I’m home!
I've been putting off this post for a little over a week now and I'm not quite sure why. Probably because I wasn't entirely sure what to write or what the right thing to say would be. In my Junior year of high school, I had a wonderful and extremely influential English teacher who taught me that 90% of all writing is pre-writing: thinking about what you mean to say, how you want to say it and the words to choose. Sitting down in front of the computer or blank page, is the easy part then. And for the majority of my posts so far, that is what I've done and it's worked well. I had experienced something, I thought about how I was going to craft that experience into words, and then I just type away for a few minutes--usually satisfied with the result. In Hong Kong, sometimes I was too busy with school work or my social life to get to that last "writing-things-out" part, and I regret that. However, I've been home for 10 days now and I've have had adequate time to compose and post, though I haven't. But then as I was WhatsApping one of the amazing friends that I met in Hong Kong this morning, I realized that I should stop thinking and just write. So, thanks to Zihui, here are a series of observations.
The battle with jet lag was exactly as difficult as everyone I spoke to said it would be. It took me about a week to completely return to a normal sleeping schedule. My abnormal sleeping pattern involved falling asleep at around 10 PM and waking up again at 4 AM. This was not acceptable and I'm glad to have put that behind me.
I still haven't fully unpacked. While coming home for Christmas break has turned into a routine by now, I've never brought such a large quantity of stuff home. And knowing that I will be packing most of it up in three weeks and taking it to California hasn't helped me want to unpack properly. Instead what I've been left with is piles of stuff on the floor of my room, as evidenced by the featured image for today's post.
It's been nice to see family that I haven't seen in months.
The temperature and weathe here in the Tri-State area is not at cold or windy as it was in Beijing. So either memory is wrong or we're having an unusually warm winter. I'm going to bet on the latter.
I really miss the food in Hong Kong, especially Hong Kong-style milk tea. I was in New York's Chinatown with my friend on New Years Day and I made the mistake of ordering an egg tart and milk tea at a Chinese bakery there. The egg tart wasn't flaky and tasted a bit off while the tea didn't taste as great as I remember it. The tea was served in a paper take-out cup, so after picking up the lid and inspecting the contents I realized that the milk tea was made with a tea bag and regular milk--so basically the wrong way to do it. I did however have some delicious curry fish balls that I bought from a street vendor outside of a Hong Kong-style restaurant.
I took a peek at the Google Analytics for this site, which I haven't done in a while, and I realized that most of my readers are not clicking the "Read More" button that I implemented for the sake of aesthetics. So while the button will still be visible, I'm going to put most of my future content above the break... so you'll see it.
Most of my experiences and impressions from Hong Kong never made it up onto the blog. I also have hundreds of photos that I need to sort through, edit and upload. While they're all still fresh in the mind, I intend to stick them up, so stay tuned.
On formatting
Hey there! I just wanted to take a few minutes and pass some notes onto you, the reader:
- For the sake of aesthetics and readability, I will make every effort to keep the blog posts short and sweet. However, most of the time I'll probably have a lot more to say than you might care to read. So here's what's going to happen: the first two paragraphs of each post will be visible on the blog's front page. If you care to read beyond the first two paragraphs, please click the "Read More" button on the bottom left of each post. That said, if you see a post that breaks this rule, then it's probably pretty important.
- I will try to include a photo with every post. This may become more difficult in the future and I cannot guarantee that the photo will always be mine. For example, the image above is stock photography. Regardless, I will try to give the reader some eye candy.
