Here comes the sun

For the first time that I can remember, I am consistently having problems sleeping in past 6 AM. If you know me, you know that I love and need my sleep, but for some reason, here I wake up hours before my alarm clock every day, unable to fall back asleep. There are few things in the world that could counteract my frustration with this situation. The fact that I feel blessed by it should tell you something about the sunrise over Clear Water Bay. Pictures may help, but they don't do the real deal justice (especially considering they were taken on my dinky old PowerShot A530).





I absolutely love my early morning ritual here. It a rare treat to watch the rising sun irradiate the water, turning it into gold for a few moments each morning before it assumes its perfectly blue daytime look. It's also the only time of day I can comfortably be outdoors without feeling like a comatose blob of sweat. That's the irony of this place- the scenery will take your breath away, but if you try to appreciate it from outdoors, the 72% humidity will suffocate you first. Here are some photos that I risked heat exhaustion to take, just for your viewing pleasure (meaning you better appreciate them, darn it!):

Here you can see the numerous small islands in/surrounding the bay

See the small section of the soccer pitch/track in the bottom left of the picture? Now see the building all the way in the corner near it? That's where I live.

When I feel like dipping my feet in the water or sitting on a rock just admiring the view, this is where I go. It's pretty much just outside my building, and there's a beach barbecue site nearby where I've seen families roasting marshmallows and celebrating children's birthdays.

I cannot get over how beautiful this place is. Sometimes I fear that by now my descriptions of places and experiences have little meaning to others because I seem to find every place I visit captivating, every experience novel-worthy. I swear, I'm not exaggerating to make you all jealous. I blame the earth for being so uniquely magnificent in every last nook and cranny. (Seriously, you couldn't be ugly somewhere, Mother Earth? For God's sake, even people aren't perfect everywhere all the time, unless they're named John Abraham or Jennifer Aniston.) I blame my parents for being so infinitely loving and supportive (both morally and financially) of my adventurous ways, nudging me in the direction of "carpe diem" over "delayed gratification" an awful lot lately. (What's with this? Is parenting supposed to involve spending the first 18 years teaching certain values only to un-teach them in the next phase?) I blame PSU/CIEE and SIMS/BFC and CTY for giving me productive-sounding (and in some cases, productive) excuses to go traipsing all over distant lands. I blame the people who told me tidbits about Hong Kong before I came (yes, I'm looking at you, E and M and A) for my expectation that Hong Kong would be a smoggy, overcrowded, westernized city, thus heightening my surprise and awe at its natural beauty. And myself? Well, I blame myself for being exceptionally skilled at silencing the desperate, dying voice in the back of my head that tells me I should be taking advanced science classes to prepare for med school or doing research to impress residency programs. And of course, I blame myself for turning all those novel-worthy experiences into novels. I just tell myself that one day when I'm too old and decrepit to travel, I'll wistfully peruse all the blogposts and journal entries and live vicariously through them. Or better yet, that the residency program director at my dream school will stumble upon this blog and infer from this brilliant prose that the author has a thorough understanding of the posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway and could easily avoid the recurrent laryngeal nerve during thyroid surgery.

...Speaking of which, did I mention that I'm "working" here, TAing for a class called Introduction to Biomedical Sciences? Or that class starts tomorrow? Er, perhaps I should go brush up on meiosis. (Just kidding, of course I know the difference between centrioles, centromeres, and centrosomes- how else would I have made it this far in life/medicine? What I'm actually going to do now is go to the staff lounge, AKA "the sauna," to print and copy about 240,813 handouts and get carried away talking to one of the many awesome people who might be in there.) More on "the job" in a future post. Time to get this show on the road.