So this past week, the week after Thailand was actually a four day week for me, as my sickness that I have been battling finally got to me. Monday during work I was pretty dead and just not feeling up to anything, by the end of the day I knew that I needed to go to the doctor the next day. My throat had started swelling up and I felt really weak, it was really odd because before lunch I was just tired, but then after lunch I started feeling really sick. When I finally got home after work I was super achey and could tell that I had a fever. So I took a hot shower got into my sweat pants and attempted to sweat it out through the night. Luckily my roommate Nick did not mind that I wanted to sleep with the air off as it gets really cold in our room. The next day my plan was to wake up at 8:30, take a shower then head down to health services which opens at 9, then from there just go to work. When I got up at 8:30 I felt much worse than I had the previous night even though I did sweat a ton through the night. I went into the bathroom where I met Ignacio and he told me that I should just skip work and rest to try and get better. At first I told him no and I had to go to work, then I started thinking about it and realized how crappy I felt and decided that I would call my boss Andrew Miller and let him know that I was not coming in.
After I called out of work, I went back to bed for an hour and ended up getting to health services around 10 am. The way they do it here is you just show them your City University Student id card and then pay them $100 HK to see the doctor. When I finally got to see the Doctor he spoke English luckily and asked me what I was feeling and what my symptoms were and I told him, he also asked me what I was doing in Hong Kong and I told him that I was working in an internship and was trying to find a job to work here full-time for a few years His response to that was "Why? Go work back home for Trump or one of those rich guys!" I laughed and said "yeah maybe" thinking if only it were that easy to myself.
One thing that I wanted to note that is very different here than back home is that after seeing the doctor and receiving my medicine I noticed how different they do medicine over here compared to back home. They gave me four different types of pills and one bottle of cough syrup. The antibiotic was a five day prescription and I had to take it 3 times daily. They gave me another pill for my blocked nose, one for my mucus, and one for the fever. Three of them and the cough syrup, I was to take 4 times daily! It's so crazy in the US we get one pill that does everything, seems more efficient to me.
So I ended up sleeping most of the day on Tuesday and started feeling a little better by the evening. I did end up going to work on Wednesday as I was feeling way better than I had the day before. Work was pretty good for me because I spent the entire day working on my social media marketing plan for Global Sage that I was going to present to John Wright the CEO on Thursday. On Wednesday night we had another person in our speaker series, and he is actually the boss of two of our interns. His name is Cory Kidd and he is the CEO and founder of a company called Intuitive Automata, which he started here in Hong Kong. His talk was very interesting as he talked about the benefits of starting a company here in Hong Kong and how the government in China supports entrepreneurs and gives them all kinds of benefits. I talked to him after his presentation for a while and he was kind enough to give me his card and later via email an introduction to a friend of his in the marketing industry. Her name is Sandy Diep and she gave me some good advice about my career path, so I am grateful to both Sandy and Cory.
Thursday I spent the beginning of the day getting ready for my meeting with John and ensuring that I had any questions he might ask me about my presentation covered. I had sent my presentation to him via email on Wednesday night so he could have some time to look at it and generate questions. However when I finally got into the meeting with him on Thursday at 3:30 I wasn't even surprised to find that he had not looked at it yet. So it actually turned into him reading through my presentation as I sat there with him. He was very impressed and even said that he may have to hire me for Marketing and I could work in the NY office. Then after I tried explaining some of my ideas he basically shot most of them down, because he said he wants to run his company very stealthlike. So he gave me a book called "The HeadHunters" by John A. Byrne and told me to read it and think about what GS wants to accomplish. Then he said when your done reading the book draft an email to the CEO of CitiGroup in NY asking for a meeting between him and John. The last request still puzzles me. I don't understand what learning how to sneakily talk to a CEO and attempt to get a meeting with the CEO has to do with social media tactics. However I will complete all his requests and see what happens.
So since that day I have been reading this book and at the same time, attempting to think of ways to market Global Sage that would be sneaky and beneficial to the company. I am yet to come up with anything. However I did find and include in my presentation that many of Global Sages competitors are utilizing social media platforms successfully however John said that we are not like other companies and I need to read the book, soooo....yeah dead end... for now.
