Enjoying Hong Kong Now

Last Saturday morning, I took a Cathay Pacific flight from Singapore to Hong Kong for a four-day vacation. Today is already Day 3 of my stay, and I am enjoying myself immensely here, like I normally do whenever I visit this former British colony.

Yesterday, I went to Peng Chau Island by ferry for a little excursion. I got there early in the afternoon, and explored pretty much the entire island within two hours. It had some nice hiking trails through lush green hills and beautiful beaches with clear, turquoise blue water. The tracks were neatly paved and easy to walk on, which made my journey around the island a pleasant experience. 

However, besides beautiful nature, the island didn’t have much to offer by way of enticing cafes and eateries or attractive souvenir shops, and there were no hotels. I found myself a bit bored toward the end of my stay and felt relieved when my ferry back to Hong Kong Island finally departed from the Peng Chau Island Piers at 5 p.m.

After returning to downtown Hong Kong, I headed to Causeway Bay to visit Perfume River Vietnamese Restaurant, one of my favorite dining establishments in town. I had beef curry with steamed rice and spring rolls for dinner. As expected, the beef was extremely tender and blended nicely with curry, and the spring rolls were pleasantly crunchy. I will certainly revisit the place on my next trip here.

By the way, compared to my previous visits, I’ve noticed that there are much fewer visitors from Mainland China. I’ve read in a news article that it’s due to the fact that the Chinese economy is not doing well these days. The unfavorable exchange rate of the Chinese Renminbi against the Hong Kong Dollar, which is pegged to the mighty US Dollar, isn’t helping matters for Mainlanders either.

The same article also mentioned that there is now a reverse flow of people, with more Hong Kongers visiting the neighboring Chinese city of Shenzhen for cheap shopping and dining experiences than the other way around. 

I’ve visited Shenzhen three times before. To be perfectly honest, it felt like a boring city that lacked the beauty and allure of Hong Kong, but it could be because I didn’t know my way around Shenzhen and ended up visiting only boring places. The next time I travel to Shenzhen, I should really plan ahead and go to more cool and fun places.

Moving to the New Office

On Friday, I worked for the last time in my previous office, where I spent nearly 19 years of my professional career. Due to the heavy workload I was handling, I had to work frantically until the last minute and rush out of the building for another appointment, leaving me with little chance to reminisce about what I had gone through in that building. Never mind - I think I’ll have time for that later if I really want to go down memory lane; it’s not like our previous office building is being decommissioned or torn down.

My previous office was located around 15 minutes away from my apartment by foot. I took full advantage of its proximity by coming home during lunch break almost daily. I would normally do things like tidying up around the apartment, prepping dinner, and taking a short nap. It certainly helped that I practiced intermittent fasting and didn’t need to have lunch, freeing up a bulk of my lunch break for my other priorities.

Starting Monday, I will work in a new office building. To figure out how much time I need to get there, last night, I walked from my apartment to the new office at my normal pace. It took me 30 minutes, exactly double the time I needed for my previous commute. Besides walking, I can also reach there by public transportation, such as the bus or subway. From a health perspective, I think it’s best if I stick to walking, but I’m keeping my options open for now.

Afterward, I swung by the Starbucks in the nearby shopping mall to study some French words. I am about one sixth of the way through my dictionary. Considering that it took me two months to come this far, and assuming I can keep up my current learning speed, I should be able to finish studying my dictionary in 10 months, adding up to a year for the entire process.

On the topic of acquiring vocabulary, I’ve watched a few YouTube videos posted by those who excel in language learning and come to the conclusion that, what truly matters is not so much the number of pages you study in the dictionary, but rather, how much repetition you have in learning the same words.

That’s why I’ve decided to limit myself to studying two and a half pages’ worth of words per day. If I ended up with some extra time after hitting my daily quota, I would use it to review the segments I have previously memorized, rather than moving on to the following pages.

My goal is to be able to understand French series and movies on Netflix with French subtitles without feeling the need to reach for the dictionary. The reason why I set my goal based on my level of comprehension of audio-visual material as opposed to books is that, once I acquire a near-native ability to understand movies, it should also help me enhance my pronunciation, as well as my speaking and reading skills.

Exactly how many words will I need to learn to attain that level? I don’t have an answer to that, and quite frankly, I don’t really care. All I know is that I need to keep cramming my head with dozens of new words on a daily basis, until my vocabulary finally reaches critical mass where I no longer feel the need to bombard my head with dictionary entries. Probably thousands of hours are needed for that, but so long as I can enjoy the process, I would consider all this time and energy well spent.

