blog of Joe cz Liao

I am writing this on the last day of another year.

It has been a year cruelly short yet impossibly eventful.

This year began by returning to ‘home’ home in Hong Kong, after four years in LA and six months in Tanzania.

The year has allowed me to live off of money I made by doing the trades I simply enjoyed doing. Thanks to people’s recommendation and appreciation, I was given a great share of opportunities.

The year has also taken me to many new places outside and in Hong Kong, where I thought I knew well. Every fresh piece of land I lay my foot upon gives me a sort of comfort that I am, literally, not stepping on the same ground.

The year has connected me with many friends old and new, whom are often inspiring and uplifting, and without whom to share my life would not be half as interesting.

The year has taught me many humbling lessons and helped steer my direction. I myself am very excited about this coming year.

Thanks to all of my family and friends who have cared about me even I might not have been able to tell you directly how much I care about you too. Thank you, if you are reading this, you know I am saying this to you.

Wish you a happy new year.

I was hoping to spend my Sunday afternoon, after the 4.3 hrs TOEFL in the morning, punching out my latest blog entry to update my friends and family about my recent idyllic life. Before I did that I tried to upload the latest pictures to my flickr page, and along the way, responded to a few emails, made a few facebook comments, skimmed through my twitter ‘correspondents’ updates, watched a video about China’s effort to fight pollution and a TED presentation. (btw, add me to your skype if you wish) At the end of all that, it was about 4am in the morning, and I needed to rest. I couldn’t help but, once again, exclaim how little time a day actually has.

My three months stay in Japan is close to half done. It is very likely that the second half will be twice as short as the first. If that is so, the next two thirds of my entire life will definitely share a similar phenomenon with my ephemeral stay in Osaka.

Being ‘Culture Day’, 2009.11.03 was a public holiday in Japan. I have decided to go to the Nagai Park (長居公園) close by to where we live with my brother and a few other friends and spend our afternoon there. The place was filled with people, mostly kids and parents, exhibiting an unaffected aura of enjoyment. We brought our guitar along, and did some singing, chatting, eating… and that was about it. All was wonderful.

See more pictures at my flickr.

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Note that my UCLA shorts’ color match surprisingly well with the curtains of my room

Best Contact, still: joe@liao.cz

If, seriously, you want to send me good stuff:

Rm. 213 J&F Plaza
4-7-16 Kire-nishi Hirano-ku, Osaka-shi
Osaka, Japan 547-0026

Here for three months, hope to learn Japanese with alacrity and become a polyglot(and they say you should use your GRE words so to bolster your learning.) The fixed schooling schedule and the pleasant bonhomie of the common room in this building is an anodyne to my inchoate, indolent life in Hong Kong.

Spent over 60% of my time last week working on the website for Match&Fusion. Soon to be released. Everything besides sushi and gogo-no-koucha (午後の紅茶) is very expensive.

Enough of being verbose. More update to come.

My rare trip to Wong Chuk Hang was driven by great expectations, and rewarded with a lift in spirit.

Chester Lau, now a new friend of mine, is an establishing graphic designer / artist young in age but of weighty substances. I learned of him on a design blog about data graphics few days ago. Looking through his flickr photostream, I realized that he is based in Hong Kong, I decided to look him up on facebook. We exchanged a few messages, and decided to meet up.

When I arrived, Chester’s working partner Christie was also there. It took us no time to get into some engaging conversations. Throughout, I listened as carefully as I can to both of them, and expressed my opinions where I thought is either constructive or spices up the conversation, otherwise I just kept nodding and agreed to most things they say wholeheartedly. I felt as though I have found my tribe. They speak of art and design like they speak of life – like I think I do. The abundance of idealism mixed with youth and ambition excites me from the inside.

They belong to a group of freelance creative professionals known as Nomad. Chester and Christie went quite in depth explaining to me the ideas behind the group, why the name and its logo etc. I could not help but notice the unusually high similarities in vision, taste and values between us. I saw clearly some promising potential for creative synergy working with this group of people .

All conditions met, I believe my trips to Wong Chuk Hang will not be rare anymore.

1.
Revisiting the UCLA campus surely recalled a scores of memory. The college life – some call the best time of their lives – was over for me. Not that I haven’t done much in those years, but who doesn’t feel like there was more that could have been done, looking backwards? I started noticing things I never noticed: clubs that I could’ve joined, classes I could’ve taken, and people that I could’ve met.

