Cantonese – The Burble

The Peak – The Tardis in reverse

One of my favorite buildings in Hong Kong – The Peak Tower. According to the the tourist guide the tower sits at 396 meters above sea level and is one of the most stylish architectural icons in Hong Kong. And situated at the top is the Sky Terrace 428 the ‘highest 360 viewing platform’ sitting at ‘and you probably guesses this already 428 meters above seal level.

Its a spectacular building sitting like some upturned boat dominating the sky line. Or at least it used to dominate the skyline but this is Hong Kong and now at least 3 buildings have appeared between us and the Tower; in just 18 months.

But what I find so interesting about this building is that it performs a trick that only seems possible in the movies. Its bigger on the outside than the inside. A remarkable feat of building and engineering leaves us with a huge edifice sitting on the top of the Peak and a range of small scale shops and coffee houses more suited to the back streets of Wanchai.

It is one of my favorites from the outside. The inside has gone missing and I’d like it to come back.

The Vagaries of Being Overseas

There is nothing I like better than a slow Sunday morning at home. Relaxed after a good nights sleep, according to my Fitbit anyway, with the smells of fresh bread baking in the oven this really is a good time of the week.

A time to reflect on the week just gone and begin to look ahead to the week ahead. A time to catch up on emails, make some of those changes to the on line accounts that you’ve been meaning to do for a while (and will be thinking about again next week) and to have a look around the internet for something interesting.

And nothing shatters that peace more quickly than the howls of anguish from your wife as she tries to make some US websites work in Hong Kong. For reasons that have been long documented and lamented some US enterprises still don’t understand that there users, while speaking English, may actually live overseas. So when you finally get around to changing your address on the system to Hong Kong the helpfully designed system automatically redirects you to the local Chinese site. In Mandarin which is of course not the local language in Hong Kong as most native speakers use Cantonese.

And to be very helpful the site itself doesn’t have a translate facility into English. And once your browser thinks your in Hong Kong it doesn’t really matter what you do the helpful system will redirect you back to the Hong Kong site, in Mandarin.

There really is no excuse for this – working overseas should not stop your ability to work. And the US companies who insist on making this difficult need to get a globe. On it they will find Asia Pacific and right in the center they will find China. The future. Lets hope the Chinese are a little more flexible on languages otherwise the whole world is about to come to a rapid stop.