Lens – Main TSB, image stabilizer, aperture unit, auto focus need to be replaced.

Cost: $2,707 HKD – $348.25 USD

Body – top cover needs to be replaced.

Cost: $900 HKD – $115.78 USD

What to do?

UPDATE, 9/3/2010 @5:38 p.m.

I asked the Canon rep over the phone for a discount and he actually called me back this afternoon and offered me a 15% discount off the lens repair price! Hooray! So they slayed $400 HKD from the price and because I paid $300 HKD for repairs, that is also taken off. Total price now: $2900 HKD.

Another lesson learned: Always Ask. Worse they can say is “no.”

Tomorrow, I’m off to Shanghai to see the Expo. Plan is to see China, Canada and Holland. We will be DSLR-less for the trip, which will be difficult, but we will live.

It was in my boyfriend’s backpack when he fell backward into the water as he tried to board a seadoo. The seadoo had suddenly lurched backward, carried up and back by strong, aggressive waves.

I was on the seadoo, my hand stretched out behind me, reaching for him when he fell backward. The seadoo was already revving its engine, ready to head toward a waiting yacht, 100 metres from the beach.

What was I doing on a seadoo? Why were we headed toward a yacht?

Let me tell you what happened. But first, some background so you can understand where I’m coming from…

I am not an outdoorsy girl.

I have always enjoyed being outdoors, exercising outdoors, and have even been an enthusiastic participant of such outdoor adventures like dragon boating, white water rafting (In Ottawa!), cave exploring, kayaking (In Hong Kong), and climbing up rather large mountains (all over China).

But I am not an outdoorsy girl. Really, I’m not.

It’s not originally me. I’m from Toronto.  I live in the city. I used to spend my weekends at the mall. Sometimes, I’d go on road trips to LOOK at the outdoors. The trees and rolling Ontario hills were enjoyed from the comfort of my car. “Beautiful scenery! Lovely leaves! Oh, let’s roll down the window to get a closer look…”

But something changed when I lived in Beijing for a year. The people I hung out with loved doing crazy things outdoors. We hired drivers who brought us out to the rugged ruins of the Great Wall, hours away from the touristy hawkers where we crawled on our hands and knees over the wall’s rubble. We ventured into the Longjing Gorge and took great leaps of faith… and we climbed up as many mountains as we could (I was able to climb Huangshan, Changbaishan and Taishan) and down gorges (namely, the Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan) as far as our legs would carry us.

But let’s be honest here. I haven’t REALLY changed – have I? Because a large part of the motivation to do such things came from the people I surrounded myself with. When in Rome… The experience of overcoming such challenges, of pushing my physical limits, was exhilirating when I did it with the group. Alone, I fear I lose my outdoorsy spirit and I retreat to the malls.

In Hong Kong, the boyfriend has worked on getting me back outside, with nature, in the sun and heat, on the mountains and on the beaches, next to the trees and the wildlife. It has not been an easy transition.

Kayaking in Sai Kung with friends

Hong Kong is one of those places where there’s a crazy metropolis, buzzing with life at all hours of the day. You can get anything in this city – everything Chinese and everything Western – and you can also hop on a bus or a boat and in about an hour, you’ll find yourself facing some of the most stunning views of the South China Sea – blue-green water, lush mountains, sun and sand. In a word, it is truly awesome. And, I’ve enjoyed my time in the Hong Kong wilderness these months. I’ve hiked on the outlying islands, Lamma and Cheung Chau, and I’ve spent some time in Sai Kung, a 12,600 hectare country park north-east of Hong Kong Island.

This weekend, a friend joined the boyfriend and I for another hike. This time we set off for the deserted beaches deep in Sai Kung country park – and that, my friends, is the scene of the crime, the place where our Canon DSLR fell into the water.

We started our hike a little late in the day – which isn’t a good idea, considering we were headed deep into the park. But we wanted to sleep in and we wanted to have our dim sum breakfast. Aiya.

For those of you interested in taking this hike, here are the details…

Get to Diamond Hill subway station — take bus 92 to Sai Kung  — At Sai Kung, take bus 94 into the park to Wong Shek Pier.

At the Pier, you can either hire a speed boat ($120  HKD one way) or wait for the slow ferry that will take another 45 minutes at least to get you to Chek Keng.

From Chek Keng, you’re supposed to follow the Maclehose Trail eastwards. Here’s where things went wrong for us. We reached the Maclehose Trail in good time, but the trail is a circuit. We could go west or east (left or right) and we asked some hikers on the trail which way to Tailongwan (Big Wave Bay). We were told to go left. This, I believe, was bad intel.

