Pics from yesterday...

I had to buy some computer stuff before my trip to Japan (a wireless router and PCMCIA wireless adapter),  so I went down to Wanchai after work yesterday.  J.to also organized a last minute birthday outing for hot pot in TST too...  

And of course I took pictures:

Its the inflatable Fat Angelo guy!  I think I need to add this one to my Kigurumi - Costume Characters photo album... 

My shopping went well.  I got a T-link wireless card for HK$160 (~US$22)  and a FON 'La Fonera' router for only HK$100!  (thats US$12!) 

nerd aside: how can it be so cheap?!?  well the answer is that 'Fon' is a somewhat deceptive/ingenious service...  they subsidize their hardware (which is a very small, very simple 802.11b/g router) by turning your router into a publicly accessible hotspot.  It basically shows up as two wireless signals when you plug it in.  one is a private encrypted one (that you have the password for), and the other is an unencrypted public one.

If you connect to the public one, it redirects you to their Fon log-in page. you have to either have a Fon service account, or pay to connect.  If you have a router you're supposed to be able to connect to anyone else's Fon public hot spot for free...  (a quid-pro-quo as it were).  You can even sign up to get a cut of the business that your router snags in pay customers (to induce you to put it in public places like cafes and stuff I guess). 

OK, back to the pictures:

I had some time to kill so I walked over to a nearby Circle K convenience store.  I had a bunch of scratch and win coupons from Pat, we couldn't exactly tell what some of the prizes were, since there was no english on them, but I tried to cash one in that i thought was for ice cream... it turns out it was for soft serve... This particular place only had one flavor left:  TOFU...  what the hell is Tofu flavored ice cream?  (doesn't tofu basically have no taste? thats why they use it for imitation meat in vegetarian dishes?)

It didn't taste particularly good either... but once you get past the first taste, its still ice cream on a hot summer evening in HK... so I enjoyed it. :-P

Wait, what is that there in the magazine rack?  Let's take a closer look:

Oh man, its a double hit of Daniel Wu!  His Elle cover w/ Zhou Xun (ads are still up in the subway) and his Seiko ad on the back of another magazine...  Which reminds me,  I walked by a watch store in Times Square that had posters of this campaign up in their store and to make it even worse, all the staff had T-shirts with the same picture on it...  hot stuff. :-P

OK, enough of that,  I had to get across the bay and I didn't want to fight rush hour MTR crowds, so I walked over to the wanchai pier to take the ferry to TST:

Not too bad,  my camera may be on its last legs, but night mode apparently works (some of the time).

In fact right as I got to TST it turned 8pm and the 'Symphony of Lights' started.  If you haven't seen it before, its definitely worth checking out:

They used to do it only around christmas,  now they do it EVERY night at 8pm. 

Not just lights, but also lasers:

The lights are actually coordinated w/ music.  Before you had to listen to it on the radio to get it,  now they have big loud speakers at the observation deck so you can get the full effect... unfortunately the music is pretty cheesy..  as I was discussing with Boon during dinner,  they really need to spiff it up a bit.

Speaking of dinner...  we met up nearby at a hot pot place:

15 people and three pots worth...

Afterwards we went to Balalaika's freezer:

Simply for the fun of dressing up like 70s pimps in a snow storm. :-P

Happy Birthday J.To!