Watching "Dahmer" in French Now

Over the past few days, I have been rewatching the drama series “Dahmer” on Netflix. This series is based on the true story of Jeffrey Dahmer, who confessed to have murdered and dissected the bodies of 17 men from 1978 to 1991. He was convicted of his multiple crimes and sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms in prison, but his life was cut short in 1994, when he was killed by his fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver.

I watched “Dahmer” for the first time in 2022, right after it was released on Netflix. It was a gripping story that kept me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. Recently, I’ve decided to watch it again, but this time in French audio with English subtitles, for the purpose of practicing my French listening skills. As of yesterday, out of the 10 episodes, I’ve already watched eight. I’ll finish the remaining two episodes tonight.

As things stand now, I can understand about 80 percent of the French audio, but that doesn’t mean that my listening skills will soon be perfect. The gap of 20 percent covers the sections containing words and phrases that are not yet known to me. Unless I look them up in the dictionary and commit them to memory, I won’t ever be able to bridge that gap, no matter how many times I watch the same content.

Currently, I am in the middle of “sweeping” my French dictionary for unknown words and phrases. Given that my dictionary contains 765 pages’ worth of entries and I can only study about 2.5 pages per day, and allowing for a couple of cheat days out of every week, the entire process is expected to take approximately a year. As such, acquiring a robust enough vocabulary to understand French shows and movies will definitely be a long and slow undertaking. 

However, for the parts that I can understand, watching the series with French audio is highly beneficial for me in the sense that it forges the connection between my existing knowledge of words and phrases and the actual way in which they are pronounced. Once that connection has been firmly established, it will never be undone, and will be permanently integrated into the foundation of my listening skills.

That’s why comprehensible input is important, and you should find a listening material at a level suitable for you, rather than something too difficult that sounds like a bunch of gibberish.

When I’m done studying the French audio of “Dahmer,” I plan to do the same thing with other Netflix shows I’ve previously enjoyed watching, such as “Squid Game” and “Inventing Anna.” I’m excited at the prospect of gradually solidifying my listening comprehension skills, before eventually learning to speak French fluently, years down the road.

My Thoughts on Learning English Through Movies

Finally, it’s the weekend again. This morning, I first woke up at 7 a.m., but seeing as it was still a bit early, I went back to sleep. At long last, I woke up for good at 10 a.m. After a long sleep, I feel like my batteries have been fully recharged, and I’m ready to take on new challenges of the day.

As today is Day 1 of the Chinese New Year holidays, most of the major shops and restaurants are closed here in Singapore. As such, I can forget about shopping or dining out, but luckily, movie theaters are open, so I might catch a film later today depending on my mood.

To be honest, I don’t go to the cinema very often, not because I don’t like movies, but because there is a plethora of choices available nowadays with streaming services such as Netflix and the Apple Movie Store. They have rendered a trip to the theater unnecessary, unless there is a freshly released movie playing that I desperately want to watch.

When I first came to Singapore 22 years ago, I used to visit the cinema almost on a weekly basis, as it was the biggest source of entertainment for me. Back then, there was a movie theater right in my neighborhood, which offered midnight showings on Fridays and Saturdays. I would catch the latest Hollywood blockbuster movie and try to study its dialogues in English.

I remember seeing films like “Two Weeks Notice,” “Love Actually,” and “Match Point,” which I found very charming and entertaining. As a gay man, I was so profoundly moved by “Brokeback Mountain” that I watched it more than a dozen times at the theater. “Argo” was another movie that deeply affected me and kept me thinking about it for days after the first viewing. I somewhat miss those days when I went to the theater frequently.

By the way, in terms of learning English, I am rather skeptical of the efficacy of watching movies in elevating your spoken fluency, especially if it’s the only method you practice, without pairing it with other learning methods, such as learning vocabulary and reading books.

It is true that some learners manage to learn English to a highly advanced level by watching movies and television shows, but we shouldn’t forget that they achieve fluency not only by watching movies, but also by hitting pause on the video whenever they stumble upon unknown words and phrases and looking them up in the dictionary before resuming the video. This takes nearly superhuman effort and patience which, in my opinion, makes the method inefficient at best. It’s definitely not a walk in the park to learn English through movies alone. 

As I’m learning French now, I’ll keep reminding myself that I shouldn’t rely too much on watching movies to improve my French proficiency, but should rather focus on traditional methods, such as conscientiously learning words and phrases, especially when I’m still at an intermediate level. That being said, it would be wonderful if I could understand and enjoy French cinema. I will keep working hard until I achieve fluency in the language of Rousseau.

So Many Coffee Chains!