The path is supposed to climb the side of a valley, to a ridge where you can rest, and look out across the natural amphitheatre centred on Tai Long Wan. The path then winds down, to the hamlet of Tai Long, after which it’s an easy walk to Ham Tin, beside the southernmost beach.

Instead, we climbed up a mountain for about an hour, sweating and swiping at mosquitos. We couldn’t see the beach, but we pressed on. Hikers coming towards us assured us the beach was up ahead.

We finally began our descent and after more than 30 minutes, we reached a village! We were greeted by a beautiful blue wave painted on the wall of a village building. “Surf’s Up!” it read. But when we turned the corner, this is what we saw:

The village was deserted. The houses were boarded up. Stores were shuttered. Where was the beach?

We saw two paths. One went into the woods with no clear foot path. The other, blocked by 5 dogs sleeping lazily in the heat. If there are dogs, then there are people, right? We called out to see if anyone was around. No response. We took a few slow steps towards the dogs, inching forward. Then, we heard a low belly growwwwwl and two dogs suddenly stood up, ears perky, those little faces staring us down. (I would put a picture here, but there was no time to take one, you see.)

Okay, we thought, back away slowly. Slowly. Slowly. Anddddd TURN AND RUN.

We had no choice but to run the other way, into the woods. There was no path, but we couldn’t turn back and head the way we came. It was getting late and we would be hiking the mountain in the dark. We tried thinking where we had gone astray – we didn’t miss a turn, there was only one route here. We didn’t realize that we had turned west instead of east at the very beginning of the trail. Besides, it was too late to go back even if we did realize it at the time. So we went further and further into the woods, balancing over swampy grounds on makeshift bridges, navigating over rocks and massive,  protruding tree roots. I let my emotions and fears get the best of me and inside, I was freaking out.

We could hear the buzz of speedboats in the distance, but we continued on for an hour through the woods, and still no beach.

“I’m scared,” I said out loud, but scared didn’t help. Finally, finally, FINALLY after about a total of 3 hours hiking we emerged and saw this:

We were on Tai Long Dong Wan, one of Sai Kung’s deserted beaches, one of the beaches we had planned to visit that day, but not via the route we took. The boys were enjoying the views, but I could not. All I could think about was how we were going to go home. I didn’t see any speedboats — just yachts. What to do?

Get on a yacht, of course.

I saw a man and his children playing on the beach. I approached him. “We were chased by dogs,” I said. “We’ve been hiking for hours. Do you know if there are speed boats here we can rent?” He said he didn’t see any speed boats….there was a bit of a silence…. and then:

“You can get a ride back to the pier with us.”

That is how I ended up on the sea doo. That is why the boyfriend was also trying to get on, when a strong wave knocked him back. That is how water got into the backpack and into the camera body and our lens (a Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM).

The really good news is that the camera still turns on, but the sensor cleaner is on a continuous cycle in an attempt to clean the body. Even when we turn the camera off, there is a constant click click click. There’s also water droplets visible in the lens.

Canon will call this week with a quote on repairs. Let’s hope the damage won’t break the bank.

Lessons learned?

1) Carry a compass. Or, get a handy GPS for hiking trails. Anyone have one of those?

2) Start earlier in the day.

3) Get a water proof bag for the DSLR, even if it’s in the backpack. Any suggestions on where and what kind of bag to get?

A disgruntled ex-policeman, who had lost his job, armed himself with an M-16 assault rifle hijacked a bus carrying 25 people, mostly Hong Kong tourists. A In the end, after a 12-hour stand off with police, eight people were dead.

There’s a lot of  anger here, with most of the local media calling the Filipino police incompetent.

There has been extensive, heart breaking coverage on Hong Kong’s cable news stations showing interviews with a victim identified as “Mrs. Leung”  who was able to get off the bus alive. Sadly, her husband and two daughters ages 14 and 21 were killed. Her 18-year-old son was in intensive care in Manila.

“The Philippine government … I can’t accept this. Why did they do this to us?” she said.

“[The gunman] did not want to kill us. He only shot us after the negotiations failed,” she said, sobbing.

Leung, who had immigrated to Canada according to HK news agencies, described how she had stayed down in her seat, pretending to be dead. Her husband was already shot, lying on the floor next to her, and she thought about getting up from her seat and dying with him.

