Good Friends

Good Friends

This past week has been great! Rob was here in Hong Kong on a work trip, but thankfully left some time open in his schedule to spend the day with us on Sunday (and part of Saturday night too). It was wonderful to see a familiar face … even if we don’t see that face enough!

We went to see the light show over the harbor. It was a beautiful night. There was a breeze right over the convention center where we watched from. I think Rob got some great pictures. We did not take many pictures from this past weekend, because, when he’s around, we have a professional photographer with us. His pictures will be about a billion times better than anything we could do.

Sunday was a whirl-wind tour of HK. We started with breakfast. We were walking down one of the streets of Causeway Bay. One of my little rules is, if no one is in the restaurant we are not stopping to eat there. We passed several and then I saw one with food in the window that I liked and people in it. We made a bee line for it, when I opened the door; I immediately knew that we had eaten here the first week. Jonathan had wanted beef noodles, and this place had them just the way he liked it. I ordered breakfast for all of us, by pointing to what we liked and telling them how many of each thing we would like.


After breakfast, we got on the MTR to go to the Peak which overlooks the whole city. I wished it had been a clear day, but there was some fog/mist/rain at the very top. We walked through Hong Kong Park and then up to the tram. (We saw a sign that said, “sub way”. Jonathan told me that this did NOT mean underground railroad, what it meant here was, an under the road walkway. ) We bought the tickets and took a rail car up to the top of the peak. Think of going up a roller coaster with no seat belt. It was that steep.

We got off, walked through all the trinket shops to get to the Peak. It was foggy, but you could still how beautiful the city was. While walking down a path, we found this:

So I took the picture because the Bennett’s, Jonathan and I were discussing Gabby getting a job here running with a rickshaw. It was perfect.

After walking around, having a nice little brunch and dessert, we road the railcar back down. It is still steep as ever, except, you are facing up the mountain, and now going down backwards. It was a bit odd, but it works.

We took a bus to Central to take the Star Ferry over to the Kowloon side. It was just quick enough that I couldn’t really think about getting boat sick. After we got off, we back to the MTR to take it Mon Kok. This is where the Ladies Market and the vendor’s are. When you think of the hustle and bustle and bargining, this is the area that you think of. After walking around this area, and sweating buckets, we left and took the MTR back to Kowloon and the Avenue of the Stars. This is where the famous Actors and Actresses put their hands in concrete. We did get to see Jet Li’s hand and a statue of Bruce Lee. At this point, I was cooked, and ready to be done for the day. It was around 7 pm. The last thing we wanted to show Rob was where our apt was. We took a cab to Happy Valley, found some place to eat and then showed him our apt building.

We had a lot of great conversations over the course of the time we got to spend together. As a former expat himself, he commented that it looked like we were happy and embracing this experience. Coming from him, this was a complete compliment.

As we (Jonathan and I) have reflected on our first international experience 10 years ago, we tried to think about why we weren’t that happy with it, and why it didn’t go as planned. There were many factors, but these were the big ones.

• We were young. I was 24, JC 28 and had a 5 month old. We really only had been married for 3 year and still were figuring things out.
• We had a baby and the people who we were friends with were not married, let alone have a family. They all could go out at night and do what they wanted on a whim on the weekends
• We only really met other American’s and didn’t get integrated into the company in Melbourne or meet any other Australians
• I was pregnant and pretty much insane

This is a picture from 10 years ago:


I tell people these things because we want to be positive about this whole experience. This expedition will teach us many things about ourselves and what we can and can’t handle. More importantly it show us how to deal with these obstacles as a family and overcome them. Jonathan has run into a couple of expats from different countries that really just hate it here. They really haven’t embraced anything about this being different. I feel bad for them, and so does JC. The funny thing is, when he talked to them, they said that they wanted to do a rotation in the States … Good luck with that Buddy!


The time with Rob was too short, but it reminded us how important friendships are ... even from half way around the world. Both Rob and Kelly's friendships mean the world to Jonathan and I. We both so lucky to have them in our lives!