Feeling good

I had one goal today: write the script for my next YouTube video and film it. I did that – and then some! Woohoo! I totally did NOT expect to be that productive today 👏 So today, I did what I was hoping to have done yesterday 🙄 Oh well, whatevs. Either way, it’s done, and that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter when I actually did the work, just as long as it was done 😁 Now it’s time to edit, and I’m hoping that I can finish that tomorrow. There are only two more workdays this week, and Thursday is my busiest day, so I’d rather get all my editing done tomorrow rather than having to add to the busy-ness on Thursday.

I bought dinner from this place that N recently discovered. It’s this cosy little restaurant that maybe only has around 5 tables all up. I went to go pay, and the waiter asked me if I could pay in cash. The owner manager had just left, and apparently the wait staff can’t operate the credit card machine without the owner manager 🤷‍♂️ What’s up with that?? The bill was something like HK$148, and I had something like HK$143 in my wallet. A HK$100 note and the rest in coins. I literally emptied out my wallet 😂 The waiter said that was fine and let me take my food, but I still felt bad. I didn’t want her to have to pay the extra HK$5 out of her own pocket. I don’t know if she’d actually have to, but I didn’t want that to happen if it did come to that. It’s only HK$5 (~A$1), but still, that matters for some people.

The restaurant is only 5-10 minutes away from home, so I walked back, dumped all my stuff, grabbed a HK$10 note and walked back to the restaurant and paid her extra. She told me to take my change – all my coins were still on the table 😂 – but I said not to worry about it. I thought it was nice of her to just let me take the food earlier, so this was a tip for her, in a way.

Maybe next time we can actually dine in, now that dine-in services has been extended to 10pm here 👍 Oh, and 7 cases today! We’re staying below ten cases! Yayyy! Suck it, 🦠! 😂

Lack of productivity and planning

It was one of those days where I was all keen bean at the start of the day, ready to do a ton of work, only to end up ticking off just one thing off my to-do list by the end of the day 😔 How depressing. I was hoping to get some more stuff done today because I will lose Friday and Monday because of Easter. But I ended up doing even less. What is up with that?? 😒 Hopefully I can have a more productive day tomorrow 🤞

Speaking of Easter, we left it too late to do a staycation 😔 The hotels that I was hoping to stay at are now all booked out. Plans A, B and C. Danggg. You’d think I’d learn by now that I need to book in advance. And with the 🦠 numbers improving here (we’re averaging probably around fewer than 10 cases per day now – woohoo!), people are starting to go out again. Hence why the hotels that I want to stay at are all booked out! 😔 So we’ll probably just go out and do day trips to an island or two, and just wander around and explore this city.

More delights

I have been able to type for most of my life. I probably learnt how to type when I was around 12. So I can actually type without really thinking about where my fingers need to go. I can close my eyes, say the words in my head, and my fingers will somehow know where to go. If anything, it’s actually faster if I close my eyes, because I don’t have the screen as a distraction. I then start visualising where my fingers are moving on the keyboard hahaha I don’t know what’s better, visualising it or actually seeing the words being typed on the screen. How are my fingers doing that?? And it’s not like I’m going “OK, now move your finger to the F and now to the I, then the N, then G…” etc etc. I can be thinking about something else, like how sunny it is today, and somehow my fingers will still find the right letters. It’s really odd! Seriously, how did I learn to do that?!? This is my delight for the day 😊

I had my Chinese lesson today. We talked about:

• How the appointments for the German vaccine have been cancelled here because it has been found that the vials were not sealed properly 😒
• How our landlord is asking us to pay his legal fees without even consulting us beforehand; and
• The Mr Tickle book that I borrowed from the library recently – in Chinese 😱

Obviously, my version in Chinese didn’t come out as nicely as this 🤣 It was more like:

• The small bottles from the German company were bad, so the government cancelled our appointment;
• The person who owns this house is asking us to pay his lawyer’s fees;
• I borrowed this book from the library.

We then went on to discuss each point in turn, focussing mainly on the first two points. So you can imagine just how difficult this lesson was! But it’s all about communication, not perfect grammar, and I got my message across, that’s the main thing. Sure, it’d be nice if I had perfect grammar, of course, but I’m not studying every single day for hours on end. So given the limited amount of time that I do spend studying the language, I’m quite happy with my progress! 👍🏻

Maybe we can talk about the Mr Tickle book next week. Hopefully I would have finished it by then!