But, she said, “I thought about my daughters and if we were both gone, who would take care of them?”

She didn’t know at the time that her daughters had also been hit by bullets.

It’s seriously breaking my heart.

The Hong Kong Economic Journal criticised the Philippine police for not being able to get into the bus even after breaking windows and storming it.

“Their appalling professional standards and the lack of strategic planning made observers both angry and sad. This tragedy could have been avoided,” the paper said.

Both the Manila police commander Leocadio Santiago and President Benigno Aquino admitted mistakes had been made.

“We saw some obvious shortcomings in terms of capability and tactics used, or the procedure employed and we are now going to investigate this,” Santiago said on local television.

“There are a lot of things (that) resulted in a tragedy. Obviously we should be improving,” said Aquino, who took office less than two months ago.

One of the problems he emphasised was the way the crisis played out through the media, with the gunman allowed to speak on radio and watch events live on the bus’s television, giving him insights into police actions.

Here’s the latest from the AP.

And then another between the kitchen and the guest bedroom.

And then another in the guest bedroom last night.

!!!!!

They come out in the evenings when we’re out and this week I’ve been coming home this way: opening the door very quietly…..AND THEN TURNING ON ALL THE LIGHTS IN A FLURRY, SCREAMING AND YELLING “COCKROACH! COCKROACH!” AS I RUN THROUGH THE APARTMENT LOOKING FOR THEM.

Enough.

Today I went to the store.

But where did these roaches come from?

Our apartment is new and we rarely open windows during this summer heat.

I did some investigating and found out that the boyfriend had left the windows open that same Wednesday when his parents arrived.  (It’s not his fault. Repeat, it’s not his fault.) They must have come through the window that night. The security guard downstairs also told us that the very same night a new resident moved in upstairs. It’s possible the roaches were stirring during the big move and migrated to our apartment during that time.

It’s not uncommon to have cockroaches in Hong Kong. But it’s something I’m not used to. Let’s see if this stuff from the store works.  :/

Affluence prompts more women in China to light up

A female smoker browses a wide array of cigarettes and lighters on sale on a Beijing street. Photo credit: Kevin Lee

There is a smoking room in Zhang Pei Pei’s office in Beijing, China.

At any time of the day, men crowd the small space, lighting up and puffing away until they’re enveloped in a thick, cloudy haze.

But when Zhang has a craving for one of 10 cigarettes she’ll smoke each day, she doesn’t join her male colleagues. “There’s not one woman in there,” she says. “If I went in there, the men might not be too happy.”

Instead, she treks outside to light up, and if she looks left or right, will typically see other women doing the same.

It is becoming an increasingly common sight in China.

In a country of 350 million smokers, more than 60% of men, and 4% of women, are smokers.
But the latter percentage is set to rise, say experts at the World Health Organization. They estimate that 20% of women worldwide will be smokers by 2025, as compared with the 12% who smoke today.

Chinese health experts say the trend is exacerbated in China because of the country’s new affluence, which has brought about rapid economic, social and cultural change, particularly in cities and booming coastal regions.

But there’s been a simultaneous public health toll in terms of soaring incidence in obesity, diabetes, hypertension, lung and breast cancer, and cardiovascular disease rates. The Chinese are consuming more fat, more sugar and more salt.
And more tobacco.

China is already the world’s biggest consumer and producer of cigarettes, manufacturing 2.2 trillion smokes every year.
But women have traditionally shied away from smoking, largely because of cultural taboos.

No more.

“Women are becoming more independent. They’ve got more money. They listen less to their parents and teachers,” says Dr. Judith Mackay, a senior WHO policy advisor who has led anti-smoking campaigns across Asia. “It’s the right culture for the introduction of thinking wrongly, thinking that smoking is associated with emancipation. We have to make them realize it’s addictive. It is a [form of] bondage.”

In a bid to tap the female market, tobacco companies have started using colourful packaging and marketing long, slender and flavoured cigarettes labelled “low-tar” or “light.”

To the chagrin of her parents, Zhang began smoking five years ago because she was curious and indulging in a quasi-taboo activity seemed fun and exciting.

Menthol-flavoured cigarettes helped clear her mind and smoking quickly grew into a daily habit as a result of stresses at her job in the information technology industry.

“I started pulling a lot of overtime,” she says. “Smoking is a way for me to vent. It’s like all the pressure comes out of me, along with the smoke. It’s a great feeling of freedom to know I can do this.”

