Part 1 — The Scenery || Part 2 — The Food || Part 3 — Weiqi

Introduction

After much waiting and anticipation, I’m happy to release the final post on my Hong Kong trip. Since we always save the best for last, it should come as no surprise to you that you had to wait till the very end to hear about my go adventures! Before we go on however, I just wanted to clarify a couple of things. (1) The title of this post was originally “Go,” but due to the fact that I was in Hong Kong, I felt it was only appropriate to title it “Weiqi.” (2) However, in order to ease the readability of my post, I will be using “go” in the text instead of “weiqi” for simple consistency with English go literature. With that said, onwards with my go adventure in Hong Kong!

Part 3 - Weiqi

As I’m sure some of you remember, I posted on reddit and here before the trip to see if anyone was in the area. Most of the feedback I got from people was that I should visit the Hong Kong Go Association (HKGA). I was a little saddened by the fact that I was unable to find anyone who lived locally online, but I knew that I couldn’t bear the idea of going all the way to Asia and not do a single go-related activity. So I promised myself that if I were to do anything for myself this trip, it would be to visit the HKGA.

When we first arrived in Hong Kong, one of the things we did was to go to one of the shopping districts. And believe it or not, as I’m walking down the street, I see this across the street.

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Part 1 — The Scenery || Part 2 — The Food || Part 3 — Weiqi

Introduction

When it comes to traveling, my number one priority is always to find the most authentic food to that area. The more special it is to the area (aka I can’t get it anywhere else in the world) the better. And for those who aren’t following me on Twitter already, you’ll notice that my Twitter consists primarily of go and food. So as you might expect, I’m quite enthusiastic about food and thus this post is a tad lengthier than normal.

With that said, I hope you prepare yourself as you set off with me to relive my food adventures through Hong Kong, and be sure to read to the end because I recount my experience with a buffet that costs $100USD per person. No that is not a typo. See you at the the bottom!

Part 2 - The Food

For starters, I’ll have to say that while we had some recommendations on places to go, my family and I were mostly on our own when it came to figuring out what we wanted to eat.

When we had finally escaped surviving on airplane food for the last 13+ hours, you can imagine our desire to find some actual food. Nothing microwaved or mushy. Just legit Hong Kong food. And even though it took us a bit before we got settled in at our hotel, we were fortune enough that there were some places open nearby. To top it off, we were incredibly lucky to pick the one place where they had excellent wonton egg noodle soup. Definitely the best I had the entire trip!

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Part 1 — The Scenery || Part 2 — The Food || Part 3 — Weiqi

Introduction

After much waiting and anticipation, I’m happy to finally release my Hong Kong post series! I originally had plans to do a day by day retelling of my adventures in Hong Kong, but I realized that it would take way too long to write and not to mention I would probably bore you to tears.

In addition, since the trip wasn’t entirely centered on go, I wanted to capture as much of my trip as possible without taking too much time away from the main subject matter of this blog: go. After all, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve worked hard to ensure that all my posts have always been related to go. So I hope you’ll forgive me for detracting from go these next couple of days to tell you about my trip. With that said, I hope you enjoy these posts!

Part 1 - The Scenery

The trip was a 13+ hour flight, so you can imagine our delight when we were finally off the plane and stepping foot into Hong Kong for the first time. After going through customs, getting our luggage, and a brief encounter of a taxi driver trying to hustle and get our family to take his taxi back to the city as opposed to the bus, we soon found ourselves on a bus driving down into the city.

After about thirty minutes, we were driving through the city and I was greeted by the following view of Hong Kong for the first time:

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I know that it’s been over a week since I came back from Hong Kong, so first off, I apologize that I haven’t been able to post about Hong Kong yet.

When I got back, I thought that I would be able to just grab my photos and quickly organize them in an hour or so. And then after I did that, I would be able to start working on my posts. After all, it’s only about a week’s worth of pictures right?

