I’ll be living in West Hampstead. I work near Old St Station, it looks quite a way on the map, but it’s actually no more then half an hour taking the tube (including the walking). That’s London for you. I kept getting confused, it took me 50 minutes to commute from Coburg to the city in Melbourne. Not only is London more compact, but there is less waiting around for the transport to turn up.

To celebrate, I’ll go to the natural history museum tomorrow, and see if I can find somewhere that sells coffee plungers.

Maybe I’ll actually feel like I live here after my first night sleep in my own bed.

I still haven’t developed any film, so no photos from HK, but I put some of Fi’s on flickr.

The second night I was there, all the Paris museums were open for free at late night. We went to the modern art museum. It was free from 9pm to 1am, and there was long lines of people queuing up till after 12 to be let in. The whole place was completely packed.

There was an amazing vibe, everyone was going around thinking, “that’s a bit crap”, “that’s pretty cool”, “oh wow that’s awesome”. I think heaps of people starting off being skeptical of the whole modern art thing and were completely converted by the end.

The highlight of the museum was a movie about the architecture design of Harvard (I think it was Harvard). It was done entirely with marionettes. I can’t really convey how awesome it was. There was vice chancellor like character that looked like death.

For the first time in a museum I got a sense that there was some kind of interaction between the art and the people/audience (very different to the Louvre). It was challenging, engaging, sometimes emotional (I can be a bit squishy). No wonder it’s the most visited museum in Paris.

The other highlights of Paris, was of course the wine and the cheese. But especially playing Gin Rummy while watching ‘Peggy Sue got married’ in French, and drinking wine till late while listening to a free jazz band in a cosy bar. Basically just hanging out. Thanks Fi.

Tsim Sha Tsui is packed full of Indian tailors trying to make me custom shirts and suits. So I usually just walk on past people trying to hand me pamphlets. But I was starving..

I thought it was just another restuarant, but it turned out to be a really expensive japanese restuarant. I asked where the restuarant was and the girl took me up an elevator. I was way underdressed. I was thinking of spending maybe $40 HKD, but it ended up at $256 HKD, but it was so worth it. Oh yummmmmm.. ahhh

It was one of those dinners where they give you all the bits and a hot pot and you cook it yourself. Since I had no clue how much to cook anything, the hostess basically cooked it all for me.

Expensive in Hong Kong is relative though. If I went somewhere like that in Melbourne it’d be something like $80-90 AUD. Just for me.

I’ve got blisters on my feet from walking around the city all day, and going up and down way too many steps. I went to the zoological and botanical gardens. Pretty cool.

I haven’t got much time here, so I’m not really bothering to plan it too much. I’d just be frustrated with what I can’t fit in.

People still smoke indoors some places here, which just occurred to me because the guy next to me is.. Cough cough..

The building I’m staying in is very old and shabby. I really like it. The bottom few floors smell like burnt and/or boiled cabbage. I’m on the 17th though so it’s just quite and cosy. For the price I’m paying I’m impressed. The location is great.

It’s right next to a train station (underground) and just down the road to all the ferries. I took one to HK central and got lost. It’s mostly lots of shiny bank buildings and stuff.

Tsim sha tsui is far dirtier, so lots of bars and shops. It’s weird it’s seems to be the thing to do here to go shopping for trendy clothes late at night. All the clothes shops are full and busy till 10 or so.

No photos yet, gotta get them developed.

It’s been an interesting 3 months. I’ve learnt heaps, programming in C#, Java and C++. Wearing a shirt every day and trying to get to work by 9am every day. I think I actually did some useful stuff too.

We ended up running out of time on the most interesting project though. We had one month to implement it, while trying to understand the maths at the same time. I can’t really go into the details, but it had to calculate millions of numbers and hopefully come up with a good result. It ‘converged’ under certain circumstances, but we felt there was a problem with the underlying maths. We couldn’t seem to optimize the solution at all. That’s pretty vague and all, but we did some hard stuff, it didn’t quite work, but it was worth the try anyway. They’ll probably tweak it after I’m gone so that’s good.