Defeated by the heat

We admitted defeat last night and gave in, turning the air conditioning back on. A week away from the warmth of Singapore has clearly made us weak.

Marriage redux

After three months and a week of being married, we figured it was time for another party, so we booked the outside deck on a bar in Wan Chai. It's November now and the weather is starting to cool, so we figured it would be a pleasant, balmy night.

Just as with our wedding, our estimate of the weather was a bit off, as Hong Kong cranked the heat back up to 30 degrees and we were sweltering in our Canada-weight clothing. I missed a trick here: I should have insisted that everyone else dressed formally too, so we could share in the joy of dehydration.

No Flies On Me

The hotel for the conference is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by beautiful mountains, a golf course, green, green grass ... And flies. Millions of flies. It was a bit disconcerting to have three days of meetings in a helicopter hangar, where every two minutes another huge black fly would buzz into your ear, or dance across the presentation screen.

Not relaxing in Malaysia

Malaysia is a relaxed country, but this is a problem if you decide to leave in a hurry.  We got a taxi from Sentral at 1:40, which was possibly cutting it fine given our flight was at 4 from KL LCC, but we probably would have been less stressed if our taxi hadn't seemed to travel as slowly as possible, all the way there.

Broken yet again

Kuala Lumpur is a strange city, particularly so when you arrive from Hong Kong, God's own experiment in how much concrete you can put in one place before the inhabitants go mental and start choppering each other to death. KL was hacked out of a jungle that keeps threatening to return, so swathes of the city are green forest, with the occasional random enormous building that appears to have teleported in from the 25th century. Perhaps because it's only been a city for a few decades, rather than a loose collection of villages, the transportation hasn't been quite worked out. If it rains, all the traffic stops (and there's a lot of traffic). When all the shops shut at ten, all the traffic stops for an hour too, as everyone tries to drive home at once.

Hot out in Peng Chau

After a morning of household chores (eating a fried breakfast, playing on the Xbox and then having to empty the cat's litter tray) I headed down to Central to take the ferry out to Peng Chau.

It was roastingly hot, so rather than break myself on the harsh test that is Finger Hill, we sat down at the French bar in the town square and ate cheese for a couple of hours, waiting for friends to arrive.

Eventually they called, to say that they had arrived. In Cheung Chau. To be fair, these are both islands, one hosting a yearly festival based around climbing up a tower of buns without falling to your doom, and the other being the island my friends should have taken the ferry to.