Hong Kong, 2011

I recently visited Hong Kong again and had a lot of fun. The stresses at work and a lack of sleep made me decide not to have a trip as busy as my last one to give me some time to relax and calm down. However, a friend and I signed up for a tour that consisted of a stop at Temple Street Market in Kowloon side of Hong Kong, an open cover bus ride, and a night time ferry ride and meal in the Hong Kong Harbour. I didn't take too many pictures in Hong Kong since not much caught my interest or they didn't come out right but I did get a lot of night pictures of Hong Kong and Kowloon. I suppose I should explain something about Hong Kong. What most people think of as a single city or island is really a number of different islands and territories, similar to districts. The tour took us around the island of Kowloon to take pictures of the main island called Hong Kong Island then out on the harbour to see a laser show off the skyscrapers of all the visible islands but mostly a small bay on Hong Kong Island.

Temple Street Market was interesting with lots of random things. It was started as a market for males with electronics and such but as with all markets it included things for women such as jewelry and shiny boxes common in the city. What caught my eye was that the market is a few streets down from the Jade Market where beads are sold, especailly jade beads sold in strings. Because we were on the tour and had limited time I decided not to vist the Jade Market but made a note of where it was for next time I come through. I know full well that I will get lost in there and probably spend a lot of money in there so I hope I remember to save up! After the market we went on the open bus ride and I enjoyed the night lights in Hong Kong with the wind in my hair. The ferry ride was fun and the food was good. It was buffet style and none of the three of us went down to watch the laser show as it was after 8 pm when we got the food and we were all really hungry. The entertainment was kind of fun too as it was two most likely Chinese women singing American tunes with their accent. One had a nice strong voice but the other woman was hard to hear even with the microphone. It was fun watching the children dance to the music though and the food was amazing. After the two hour ride was over we went back to the bar near where we were staying and had some sangri, my friends latest favorite drink.
The next day we went out to the Lady's Market which was full of clothes, sparkly jewelry, hair accessories, and boxes, as well sandals of every style but only small sizes and bags among a lot of things like ciggerette lighters and electronics as well as toys. We had fun and I got a lot of my Christmas shopping done already, or that's my excuse for spending so much. :) However, I didn't go too far over my limit so I'm not upset. It really is amazing what a person can find at markets. For supper that night we went to an international resteraunt that had nothing remotely American, which was odd to me. Usually international means American but there it meant other Asian countries. I got three pieces of fried pork in a white curry sauce to be put over steamed rice and my friend got a stone bowl of eel soup.

We had fun in Hong Kong and I hope you have as much fun in your life. For now this is Li'l B signing out 'til next time.

Manila 2011

I had a lot of fun in the Philippines not too long ago. The first night we stopped at the Mall of Asia and had some good food at the food court next to the ice rink inside the mall. It was good food but we still had a few hours of sunlight to explore so we did. Curious how the Mall of Asia compared to the Mall of America not far from my family home, my friend and I walked as much of the mall as we wanted to. There we saw a few play areas for children, the ice rink I saw before, and the bowling alley as well as the cinema and a lot of stores. I’m not sure which mall is larger although I do believe the Mall of Asia may win in size. However, the Mall of Asia is two stories long and spread over two or three blocks while the Mall of America is four floors tall.

