But first I had to walk to Ken's apartment, because he had offered me a ride in the company car for my first day. I navigated to his apartment the best way I know how in a city of randomly angled streets: wander a few blocks until I find a street sign I can read, check the map, backtrack a bit, choose a better angled street, and thus eventually converge on my destination.
Hopped into his car, and his driver took us to our building in Chai Wan, which is at the far West end of this island... it's an industrial area, and one of the only areas on the island where tourists never seem to go.
I probably can't talk about work much, so I'm going to leave that part vague. Suffice it to say that the working conditions here are subtly different from my hometown studio's lushly landscaped mediterranean villa with the waterfalls and the koi ponds and the free food and the free lattes and the clean, airy hallways with the sizeable individual offices with the windows and the doors in each one and the clean carpets that I'm used to.
Subtly different.
They showed me to my particular two-foot portion of a long counter at one end of the huge room with the 64 other people in it... But hey, work is work, right? So I sat down and made myself comfortable; I surveyed the extent of my elbow room, which, though less than I have in my car back home, should be enough to type, as long as I keep my elbows tucked to my sides. Yeah, I'll be okay, I thought... This won't be too weird. And then I looked down at my keyboard:
What th'...?
That's all I can say for the moment about work, except that apparently the concept of "coffee" is not universal.
For lunch, about ten of us went out for Dim Sum, which was basically a rotating tableful of stress for me... Not only did I have to ask what each thing was, but what animal it was from, and which part of that animal, and whether it was a euphemism for something far more revolting... then I also had to carefully read the body language to see if the person was kidding. The best item was the tofu-covered Krispy Kreme (that's how it was described to me, and that's pretty much what it was). (I hope.)
The "mango pudding" dessert was a relief. One more mealtime down; only about 629 to go.
After work, I took the MTR subway back to my home base, Times Square, where I grabbed a nice, safe "ham and corn pastry" and a custard tart... But much later, after walking around Causeway Bay for a while, I got hungry again, and I broke down and -- I admit it -- I went to KFC. But it was sooo good to eat chicken again, American-style, with all the normally missing parts missing. The biscuit was WAY better than any back home. Or so it seemed; maybe I'm just getting desperate.
