Greetings my loyal fan. I know you must be understandably upset about the degrading quality of my blogs and I sympathize. Since many of these trips happened months ago, I can only go by the vague recollection stored deep in my cranium. Sadly, I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday so the details of a trip long past are as "hazy" as Beijing air.
Alas, I recognize the deterioration of my writing style as well as the increasing length of time between posts, so in order to keep you, Mom, I mean my loyal fan base happy, I have taken a drastic step to remedy the situation:
I quit my job.
Now, you will no longer click on "Marc and Brina in Hong Kong" on your list of favorite websites and be met with a stale story on Malaysia. No siree Bob, I am ON it now. I will devote all my days to providing quality blog posts because THAT is how dedicated I am to you. Oh, and I hated my job to the point that I had taken to drawing sad faces on my calendar for every bad day I had at work. There were more frowny faces than smiley faces, so something had to be done.
Today is Labor Day in the US and, of course, we don't get that holiday here. We've already celebrated British Labor Day, Chinese Labor Day and Hong Kong Labor Day, I don't see why we can't tack on one more. That's OK, next week is Mid-Autumn Festival so we're going to the Philippines. Man, I need a vacation like a crack addict needs, well, crack. It's been TWO MONTHS people! Granted, we went to Shenzhen for a weekend to stock up on fakes and I went to Macau for a day trip last week, but that's nothing. As Marc's dad said, when we move back to the States, I'm going to throw rocks at Marc when we don't go out of town every month. He better learn to duck.
It's funny how, having been here a full year now, some of these crazy holidays are actually making sense! Remember Hungry Ghosts' Day last year? Well, they had it again this year and I was paying attention this time. Apparently, the older Locals burn paper money (no, not real paper money but like Monopoly Hong Kong Dollars) so that the ghosts of their ancestors can "use" the money to buy things they need in the afterlife. They better get with the times before I get there because I'm telling my descendants to burn paper Visa cards. They also burn food like oranges, in case the ghosts are hungry and perhaps have a slight case of scurvy. For the more important necessities, they burn paper replicas of items from the material world, again for use in the afterlife. These items can be bicycles, cars, refrigerators, even computers and mobile phones. The other day, I passed by a store that sells these replicas and I saw a replica of a window AC unit. Man, I feel bad for whoever's ancestor needs an AC UNIT in the afterlife, if you catch my drift.
In other news, Batman: The Dark Knight came out last month. Have you seen it? If you haven't, it is super awesome, you should go see it! You heard about it here first, ladies and gentleman. The part in the movie that shows Hong Kong is short but action-packed and most importantly, it shows Marc's office building and the Escalator where we walk every day. So what are you waiting for? Go!
You still here? Good because it is time for the always hilarious "This Only Happens to Marc and Sabrina" story of the week. About a month ago, as part of Brina's countdown to that awful time in a woman's life when she realizes she can no longer put a 2 in front of her age (sob), we went to an out-of-the-way beach on Lantau Island. You might think that the stretch of beach that we walked on where every man we saw was wearing a black mesh g-string leaving nothing (and I do mean nothing) to the imagination is the hilarious part of the story. But you'd be wrong.
Picture this: Marc and I are laying out on our beach blankets in the hot mid-afternoon sun. We've each fallen asleep reading our respective books when all of a sudden I, the lighter sleeper of the two, hear uncontrollable laughter from a crowd of people around us. Wanting to see what the commotion is about, I open one eye and see two large shadows near our blankets. I sit upright and realize the shadows are made by none other than a pair of water buffalo coming straight at us! I frantically wake up Marc and point, unable to make the words "Marc! Wake up! There are 2 large water buffalo coming our way!" come out of my mouth. He wakes with a start as the buffalo are walking by just 1 1/2 feet from us. Yes, the people on the beach were laughing at us, the sleeping gweilos that were about to be trampled by the rampant water buffalo. Man, it just doesn't get much stranger than that. Only in Hong Kong.
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