Saikung 07 - chapter 1

On Friday, my research group at the university and I all took an afternoon off and headed to nearby Saikung for a boat trip (as some sort of end of semester party...)

As I'm planning another trip next weekend,  I thought it'd be good for everyone who's going (most of whom have AnD profiles) to see what's in store.  Unfortunately my camera started crapping out on me (something wrong w/ the brightness sensor or something),  so i was having problems taking decent pictures.  I was able to get some nice ones despite the camera problems.

We have a pretty large group,  total was like 35 people. We headed down to the pier to get our boat:

Most people refer to these trips as 'junk trip' (as in the chinese boat junk, not garbage junk) -  but as you can see, the boats are actually regular modern boats.

After loading on,  the boat will head out a short way into Saikung bay.  Which as you can see from g00gle maps, is quite an intricate water system, full of islands and coves and what not.

You can guess from these pictures that the weather was absolutely great...  super clear and bright... the only thing you can't tell was how friggin' HOT it was... it was like 33+C (95F?)  and with the humidity it was much worse.  But once we got out on the water there was at least a breeze...

We dropped anchor in a cove and just relaxed a bit.  Some of the mainland students were playing cards most of the time...

The rest of us went swimming.  My colleague Tom brought his kids.  He takes them to the beach often so they each have a wet suit w/ built in flotation. 

While we were there the captain busted out a fishing rod and caught a cuttlefish or squid or whatever it is.  it was pretty creepy.  while it was still moving he cut it up and some people had fresh slices.   no thanks! :-P

After an hour or two of swimming and eating (and some karaoke), there wasn't much else to do,  except sit around,  but then i found out two of the technicians in my group brought DSs.  I had mine too of course so we did some 3 player gaming:

R to L: Eva, Jennifer and the daughter of the crew... we took turns switching off on different games. I kicked all their asses at mario kart. :-P

nerd side note:this was the first time i tried the 'download' feature of the DS.  Its pretty amazing.  Basically for most of the DS game library, you can do a multi-player game even if only ONE person has a copy of the game.  They can send the game code to the other DS's via their wireless connection.  This means you don't have to all buy multiple copies of the same game to do multi-player.  In my case because I have an R4DS full of games, we could play quite a few different things.  We did Tetris, Bomber-man, mario kartand machigai museum 2. :-P

Around 6:30 we headed back into the pier to pick up some people who couldn't make it out earlier.  It was right around sunset:

But by this time I was pretty sun-n-fun'ed out so i made a quick decision:  They were going to stay out another few hours and do fishing for cuttlefish more.  but seeing as how I wasn't interested in eating anything we were going to be catching,  and 8 continuous hours together w/ my boss and coworkers was a few too many.... i figured it was a good time to go. :-P

(especially because I get to do it all again next saturday w/ Marbel!)