Alien or not?

Alien, football (AKA soccer) creature,
over-sized flower pot or
all of the above in Suwon town?!

Many moons ago, I mentioned in a meme entry on this blog that my ethnicity and/or nationality often has been mis-identified in many parts of the world. Well, now one can add South Korea to the list -- in that during my recent visit, I found that I apparently look Korean to Koreans! Indeed, so much of a native did I look there that people would come up to my mother -- who met up with me in Seoul a day into my Korean vacation -- and I to ask us for what appeared to be directions as well as just plain assume that we could speak Korean pretty much wherever we went in the country!

What accounted for this state of affairs? Is it, I wonder, because we often walked around without maps or guidebooks in our hands, yet seem to know where we are going? (A "trick" I learned from travelling and living in parts of the world where obviously being foreign or unsure of where one is (going) might expose one to crime.)

If so, why is it that in Beijing, my mother and I stuck out like sore, foreign thumbs even when we weren't speaking? (For the record, we were often mistaken there for Japanese, Taiwanese or Americans!) And then there was the assumption by most Taiwanese we encountered in Taipei that we were not only foreign but specifically Japanese! (And should anyone wonder, in Japan, I often get assumed to be Japanese -- or a Japanese-speaker at the very least...)

Actually, I do have a couple of theories as to why my mother and I obviously don't look like Beijingers: the first being that the ethnic Chinese parts of us are southern rather than northern Chinese; and secondly, that our clothing styles just aren't very Beijing or Mainland Chinese. But whither, then, the Korean and Japanese mistaken identities as, from what I can observe, I definitely tend to dress more casually and less smartly -- especially when on vacation -- than your average Korean or Japanese?

Whatever the reason, I have to say that there often are advantages to being mistaken for a native. Now if only I could be more polyglot and be able to speak the (dominant) language of more of the countries where I've been... and while I'm doing a bit of wishing, being able to read non-Roman alphabetic scripts would be cool too! ;b

Korean sights (photo-essay)

I'm baack! To be precise, I've returned from an all too short Korean vacation that, among other things, saw me actually on the North Korean side of the border for a few seconds as well as visiting three UNESCO world heritage sites in two days and going on a stroll along the banks of the restored Cheonggyecheon stream.

Over the course of just a few days, I came across many beautiful, interesting and downright amazing sights -- so much so that I ended up literally taking hundreds of photos. The following eight will hopefully give you a taste of what I've seen and where I've been this past week -- and also whet your appetite to view more of my Korean shots (because, ready or not, I do plan to put up quite a few more on this blog before too long!):-

I got the feeling that this vacation would be
a good one after I serendipitously came across
this newly built statue of King Sejong
while out strolling on my first evening in Korea!

View from inside a courtyard in Suwon's
Hwaseong Haenggung on a beautiful fall day

As impressive as Hwaseong Haenggung may be,
it actually isn't Suwon's major attraction --
rather, that honor goes to the Hwaseong Fortress
on whose close-to-6 kilometers long walls I walked

I'm not sure if I was particularly lucky but
I witnessed plenty of ceremonies being enacted
on my Korean visit -- including this one at the
Jongmyo royal shrine in Seoul

Close up of some of the architectural detail on view
at Changdeokgung -- one of Seoul's five royal palaces
(but the only one to be UNESCO world heritage listed)

Colorfully costumed sentries at Daehanmun,
the main gate of Deoksugung (a palace
whose walls I regularly passed by on such as
walks from my hotel to a nearby subway station!)

Real life guard on the North Korean side of
Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)

Ducks swim in Cheonggyecheon,
Seoul's wonderfully rejuvenated inner city stream

Travelling woman

Apropos re travel talk in the blog entry below (including its comments thread), an upcoming vacation and also a friend's impending travel abroad...

visited 23 states (10.2%)
Create your own visited map of The World

Things are really relative. Compared to many people, I'm pretty well-traveled. (Wanna let me know how you compare? If so, give this meme a spin on your blog!) But looking at the world map indicating where I've been in red above, I realize how much of the world I've actually not set foot in.

Worse, the picture above is actually quite deceptive. This not least since while the United States is completely red in the above map, it's less so in the one down below... :S


visited 28 states (56%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

A friend in Hong Kong and Hello Kitty

The summer 2009 edition of the Hello Kitty-themed
Visit Japan campaign tram

One of its predecessors from earlier still this year

A good part of this weekend which is fast coming to an end has been spent culture-vulturing as per usual. Quite a bit of time also has been spent resting from exertions at work this past week (where I've been working longer hours than usual to prepare for an upcoming vacation) and preparing for that holiday away from Hong Kong.

Amidst it all, I've additionally spent some quality time with a good friend who, after slightly over seven years spent working and living in the territory, has been recalled to company headquarters back in her and her company's European homeland. An uncommon expatriate who has come to love Hong Kong, one of the things she takes as consolation from having to leave the place is that she will have gained permanent residency status in her adopted home by the time she heads back to her native land.

