outside

So the weater outside is a bit frightful (cold and rainy, which looks like snow in this photo). But that doesn't stop my coworker Charles and his delightful wife Carmen (in red) from throwing a fabulous bbq! Folks from China, Malaysia, the US, Australia, Germany, and Britain all attended the Hong Kong festival, and we all brought our own version of bbq food. I discovered bbq pumpkin (yum!!!), and us Americans introduced our new friends to smores.

Going around the table from the far left are... my boss Murray, coworker & host Charles, ?, coworker Robert, me in brown making smores, ?, New Yorker and coworker Jamie, some guy from Colorado, coworker Ben, coworker Leo, coworker Winnie, ?, hostess Carmen in red, and Murray's wife Kate.
As you probably gathered from earlier pictures in the blog, I live in a sea of buildings. To break things up a bit, there are a lot of tiny little parks, like this one a few blocks from Wing Lok Street... the "Cleverly Street Sitting-Out Area." Complete with chess-like table tops to play with.

This is another view from my balcony. It's amazing just how packed all these streets truly are with buildings! And I'm a New Yorker, so you know it's intense if I'm impressed.

The dreary grey atmosphere lasted over 15 days. Today, it finally broke and we had some sunlight. The weather in Hong Kong isn't usually this cold or gloomy - the climate is typically subtropical! See the weather reports on China's snowstorms for a sense of what this country is going through. Worst weather in 50 years. Thankfully, I'm not up north in Shanghai!

So there you have it - a taste of the great outdoors. Hopefully I'll get to go outside during the sunshine and share some more flattering images of the city. Good thing I found such a fun, energetic group of people to spend time with!