Moving to HK and trip to Tokyo

So, it's only taken me about 3 1/2 months or so to get this blog thing up and running! Here we hope to provide you all with some updates as well as our perspective on how we see things here in Hong Kong and throughout Asia.

The first few days went something like this......

Day 1, we got to our empty apartment with a stench so strong of polyurethane that John and I could smell it down the hall before we even got to the door. Once inside, we began to unpack all 6 bags we managed to bring with us (I will not try to explain what we looked like going through the airport with bags EVERYWHERE). As we get to the last bag, John's like "Holy S**T this is not my bag!!" In a state of delirium the night before, I had pulled off all the bag tags, so not only did we have someone else's bag but we had no idea who's bag we had and who had our bag. We went back to the hotel we stayed at and tried to 1) see if our room had been cleaned 2) explain that we were looking for bag tags in the trash can 3) beg them to let us go up to the room and see for ourselves. Finally, after about 15 minutes of discussions the hotel staff let us back into our room and we found the bag tags, went back to the airport and returned the bag. I am now on some offenders list at Cathay Pacific because they took copies of my passport and made me sign some document stating that I took someone else's luggage.

Days 2-5 were somewhat uneventful, but when something like this....days were spent going to Ikea (same hell all around the world, but is the only place you can get "western" type stuff here"), trying to stay awake past 6:00 pm and sleep past 4:00 am, and figuring out ways to pirate the internet from someone with the username "mailmanyu"

After about a week here, we went on our first trip to Tokyo - it was awesome! Our friends from NYC, Kevin & Katie, move to Tokyo the same time we moved to HK so we met up with Kevin for his first weekend in Tokyo. It was also Halloween weekend, so there were kids running around in costumes. Here are some pictures

We also caught a Japanese Beatles cover band. Now, at like 2:00 am when we saw these guys, we were all convinced that they were really good --we were singing along, loving every second. Listening to the video afterward, I guess they could have used a little more practice. Here is our picture with them

Here are a few more pictures from our trip....






This is a family that was sitting next to us at dinner one night and per the grandson (pictured) his grandmother is an Origami champion (grandma is the one in Kimono). They were really nice and the grandson tried to talk to us all night - even offering us his food ("raw meat, very good") and sake. The grandma was creating Origami figures with anything she could get her hands on.





Here are some photos from around town -- we ran into a wedding, some Harajuku girls and that big intersection

That's it for this trip....