Belated Birthday Post

Wow, I have not been doing a good job lately. I've missed keeping things up-to-date for ~2.5 weeks now, specifically two weekends already.

This past Sunday I played frisbee outside on a nice, cloudy day. Someone casually mentioned that the UV-index was at 10 despite the clouds; not knowing what this meant, I decided to try to evade the Hong Kong humidity by playing on the 'Skins' team in Ultimate. I later found out that the UV-index is a index for the severity of UV radiation from the sun, and it's measured OUT OF 11, which I can only assume is a pretty sick Spinal Tap reference . Still, I sun-roasted my pale, delicate skin for three hours, and this past week I've been recovering. I've mostly been avoiding wearing clothes on my burns. It's not the worst burn I've ever gotten, but it's certainly the worst after-effects I've ever had - the past two nights I probably got a collective of ~7 hours of sleep.
Not that this is a real excuse to you or myself for the two weekends before this, but I'm just saying that this past week I have felt generally ill.

So anyways, I'll do a quick post about my birthday, which will mostly contain pictures!

Starting with August 31st through July 2 (including my birthday!), and then also July 8th to July 10th, I've definitely missed updating the general population on the very important information of the past two weekends worth of my adventures.

Last Friday, it was my birthday, and luckily it also happened to be "Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day", or the rough equivalent of Independence day (from Britain). As we didn't have work,  I joined a group of eight (which later became four) people who were going to Lamma Island, a Hong Kong Island with a population of 6,000 people.

Lamma island told through a few pictures:

The Journey Begins

Reminds me of Tanzania

I made a whole post about spiders, but didn't post it, but now I know a decent amount of facts about spiders. This is a Golden Orb Spider. Their webs stay up for years at a time, and sometime catch small birds.
Spiders don't eat birds, so it's bad for both parties.

Panoramaaaaaa

Lamma Island Powerplant

C'est la plage

me_irl

We saw a secluded beach from a higher vantage point, and I wanted to go, so we fought our way through a lot of large spiders in the jungle-y area to get to the beach. But we had 2 hours to spend on our own private beach, so it was a pretty good birthday.

The crew

Part of this adventure made me realize that other people are just as bad at making decisions as I am. When we saw the beach from a pitstop by the path there was a lot of dilly-dallying and delaying about what to do next. I wrongly assumed that people knew what they wanted to do, and so I didn't push people to do something else. We ended up going down to the beach, but if I realize I could have saved us a bunch of time by being more assertive with this thing that I wanted to do. 

Stray dogs eating garbage. I don't know what mange is exactly, but I'm fairly certain they had mange.

So, I'll be sure to post up, and make some real posts about what I've been doing, and thinking about. This upcoming Monday-Tuesday our group is going to Macau to give midterm presentations (read: gamble). And I'll be better by then!

Real posts are coming !!1one!!1!

Working hard, or hardly working, amirite