According to the tobacco control office of China’s Centre for Disease Control, that feeling of freedom is costly: more than one million Chinese people die annually from tobacco-related illnesses, about one quarter of all smoking-related deaths worldwide. By 2020, the WHO estimates that toll could climb to 3 million.

“You can look at swine flu or SARS, but it’s clear nothing kills like tobacco does,” Mackay says. “It’s not like a mine collapse or a road accident where people are killed immediately and there’s a national response to it. This is a long term disease and there should be a national response to this, too.”

The Chinese government is taking tentative steps. It has banned tobacco-advertising on television and radio (but not billboards), while adding health warnings to cigarette packaging. Smoking was prohibited at the 2008 Summer Olympics, and at the World Expo in Shanghai. More than 200 million reminbi (roughly $30 million) worth of Expo-related donations from tobacco companies were returned after the nongovernmental Chinese Association on Tobacco Control pressed for the organizing committee to honour its promise of hosting a “smoke-free” event.

China was a signatory to the 2003 UN Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which obliges it to ban all tobacco advertising and smoking in all public places, while raising tobacco taxes, before January 2011.

But few believe those goals will be realized, including government officials.

“There’s a very long road ahead of us,” says Jiang Yuan, vice-director of the Centre for Disease Control’s tobacco control office. He adds that regulations banning smoking in indoor public spaces have only been adopted in seven provincial capitals.

There’s no way a prohibition will be achieved by 2011, adds Xu Guihua, vice-president of the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control. “This goal needs related national laws and regulations. The result of China’s tobacco control and its progress highly depends on the Chinese government’s attitude and determination.”

That attitude may be predicated on a conflict-of-interest: China’s largest tobacco company is state-owned. Critics say that has prevented the government from raising prices. A 2009 tax increase was modest and absorbed entirely by the industry. A package of cigarettes now retails for as little as $1.50 in Beijing and Shanghai.

Nonsmoking campaigns appear the government’s preferred option, including a special appeal to women made during the release of the China Center for Disease Control’s annual tobacco report, which warned of the increased danger of developing tobacco-related illnesses and appealed to a woman’s cosmetic sense by asserting that smoking will bring on early signs of aging and damage the skin and teeth.

The report also cited data linking smoking to low fertility rates, miscarriages and infant deformities, noting that a survey of 1300 families indicated that 47.9% of pregnant women are exposed to second-hand smoke.

Those kinds of nonsmoking pitches may eventually sway the 30-year Zhang, who hopes to one day have a child. “But that time hasn’t come yet,” she says. “I want a healthy baby. So when it’s time, I will quit smoking for the child. It might not be easy, but it’s an important enough reason to try.”

I’m sorry for my absence. I made it a priority to blog when I first arrived in Hong Kong. But things started to get busy, as I signed up for two volunteer projects – one teaching English phonics to 10-year-old kids and the other visiting a shelter for battered foreign domestic helpers – and I’ve been stretched in a few different directions. In the last week, I’ve attempted to refocus on my number one priority. This year, that priority is improving my Chinese reading and writing. This is truly a labor of love. It is something I must do every day. And so, I’ve had my head (and hand) buried in Chinese characters pretty much every day. The work is starting to pay off. Yesterday, I read through a Chinese newspaper article without a dictionary and understood it.

Teaching phonics at the elementary school has been really interesting. For one, the kids are pretty badly behaved. You’d think that the Chinese kids are disciplined, respect authority, and are good students. Well, not all of them. In Hong Kong, as the phonics teacher told us volunteers, the students are very different from the immaculately behaved children in mainland China classrooms. In this modern Asian city, perhaps the Confucian idea of respecting your elders is not up kept. Then again, it’s not like the kids in China are that much better these days. I’ve witnessed one too many “little princes” 小王子 growing up in this era of China’s one-child policy.

The kids can get out of control in this classroom of 30 students to 1 teacher. That’s why they have the volunteers. One volunteer to a table of 4 children, to help keep things in control and to help the kids with the phonics training. The boys are rascals. They can’t sit still. There is endless chatter as the teacher speaks. Fights have broken out – punches were exchanged and homework sheets were ripped up. The girls are much better. But the ruckus at the boys’ tables is distracting. The kids have a lot of attitude. It seems to come with the Cantonese culture, and the very language itself.

Still, teaching this is incredibly rewarding. By the second lesson, the girls were calling me “Missy” – which is what the Hong Kong-nese call their female teachers. It helps that I speak Cantonese, because the kids aren’t able to fully function in English. I can switch from Cantonese to English as we fill out the activity sheets or do a dictation. It’s been a stimulating challenge for me.

