Raaaaah - killer session at dragonboating today. I've just joined a new club and it's always hard getting used to how they do things. I was in the front seat tonight - lots of people LOVE the front seat because they think it means you're the best. This isn't necessarily true - you might have the best timing, a good stroke...I always like being where it makes sense and where you can just go for it. Power times.

I've been hitting the weights pretty hard this year because I had this awful realisation that I had gained about 4kg last year - this was pretty obvious why. Despite exercising, I was eating and drinking like a madwoman. Imagine if I hadn't gymmed. Anyway. I've gotten my discipline back this year - calorie counting, gym sessions, dragon boating. Diet and drinking has been the hardest - especially with socialising and client lunching.

I cut out wheat at the beginning of this year. I'm not super strict about it but I find it just makes me think about my food choices a bit more. It's easy just to shove pasta, biscuits and bread in when you are hungry. Now I have to pack tuna, cabbage, sweet potato and rice crackers. I don't have a total ban though - if I'm out with friends, and there's bread - I'll have a piece. If they order noodles to share, I'll have some. Day to day though, it's oats, potatoes and rice.

It's not always easy - at the moment I am craving fried chicken wings (McWings) from McDonalds, champagne, oysters and a beautiful slice of white bread with butter.

Tonight, I was sore, tired and fatigued during our water piece but I felt strong. The weight training I've been doing now means something. I can't think of anything worse than going to the gym for hours on end just to 'lose' weight. How pointless - go because you want to be stronger, faster, better. These are the things that motivate you to be better - not to wear a smaller dress size.

I love that mental place that you go to for sports as well - some people think it's too hard and they give up. I like to think of it as a finite amount of time which if you grit your teeth and push it out, you will come out of it better. I am so undainty when I dragonboat - I breathe loudly, I grunt, I yell and at the end, when I stop after a race piece, the lactic acid finally hits my body in this wave - and I dry wretch over the side of the boat.

It doesn't matter. It's 2 minutes of my life in the scheme of my entire life. Leave it all out there.

I love that breakthrough session when the hard work starts to make sense. Can't wait to get back into the gym to lift and back onto the water to feel the power.

As I always repeat, when I'm grinding it out in the gym...

I will be leaner.

I will be stronger.

I will be faster.

I will be better.

This city is under my skin and it makes me feel more connected to being alive than years of the same old in Sydney ever did. I haven't written this entry earlier because I haven't known quite where to start. But in the interest of keeping things and starting things, I will try.

Hong Kong is a stunning city. I always imagined it to be a blinking, shiny metropolis with malls, skyscrapers and the occasional market. But there are hills, trees, beaches and the harbour. Everything is packed in, the hills meet majestic residential apartments which sit directly onto markets. I have been here almost 9 months and I still love the way it feels - not in the famous places like The Peak or the shiny shopping malls.

The parts of Hong Kong that I love are when I'm down on the ground, walking past the local fruit markets with their swinging red lights and the throaty spruiking cries, punctuated with calls of 'leng loy' (pretty lady) as they try to get me to buy fruit from them.

When it's 10pm and on the streets and parks, everyone is still out - doing their thing. Young men play football, shirtless under the halogen lights, shouting in a mixture of Cantonese and English. Old couples hold hands and shuffle through the park, just being out for no real discernible reason. Parents take their children out - why so late? Perhaps it's the all pervading heat or it's just that it's how things are done in Hong Kong.

Another Hong Kong scene I love is when it's night time and it's the harbour in all of its blinking, shiny mess of neon glory. This is the city that never gets dark...

The ease of getting things done in Hong Kong is a welcome force that just makes me feel like I have more time to do my things. I don't struggle on transportation. Taxis are cheap and abundant. Shops are open past 6pm (so someone with a full time job can actually get stuff done). An option on a massage is plentiful, cheap and available til midnght. Restaurants don't close their kitchen at 8pm. For all the ethical and moral debates that people have, I can get domestic help for a reasonable price every weekend which makes my life bearable (say what you will, who wants to work a full working week and then scrub out their toilet on the weekend?).

