, and then overdrank. At 9:30, I promptly came home to my apartment and dialled into the conference call for the deal I'm working on. 5 minutes into the conference call with a super high ranking NYC partner and several HK lawyers, I fucking fell asleep from the mass volume of beer I had consumed the few hours earlier. Now I don't know if I snored, or if I was asked any questions, or even how long I was out. Needless to say, the heartracing panic of waking up drunk in the middle of my first conference call was not good.

Tuesday:
I woke up early to join in the second conference call at 9:30...and I stayed awake the whole hour!!!

And luckily, Tuesday was a holiday. It was Dragon boat day! So the three of us summer associates took a bus down to Stanley Beach and watched the Dragon Boats race! The races, although incredibly Asian looking, are actually done in large part by large groups of white people racing with their respective corporate groups. So banks v. banks v. corporations v. consulting groups. In other words, white v. white v. white v. asian. Here's a shot of that...

Work:
Office work has consisted of hours of poring over the world's most boring prospectus and making markups and editorial changes in pencil. (Note: Chinese English, although often technically correct, fucking blows.) I tried to stab my pencil into my eye.

Actually...I'm getting way too tired now to write anything interesting, so I'm going to cut to the chase.

Saturday was a fantastic day. We all got up early as balls and set off for a long hike on Dragon's Back.
Before this trip, I had no idea that Hong Kong was this beautiful, tropical, lush mountainous island. I always imagined it as a concrete jungle with glitzy skyscrapers. Not so.
(Those are the two other summers) So we set off on a 2 hour hike through this beautiful mountain terrain, surrounded by the oceans on all sides, sun beating down on our necks. Actually, as the picture below demonstrates, the sun was so vicious and hot that I didn't let the sun touch my neck. (I do sorta like the enormous mountain man look I have going though)

We trekked all the way until we hit a little beachside town called Shek-O. We found a Thai and Chinese seafood hole in the wall, gorged ourselves on fresh fish, shrimp, veggies, several enormous Tsingtao beers, and very refreshing Coca-Colas. Here's a shot of the aftermath of the meal. That's the other summer Patrick.

There we basically lazed around on the beach, swam in the clear green waters surrounded by green peaks, and rocky outcrops far out in the ocean...and completely had the chance to unwind and relax. (Actually, I ended up wandering out into the ocean by myself after they passed out asleep on the beach.)

After all of that, we were soaked, covered in sand, salty, disgusting, smelly, out of clothes, sore, severely sunburned, and exhausted. But content. So what did we do?

We went to Jolly Foot...to get foot massages. For an hour.

Then afterwards, in a strange twist of fate, we ended up with people who appeared to be the Paris and Nicole of Hong Kong, and ended up in super exclusive hidden clubs hounded by the paparazzi. (It really had nothing to do with us. I barely spoke to the girls, and thought the clubs were overpriced, overlame, and underwhelming in every respect except the lavishness of the decore. That basically means the people sucked.)

'Tis All. I'm tired. I'm going to bed

Day 1: Hong Kong Corporate Confidential.

(Is it just me, or is life a constant barrage of new experiences and situations requiring constant adaptation and readjustment?...)

The first day in the HK office was uneventful, but nice. The office is really small, with approximately 18 lawyers (85% Chinese or Chinese descent), and the feeling is much more laid back, much more collegial, and much more informal than in Manhattan. Instead of 15 floors of 500 lawyers encased in elegant offices, there is a single floor in an ugly building.

So my jet lag woke me up promptly at 8 am (apparently I picked up my wakeup call and hung up immediately an hour earlier) and I took the hotel shuttle to work. After a 10 minute, sweltering, sweating, humid, muggy, no good very hot walk, I arrived at the office, wrapped myself in the delicious air conditioning, and promptly sat around for 5 hours passing the time. Other than that, we had a lunch of random pizza and caesar salad (have you ever had lox and cream cheese pizza?), had a lawyer's weekly lunch, and then spent 2 hours falling asleep while proofreading a prospectus for a Chinese company. (Chinese people fucking suck at English. I have never encountered such technical perfection, yet complete unintelligibility in single, multi-clause, multi-modifier, molto confusing sentence.)

Actually, I'm not even going to go on and describe the rest of my day. It's too boring. Even for me to recount. So...I went to dinner, I got full, I drank beer, I sat in on an hour long conference call from the cell phone they gave me (I actually fell asleep drunk on my couch at some point during the conference call when the head partner began discussing issues of corporate taxation in determining acquisition structures...and I'm not entirely sure how long I was gone...but I don't think they caught on.)


So...tomorrow is the huge dragon boat festival in Hong Kong...and I will go promptly after I attend a conference call in the morning with Beijing and New York (huff on fingernails and buff them on my lapel. diffidently.) And hopefully I'll update then.

Hong Kong.

So I have arrived in Hong Kong...

Let's start at the top...The story is very snooty. Because the circumstances under which I have been operating have been inherently snooty. And lavish. And absurd. And thus, I will discuss them as such. Because that's just the way it is...bitch.

I believe this picture serves my purposes well. Aside from the Aristocratic
bearing of this fine gent, he's got a gesture on his
hand that makes it all somehow bearable.