This morning, I managed to wake up on my own at 6:45 without the alarm. It’s a rare occasion for me, as I typically sleep all the way until my alarm goes off at 7:45. To take full advantage of the extra hour I’ve gained, I’ve decided to write another journal entry.

Incidentally, my office is slated to relocate to another location in just a few weeks, about 15 minutes further away on foot compared to my current office. Therefore, it behooves me to practice waking up a bit earlier going forward.

To be able to do that, logic dictates that I move up my bedtime in the evening by 15 minutes, from 11:45 to 11:30 p.m. I know it’s easier said than done, as I normally have tons of things to do before I go to bed, but something has got to change to accommodate my new commuting routine.

Late yesterday afternoon, I went to the Chinatown Point shopping mall to do my customary Sunday grocery shopping. Once I arrived at the complex, before going to the supermarket, I wanted to sit down at Starbucks to study some English. Unfortunately, the outlet was packed with no available table for me.

I quite like this outlet, because it's covered on two sides by huge glass walls and directly looks out onto a busy intersection right in the heart of Chinatown, allowing customers to observe the comings and goings of people outside, which is always interesting.

Out of no choice, I went to The Coffee Bean upstairs, which is nestled in the middle of the building and offers a much more boring view and a somewhat suffocating vibe. To be fair to The Coffee Bean, I visit their outlets as often as I go to Starbucks. They not only serve decent-tasting coffee but also tend to be cleaner and better maintained than Starbucks, which is often short-staffed and full of leftover beverages that take ages to get cleared away.

By the way, aside from Starbucks and The Coffee Bean, there is another coffee outlet in the mall called Luckin Coffee, a huge coffee chain originating from Xiamen, reputed to be China’s answer to Starbucks. I’ve been to Luckin Coffee only once. Their outlets are sleekly designed and their beverages taste OK, but I normally don’t visit them as they don’t offer decaffeinated coffee, a must for me.

Over the past few years, there has been a drastic increase of coffee chains operating here in Singapore. I wonder how they can stay in business without cannibalizing one another. It could be that the overall demand is still growing, not so much for caffeinated drinks per se, but for venues where people can chill and relax, due to the high level of stress they are feeling in this ultra-modern and fast-paced city.

It remains to be seen how the competition will shake out, but consumers are the ones who stand to benefit. I'm looking forward to a brighter future where we can enjoy better-tasting coffee at more reasonable prices.

I'm a Fan of Bull Nakano

Last night, I spent hours watching YouTube videos with no specific purpose. After watching a few videos on US politics, I ended up watching several female professional wrestling matches in Japan in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, I was still in elementary school. My father was fond of watching female wrestling matches, which aired on TV on Sunday afternoons, and being close to my dad, I naturally joined him in those viewings in our living room. 

It didn’t take me too long to become a fan of professional female wrestling and start watching the broadcasts religiously. What truly fascinated me about it was the element of surprise where those young females, some of whom looking quite pretty and even elegant, could fight with each other so ferociously within the confines of the wrestling ring.

There was also an element of entertainment, where the wrestlers made singing performances before the matches, in a manner almost reminiscent of pop idols. For dramatic effect, the wrestlers were mainly divided into two camps - the goodies, who wore pretty make-up and  always fought in an honorable way, and the baddies, who wore scary make-up and resorted to all manner of underhanded tactics, like hitting their opponents savagely with a wooden sword or metal can.

About two years ago, I chanced upon the YouTube channel of the former wrestler Bull Nakano, one of the most notorious baddies back in the day, boasting a height of 170 cm (approximately 5 feet and 7 inches) and a weight of 115 kg (approximately 254 pounds) at her heaviest. She was active as a wrestler from 1983 to 1997.

Although I didn’t know much about Nakano, after watching one of her interview videos, I immediately became a fan. Quite in contrast to the scary and ruthless image she projected as a wrestler, she has slimmed down drastically since she retired, and has become a good-looking middle-aged woman with a gentle and affable demeanor.

Bull Nakano’s YouTube channel mainly consists of videos in which she interviews other female wrestlers or recounts her own experiences of fighting as a baddie, which I find absolutely fascinating. She conducts her interviews in a very friendly and respectful manner, so I can watch her videos without feeling too much stress, despite the gruesome subject matter that they inevitably deal with.

Needless to say, I am against any form of violence in real life, but I hold those professional wrestlers in high regard, and respect their choice to work as fighters for a living. I wish them well and hope they don’t get injured too badly. In particular, as an avid fan of Bull Nakano, I wish her continued success in the coming years, and will keep watching her videos on YouTube to support her excellent work.