Australia is still my home and where my heart will always come from. While there is something special about Australia and the culture / way of life that we hold dear, there is just a relief that I can work full time and get thing done in Hong Kong. I am constantly thinking when things just seem to work in Hong Kong 'Australia, I love you - but hot damn, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.'. Then I read the Sydney papers and see that there's another inevitable infrastructure break down or some bickering about why we can't have electronic ticketing on buses.

I think of my Australian friends who just seem to live in this Bali / Perth / Melbourne / Sydney / UK loop and the constant cries of how Melbourne has these 'cool little bars'. This isn't a negative comment at all, but I just can't fathom going back to Australia and paying so damn much for EVERYTHING and just to survive in any of those places.

...

Hong Kong can be a shallow city where your existence is just the exact same type people you saw at home, the exact same words you said at home - and you'll have a bit more money in your pocket and different places to go. Or you can make the decision to be outside of that - learn the language, go to places which aren't 'Western' and make friends with whoever you feel is interesting. Whatever you choose to do, this is the city that won't wait and perhaps more astute, it's a city that can't wait. The people come, the people go, you make friends, you lose friends - I don't think it ever stands still.

I think there comes a point where you just don't want to roll with Hong Kong any more. Perhaps you are tired, out of space and sick of losing friends to the constant leaving churn. But at the moment, it's only been 9 months and I have only just started with this place.

This country...where I can go and sit in a very nice bar and drink lychee cocktails all night because I'm female. Bless.

I've been to the gym twice since Sunday. I haven't lifted weights for 4+ months, since I moved to HK. With dragonboating season over, I'm in the gym and now I'm feeling centred in the way that dragonboating never managed to do it for me in HK.

My bench weight has dropped by 60%. My upper body weights have dropped from 25 - 50%. I look at the write ups of my old workouts and wonder how I did them. I had a paltry 11.2kg (yes, switching to pounds as well) bench today and I used to have that on one side... :(

Will be happier when I drop a bit of fat and get PSFG back on the road. I had cabbage + steamed salmon for dinner. I guess you could say that I'm coming back.

I can't even sleep, I just listen to this track over and over...

I am trying to get rid of things so I can fit them into my new life.

I already did this before I left for here, but there's still too much. I love the idea of having a simpler life but getting there is so hard.

I am thinking that everytime I buy something new, I should let two old things go. I am trying to give away things to friends who I know would like them. Anyone can give away something they don't need, but it's bigger to give away something that you like.

Listening to this song and thinking of my grandma, who despite all her Asian badassness was a mad reggae fan. She grew up in a fishing town and endearingly called it 'leggae'.

I was cleaning up my iphone contacts and trying to sync it with my address book. I was deleting contacts of people that I will never call again. But then I came across the numbers of Brian and my gran and even though I'll never call them again, I left their numbers there.

To all my friends who still have their grandparents with them, call them tomorrow and say hi. I know we all get busy with the things we do and our jobs and petty things like going out...but once they go, you can't call them anymore.

xo

I have so much to write about...how I'm in my new city and how even though I'm HERE as a resident, I still feel like a visitor. How I leave work and stare up at these pointy, shiny skyscrapers that pierce through the winter sky as thousands of people shove past with eyes straight ahead and not a care about anything other than where they are going.

I want to remember the feeling of being in a new city, so when this place has me tired and worn out, I can remember that at one point in February 2011 that all I felt was the energy that this place has.

People here are incredibly welcoming. I think it comes from a city where everyone was new at one point and didn't know what to do next in this foreign place. People thrust their numbers and email addresses at me, asking me to call if I need anything. People walk me around their neighbourhood, just so I can get a feel for the place. Even though they could have been home half an hour earlier.

