Scuba-doobi-doo

The first time I tried diving, I nearly choked. Okay, so I was only in a shallow swimming pool and it was from the sight of a dead fruit fly, but to be fair, it was magnified at least 10x underwater, as was the rest of my body (and to be honest, I don't know what was scarier).

Since then, I never really thought of taking it up again, but for whatever reason, I'm booked to do my PADI OW course this weekend in a remote island called Pom Pom in Sabah, Malaysia. Forget fruit flies, bring on the giant turtles, poisonous lionfish and swarms of steel-eyed barracudas and (if I'm lucky) the almighty whale shark! :O 

In preparation of going into the deep, we checked out some YouTube clips of what people usually saw diving around Pom Pom and what can I say, it truly is "another world" (THEIRS, to be exact, and HORRIFYING, might I add). It's like you're in a tropical aquarium, only you're that weird plastic guy in a space suit without a face, the oddity in the sea that totally doesn't belong but is there anyway to gawk, stare, touch and feel (or be eaten, if you're really unlucky). 

In one of the diving manuals provided by a resort, they stated that anyone caught taunting, teasing or riding a turtle would have to sit out on the next dive. I chuckled when I saw this but it's quite serious since doing so could potentially kill a turtle (they get scared, can't breathe and then drown underwater), so no turtle rides for me.

I'm not sure what to expect, but I'm just hoping to see more than what I saw last time in Moalboal, the Phillippines (another famed dive spot), where there was little wildlife to be found other than the micro-organisms breeding on the used diapers, medicine bottles, random scraps of garbage drifting around.

Deep sea creatures, here I come!

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A Giant Foot Massage

If you work in Central, you've probably come across the Giant Foot Man at some point. A life-sized foot mascot, he can usually be seen at the corner of Lyndhurst Terrace and Gage Street outside of Pizza Express handing out flyers for the foot massage place called 'Refresh', which is located just down the street.

You can't deny it's a great marketing tactic, and if being encased in a giant foot costume in 30+ degrees and 95% humidity wasn't torturous and/or humiliating enough, their latest gimmick is a smaller version of a foot, this time to be worn on the person's head only with a circular hole cutout for the face, so the poor person can't even hide their identity! 

Anyway as I've always been a big fan of the Giant Foot Man (or whoever's the poor person stuck inside), I decided to give it a try last Friday to see if it was any good. The place was pretty clean with a good selection of Eng/Chi magazines (+) and a never-ending soundtrack of wild bird shrieks (-), but when it came to the massage, it was pretty damn bad.

I got Lilian, a stone-faced, hefty Chinese woman in her 50s with thick fish lips, ruler-cut bangs and a constant deadpan expression on her face. During the first 10 mins of the massage which was on the neck and shoulders, she pinched, poked and tugged at my skin without any rhythm at all, then plucked at the tendons in my neck as if she had mistaken it for some kind of stringed instrument (a banjo, I think). 

When it came to the foot massage, she was rough as hell, claiming that I had a bad stomach, eyeballs, earlobes, whatever, which justified the intense pressure that she was delivering the massage with. Despite my 'Yeowws!!!' she continued to press harder, so I tried my best to focus on reading my magazine instead. The creepy thing was, whenever I glanced up from my magazine at her, I found her staring back at me with glassy eyes, and in the dim lighting of the room, she looked extremely zombie like…

Traditional thinking is that the more painful the massage, the more benefits you're supposed to get, but the next day, all I got were a bunch of small, finger-sized bruises all over my shins. Let's just say, I won't be going back!

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Our new secretary

We recently got a new secretary at work, and all-in-all she seems to be a nice girl. I don't know much about her, but what I do know is that I always seem to get caught in her Dutch oven (or should that be Canto-Oven?)…

Although there are no bedsheets involved, the concept is the same. Every time I get up to go to the loo, she's JUST made her exit from the one and only tiny claustrophobic toilet on our floor, where odors get steamed and ripened by the humidity and linger around for much longer than they should. From the noxious smell and race car tracks at the bottom of the toilet, I can tell she has some pretty severe digestive tract issues…TMI, anyone!?!!

Every time I'm caught in her trap, I find myself cursing her silently while I try to hold my breath for as long as I can. When I return to the office, she flashes me a purpley gummy smile as if nothing's the matter, when in fact, my oxygen-deprived face must be the same shade as her gums…

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I'm a cavity; come and get me

There are some things you're just supposed to know, like: never touch a hot stove, date a guy who lives at home and wear high heels to go hiking. Another thing to add to this list, which I'm guessing most other people know already, is: never move into an apartment that's under construction.

I have no idea why this never occurred to me before, but as I sit here in my godforsaken apartment listening to the sound of 3-4 industrial drills hammering away at all four walls around me, I finally understand now what it feels like to be a cavity.

The entire building is going through a renovation right now starting with the exterior, followed by the entire lobby, and of course, the landlord and agent conveniently showed us the place in the evenings when the dirty and dusty construction workers were nowhere to be seen. 

