Happy New Year!!

We celebrated the New Year in our home. Was good fun to play games together and enjoy some Champaign, Wine and Pizzahut food.
Hope everyone will have a great 2008! (Strange to be typing this while we already just entered another New Year (the chinese year of the rat).

Bicycle activity

On the 25th of November we went to (....euhmm...always have such a hard time remembering these kinds of things) to go bicycle riding. Me and my girlfriend had been there before, so it was a quite familair track.

I always quite enjoy riding bicycle, quite a dutch thing to do ;). Mabel and Big Rice don't know how to ride a bicycle so they shared a tandem bike with Matt and Marc.

As before by the time we had arrived the destination it was already getting quite late, we had to return the bikes at 6 so it was quite a race back.

I was the first one to arrive back at the bicycle renting place. And shortly after the others started to arrive, except for Matt. Everyone thought he was driving the last part together with me, but I had not seen him for quite a while already. It appeared that he took some wrong turns earlier on and had gotten quite lost. Quite a relief for everyone to finally see him make it to the rental place as well....

It has been a while....

It has been a while since my last update of this blog....

But will try to catch up over the next few days as quite a lot has happened recently.

At the beginning of November I finally decided to quite my job. After a little over 2 years working in this company work was still not challanging at all and also often didn't have much to do; that on top of a bad atmosphere in the office finally made me decide to leave. It was really boring to go to work every day and also often quite annoying to be there, thinking back I probably should have left a lot earlier. But it ain't that easy to make such decision when in the end my right to stay in Hong Kong depends on having a job. Fortunately not too long ago I did get my working visa extended, so will still be allowed to remain in HK for another 1,5 year or so.

On the 24th of November we went to visit Louis and Tracy to see their baby. At that time they still had not decided on the name for the boy but by now we know he is called Isaac. Very cute baby :).

My neighbours

It took a lot of time, but recently my neighbours aren't scared of me anymore :). These days we quite often play ball together.

Xbox 360 update

Well finally the day arrived that I would be able to go exchange my dead Xbox 360. (the callcentre employee had told me I would be able to excnage it from last Monday, but as I had to work the entire week I was only able to go today).

Before going just made sure it still had the same problem and luckily the now familiar 3 red lights popped up again. So packed my Xbox and went off to the service centre... When I arrived in the service centre they told me they are out of stock with replacement Xbox's!! They took my death Xbox and told me they would send the replacement one to my home as soon as they would have new stock. The new stock would arrive in about a month!! from now.

That means I nealy have to wait for 2 months to get it replaced. I asked if they would provide some compensation for that. E.g. free Xbox live or a free game or so; heard this is quite common in other countries. But no, the service they provide is that they won't charge for the shipping to my home; as if I ever expected that I would need to pay for that!!

So anyone reading this in doubt which console to get...don't go for the Xbox! It is a great machine with great games; when it works... And when it doesn't (so far statistics say about 30% will experience the 3 red lights) for way too many people, their service simply sucks...

Hiking in Sai Kung

On Sunday we went to Sai Kung for a hiking trip. Sai Kung is a beautiful area for hiking! 3rd time for me to walk this track, 10th! time for my girlfriend... And for Big Rice, Vicky and Matt it was their first time to be hiking in Sai Kung. Great view of the reservoir:

Hiking in Sai Kung part 2

We spend quite some time playing around on one of the beaches along the route. Think most of us ended up with some sunburn, at least I did...but it definately was fun.

Overlooking the remainder of the route going back...