seeing stars

last week i spotted a Hong Kong celebrity... Nick Cheung (Cheung Ka Fai), who was in a number of recent HK films including Election, On the Edge, and Breaking News.

i was strolling inside G.O.D., a designer home store, in Causeway Bay when he walked right past me. i'm normally oblivious and don't really pay attention to other people walking around me. but that day, i turned the corner and passed a guy holding a tripod and professional camera and i knew well enough to think that there might be a model or celebrity nearby. seconds later i looked up to see Nick Cheung walking past me. having just watched the HK drama series, "The Last Breakthrough" which he starred in, over the summer, i knew exactly who he was.

i guess HK is small enough where it's fairly common to spot celebrities around town. i wonder who i'll get to see next... ;)

back to the roots

several weeks ago, while my parents and sister were visiting, we took a short trip up to China to my dad's old village in Guangzhou.

it was a pretty amazing experience being in the rural village and in the actual tiny little house where my dad was born and lived as a young boy with my grandparents and all my aunts and uncle as young kids. my ancestral home! the village was a farming village, a total countryside village, where living standards, amazingly even in this day and age, were still at its absolute basics. where brick coal-burning stoves were used. where you step into houses that are tiny 35'x35' square boxes. where the idea of garbage disposal was simply to toss your garbage on the grass in front of you. where rice fields and sugar cane fields were part of the "front lawn" scenery. where life was poor and simple, but the people were still friendly and welcoming.

incredibly enough, we met several people in the village who were actually related to us. my sister and i met two distant cousins in their early 20's who share the same great-great-great-great grandfather as us! talk about distant relatives! but we are related, nonetheless. we share the same blood, no matter how tiny that drop of blood is. how cool is that?!

not only was it me and my sister's first times to dad's village, but it was also the first time my dad brought my mom there as well. my dad even joked to the villagers, "i've brought back my new bride to see you all!". heehee!

just like the paintings

a month ago, we joined a tour on a weekend trip up to Guilin, one of the most scenic areas in all of China.

first we took a 4-hour river boat ride up the Li River from Guilin to a little town called Yangshuo. you know those traditional Chinese paintings that you see hanging in many Chinese people's homes, the ones of mountains shrouded in fog along a river with little bamboo rafts floating by? the scenery along the Li River is supposedly where all those artists got their inspiration from. we just sat back and enjoyed the scenery of foggy limestone mountains to our left and right.

during our brief stop in Yangshuo, we walked along West Street, their busiest (and tourist-filled) street filled with restaurants and souvenier shops. we then rode on a small, narrow bamboo raft (about 6 people per raft) where one man was manually propelling our raft along the river using a long bamboo reed. talk about manpower!

we went to a village called Longsheng to see their famous terraced rice fields... incredible terraces of rice paddies created along the mountains to resemble a staircase. goes to show how resourceful the people there are, not letting steep mountains get in the way of farming and being productive. what an amazing sight!

on our last day, we visited Elephant Trunk Hill to see a hole in a mountain shaped like an elephant drink water from the river. let me tell you that the Chinese just love to use their imagination and visualize animals or objects out of mountains and caves and other areas of nature, and then proceed to name them just that. another example is Crescent Moon Hill, where a hole in a different mountain is shaped like... you guessed it, a crescent moon. in a cave, we saw natural formations with names such as "Praying Buddha", "Key", "Empress Taking a Bath", and "The Great Wall". it can be a stretch, but at times if you look hard enough, you'll see what they're talking about. use your imagination! ;P

Guilin and its neighboring villages are certainly scenic and quaint, worth checking out in your lifetime (even the Clintons visited here years ago!). hopefully i can take my parents there someday, as i'm sure they'll appreciate the scenery.