After moving in, we discovered that the drilling is daily and usually starts at 8/9am on weekends, the lifts are often crammed with smelly garbage bags and various other crap, and the sky literally rains concrete clumps that hits our windows on the way down. Because of that, all our windows have been covered by a thick and opaque piece of white plastic, which means we can't even look out to check the weather for the next couple of months.

The expected completion date of the renovation is supposed to be July 23rd, but that's just for the exterior. After that, they'll get cracking on renovating the entire lobby downstairs, fml. AND, if that wasn't enough, the cherry on top of all this is: there is now a band of miniature flying cockroaches mating outside of our apartment door as we speak (which turns out to be quite a good story in itself...stay tuned!).

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Why I Love Queen's Day

It's been 2.5 years (whoa!) since I moved from Amsterdam to Hong Kong, but I've managed to go back 3x already, twice during Queen's Day if we count this current trip. What can I say, I miss the Netherlands big time and will jump at any opportunity to revisit my second home, ESPECIALLY when it coincides with what is arguably one of the world's biggest and best parties - QUEEN'S DAY, aka Koninginnedag (forget Will & Kate)!

For those unfamiliar with Queen's Day, it's basically the Dutch's national holiday every year on 30-April where everyone dresses in orange and floods into Amsterdam for an all-out street party. Before you dismiss it as JASP or 'just another street party,' here's what makes Q-Day so freakin' awesome:

DJs
Fans of house, electronica and trance music like me always have trouble deciding where to party on Queen's Night & Day, because the all of the world's top DJs including Armin van Buuren, Tiesto, Chuckie, Sander van Doorn and more will be spinning in various squares and open areas around Amsterdam, all for FREE!

Crazy Boat Parties
On Queen's Day, the canals are flooded with party boats that are blasting dance music and full of happy, drunk and dancing people. The boats are privately hired and cruise around Amsterdam all day long, allowing the party animals to hop on and off as they please (usually for pee breaks)!

Flea Markets Everywhere
Queen's Day is the only day of the year when the Dutch don't need a license to sell stuff on the streets, so anyone can set up shop as long as you mark your territory in tape at least a full week ahead. That means the streets are literally lined with everything from kids to seniors putting on dance shows, carnival games and selling home-baked goods, drinks, old clothing, books, and I've even been tried selling my crap on Q-Day twice! Hardly made any money, but it was fun while it lasted...

Turning Orange
As mentioned earlier, the colour to wear is orange and that means anything and everything orange you can get your hands on, including hats, scarves, shirts, pants, socks, wigs, etc. Of course, the more unique your item is, the more nods, attention and RESPECT you'll get compared to everyone else, so definitely try to stand out with your orange picks!

Oops, this is starting to sound like PR copy, so I'd better stop!! If you ever get a chance to visit Amsterdam during Queen's Day, be sure to do so. But now...it's time for me to go and get out there in all my oranginess!

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Blogstipation

Wow...so this is what happens when you don’t blog for a long time. You get a million ideas piled up in your wrinkly brain, only to have them hardened into a rock hard turd that’s near impossible to squeeze out when you finally have time to sit down.

I guess that’s the ‘shitty’ part about being a full-time writer. During the day, we write so much that it becomes a chore to write even more at night (especially when most nights are used for writing whatever we couldn’t finish during the day), so we end up losing any motivation to sit in front of a computer screen at all.

Even so, I won’t and don’t wanna give up. Hopefully, there’s some kind of ex-lax remedy for my case of blogstipation, or at some point, I’ll just painfully explode with a gazillion ideas spilling out of me. Until then, stay tuned for more uninspired bits of writing...

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A face only a mother could love

Sometimes, you come across people so beautiful you can't help yourself from staring. Other times, you come across people so ugly...you just wanna punch them out.

WHAT? Yea, I said it. Some people are so ugly, they just trigger the whack-a-mole reaction in me, whereby I gasp in horror every time they pop up and all I wanna do is clobber it back into its sad little hole with my giant stuffed hammer.

I believe there's a term for this in Cantonese called 'yeung seui', which literally means 'ugly in appearance'. I've tried to translate it into English before but never quite managed, since 'fugly', 'repulsive' or 'disgusting' just doesn't warrant a physical beating like 'yeung seui' does. Or is it just me who defines 'yeung seui' as 'so damn ugly you just wanna punch him/her out'?

As an example, I came across a very 'yeung seui' guy in the MTR the other day. He was sitting across me looking like a zombie with his lower jaw jutted out and mouth hanging open to catch any flies passing by, I presume. His eyes were rolled into the back of his head, yet he still managed to stare at everyone around him for uncomfortably long periods of time, all the while giving a 'I want to eat your brains' look to us all.

Like a train wreck, I tried to look away but found my eyes drifting back to him magnetically against my will, getting more and more annoyed with the way he looked, and why did he have to keep staring at me?! Even though it was days ago, the image of him was emblazoned into my head, so I just had to draw him out:

...now isn't that a face you just wanna punch out!? 