Yeah… Let’s just say I completely forgot and therefore underestimated the amount of effort it takes to properly organize your photos (and that doesn’t even count editing, cropping, resizing, etc.). There were the duplicates, the variations on a shot that I had to choose through, and then renaming them properly so I can easily track what is what…

So while I thought I would be able to knock it out quickly so I could get started on drafting my Hong Kong trip posts, it’ll probably be at least another week before I’m able to get them up and online. Because in the end, I’m not trying to just throw up posts for the sake of posting. I’m really trying to capture the experience as best I can in order to give you the most enjoyable reading experience possible, so I hope you can bear with me a bit longer.

On a separate but related note, I am also starting to feel the twinge of anxiety as I’m starting to fall slightly my weekly posts. As I’ve been trying to improve the quality of the game reviews, they’ve also started to take a considerable amount of time. But don’t worry, I’m working hard to make sure that I don’t fall behind. Back to work I go!

Hey everyone. I just got back from Hong Kong yesterday. So while I’d love to write all about my Hong Kong trip, I’ll need to finish catching up before doing so. But overall, the trip went well and I got to spend a bit of time really fine tuning my approach to go along with having the pleasure of visiting the Hong Kong Go Association. More on that later though. Hope you all are doing well!

Friday Go Forward: Week 54

Overview

This week marks the start of my race towards the dan wall that all kyu players are striving to overcome. I’ve tried playing more recently, and I’ve completely ramped up my training regimen. In the past, I’ve tried alternating between time-based training versus task-based training and kept finding something lacking about each. As a result, I’ve decided to do a fusion this time around to really get the ball rolling. I’m really hoping that it will gain some traction this time.

Secondly, I wanted to give a shoutout to a fellow go player Lizardfish (aka Eulerstotle for those who knew him before) who started a new go site called Lizardfish’s GO Notes. He approaches the notion of explaining go topics through PDF’s as opposed to SGF’s (which can be quite confusing if designed poorly). Be sure to check it out! Definitely looking forward to seeing more of his work.

Finally, in case you missed it, I am going to be heading out to Hong Kong this week and will be pretty MIA for the next week. However, I am happy to announce that none of the weekly articles (i.e., Monday Go Meditation) will be taking a hiatus. I’m not sure what my internet connection will be like, but I’ll be sure to try and update as best as I can. So if I don’t get a chance to get online next week, I’ll see you all after I get back!

Training Regimen

• Reading Ability - Work on the tasks below until whichever comes first.*

  • Work on go problems for 30 minutes.
  • Work on 200 go problems.
    *This is a way to split the difference between task based versus time based training. If you work faster than normal, and can get through 200 (or whichever number you decide on) problems. Kudos to you. But in the event you’re having trouble and need more time to work on the problems, just keep at it until 30 minutes is up (or whatever time you think it best for you).

Games

• KGS - 2 games
• DGS - 3 ongoing games
• OGS - 6 ongoing games | 1 completed games

Books

• Worked on Life and Death Problems 1 - Basics by Robert Jasiek.

I haven’t had a chance to really talk about this much, but I’m actually going to be headed to Hong Kong in less than a week! As you might expect, it’s been a busy rush to get all my ducks in line and make sure I don’t have any lingering things to do when I leave.

One of the things I’m pondering about however, is how I’m going to be utilizing my time during those long hours on the plane. I’m debating bringing a magnetic go set so I can use it on the plane, but then I worry that I’ll spill the bowls and all the pieces will go everywhere on the plane. Still a little on the fence about what I’m going to do, but so far it seems like I might just use it to do some serious life and death studying. I’m open to suggestions though!

Most importantly, if ANYONE has any connections to people who play go in Hong Kong (or know a friend of a friend who might be able to help me out), please let me know since I would love to be able to do at least one go related activity while in Hong Kong. It would be awesome if I could play with some locals and have something go-related to commemorate the trip with!

I definitely will be doing a post on my Hong Kong trip after I get back, but I’m really hoping to have some go-related material in there if possible. Although worst case scenario, you’ll just have to endure numerous photos of food and stories instead. Guess that’s not so bad right? But it would definitely be epic if I could have at least one go anecdote in there, here’s to hoping…