Busy few weeks

Ok sorry for the delay in posting my latest update. I do have a good reason this time, I have been back in dear Ol' Blighty planning my wedding. I won't bore you with the little details except to say that most of the major details (date, venue, catering, marquee, suits, dresses etc.) were done in the space of the 10days holiday I had. 7 of those days were spent suffering with a raging cold that I am still dealing with the back end of. Have you tried flying for 12hours with a cold? My ears have yet to get back to anything resembling normal (I have to keep popping them every 30mins). The other obvious downside was that this was the first holiday I had had in 6months and I have come back feeling more tired and run down than when I left.

In all honesty however I am glad that most of it is sorted, so I can relax for most of the time running up to it. My wife to be has also been fabulous at organising everything and she is actually going back to the UK in about another week to carry on with some more things.

I deeply regret missing Chinese New Year in HK but it did make me feel like an actual local as this will also be the only time of year where I will be easily able to go back home and see my family.

Things I noticed when I was back home (good and bad)

1. Man is England dirty compared to here. Seriously the amount of general dirt and crap on the pavement and on the buildings is unreal compared to HK.

2. The shops shut a ungodly early hours. 6pm closing! I don't finish work on a good day till then.

3. Nobody seems to smile as much. I haven't been back since the economic downturn took hold so I am going to play it safe and blame it on that.

4. The TV is genuinely brilliant comparatively. No adverts! God bless the BBC. I saw a load of brilliant documentaries, some pretty damn good dramas and had a proper football highlights show (Match of the Day is god).

5. Beer. Mmmm. bitter... IPA... Micro Brewery... if you haven't been to England you have no idea about beer. I had 5 beers that you would not be able to find outside of the pubs that were serving them. I went to a hamlet that had no services, only 10 houses but 2 pubs! The only way that works is if you are making some damn fine beer. If you haven't been to England, or have only been to London then you haven't really lived. Ask me nicely and I will take you on a proper tour someday.

Enough of that nonsense its time for some music.

I can play this one.... just. Seriously this is a mind boggling hard song to play well on all of the instruments and they just make it look so damn easy. You can also see that John Petrucci (the guitarist) can't actually hear anything properly from the way he is gesturing at the tech guys, which just makes me wonder how in the hell he managed to play this song properly.

Why I suck at Pub Quizs

Another week has passed and another Tuesday evening was spent trying to win stuff at the Bulldog's Pub Quiz in Lan Kwai Fong. As per usual our team didn't win and was once again beaten by our friends from the rival team (curse you all!!). We cam 5th out of 14 teams, which on the face of it is not bad going and wasn't as frustrating as the 4 week stretch we had of coming in 2nd overall to the "Other Team".

Still winning was never the real point of going to the pub quiz, although it has now become an obsession so much that I am refreshing a random fact generator as we speak. Did you know that Green is the colour least used by plants in photosynthesis, therefore more light is reflected of the green pigments to our eyes making the plants appear green. The real point of going to the Quiz is to meet up with some really cool people have some fun, get drunk and then try and wake up for work the next morning. Note: I have now determined that 5 pints of Kronenberg is enough to get me reasonably drunk and still be able to get up easily the next day. The time I drank 12 Heineken was hell, Heineken gives me a headache in small doses but in those doses my head felt like there was a Frenchman living in it.

The beer is probably the reason why we don't do as well as we could in the Quiz. The "Other Team" are all slightly older and more sober than us which does help a lot. Also we all tend to think we know the answer to the questions which means we can need several minutes to thrash out the arguments for a particularly contentious question. Also we do quite well in the music rounds usually, which is bad because it doesn't count towards the overall score and you get a free shooter for every answer you get right.

However despite the humiliation each week it is really good fun. I think I enjoy it more than a full blown night out in many ways (mainly because I am a lazy arsehole and the opportunity to sit down and get drunk appeals).

The Music section:

Last week I had two songs highlighting my earlier musical days and also what that developed into. This week I thought I would continue that with my love of instrumental guitar music. The song below is Always With Me, Always With You by Joe Satriani. This the first instrumental guitar song that I learnt to play, back when I was in school. Playing this song I became the first person ever at my rather old fashioned school to get to the final of our annual music competition. I entered myself in the strings section, against some very decent classical musicians and won, this didn't go down to well as it meant that there wouldn't be a senior violinist etc. at the end of year concert. So they made a new category for the guitar for the first time, something which they have kept going ever since. I didn't win the overall prize but I enjoyed the experience of being able to show some rather old fashioned people a snippet of what is possible on the electric guitar.