School Picnic

A photo with my colleague, Ms Ma

Had our School Picnic on a 'black Friday', thanked God everything was OK. The best thing today was the walk around Aberdeen Reservoir. Autumn is always my most favourite season and today is a typical Autumn day. High blue sky with breeze around, it was fantastic. The worst thing was eaten the barbeque food the students fired for me, charcoal outside and uncooked inside. Don't want to discourage them but to say the food was good. What a white lie! Felt a bit of stomach ache when I reached home.

It is a pity there are too many meetings after school, too much non-teaching duties. I can hardly squeeze some time out to know the students or chat with them. Today, at last, I could spend a day with them. But it is not enough, I wish I could stay with them more at school instead of wasting time having stupid meetings, doing stupid non-teaching work and discussing nonsense matter.

Hong Kong 'at last'

What made me write again after being lazy for more than a month? It's the picture above. It's what I saw today in the MTR. I remembered this Easter when we went to Taiwan, something impressed me when I stepped on the train was the seats for the needed people. I felt sad why Hong Kong did not have this service for those needed. Now I am happy to see it. At least, I won't feel shamed being a Hongkonger.

One more thing the MTR needs to do is to put a poster up telling people how to use the mobile phone like the one in Taiwan. I don't mind following others as long as it is for our good sake.

Mid-Autumn Festival

Today is the 15th day of August in the Chinese calendar. It is the Mid-Autumn Festival, also called the 'Moon Festival'.

Lanterns are very important at the festival. Traditionally, kids play lanterns on this day. Being nostalgic, we went to Western District this afternoon to see the traditional lanterns. There were quite a few shops close together to sell both old and new style lanterns. The shops form a tiny market. There you could find 'the lanterns of your childhood'. They were the rabbits, the fish, the star fruit and many others. The lantern shops made a manificent scene of the area. There was a large variety of different kinds of lanterns for you to choose.

Rabbits are the most significant traditional lanterns.

Star fruit - my favourite. My father could make it.

Gold fish again - very cute

When I was a kid, we could not afford to buy these kinds of lanterns. We could only play with cheap lanterns in cylindrical shape. However, our genius father could make us beautiful lanterns like the ones we saw in the shop. He made us rabbits and star fruit, etc. We are proud of our father and we still talk about it at time :-)

The full Moon at the Moon Festival

It was told by the Observatory Department that the moon was the roundest at 11:38p.m. tonight. (03-10-2009)

Mid-Autumn Festival dinner

We had family dinner at the night of the Mid-autumn Festival. Is it delicious?

New meets old

New meets Old

The picture shows the traditional and the modern style lanterns. You can compare the new plastic ones on the right to the old ones on the left side of the traffic post.

The latest lantern I have seen. It's soft rubber with a ball inside. If you shake or hit the ball, there will be light . If it is in a still position, there is no light.

Plants for teachers

Each year, the Methodist church gives us a small gift as a symbol of respect to our contributions to education. I have received some strange gifts that I didn't like for the last three years. I forgot what the gifts were because every time I received it, I either gave it away to someone at once or put it somewhere and forgot about it.

Surprisingly, the gift was different this year. It was the green plants. I liked it because I myself was planning to buy a plant for my desk. Someone must have read my mind :-) The plants not only promote greening in the staff room but also give lives to the teachers. Why I said that because I feel that the teachers there work day after day from morning till night like a machine. With the plants on their desks, I hope they spare some time each day watering the plants and take a look at them instead of burying their heads in the piles of books on the desk.