The next day we went outside Manila to an abandoned naval base turned into a thrill area for people who love heights. There we did what they called a Superman ride where got strapped in tightly then sent across on a zip line for a few seconds and back again stretched out like Superman, or with your legs out on the bar and your hands tightly clenching the bar under your armpits, like I was. Quite exciting but really a short ride when it was over. Next we went on a ride where my friend and I stood on a few pieces of metal facing each other strapped on and sent across more zip line. That one was really fun because any little movement had a strong reaction to the metal that supported us. The next and last ride we went on was a freefall. Basically they strap you in to a tension line, you step out into the air about three floors out and can go head first, sitting, or Mission Impossible style. Then they release the tension and you freefall until they tighten the tension again about ten feet above the ground to slow you to a soft landing. Yeah, it was scary but fun and over really quick. It seems unsafe but all the people there that day landed safely although pretty shaken. Unfortunately I can’t post pictures of my fall because I only got video of it and even that was half missed by the amateur photographer that was nice enough to film it on my camera. I’ll try to post the video but no promises. Next we went on a hike through the trees and saw their version of poison ivy, the vines strong enough for humans to climb or swing on, and trees with roots up to my waist. We also had a lecture session on how to survive in the jungle including how to get water out of bamboo shoots, how to make fire from bamboo (no stones used), and how to make a spork jungle style.

For lunch we stopped at a lovely place overlooking a lake and ordered some good food. I ordered a soup but one of my companions ordered broiled squid and actually was served two small but whole squid. After a lovely meal we went shopping before getting on the bus to go back to Manila. Along the way our pit stop was called the Shell of Asia, which I found amusing as we had stopped at the Mall of Asia the day before.

The next day we again went to the Mall of Asia for lunch and found that the children’s bouncy playgrounds had been taken down and there was a martial arts competition in its place. After a few hours of shopping at the mall we got in a cab and went to a bar called the Hobbit House. The novelty of the Hobbit House, besides its selection of over two hundred international beers and the Lord of the Rings décor, is that all the servers are legal midgets. It was rather amusing to me because my companion was acting like they had met a celebrity just by being in the bar. Well, the peach flavored beer I had and the cherry flavored beer both of which were labeled from Belgium, may have added to the silliness of the night. The food there wasn’t bad although it wasn’t the typical version (my spaghetti had bbq sauce on it instead of marinara sauce) and it was a fun night.

All that said I had fun in the Philippines and can’t wait to go back. Well, until next time, have a nice life and check out my pictures on Facebook.

My links

Some of you may have noticed that I have a few more "Li'l B" blog pages in my favorites on Facebook. A few weeks ago I got bored during the hours stuck in a tin can and decided to explore the web and get a jump on my writing career. Most of you know I plan to be a proffessional novelist when I can switch jobs. I realized that being oncall 24/7 for systemproblems left me with a lot of free time. Why wait for three years to enter the writing community and get friends that know the industry? That in mind I started a few more blogs and have more plans. With all this going on I figured it would be nice to tell you all about my different sites.

Li'l B's Ramblings is this blog. (obviously :) ) It is designed to tell my family and friends (the ones who know me from my life before the writing) about what is going on in my life, where I visit, and what I do with my various hobbies.

Li'l B's Writing Journey is a blog for writers by a writer. Though it may talk about publishing industry news or internet marketing news or facts, it is more designed to help improve story writer's latest works. I'm currently writing a series on how to create characters, things to keep in mind about their past. My next series will be about things to think about while world building for sci-fi writers.

Li'l B's Reviews for Writers is my newest blog and doesn't have a post yet. I'm planning to review things like the books to improve my writing that I read anyway and to analyze movies I feel useful to writers for whatever purpose. Again, this is a blog based for writers by a writer. It is also my main "moneymaker". I'm looking into internet marketing and plan to test out different ideas on this site whereas my travel blog won't have advertising (at least for now) and Writing Journey is based more towards facts than advertising money.

SC's Discoveries is a story I need to restart. It was an idea for a writing outlet before I did enough research to really make a writing home anywhere. It was also meant to be like a blog with me coming up with a weeks worth of blogs at a time and not really thinking beyond that. I have since realized that way is horrible for writing a good story. Without knowing where I want each character to end up, it's kind of hard to write a coherent story. Now I'm trying to figure out a rough but more detailed outline for the story before continuing. Unfortunately I get distracted easily and am having trouble just sitting down and doing the work.

