Also, this.

You will never be as cool as this guy.

Love

Earlier this week Kelly and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary - we've been in Hong Kong for all three of them. We're lucky - moving to a new country, a different culture, new jobs, incomparable heat and humidity - gave us a common set of challenges to deal with and brought us even closer together. Of course, there have been many times when, soaked with sweat and trying to walk in 3-inch heels while lost in Mong Kok, I've gotten a bit snarky, but overall things have been great and I wouldn't change a thing. Marrying him was the best decision I ever made.*

And as I love Kelly, I love Hong Kong. Even with the quirks, the challenges, and the absurd. Oh! - speaking of the absurd, check out this advertisement for Hong Kong's latest attraction:

Rub fiberglass antelope faces! Touch LED screens with a look of wonder! Let your baby shove some scrambled egg in your face! Learn history from an animatronic meerkat! I made that last one up. Fine. But even overlooking the absurdity of this "attraction", this is a really bad advertisement. Luckily it's impossible to overlook the absurdity, so I guess the ad agency will escape criticism.

*Except maybe for that time in Guadalajara when everybody else had the carne asada but I decided to have the ceviche and the next day everybody was laid out with food poisoning and I was like "suck it losers!" and went to tour the tequila factory.

What?

I work in an older building in Sheung Wan that's surrounded by dried seafood shops, so the area has a very particular smell. Western tourists are advised by guidebooks to come visit this street - not to buy anything, but just to... smell.

My office building houses residential flats, the chambers of commerce of various small nations, and mysterious "import/export" businesses. Each floor has a distinct smell. Floor 5? Chinese medicine shop. Floor 12? Seafood. Floor 16? Ginger and... ammonia?

Anyway, I work on the 22nd floor, so getting to the office every day is an olfactory adventure.

The other day I was leaving work, and going down the elevator stopped on a floor I'd never seen before. As the doors opened, the elevator was flooded with the most godawful smell of decomposing bodies and durian and backed up sewage and incense and bad dreams, and all I saw was a pet carrier. A Buddhist monk stepped on, pointed at the carrier, and said "Dog." My pithy reply - "It stinks."

After the elevator had descended a few floors, the monk said, "Smells bad."

Then, a few floors later, "Dead. Hahahaha!"

Then we reached the ground floor and walked in separate directions. What just happened?

Quokka!

We spent our last full day in Perth bumming around Rottnest Island, where we went swimming at the beach where someone got eaten by a shark a few months ago. But look at that water - we couldn't resist!

Rottnest was originally called Rat Nest Island because it's inhabited by a small marsupial called a quokka. Quokkas look a great deal like rats and would be fairly disgusting if they didn't hop. The hopping is the redeeming feature that takes them from gross giant rat! to aaagghhh cute hopping thing! Here's a really uneventful video of me feeding a quokka a piece of banana, and then getting way too excited about petting it:

It takes very little to thrill me.

Headed to the airport now to have a breakfast beer and spend all of my change on koala jerky.

Down under for Valentine's Day

On the dreaded V-day I got up at 5am to catch a flight to Singapore. The husband caught a later flight, we met there, and then travelled on to Perth where he's attending a conference and I'm flitting about visiting friends.

For the flight we'd ordered the vegetarian meals, as usual. We always do this because (a) you get your food first, so you can wolf and then pass out watching bad romantic comedies sooner; and (b) said food is generally better than the standard options. It was a decent couscous and bean dish with the same salad and roll that everyone else got but the dessert, instead of the tiramisu that everyone else had, was some sort of heart-healthy apple bread that weighed approximately as much as a bag of oranges. Dammit - just because someone's vegetarian it does not follow that they want to be healthy. Among the special meals they have vegan, lacto-ovo vegetarian, and low carb vegetarian - why not fatass vegetarian? I wanted that tiramisu, dammit.

We landed at 1:00 am and finally got through customs at 2:00. (If you've been to the Perth airport, you know why. If you've never been to the Perth airport, don't go). Our friend Ruby was kind enough to pick us up and ferry us to the accommodations that the conference had arranged for us at St. George's College. Where they'd never heard of us.

After waking up some mussed and confused student to check us in, the long process to determine exactly who we were began. Another student is woken. The office is unlocked and files are gone through. No - never heard of us. Luckily, between the three of us (because Ruby was a trooper and stayed to make sure we got in and didn't have to come crash on his couch) we had three iPhones, two iPads, and two laptops, so we eventually scrounged up all of the emails between Kelly and the conference organizer confirming our reservations.

Okay, fine. They'll give us a room.

At 3:30 am, a key is produced and we're led up to a student dormitory - communal shower at the end of the hall, creaky staircases, stained carpet - and to our room. We walk in, the student looks at the bed, looks at us, "Oh. Yeah. We only have single beds."

The process begins anew. More ruffling through files, another key is produced, and I'm led to another dorm room on a different floor with my own single bed. Finally, at 4:30 am, I lie down to sleep.

Only for a short time, however, as a car alarm begins going off at 5:00 am. wooOOOP... wooOOOP... wooOOOP... Except it's not a car alarm - it's one of the thousands of species of completely f*cked up birds that inhabit Perth. And it's directly outside my window. I stumble out of bed and, in my attempt to close the window, manage to rip off the screen and hit myself in the face with it, knocking me backwards onto my ass. At this point I just give up on life and crawl back to bed.

But none of that mattered the next day, because behold my first meal in Australia - the 'roo burger:

It was juicy and bouncy. Cute animals just taste better.

A calm Sunday in Tuen Mun

Nap time.