So on Thursday afternoon, after getting slammed with work from the M&A partner I've been working closely with, the summer supervisor gives me a ring and asks if, by chance, I would like another assignment. Eager to try something new, but not knowing how the fuck I am supposed to get my work done before the end of the day Thursday...I hesitantly say yes, and take on a brand new capital markets assignment. And thus, the "don't come in on Friday before your flight" turns into a "Shit, it's friday, my flight is in 4 hours, and I have 3 assignments to complete."

The end of this brief story, of course, is that I'm awesome. And I finished. And got to the airport in a black luxury car in my pinstripe suit to board my 16 hour business class flight to Hong Kong. So I checked in, went upstairs to the first class lounge, ate about 15 mini sandwiches, lounged on a beach chair sipping a free Heineken and reading the Times when I realize I don't have my cell phone. The cell phone I did have while I was in the car on the way to the airport....Jesus Fucking Christ. (Long story short, I call up my omni-competent assistant, and I believe that it's been taken care of...but I'm really not sure.)

Anyhow, I want to take a moment to describe Business class on an Asian Airline (Cathay Pacific). So the seats are huge. They are each fully encased and fully enclosed in the back, so when you lean back...the person behind you doesn't actually have the seat invade their space.

Then, the seat slides down mechanically in its own little cubby, and becomes almost horizontal. And there's tons of leg room so that a 6'2" Chinaman is able to extend his legs fully for the first time in his life in an airplane. With the pink silken pillow, 'tis bliss to be flying.

Then comes the movie selection....of which, I shamefully admit, I overindulged. If you're going to be sitting on a plane for 16 hours, it's no time for class. It's no time for thinking. It's no time for anything except the guilty pleasures. So out of the 60 movies on demand to choose from, I chose: Ghost Rider. Letters from Iwo Jima. Shooter. And...yes...Because I Said So. (Which none of you have heard of, because it is the Diane Keaton Mandy Moore vehicle. Even as low as my standards go, it was not good...) And then I watched 5 straight episodes of Sex and the City (for some reason the nudity wasn't blocked), the Office, and Scrubs.

And then came the meal. A 4 course meal brought out cart by cart. The first course, a Mesclun salad, a roll, and braised carmelized scallops on an avocado puree. The second course, either steak, chicken, or pasta. The third course, a choice of fruit, cheeses, and olives. The fourth course, tiramisu and coffee....and thus the flight was over. And so soon!

Hong Kong. It's fucking muggy man. It's like 100 degrees, and you could eat the humidity with a spoon. (I've decided that cliches are awesome. Especially if you just slightly modify them.)
I did learn a few things.

1) I had no idea Hong Kong was tropical. I believe it's further south than Delhi. that's not good.

2) Hong Kong is actually like...a Mountain. It's extremely hilly, and the mountain is always in the background...covered in tropical foliage.
3) Hong Kong is a very dense dense city. Full of white people.

So...we were picked up at the airport by those funny little people holding up signs, and we got into the car and jetted off to our hotel/apartment.


This is where I'm staying.

These pictures do not include the kitchen or the second flat screen located in the bedroom.

And then I actually went out into Hong Kong.

Verdict?

Eh. It was ok. The first place I went was about 40% white people. Which...all of you should know how I would react to. The second place was just boring.

So the actual Hong Kong Saga has not begun. I will go to work early tomorrow morning and see how my first real day goes. So...until then....

I continue...

So things have been pretty uneventful to be honest...

My time at work isn't bad. I actually find a lot of the work very interesting in its own perverse sort of short-sighted, money money money attitude. I don't say this in a spiteful or hateful way as to suggest any evil greed or republicanism (you like how comfortably I just toss that into the same string of descriptors as evil greed?) (note: I didn't say conservative. I said republican.) Anyhow, I think I just see a general human shortsightedness where it is nearly impossible to look at the transactions we are involved in, and see the very human and systemic consequences down the great chain of economic being. I mean, when you take a shit, can you really tell me where goes, what other human being has to touch it, which sewage plant processes it, and which person drinks the purified water squeezed back out of it? (Yes. It's the water cycle.)

The life is deceptively nice, though. The people will never be my best friends. I will not likely find a soulmate in the crowd. But they are friendly. They are personable. And they are not evil. Just a little detached. Or with different priorities. My work has involved white collar defense for hedge funds, pulling together an enormous outline for a partner's presentation on an extremely cutting edge legal issue amongst investment banks and hedge funds, and another domestic violence pro bono divorce case. Although I haven't really gone to a whole lot of absurd restaurants (except for a banquet at the Rainbow Room), I think it's been a fairly positive experience.

The next step, of course, beginning this Friday, is a 4 week rotation in Hong Kong. Isn't that fucking crazy? I feel like since I will no longer be spending all my evenings doing things with AHJ, I will have more time to update and speak as to my experience there.

As usual, I don't really have internet, and as a result tend to respond neither to emails or blog posts...especially because I don't want to do it from work.

But all of this ignores the TRUE driving force behind this post....The Monster Pig.


FUCK! Gives me the willies.