My profile on Writing.com is a more up-to-date place for my writings. I currently have two short stories up there and am working on two more right now. These stories are what I believe is called "flash fiction" which means really short and often written in a very short time. My current idea is to keep all my stories under or around two thousand words, which is only about two pages typed at size twelve font. Many of my stories right now are background for characters that will meet for a book or series on a space station. I plan to have background stories on about twenty characters and keep in mind each of their stories throughout the work or series. It sounds like a challenge but those are fun and a writer is always looking to grow. However, I still have little more than a few characters and a few random ideas for the story so it's a while off still. However, I'm always loking for feedback so feel free to stop by and let me know what you think.

That's all I have up for now. Soon I plan to put up a profile on Squidoo.com that I'll keep up to date as well as starting a jewelry line/site for my jewelry line which I'm thinking of naming LRuth Designs. However, that site is a while off. I need to finish the two projects I'm currently working on and my focus is more on my writing than on my beading. One of my New Years Resolutions (or close enough) was to send a book out to publishers by the end of the year. I'm done with the first draft and realized I now need to completely rewrite it. Iforgot to show the main character has emotions!! Stupid me, oh well, it goes with the learning part of writing. Anyways, I adjusted the plan to having the rewrite and another draft done by New Years and send out the query letter by the end of January. The general rule for writing a a query letter is not to send it out until your work is perfect but the examples say that just getting a reply can take months. By then I'll have had at least another month to do another draft and see how it is.
Well, that's all for now. Feel free to stop by anywhere and let me know what you think. For now this is Li'l B signing off and hoping you all a lovely week.

A different type of barbeque

The next time I went out in town in Korea was with my coworkers. One of them had found a nice authentic Korean barbeque place and he insisted we go there every time we get here. Unlike the place in International Market, this one we sat on the floor on pillows and cooked our own meat on an actual grill instead of on a platter on a grill. Also at this store the vegetables were on the side, as were the sauces, instead of getting cooked with the meat and boiling off the sauce. They brought out hot coals to cook the meat over and leaves (basil and lettuce) to make a wrap out of the cooked meat and any sides we may want. The meat were pork and steak while the sides were rice, soup, kimchi, kimchi cakes, radish slices, sprouts, various sauces, and a few other things I really didn’t use with the meat. It was awesome by itself.
After we finished the meal half of us headed back with a side trip to ice cream and the other half went to International Market for Krispy Crème donuts. After donuts L and I went to the DVD store. She was looking for another CD and I was just looking while she shopped. The American CDs were a rather well represented although I listen to country and it’s not as popular overseas. I wound up buying two old movies and a new one for about ten dollars all together. Not bad considering that The Three Faces of Eve has been on my list to watch for a while. It’s the only movie I know of based around a girl with multipersonality disorder and it earned an Oscar for best actress. Other than that, I really haven’t done anything interesting in Korea yet. So this is Li’l B signing off and wishing you all a lovely day.