Lots of closures – and reading practice!

Our favourite yum cha place in HK is currently closed because the building that it’s in is currently effectively being used as a COVID vaccination centre. But apparently they have another branch one suburb / district away, so we decided to go find that other restaurant and try it out.

But once we found it, we quickly realise that that too is closed 😔 Not sure why this other venue is currently closed, but regardless the reason, we still didn’t have a yum cha place to go to 😔 N then remembered another place nearby that we had been to once or twice before, so we made our way there.

Turns out that place is closed too! 😩 Is everything closed because of COVID? The protests the year before? A combination of both factors?? Regardless, it’s all quite sad 😔

We finally stumbled upon another restaurant and decided to try that. It actually turned out to be OK, good enough for us to return to 😅 All our walking around eventually paid off 👍🏻

We then went to the library and borrowed a few books. N found the Mr Men and Little Miss books in Chinese! Omg I had to borrow one and work my way through them. I really like these books, and I know they’ll be good books to read in a foreign language 👍🏻

Turns out I was right. It probably took me about an hour to read a third of Mr Tickle 😂 OMG how painful, knowing I could read the entire book in less than five minutes if it was in English. But every little bit counts, and I’m determined to finish it – and every other book in the series! They don’t have all of the books in Chinese, maybe just a quarter of them, but that’ll be plenty for me to work my way through 😆

And then in the evening, we watched another movie: Snowpiercer. There were no English subtitles available, so when the Korean actors were speaking, we had no idea what they were saying. But they had Chinese subtitles 🤪 I was ready to take this as a learning opportunity and test my Chinese reading skills, but N just used the camera in Google Translate for quick and dirty translations! 😂 But when I could read the Chinese, I used the Google Translate translation as confirmation (or otherwise) of my own attempt.

Lots of Chinese reading practice for me today! I have to recount today’s events in my next lesson – in Chinese 😱 It’ll be speaking practice that day! 😆

My fun, productive, awesome day 😁

I had one of the most productive yet fun days that I’ve had in a long time! 😁

We started the day off having an online meeting with our financial advisor in Oz. That took longer than I expected, but I should’ve known it would take ages. It’s not like we’ve just met the guy 🙄 But it was productive, and totally worth taking the time to catch up with him 👍

My mum called soon after. My parents needed help looking at stuff online, so I helped them out as much as I can. I have somehow found how to be zen when talking to them. I don’t quite know what I’ve done, but I’ve solved the mystery 😂

That call took longer than I expected, so it took us a while to head over to TST for afternoon tea. I had a voucher for 20% off at this afternoon tea, so we took advantage of it today 😊 That too took longer than I had expected, so by the time we finished up, it was pretty much time for N to go to karate. Karate is over on that side of Victoria Harbour, so we went our separate ways. I went home via the supermarket, and then filmed my next YouTube video.

Oh, and to top it all off: HK opened up the vaccination program today, extending it to everyone over the age of 30. We logged in to see when we could get a booking, fully expecting everything to be booked until November or December. We actually managed to get a slot at the end of this month!! 😱 OMG! Sooo happy! 😁 I didn’t think we’d be able to get vaccinated until the end of the year, I really thought we’d be right down the bottom of the totem pole. I’m so glad that the HK government is pouring a lot of resources into this massive undertaking #grateful

So that was my awesome day. I wish I had more days like this one!

A screwed up world

Apparently the HK government has decided to extend the vaccination invitation to everyone over the age of 30. So from tomorrow, we can sign up to get vaccinated. There are two vaccines available in HK: the Sinovac vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech one. I couldn’t decide which one to get, as choices like this are not normally available to consumers. I just get jabbed and that’s it 😆 But one thing that I wanted to make sure was that the Australian government would recognise the vaccine. At the end of the day, we are Australian, so we need to make sure that whatever vaccine we take would allow us to enter Oz.