I’m traveling to Holland this week for a friend’s wedding and a much anticipated reunion with a good number of friends from all around the world who are also flying in for the wedding. I’ll keep twitter updated as much as I can while I’m gone.

Today is Duan wu jie, also known in the West as the Dragon Boat Festival Day. It’s an official holiday in Hong Kong.

Some of you may recall I was a dragon boat paddler back in Toronto and Ottawa. No racing for me this year.

But, we’re going to eat lots of sticky rice dumplings and watch the dragon boat races in Aberdeen.

In Hong Kong, an hour before World Cup games are to start, you’ll find locals hauling beer cases and bags of potato chips home from the local supermarkets.

For me, when you’re spending lots of time with Dutch and Swedish friends, the World Cup is all the more important.

Last week I watched the opening match between South Africa and Mexico, at a big event with about 80 Hong Kong football fans. Last night, I was in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s party-pub district, for the Holland-Denmark game. We were, of course, cheering for Orange. (The Dutchies won 2-0).

And apparently, we were also disregarding the Hong Kong government’s warnings for a healthy World Cup championship.

The government recently released this special World Cup announcement:

A spokesman for the Department of Health (DH) said today (June 10) that even though crispy snacks (such as potato chips and fried food) and alcoholic beverages could add to the World Cup festivity, it is important to maintain healthy eating, get sufficient sleep, avoid tobacco or excessive alcohol, and stay within the law in terms of the smoking ban.

It continues on to list bullet point tips on how to stay healthy during the World Cup. This was the best one:

Consume snacks only when you are hungry. Do not snack for the sake of snacking.

And more:

* Stretch and move around while watching the matches.

* Sit properly while watching the soccer match to avoid muscle aches afterwards.

* Strike a balance between watching matches and fulfilling your social commitments.

“I didn’t expect Hong Kong would be like this,” she told the judge.

“This” was to be a place where she could find work, make some money, and send that money home to the Philippines. “This” was supposed to be a safe place.

The woman was a foreign domestic helper, a nanny, who had recently filed charges against her employer for assault and attempted rape.

She was called to be a witness in the case, and today was the second day of cross-examination.

Her former employer’s defense lawyer exhaustively went over previous statements and testimonies to point out discrepancies in her recounting of the events.

Foreign domestic helpers, mostly from the Phillippines, Indonesia and Thailand, spread out across Hong Kong's public spaces on Sunday, their day off.

In this Hong Kong courtroom, interpreters murmured translations simultaneously. Beside the nanny, sat a woman who spoke Tagalog and English, and beside the nanny’s former employer, a man repeated the court’s proceedings rapidly in Cantonese.

There are approximately 140,000 Filipinos in Hong Kong. Most of them are domestic helpers, maids and nannies, who make the move to Hong Kong for a higher salary than they could ever make at home.

That salary is a minimum of $3,580 Hong Kong Dollars a month, about $460 USD.

The foreign domestic helpers must live-in with their employers. If, for whatever reason, a helper’s employment is terminated, she must find another job within two weeks or leave Hong Kong.

Advocates for migrant workers claim this is a form of discrimination, since this rule is not enforced on other foreign workers. Such a limitation, they argue, essentially silences many migrant workers who suffer abuse at the hands of their employers, but are too frightened to come forward because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

Once, during dinner with some family friends, I observed the way a domestic helper is treated in the home. The helper was responsible for taking care of an 8-month old baby in the house. And even though the helper will hold the baby, feed the baby, play with the baby, she is invisible. During dinner, she ate her food in the kitchen while the rest of us ate at a table in the living room.

I suppose, if you’ve hired help, you are paying a domestic helper for a service. You are not paying her to become a part of the family.

But for many families in Hong Kong, I think it’s easy for them to forget that these helpers are human beings.

This is a city where dog strollers are abundant; where volunteers take to the street daily to ask for a donation in the name of animal rights; and where ads in subway stations Photoshop cats and dogs so they are standing upright, and a caption in Chinese reminds us that “animals have rights, too.”

Sure. But what about the rights of domestic helpers? This issue is not in the minds of most Hong Kong people.

In 2008, the Mission For Migrant Workers handled an average of four clients a month who had filed physical or sexual assault complaints with the police.

There aren’t a lot of charities advocating for the rights of these people, but next week, I’ll be visiting Bethune House, a shelter for battered foreign domestic helpers.