Korea version 2 part 1

My first day in Korea was marked by fog. We couldn’t pull in because of the fog so we wound up sitting out in the sea for hours waiting to be able to see anything. I left with a friend, I’ll call her L, mid-morning and we went to what we call International Market. (I’m not sure what the real name is but that term fits.) The place is one of the typical places we can get buses to so whenever we stop here the market is an awesome place to get anything from designer clothes to vendor clothes sold in street stands to cheap jewelry to expensive jewelry to household goods to lighting fixtures. We got to the market by 11 and decided lunch was first on the menu so we found a Korean barbeque place. Now that probably brings to mind the sauce many Americans put on their grilling and call “bbq”. Not so with the Korean style. Korean barbeque is really food brought to the table uncooked and put on a stovetop put in the table. Many Koreans cook the food themselves but the restaurant we went to wouldn’t let us cook ours. They monitored the time and came back to stir our dish of meat, bean sprouts, and tofu pieces until they decided it was okay for us to start eating the dish. (That may have had something to do with the fact that we had a small squid uncut cooking under there to begin with. After it had cooked some they cut the squid into bite sized pieces and mixed it in to cook with the rest.) The food was good (the squid a little chewy but good) although I did learn something about the sauce. The longer it sits on the heated pan, the more liquid evaporates therefore turning a moderately spicy dish into an eye watering dish. (Mental note to self: stirring can be bad after letting it sit a while.) After we got done eating we went wandering around the market some. She was looking for clothes and a specific CD of a Korean band and I was looking at clothes, jewelry, souvenirs… Unfortunately the gloomy day didn’t help our mood. Neither of us were quite in the mood to buy anything. After about an hour of mindless wandering we finally walked to a Lotte Center which is like the Dias in Japan: a large department store that is more like a mall with all the separate designers having separate areas to sell things in. L figured it would be a good place to find a CD store or clothes she may like. Yeah, didn’t happen. There were no CDs or DVDs and the clothes were too expensive. ($130 for a pair of Levis? Not quite my cup of tea.) We wandered up six floors of the place before giving up and deciding to take the train to another Lotte Center this one was connected to a Lotte Hotel with a casino inside. After wandering for about an hour in the Center (she bought a jacket and I got a shake so we were happier) I commented that I’d never been to a casino. We were barely halfway through the afternoon so we went to the casino. It was small and barely occupied. Two of the four poker tables were being played, the roulette tables were closed, and only five to eight of the maybe forty slots were in use. There is a reason for that as it’s illegal for Koreans to gamble. The only reason they allow the casino is attached to an international hotel for tourists. I spent maybe twenty dollars and won at least half that back and lost it again before we left after another hour.
However, L got the directions to a CD store in walking distance and we headed out. We walked in to a book store thinking that was it. Nope, just a few levels of Korean books. We walked out the store on the second floor…right across from an art store. Yeah, we both got lost in there. She found special pens for drawing cartoons and bought them. She explained in the US they get bought for about $10 a pen, in the store they sold for about $4. Not bad. She bought 24. Combined with notebooks, cool Asian papers, lots of stickers and a few random things, she spent about $200 there. I managed to find thick gauge wire in black, green, and blue that I bought. Eventually I’ll make them into awesome chain maille jewelry or wire wrapped pendants. I’ve been keeping my eyes out for good gauge colored wire and decided to buy a lot since on thick gauges you get less length. Combined with some notebooks to organize my writings and stuff needed to organize study for work, my stuff came out to under fifty bucks. Much more conservative than my friend’s. However, the stuff she got was much less expensive there and she was happy with all her buys. (I’ve seen some of her art by her new pens and they do look pretty cool. Now if only I could draw beyond stick figures…) After that we went downstairs and she bought her CD and I found a set of ten female Disney movies for about twelve dollars so we left the building happy.
By then it was almost supper time so we decided to call it a day and went to Mr. Pizza for supper. Their motto is “Mr. Pizza Love for Women.” I know that because she had been saying that phase all week in her cute Korean voice. Luckily she didn’t say it so much that it lost the humor so going there for super was good. The point of that store is Korean pizza. That means corn on most of the pizzas which wasn’t too odd. The sweet potato filling instead of cheese in the crust was odd but not bad. We got a 4 in1 pizza that had their main four pizzas mixed on one pizza, two pieces per type. I must say that though it definitely wasn’t American, the meal was still pretty good.
All in all we had a good day out in Korea and I’m glad I went out. Until next time, this is Li’l B signing out and wishing you all a lovely week.