2.
Crashing the end-of-year party at Caltech was something I did not anticipate myself doing. Looking into the pool of people dancing and enjoying themselves like any other party I had been to, I couldn’t help but also understand that that was probably the pool of people with the highest SAT average in the whole world. We all just wanted to have some fun though, from time to time.

3.
Sitting in one of the many libraries at Stanford, observing people passing by or concentrating on whatever at their hands (while I am distracting myself from what I told myself I would do in the library by ‘observing others’), I wondered whether life would’ve been much different had I studied at this school. Would the prestige of its name make me a different person? Better or worse? Would the student there be that clearly smarter than those that I peered with? Of course these are overly-simplified questions, but then outside the shield of a campus, who doesn’t simplify the product of college education down into the names of institutions? (Some even only TLAs!) Ting told me his company wouldn’t even interview a person not coming out from one of the big-name schools…

4.
The spicy salmon and unagi hand-roll, baked salmon, organic salad, nachos with guacamole, and the mangolicious smoothy were the only food I got to try out of the many many options at Charlie’s–one of the many many restaurant options at the Google campus. The shark fins that comes out from the ground, the T-rex with a flamingo in its mouth, the coffee shop with bean bags, glass conference rooms with cartoonish hand drawings all over the inside of the room (clearly seen from outside) and the bookshelves that stores Legos quite successfully convey what life is like there for me.

5.
I wish I belong to a campus, or have a campus that belongs to me. Soon again, hopefully.

The stars were glimmering among the mist rising from the hot tub that was sitting in the snowfield, while Vivien and her company were relaxing, after a fulfilling day of skiing the Tahoe slopes. Their glasses of wine were chilled by the air, and laughters overheard by the houses around. It was an experience.
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Back in Kathmandu*, where air is so thick that (stealing from my father) “we need to push them aside to make way”, we are slowly following through the falling action of our journey, after we did what we came for – reaching the Everest Base Camp (EBC, 5,360M) and also Kala Pathan (5,545M) – the peak which is often used as the spot for panoramas of the Himalayan giants (You’re likely to have seen one).

Unlike the Uhuru Peak of Kilimanjaro (5,896M) which York and I summited last March, the “Base Camp” as our goal was quite an anti-climax to a hiking trip, albeit a very reasonable one. Frankly, it was by no means easy for me, I had my share of headaches and short breathes, and that 2 kilometers stretch of rocky road between our campsite and the EBC took us more than two hours each way. After 9 days of trekking, starting from some 3,000M up to our highest point, we had not even ascended half way up to the Everest (8,848M) – the top of the world. It was humbling, and it was a fact. Kala Pathan was the peak we deserve, after some effort. It was the peak from which we, struggling to stand straight in the unforgiving wind, admired the greater peaks at a distance.
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I take my word back about not being able to be reached while in the mountains…

We are currently at a village named Namche, deep in the Himalayas, and apparently there are bakeries, mountain gear shops (like 30 of them) and, so far I have spotted, four internet cafes. I am now making this post from the Buddha Communication Center. Of course, this is also my highest update to date. Let’s see if we get internet connect higher still, in the days to come.

Have I mentioned that the internet speed here is about as fast as the broadband I have at home? Ridiculous.

I think I am having slight headaches already, very mild though. I am going to buy some Pringles – baked potatoes flavor – which I suspect might help ease the pain :-)

Soaked in the smell of inscent , typing on a half responsive keyboard, in an internet cafe about 30 sq. meter in area, I am making my last blog update in the coming two and a half weeks.

Tomorrow 5 in the morning we will be flying into Lekla, our starting point of our trek. I shall not be reached (kind of, because my dad’s roaming phone will work even out there, apparently.)

I will try to capture something visually and perhaps spiritually, if I am lucky, and share with you when I return. Thank you for all the blessings from my dear friends, and sorry for making so many of you so jealous. Wahahahahaha….

I will make that extra Jump for Jessica who have made the specific request. For the rest of you sorry it’s too late to take any more orders but I’ll do a few extra if I can to spare :-)

Just to clarify, I am not climbing Everst…. basecamp is about 5,500m (corrected from 55,000m. Sharon is always right), only. Not as high as the peak of Kilimanjaro :-P

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