This & that......

Hi All, although I can't think straight today I thought I should check in with you - it has been a while. The past night we have been celebrating Michael's birthday until 3am in the morning and today we had to accept the fact that we're getting old in deed - lack of sleep = pure exhaustion


I decided to throw him a surprise party themed "Desserts & Drinks" and had a hard time to hide all the preparations from him. Luckily the neighbour helped out with her fridge and I managed to find all these snacks/drinks/etc. again that I hid in various closets. For sure I can't stand the thought of ANYTHING sweet for days to come but Michael was really excited and therefore all was well worth it. By the way - we counted 13 different nationalities within 16 guests and I was the only German there, WOW - one of the reasons I love Hong Kong so much, you never stop enlarging your horizon...


The weather continues to be awful - June has been the wettest month in about 150 years, May came in as a close second and July continues with heavy thunderstorms and torrential rainfall. If we weren't so busy I would be slowly gliding into a depression but luckily none of us has any time left for these kind of sentiments.


I started to get involved in organizing the Election Central Day with some Americans. As you know the next US-President will be elected in November and the American Chamber of Commerce, the American Consulate, AWA and the LoWV will prepare a venue for American citizens in HK to mingle and watch the outcome of the election/results via TVs, set up in a party atmosphere to share their views and celebrate. Since I am a news junkie anyway and would have watched TV all day long I thought I might as well get involved actively. I was asked to be a venue manager and I am convinced we'll be having a blast (amongst quite some work).


Some of you wondered why I still haven't passed on the Dragon Boat race results - Hmm, quite honestly, I was waiting for photo inputs of my friends to make the report more fun but everybody seems to have left the City immediately afterwards to spend the school holidays abroad. We spent a phantastic day together - first of all we were blessed with heat & dry skies which was unexpected considering the fact that we had a black rainstorm the previous day. My team was absolutely pumped and managed to come in 6th (1 second behind the 5th placed) which is very promising for next year because we only had the paddle clubs ahead of us who practice 3/4 times a week up to 2 hours - we can't compete with this and it wasn't our goal to begin with. It was the usual crowded, crazy day at the beach with 231 race entries which broke the record for another straight year. All of us were happy having had the possibility to escape to our junk after our last race to continue watching the finals on board and celebrate.
By the way it looks like we might have found a potential sponsor for next year already which would make my job a lot easier - it'll be decided on by mid august, keep your fingers crossed!


Unfortunately there was one tragic incident which none of us found out about until very late in the evening because no public announcement had been made - an American expat managed to fall in between 2 junks while jumping from one to the next one. He seemed to have hit his head and went under - due to the muddy waters he was nowhere to be found until he was swept on shore 2 days later. There's a lot of drinking taking place on these party junks surrounding the race course and people tend to visit more then one boat by jumping across junks that are sometimes towed together. In case anybody is curious about further details about this I include a weblink below.


http://hiphongkong.livejournal.com/11260.html


Other than this, despite the fact that it's supposed to be a looooong relaxing summer, I am nearly as busy as usual and find far to little time to update my Blog as often as I would like to, I apologize! It's never the lack of ideas but the quiet time to put them into words - after all I am German and not a native English speaker so I really need to be in the mood for it.


During the next 2 weeks we will be busy
- participating in a Geographical Quiz Night which is organized yearly by The Royal Geographical Society of Hong Kong
- attending 2 classical performances of the Royal British Ballet, one of the best Companies in the World
- listening to Alicia Keys at the AsiaWorld Arena, hopefully a memorable evening!


In August we're looking forward to the Beijing Olympics - the highlight for me is being finally able to watch some sport events in real time again and not doze off in my Pj's in front of the TV or in some noisy bar (not in my Pj's of course) as it was the case during the past soccer tournaments. I will even have the opportunity to attend an evening at the individual dressage competition live because as I mentioned previously, the equestrian part of the Olympics will take place here in HK.


Does anyone of you happen to grunte at these Olympics - I keep on hearing people and the media denouncing the terrible pollution, the violation of human rights, the freedom of speech, etc. to the extent that many Westerners intend to boykott watching them - well, personally I find that rather self-righteous - the responsible people in the Olympic Committee should have taken that in mind way ahead of giving the Olympic Games to a country like China or a city like Beijing because these facts were always known before and China got the Games despite these deplorable states. I think we simply should accept this now and let the Chinese celebrate their pride to be the host of these Games - as we would like to be happy were they given to any of our countries. My Chinese friends are fuming when the're reading the complaints in the Media and often want to discuss this issue with us.


I'll keep you posted, until then - keep on pushing these clouds away for me :-( !!