Elad’s blog

It was in the late 13th or early 14th century that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy. Thus, when the first italian cook made his first vermiceli soup (soup with noodles), the chinese had already had over 2000 years of practice in eating noodle soup with chopsticks.
At the centuries that passed since, the chinese people continued to use chopsticks, while the europeans used forks. By mere evolution, every chinese child can handle the chopsticks better then me, nowadays.
This sad fact was extremely clear in my daily struggle with the sticks, at today’s lunch. The noodle soup today came with meat balls, and the restaurant owner - along with one nice customer - tried to teach me how to use the sticks. Unfortunately, they both held the chopsticks on their right hand (everybody here except me is doing so), which made the battle very hard - as you probably remember, I’m left handed with extreme poor motoric skills on my right hand. At the end, of course, I managed to eat everything - but had to use my left hand for this.
A question for all you engineers and engineering students. It comes from the field of control: what is the optimal position to hold chopsticks? limitations: they have to sit comfortably in your hand (which rules out the ‘drawer’ answer), your hand must not touch the soup (which adds a parameter of the palm size), and you must have the most precise control on the sticks. The most correct answer will be awarded a decorated chopstick.
Most of the day I did electronics shopping. I bought a few accesories to my camera (including a marine pack, so I can send you underwater pictures from Australia) and a diving-computer, to enhance my dives. I was very disappointed, though, to discover that they only hold here the cutting edge, most new things. I couldn’t find any of the things Oded requested, because they are too old. I also didn’t find some of the older things I wanted for myself.I did find, tough, an amazing variety of 3G cell phones (Nokia rules!) and some MP4 equiptment (anybody: what is this standard? I knew only of MP3!). During my shopping I entered this magasine shop, which turned out to be an Anime shop - Arik, you would love it! It was all full with anime magasines, of every size and color.
At the evening I went back to the electronics area (a small street parallel to Nathan Street), to look for a battery I wanted, and found out that the street was closed to vehicles and was full of pedestrians - for no special reason, just for fun. It was very crouded, and I enjoyed wandering there a bit. Before doing that I had a dinner at a japanese fast-food store, and noticed that rice is much easier to handle with chopsticks than noodles - the noodles disturb each other, while rice seeds merely fall from the stick if you don’t eat fast enough. This is why asians had to become so quick - their way of eating forced them to! (It also forced them not to have good steaks, and the warm weather made them eat a little, which can explain why they are generally small and quick people). Anyway, I was walking in the street (the MIDRAHOV) when I noticed a bunch of girls signing up a petition. Of course I joined - it turned out to be a petition a newspaper named ‘The Epoch Times’ arranged against the chinese governement, who tries to close the paper for being anticommunist. I actually recieved a free copy (today’s special edition. The headline: ‘Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party’. The nine commentaries include things like ‘On how chinese communist party is an evil cult’ and other - Arik, you’d love this stuff. Try looking at their web site). After joining the petition, I had this nice conversation with one of the girls, and she suggested me to go to Victoria Peak tonight for a good view of Hong-Kong, so I went there.
A few words about the geography of HK colony. HK is a set of several islands (the biggest one is called Hong-Kong, but there are also other islands - for example, Lantau island) and a peninsula (called Howloon) that has a direct connection to the mainland. All the islands (there are many of them) are connected through bridges, tunnels, and ferries. Victoria Peak, found on Hong-Kong island, is the highest in the entire archipelago - it rises some 600 meters above the south chine sea.
It was nine o’clock in the evening. I was in Howloon. I wanted to get to the Peak. A short description of the way is: I walked. I took a bus. I took a ferry. I took another bus. I took a train that climbs to the peak. I arrived to 22:20.
On my previous work, I learned to pay attention for details. For example, when constructing a system (the technical term is ‘integration’) you should save in the box more space than just required for the parts to sit together, because when inserting them in they usually go in various angles and you need space for the working tools, too. So if you don’t want to go into a battle of accusations with your mechanical assistant - just make sure he also plans a way to construct the box, not just how it will look in the end. This evening I had the opposite problem: I arrived nicely to the peak, and in time to go back from it, but only to discover that it was inside a cloud and I could see nothing, not to mention any photography. It was really frustrating, because it was all kind of impulsive, and because I entered the cloud inside the train, on half of the way up (and on the mid-way down, I went out of it and could suddenly see the city). I stayed in the peak for some 10 minutes, saw that there’s nothing to see there in the night when you’re inside a cloud (fog looks the same everywhere), and went back down. Could I know this? probably not. Sometimes, paying attention to the details just isn’t enough.
Anyway, it was a nice thing - getting there and back while there’s still transportation (buses here stop around midnight; the ferry service ends at 23:30). I learned at the hard way that the buses here don’t give you change (It costed my 2 HK$, around 1NIS) , and managed to arrive back to Howloon, when I’m going to get some sleep.

City buzz never stops.
I did yesterday a nightly bar tour, just walking for a couple of local (non-touristic) bars, at the chinese allys by the harbour, and having one beer at each bar.
They play here games in their bars. Most commonly, the locals order a six-pack, which is a metal busket full of ice, in which six beer bottles float, and play this nice game: they have a can with five dices, which they throw on the table, and every one has to say the total sum of the numbers on the dices (there are variations: sometimes they say how many dices came out with a specific number, or they compete for some other aspect - in one version, ‘1′ has the role of a joker, and you need to get a good hand). In all the variation, the round ends with someone drinking beer (I don’t know if it’s the winner of the loser). Another nice bar game they have is that everyone pulls out his hand with a few fingers stretched, and they have to shout as quickly as possible the total number of stretched fingers. Again, the looser drinks.
Karaoke is also a common practice in the bars here, though all the songs are in chinese (which adds an oriental flavor to the experience). The beers, however, are mostly european (’Carlsberg’, ‘Heineken’, etc. are very common. I also had a beer called ‘blue girl’, which I didn’t know before, but I guess it’s also european).
From all the above, you probably understand that there’s much noise in the bars here - the dices shaking in the metal cans, the people shouting, the background music; however, the air is extremely clean - almost no one smokes here! Maybe it has something to do with the fact that cigarette packs here come with printed warnings (the usual ‘cigarette causes cancer’, ‘cigarette harms your children’, etc.) that are printed the size of HALF THE PACK. So when someone looks for cigarettes, they first see the huge warning, and only later - in small writings - the brand of the cigarette.
Hong Kong is trying unsuccessfully to diminish its British past. They still drive here at the left side, the streets have names like ‘prince Edward west’, and in many places there are signs in English (which is also widely spoken, almost everyone here knows English to some extent, even the bar tenders). However, in the small streets you can already find places that practice only chinese, like the Dim-Sum stall from yesterday.

I am now finishing my breakfast (an excellent Vanilla Latte they have here) and going to do some shopping.