There is the shopping and the eating. Mall after mall of immaculate shop windows, beautiful things and gorgeous people. There are open air markets where the floor is wet with dirty water and old, worn Asian faces with bad teeth offer produce of varying quality. Where 'offer' means the dull thud of the cleaver against ancient wood, unrefrigerated meat and pools of visible blood. Or bowls of water with a bubbler which fizzes and foams as a fish sits, alive but not really moving - almost accepting of what comes next. Inbetween the shiniest pharmacies and malls sit old Chinese men who tend to their stores with cheap, practical wares.

On Saturday night I walked past bars in LKF. Clubs blared bad music, bouncers wielded guest lists. Untidy white people wore flashing headbands and sang along to Chumbawumba and Enter Sandman. Holding each other way, slack jawed and rubbery ankles trapped in ridiculous high heels. Sweaty brows and eyes going every which way. To add insult to injury, the Black Eyed Peas started to wail across this scene. 'This is a living nightmare', I thought to myself. Other exclusive clubs had people straight from the gulf in tidy stitched tuxedos and glittering Arabian sequinned gowns. Fat men sway to the music knowing that it's their money that will talk to the women, and not their dance moves.

People know HK for its shopping, pace and bars. But on Saturday afternoon, I caught a bus down to Deepwater Bay, expecting HK beaches to be small, dirty and unspectacular. As the bus wound its way out of the city and down to the south of the island, I watched this unfold itself infront of me. Green hills and that water, stretching out. I met with a whole bunch of people I didn't know, got my paddle and spent 2 hours dragon boating. This new club already are asking me to commit to racing in 2 weeks. People were surprised that I was 6 days into a new country and I was already out there on the water. It was different to Sydney dragon boating but that's the whole point of this isn't it?

I met a girl who said she wanted to try dragon boating. I told her to come along and try it, trying to explain to her how there's something so special about being in a place in your life where you have the ability in your life to be on the water. But when she told other people about it, everyone told her how 'hard' it was and how she's now thinking about sticking to spin classes and the gym.

The best things in life aren't always the easiest.

Sometimes you just need to keep pushing, even when it would be easier to stick to what you know. I keep thinking about this comment about it being 'hard' and sticking to what you know.

But then I also look at photos of international dragon boat racing in HK which is unlike anything I've ever seen before. Where they bring in barges to block off Victoria Harbour and thousands of people come to race and watch. And that's why I know there's a reason why sometimes you don't always want to do the things you know so well.

I still have to get my pictures together for my post-Japan post. Wow, 2 weeks in Japan - it's such a great country. I'm paying for it now - broke and fat. But as my mum says, that's what holidays are about.

I've thrown myself back into my routine and I hurt everywhere. I can't even sit down properly at the moment because my glutes and quads are totally busted from dragonboating. I need to do more pure cardio training at the gym because I'm not as fit for basketball/oztag as I want to be - but who has the time when you work full time+ and you're on 4 sports teams?

I absolutely love dragonboating. I love how it's an absolute break from work - it's not like you go down the road and just push some weights around in the gym. I walked from work to training yesterday (right next to the Sydney Fish Markets) - the sun was shining and it's beautiful down there. It gives me this overall sense of just being really thankful of being in this spot in my life that lets me do this. I love that you're working with about 20 other people to do something tangible - rowing somewhere together, rather than staring at the wall and jumping up and down. 30 minutes ago you were at the office and now you're on the water. Two hours later you're aching, tired, generally soaked through, salty limbs and just so pleased with yourself.

All of these sports are making it so hard for me to go to the gym and just do cardio. I don't mind hefting weights around but how can you go from rowing around the ANZAC Bridge at almost sunset, playing Oztag at Jubilee Park near the water in the almost Summer sun, training outside in the Domain and then trying to then find the willpower to slog it out for 30 minutes of interval training on the stepper, inside with the muted Channel V hits on? KILLLL ME IN THE FACE.

My favourite take away from dragonboating so far was something our coach said when we were doing sprint training. We were doing minute sets and she said 'What's one minute out of your life? NOTHING' and I take that with me every time I'm hurting and I just gotta push through.