Good Night Hong Kong

Tonight is my last night of my 15 day Asian tour of duty. As much as I love working in China and Hong Kong, I am happy that I am headed home tomorrow.

Went up to the Peak tonight for dinner. The view is amazing- but now I am back at the New World, ready to crash...

15 days straight, no full days off- I will be very thankful on Thanksgiving....

Wan An!

10,000 Buddhas

It's Sunday and I am in Hong Kong. I worked a half day and then Molly and I went out with our colleague Tak and his lovely wife Suki. We all went to Shatin Pai Tau to visit the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery. We followed stairways cut into the mountain to get to the top the temple. The stairway climbing up and down is lined with golden aspects of the Buddha. At the top there are several temples each paying homage to a specific face of the god. It was completely worth the trek up. It was awe-inspiring and beautiful. I had never seen anything like this before.












After our tour of the monastery, we went back to Kowloon and shopped for souvenirs at the Jade Markets, Ladies Market and Temple Night Market.

What a day....so many sites, so many people...so good to be back at the hotel. I'm exhausted.

4 hour traffic jam

Molly and I arrived in Shanghai on Wednesday. Shanghai is a beautiful city, but we are not here to take in the sites, we are here to work. So our hotel is not located in the heart of this wonderful city, instead we are in the out-skirts where it's wonderfully working class and grimy. According to our Chinese counterparts, our hotel was reportedly 1 hour from the factory. However, it took us 4 hours to get to there on Thursday! Our van moved about 100 feet in 2 1/2 hours. The way the Chinese respond to the traffic standing completely still is to get out of their vehicles, walk around, smoke cigarette and whiz from the side of the road. Nice! Safety is always paramount here. NOT.





On the highways you see trucks are piled high with all sorts of hazardous materials. Cars, bikes, pedestrians, mopeds, trucks weave in and out. No one pays attention to the traffic signals. Stop signs do not mean stop. There is no posted speed limit. It is the driver's choice which side of the road he should drive on. Making a U turn in the middle of the road with on coming traffic is a regular occurrence....

We had an interesting view of a farming community that was right off the highway. We watched people doing manual farm labour with old tools, women threshing rice, men turning the soil. Curious melons growing on the sides of crumbling old buildings. Strangely, although the workers lacked modern tools, most homes had satellite dishes. China is filled with this paradox. People ride around on make-shift bikes text messaging on their cell phones. Bizarre.










I love China!

The sickest place to work

I don't usually write about my day job, but this event was a little too whacked to leave unmentioned...

Most of my friends work in offices where they might blow off steam on a Friday afternoon with a TGIF happy hour or cocktail hour. However at Burton Snowboards we do things a little different. Ok, we do things very differently.

Last Friday we had a "Trailer Trash" party. We were cleaning out the storage trailers, out behind our building,in prepartion for new samples that were coming in. It's hard for my colleagues to do much of anything quietly. So the Trailer Trash party insued.

People dressed in all sorts of BIZ-are costumes. There were girls dressed in tiny costumes, one I think was supposed to be Strawberry Shortcake? Go figure. Food courtesy of Hooters.(Now that I think about it so was the Strawberry Shortcake) Beverages: Bud on tap and PBR in cans. Nasty food eating contests that consisted of pickled eggs, pickled onions, sardines, cheez whiz and cat food. Yes, there was a contest for who could eat the most canned CAT FOOD. (SO GROSS) There was milk chugging, bicycle relay races and an obligatory flip cup tourament....

Yes, we play hard, but then we work really hard too... No flip cup this week. I've got production specs to write and the boys and girls of softgoods are getting ready for a huge sales meeting next week.













Kung Pao!!