went for yum cha with some relatives today at Furama Palace at Furama Hotel.
it was pretty good....the tim sum was of a pretty high standard. had a great chat with my cousin....who has just returned from tokyo after a really long stint at the singapore embassy there. he's really having a good time. meeting japanese diplomats, bringing the singapore ministers around to the best restaurants in tokyo, going on holiday at various cool places around japan. yea...life in the foreign service. he brought back lots of cool stuff like sake and immaculately wrapped boxes of chocolates for us. it looks so well wrapped that i can barely bring myself to tear it open!

my cousin is pretty much an inspiring story. though he wasn't a scholar or anything like that, he joined the foreign service and through sheer hard work and willingness to learn, rose through the ranks pretty quickly and even got his tour of duty on the japanese posting extended. he picked up japanese through interest while he was in NUS and went on to get his Japanese Language proficiency test level 1, which is apparently the highest level. now, one of his tasks is to make sure that the transcripts between the jap and singapore officials are consistant after being translated from jap to english and vice versa.

had a great chat with an old friend from JC on MSN just now...she's studying medicine in HK. what started off as a casual conversation ended up in a serious discussion about the HK govt and the problems HK is facing in the next 20 yrs! wow! how heavy going! never knew she was into politics! but yea...its always nice to find someone who shares a common interest and who engages in some intellectual sparring with ya.

apparently the housemen in HK earn about 30000 HKD a month! that works out to about 6000 SGD per month which in my opinion is crazy! nowander the HK hospitals are not making money! that kind of pay is even slightly higher than in australia. and considering the fact that the cost of living in HK is only about the same as singapore, how can HK doctors be paid about more then double what singapore doctors get? ridiculous!