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.