Sunday, April 18, 2004  

OK, lots to catch up on. Firstly, Starsky and Hutch was AWESOME. Really, really funny stuff, as you might expect from a film starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn; directed by the guy behind Old School; and featuring bonus appearances by Will Ferrell and The Dan Band. Even Snoop Dogg was funny. Unfortunately, nobody else seemed to think so. The film came out here on Thursday and there were only six other people in the cinema. It might have something to do with the odd fact that in Cantonese, Hutch is apparently named "Fit", according to the subtitles.

In other news, I've been catching up on 24. My much-publicised (on here, anyway) disillusion with the direction of the third season burnt me out back in January, and though I kept downloading new episodes I didn't care enough to actually WATCH them. It says something about how I was feeling about 24 that I left it on a pretty good cliffhanger for months on end. Well, I finally decided to start catching up, and it looks like I picked a great place to start doing it. The next two episodes were pretty good and I'm now looking forward to watching a few episodes every night now until I'm up to speed. I guess I just needed a break before I could get hyped up again, though I do maintain that this season isn't nearly as good as the last two.

I went to a huge party in Hong Kong on Friday night. It's Louis Vuitton's 150th anniversary this year and they celebrated with four parties in four cities: Paris, New York, Tokyo, and... Hong Kong. They put up a huge tent in the shape of a Louis Vuitton case on the site where Prince Charles officially marked the UK's military withdrawal from Hong Kong and invited a couple of thousand people to party the night away inside. I snapped a couple of pictures of the inside of the tent, though I apologise for the quality of the pictures: I only decided to go at the last minute, so the best I could do was snap a couple of pics with my PDA's camera, which isn't the best in normal conditions but even worse in low lighting (as you can see below!).



Unfortunately, I turned up rather late to the party and although there were a lot of people there enjoying the music and the free champagne, things were winding down. I was late for two reasons. Firstly, as you know, I only get off work at 11pm. This isn't a huge problem, since Hong Kong is a fairly late-night sort of place, but I was stuck at work for an HOUR waiting for my sister Rina to change and get ready for the party (it's not like she didn't have UNTIL 10:30PM TO GET READY or anything). And it turns out we missed quite a lot. Kelly Rowland performed alongside some trampoline troupe (bizarre, but good... apparently), and then they managed to make an Eiffel Tower model out of a bunch of Louis Vuitton suitcases, which you can kinda-sorta see in below's picture. I thought that was vaguely cool before I heard that all the cases that made up the tower came out of one case originally. Which is actually pretty cool.



Still, it was a good night overall. I think fully half of all the partygoers actually knew my mother, so she couldn't walk more than a step (LITERALLY) without stopping to say hi to someone. As nice as it is to meet so many important people and powerful contacts, it gets really tiresome after a while, so I found a group of colleagues from CNN and hung out with them before heading off to Kee Club to finish the night. Or their night, at least. It being only 3am, I still had a bit left in me so I headed off to Drop to meet up with my mom and sister again. Now, I know at super-late hours there aren't too many places to go in Hong Kong (Insomnia and Drop seem to be it, and Insomnia tends to be filled with hyper-drunken riffraff and US Marines on shore leave), but Drop is really an awful place. It's in a poor location, tucked in a nondescript sloping alleyway a fair trek away from anything else and it is by far the most crowded club I have ever been to. It took us TWENTY minutes to get to my mom's table, and this is a tiny club. Even Dragon-i with Real Madrid (Beckham and all!) wasn't as crowded as this, and you can forgive Dragon-i for those exceptional circumstances. This was just ridiculous.

Also ridiculous this weekend was Liverpool... but that's a story for another day. Like tomorrow. Maybe.

Posted at 11:10 PM

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