And now I’ve heard that Australia won’t recognise the Sinovac vaccine 🙄 I don’t know how true this is, but given the current political climate, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is indeed the case. I don’t know if this will change over time, but right now, apparently that’s their stance. So true or not, rather than risking it, I think we will just go with the less risky option. The decision has effectively been made for us 😒

I feel like we live in such a screwed up world at the moment 😔

Category #3: Papers

One of N’s bosses, her husband has tested positive 😔 So now her and the kids have been shipped off to quarantine. This is exactly what I was talking about yesterday and how I didn’t want this to happen to us! 😩 So now their whole team has been asked to work from home for the next few weeks. Greeeat. N doesn’t like working from home. The connection isn’t very fast, and he only has one monitor at home. Plus he’s in a lot of meetings, so if I want to film any videos, I have to go set up in the bedroom and close all the doors so that his voice doesn’t get picked up in the audio. Plus he just makes noise, like any person does, which, again, isn’t great when all the noise is picked up by the mic! And then sometimes I’m teaching while he’s in a meeting, so he has to walk off to take his call in a different room. So yeah, it’s not the ideal work situation for both of us. But given all the cases at the moment in the area, I’d still rather that he stay home.

N started cleaning out his closet today, which inspired me to start cleaning out all the papers in the study! I got through some, but there is still quite a fair bit to get through. I’m guessing I’m about halfway through – and that’s after tidying up for around 3.5 hours today! 😱 And that’s just papers. I still have other miscellaneous items to sort through. Not just in the study but everywhere in the house. Sighhh… I don’t know if I’m going to get through it all in 8 weeks! That seems really ambitious… But I’ll just keep pushing through and just do whatever I can in that timeframe. Much like my 30-day splits challenge, I never actually made it to the full splits at the end of the 30 days, but I ended up with a new daily habit. And maybe this 8-week challenge will be similar. If that’s the case, then I’ll be happy 😊

Is this the start of the fifth wave??

I talked about the lovely 🦠 cases at N’s gym recently. Well apparently there is a cluster at a particular gym near our place, and it has taken the city’s cases up to 60 today 😔 And because the gym is near our place, these same people also live near us, so more cases have cropped up in our district / suburb. Arghhh! And there is also the risk that gymgoers go and visit other gyms, so the risk of this stupid virus spreading in our area is even greater. Faaantastic 😒

There is currently a government policy saying that if someone is a confirmed positive case, everyone in their building must undergo testing. HK is a city filled with high rises, so the risk of the 🦠 spreading quickly in a building is quite high. So hundreds, if not thousands, of people would have to be tested in a single building 😱 If there’s a case in our building, I’m sure we’ll hear about it soon enough 😔

So maybe this weekend will be spent at home yet again 😔 I was thinking of doing a staycation again during the easter long weekend, but I’m not sure if I want to do that now. What if this is indeed the start of a fifth wave?? Arghhh! 😒

These damn waves 🌊

I mentioned recently that the restrictions have been eased a little here in HK. They have extended dine-in hours to 10pm, and people can now sit in tables of 4. And a few places have been allowed to reopen.

One that is very important to N is gyms. But unfortunately, there were a number of positive or preliminary positive 🦠 cases at gyms today, including one of the gyms that he frequents 😔 The positive case went to this gym on the same day that N did, but after N went there. N went first thing in the morning, and the positive case went there in the late afternoon on the same day 😓 Sighhh… So he’s thinking that maybe he should stay away from the gym for a while. I completely agree.

And now with all these cases from the gyms, the government might reassess the restrictions once again. Sighhh… We were getting the numbers down so low, and now they’ve gone back up again. I hope this isn’t the start of yet another wave. I’m getting so sick and tired of these damn waves! 😒

Taking it easy

I walked a LOT today. 9km, according to my Apple watch 😱 And coupled with the jogging and the star jumps that I did yesterday (trying to reach my exercise goals for my watch 😂) and the daily stretches that I’m still doing for my splits goal, my legs are now SORE 😝 And my body was just generally tired. I’m no spring chicken anymore, these things are now tiring!

So I took it pretty easy tonight, and just resumed watching my current Korean drama, Secret Garden. Oh, that link is to IMDb! I’m glad to see that Asian shows are now showing up on IMDb 👍 I guess a lot of these are available on Netflix, so they’re getting seen by more people outside of Asia, which is cool. And Korea makes the best dramas hehehe It’s just a shame that I’m not learning Korean! 😆

N had karate today. It was the first time that he’d been to karate since the restrictions were imposed back in December, so it’s nice to see things open again. There are a few places that are still closed, but they are places that I don’t really go to (eg karaoke venues, mahjong parlours and swimming pools) so it doesn’t really bother me. So I’m good 😄 But summer is just around the corner, and I’d like to be able to go to the beach when the weather starts warming up. I hope they’ll open the beaches sometime in the next few months… 🤞 🏖