Friday was anther big day for me as it was the day of my first interview at EF Englishtown the company that I was applying to work for as a social media specialist in Hong Kong. The interview was at 12:30 in Causeway Bay with Jessica Szeto the woman who would be my direct superior if hired. I thought the interview went well as Jessica and I talked for about an hour and a half. We talked about how she is looking to expand the EF Englishtown brand and what the duties and future possible ventures the job entailed. She asked me most of your general interview questions including the much hated "what is your biggest weakness?" That one took me a while because I didn't really think about it before the interview, and I did not want to say something stupid, that would knock me out of the job opportunity. So I basically told her prioritizing tasks, is sometimes a challenge. However over all we had a good discussion and she liked me enough to move me into the next phase which was, that I had to answer two out of three questions regarding social media that she sent to me. I had to do this within 24 hours, so I spent all Friday night doing that, as I wasn't done taking my antibiotics anyway and wanted to rest up for the big day on Saturday.
So Saturday was the day of our big "Dream Careers Junk Boat". This was planned by Michelle Vock and Amanda Wieland who we all owe much thanks too as it was a great day and a ton of fun. We all woke up at about 8:30 because we had to be at the docks around 9:45 and ready to board the boat at 10 am. So a bunch of us staggered out of bed and made our way to the train station which we took to TST to meet everyone else at the docks. Tucker Hudson and Stanley Soh from Global Sage also both made it to the boat which was great, as they are well liked by all. The weather for the day was not the best as it was somewhat cloudy and and a little rainy throughout the day, however we still made the most of it and had a blast. There was no shortage of alcohol as we had beer and mixed drink which all added up to be a sloppy day on the boat. Wakeboarding proved to be very difficult as the water was super choppy and the waves were fairly large and would end up knocking you down quite easily. We did have fun singing/dancing on the boat, I played the song Danza Kuduro by Don Omar ft. Lucenzo like 5 times haha. We also had a blast jumping off the top of the boat into the water, which....Tucker and I were the first to do! However something sad did happen to me on this day, I ended up losing my famous WNEC Lax booney hat. I had it on all day and it was not going anywhere, then at the end of the day I was standing at the back of the boat and as we were heading home it blew off my head into the sea! This was a very sad moment, however if luck has it, I may know somewhere back home where I can find another, so hopefully that is the case. This picture is the last picture I will ever have of me wearing it, very sad.
After the boat finally docked I found myself following Nick and Alex home because I thought we were going to get dinner. However they decided to make a stop while we were in TST and I found myself in a sketchy apartment building and in this backroom on the 3 floor. Inside the room Alex and Nick were looking at counterfeit watches being sold by these Indian guys. These watches however were not the typical Hong Kong fakes, they were very real looking and as close to the real thing as you could get without getting the real thing. The entire time I was in that building I was very tense and just waiting to be robbed. I was even more nervous when both Alex and Nick decided not to buy anything because I thought these dudes would be pissed they wasted their time. I was not however surprised they didn't buy anything because they are both fans of watches and already have very nice real watches, and I could not see either one of them settling for fakes. After that we went to Dan Ryan's for dinner where I got a delicious burger. From there we just went home and immediately passed out for the rest of the night.
On Sunday I woke up at about 11 in the morning and headed out to meet Tucker and Coco in Central, from which we would all head up to midlevels and spend the day at Daniel Clark from Global Sages apartment. We all met up and headed up the huge escalator in Soho to Daniels apartment. His place was unreal, it was six stories and he lived on the sixth floor with two other people. Since he is on the top floor he and his roommates have roof access where they have furniture and a table so they can hang out. There are four apartments on the top floor and the roof is divided into four roof areas so they each have their own. Daniel told us that they have thrown some awesome parties at his apartment. After a little while Chris and Melissa arrived and we all went up to hang out on the roof, where we smoked hookah and listened to music. Daniel ordered some pizza from this place called Pizza Slice out of Causeway Bay and it was phenomenal! Finally some delicious pizza, by far the best I have had in Hong Kong. After a while we went back inside and just relaxed on his couches and played a little COD and watched some TV which was a nice change of pace. I have not had a lazy Sunday like that in a while it was nice to chill on a couch, watch some tube and play some xbox; it reminded me of my college Sundays!
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