A table-tennis enthusiast before she came to the Big Lychee, she also now leaves it with a distinct fondness for Chinese desserts and certificates attesting to her having reached instructor level in a couple of tai chi disciplines! Still, the moment which may well have confirmed to her and others that she had really become a Hong Konger was when she experienced sudden urges during this summer's McDonalds' Hello Kitty promotion to get herself a couple of Hello Kitty plushes!!

Speaking of summer and Kitty Chan... the long, super hot summer here in Hong Kong may finally be coming to an end. (Talk about it being long overdue: the Mid-Autumn Festival was celebrated last weekend, after all!) In celebration of that (and in honor of my good friend who *sob* also will soon be going away), here's sharing a summer (holiday)-themed Hello Kitty photo -- and throwing in another cute cat visual from last winter for good measure! ;b

Mid-autumn festival lanterns in Hong Kong (photo-essay)

When I was a young girl in Penang, I used to enjoy celebrating that which I used to think of as the lantern festival -- Malaysia being a place where it's perennially summer (and there thus being no autumn, never mind mid-autumn). So the mid-autumn festival's small portable lanterns that kids like to carry about at night are familiar enough to me (even while I have to say that in my time, one never saw any lanterns in the shape of Hello Kitty or CJ7 (the latter of which was the rage last year)).

On the other hand, extravagant public displays are another matter altogether. Consequently, they are something that I do really enjoy seeing around this time of the year in Hong Kong in each of the three falls and counting that I've now been a resident of the Big Lychee... ;)

From Victoria Park, 2007:
something very Chinese and red!

From 2007 too, but looking ahead to
the 2008 Olympics (whose equestrian portion,
lest we forget, Hong Kong hosted!)

For some reason, the 2008 lantern display at the
Hong Kong Cultural Centre piazza in Tsim Sha Tsui
was partly oceanic in theme and nature

Other parts of that 2008 lantern display
also had a biology emphasis

Tsim Sha Tsui, 2009: lantern dragon,
lantern 2009 East Asian Games mascots
and real Clock Tower, among other things

Victoria Park 2009: Cute panda lantern display...
and a toilet banner right down below!

Wide-angle view of this year's very well attended
Lantern Carnival in Victoria Park

The female half of the phoenix display that complemented
the dragon display, a picture of which I put up previously
-- yin and yang times two, it might be said! :)

Mid-autumn festival 2009

Large dragon-shaped lanterns
on display in Victoria Park tonight

Mooncake gifts galore -- together with
a box of chocolates from The Peninsula! --
have made my small fridge look really small indeed!

Thanks to the hype surrounding the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, it was hard to not forget what a special day October 1 was this year -- and easy to overlook the fact that October 3, 2009, actually is a public holiday in Hong Kong too. And this even though I made plans early on to go to see the Tai Hang fire dragon and the mid-autumn lantern carnival in Victoria Park this evening with a friend.

But as my Canadian-Chinese friend noted earlier this evening, it sometimes is hard for us who have lived elsewhere in the world that mid-autumn festival to fully realize how big a deal this festival really is in Hong Kong. To be sure, it is celebrated wherever there are significant numbers of ethnic Chinese people (including my native Malaysia -- as fellow Photo Hunter Bengbeng reminded me with his Photo Hunt entry for this week). However, the lantern displays here really do put most elsewhere's to shame.

Additionally (and especially this year) nowhere else in the world have I received so many mooncakes as gifts. So much so that even though I've given a bunch away, I still have enough "in stock" to have the gluttonous pleasure of eating mooncakes for another couple of weeks after the festive lanterns are put away, I reckon! ;b

Words (This week's Photo Hunt theme)

To better appreciate the words to be found in the photos above, one should click on the photos themselves and view the enlarged versions of them. Of course, I can't guarantee that you can read the bulk of the words on them since the first photo shows Manchu and Chinese writing and the second photo has Chinese and Burmese along with English writing on it!

For the curious, this Photo Hunt's first photo was taken inside Tai Fu Tai, a Qing Dynasty
residence located in a far northern section of Hong Kong's New Territories. Dating back to the 19th century, it is the sole remaining Mandarin's mansion in the whole of Hong Kong.

The second photo was taken outside one of two rival Buddhist temples and landmarks located opposite each other in my home state of Penang, Malaysia. The Burmese Buddhist Temple has expanded considerably in recent decades -- and often in such a kitschified way that I like to joke and say that it's like a Penang Buddhist version of Disneyland. In many ways though, it still remains in the shadow of the Wat Chaiyamangkalaram Thai Buddhist Temple on the other side of the road which boasts, among other things, one of the largest reclining Buddha statues in the world.

(For regular visitors, I've already put up an entry on polyglot Penang on this blog but am still contemplating one devoted solely to Wat Chaiyamangkalaram -- the temple I used to regularly visit with my mother when I was a child -- somewhere down the road... ;b )