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Tazed and confused

So…the votes are in and it seems that most people actually dig armpit hair…! However, I decided to go through with my laser hair removal appointment anyway and boy do I have a story to tell…

First of all, let me explain the reason why I even signed up for laser hair removal in the first place. The thought of doing it had never really occurred to me until an email landed in my inbox from the increasingly random group buying giant Groupon, this time advertising for 'permanent hair removal at just HK$388 (instead of HK$6,000)'. Since it was for an unlimited number of treatments, I thought, "Meh, what the hell. It's cheap. Why not?" Smart consumers would of course do a background check of where the laser hair removal would be done, but silly me figured it'd be fine, wherever it was. But little did I know…

The company I had bought the deal from is called Brand New Skin and located in Tsim Sha Tsui East on the basement floor of a browned and aging mall. To my surprise, the address led me to what looked like a makeshift office, where the interior was partitioned into various rooms by typical cubicle walls. To be honest, the place looked more like a pop-up blood donation booth than an actual beauty salon where laser hair removal would take place.

Thy advertisement sucks!

After registering my name, the 'technician' (read: random middle-aged woman) asked me to get ready in the 'operation room' (pictured below), which basically meant take my shirt off, lie down and get ready to get zapped. So I did. When she walked in, everything happened so quickly. She tucked paper napkins into my bra to cover my stomach and neck, gave me some orange sunglasses to wear, slapped a bit of clear jelly on my underarm, and then started zapping.

The bare-bones 'operation room' with a toy-like laser machine!

This is where I have to say - I have NEVER experienced anything more PAINFUL in my ENTIRE LIFE! And this is coming from someone who's got a pretty high tolerance for pain (really!). Pinch me, drill my teeth, punch me in the face - I can handle all that. But the feeling of the intense lasers piercing deep into my armpits (like giant 4" needles), pulse by pulse, row by row, was completely unbearable and had me writhing in pain, shouting, "Stop!! Stop!! STOP!!!" Unimpressed, the woman did stop for a few seconds, telling me in a flat voice to just bear the pain, but before I could catch my breath, she started again, piercing into my underarms and heating them up so much that I was convinced that they were burnt to a crisp like a roasted suckling pig.

"Ahhh!! Am I burnt??" I squealed as she kept on pulsing, row by row. "I'm almost done, hold on," she said, emotionless as ever, and then asked me to switch arms, which I reluctantly did. More zapping and screaming ensued, and by the time she was finally finished, she left the room hastily, leaving me lying on the bed with my arms hanging over my head and a frozen expression of shock on my face. 

I think I was lying like that for a good five minutes before slowly coming back to my senses, wondering what the hell had just happened to me. I mean, the feeling must be similar to the way people feel after being tortured, tazed or abducted by aliens. Dazed, confused and with very sore underarms, I got dressed carefully and left the office building wondering if I'd ever return.

Curious about how all the other women do it, I did a bit of research online and found out that in professional salons, the laser should only feel like a rubber band snapping against the skin, and that if it hurts too much, they should give you a cream to numb the pain! If I go back, which I think I probably will (yes, we women are nuts), I will probably find my own to apply beforehand. I mean, I can't waste my HK$388 now can I?? :p

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Ghostly Guards

"Hi Elaine, can you please get someone to remove the 'ghost' that is in the pot outside of our apartment door before we move in?"

A few minutes later, my housing agent replied: "In Chinese, the ghost must remove by the landlord. I discuss call you later."

Who (or what) is this ghost, you ask? To be honest, I haven't really got a clue either. I only noticed the little red pot of soil outside of my new front door last weekend when a few of my friends pointed it out, saying that I shouldn't touch it and that I'd better get rid of it before moving in this Saturday.

According to local sources, the ghost was hired by my past landlord through a spiritual specialist to guard the apartment, and can only be properly removed by such a specialist (or should I call this person an exorcist!?). Until then, he or she is probably floating around in my empty apartment waiting for me to arrive...aiya!!

I've searched online for hours trying to find out who these ghosts might be, but I just can't seem to get any information on them. Instead, I might just be better off putting up a poster of the door gods Qin and Yuchi on my front door to keep all the evil spirits out in the meantime. Take THAT, you ghost!!

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Central Handless Burnt Eyes Beggar

After another long day at work, I came across another beggar on my to the Central MTR. Seated on the right side of Theatre Lane near exit D2 of Central, the Central Handless Burnt Eyes Beggar has severe burn marks on his head, especially around his eye sockets.

He looks up at passerbys with a forlorn expression on his face, and shows off his (missing) hands which have apparently been cut off. His head is also quite bare from having been burnt, and as I recall, he's only got a tuft of hair on the top of his head.

Although he is in a high-traffic location where many OL (office ladies) and OM (office men?) pass by, I've never seen anyone stop to give him anything. So if you're reading this, please stop by Maxim's, McDonalds' or Marks & Spencer nearby to get him something nice!

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