My thoughts on Manila

What do I think of Manila? It is definitely dirtier than the US or Japan, it looks a lot more gritty with more littering. Also there are a number of people who were really thin, especially in the inner city. However, my idea or a poor country was obviously created by those “sponsor a kid” commercials I used to see on television. Seeing a kid in the neighborhood H4H set up walking around with an IPod and hearing a number of radios in that community surprised me, as did the fact that all the people who got houses in the community were expected to pay back the $3000 dollars it took to build the houses in three years. Granted, that’s still really cheap and easily done in a few months by most families in the US, but it changed my view of a “poor” country some. I’m glad the kids there all have clothes to wear and food to eat, mostly (there was a comment made that some people can only afford one meal a day in some places in the Philippines). It just changed my view of a poor country from a super-poor country to a moderately poor country. That whole “dollar a day” thing wouldn’t have been much good for the kids of the community we worked in, though maybe in more rural communities. Oh well, I guess that’s why we travel to these countries: to see what life really is like instead of believing what the television tells us.
I apologize if these posts weren’t as interesting as usual. The days I was out I would much rather have been sleeping so I didn’t get to excited or adventurist while out. I guess I would recommend visiting Manila as long as you have a friend that can get you around safely and ignore the litter on the streets and the poor architecture lining most streets of family shops and homes. The city is designed for tourism and there are many interesting shops and amusements around the city.
That's all for this trip so this is Li'l B signing off and wishing you all a lovely week.

My last day in Manila

The second full day started much the same as the first with me not willing to get out of bed. However, I had set up a tour for the day, the second one I’d been on since getting on this ship, and couldn’t stay in bed. We met on the pier about 8:30 am and got in a truck, three people from the ship and me. The tour guide said it was too early for the museums to be open so had we eaten breakfast? We all had so we stopped at Starbuck’s for a snack and then went to an ATM. After that one of the girls wanted to see the Church of San Augustine so that was next. Apparently the church is one of three Basque churches in the Philippines and is on an endangered church list because the neighborhood can no longer maintain it. Most of the church, minus the sanctuary of course, is now a museum of Catholic history in the Philippines. It was interesting, although I’m not Catholic so I thought there was too much of it and the paintings were obviously not done by Western painters. However, the ceiling of the sanctuary was amazing. I took a few pictures to put up later but the ceiling looks like it’s intricately carved. The amazing part is that it is pure painting and shading to give that impression. Well done paint job. The next place we went was Fort Santiago. It was once the entrance point of the Walled City, or their old capital. At one point the capital was a large walled triangle with Fort Santiago as the seaside point. Now the area is a number of buildings in various states of disrepair. I took pictures but it was hot and I chose to sit in the shade rather than explore too much. After the fort we crossed the street to a store that sold native crafts and jewelry. Apparently pearls are very common here and rather inexpensive. After the store we got back in the truck and went to the Oceanarium for lunch and a trip through the aquarium. I had a spaghetti with chicken on top but the sauce was a native green thing, kind of spicy but not really hot and watermelon juice (hm, heaven). It was a good meal although maybe I should have gotten an appetizer like my companions. After that was the trip through the exhibits which were cool. I was starting to tire and after being at the aquarium under Mall of America and the aquarium at Monterey, this one wasn’t amazing, although the shark tank was cool.
Our last stop was the Mall of Asia. The type of stores were similar to Mall of America, as in designer names and more expensive than usual, but it was nice. The mall has a theater with about six or seven screens, an ice rink about the size of one at a park back home, and an open air center for concerts of such. I was there during a competition for martial arts involving sticks and only the one person, not an opponent. Interesting but not in my mood and with my lack of knowledge. One thing I should mention is that at least a fourth of the mall is outdoors. I ate at a popular fast food place called Chowking which served a mix of Chinese food and Filipino food. I had a mix plate that was rather good. When we were dropped off the tour guide gave us a balut to try and the others opted out so I got to try one. A balut is a chicken or duck egg fertilized and let to grow for a few days before being boiled. Luckily my egg hadn’t formed the fetus yet but the white stuff was definitely harder than the usual egg. Um, yeah, not trying that again.
That's all for today, come back tomorrow for my impressions of Manila. Until then: this is Li'l B signing off and wishing you all a lovely day.