Thursday, 9 May 2013

08.5.13 - Oo heui ying gok leng see goon jo yeh!


This is my probably inaccurate (apologies to any Canto speakers) phonetic rendering of the phrase – “I’m going to work at the English Consulate!”*

A fortuitous aligning of the stars for both me and the Consulate – the Consulate had a sudden interim vacancy come up in their political and economic team last week. The head of the team knew the vacancy had to be filled temporarily or the team would be unable to function…but who on earth do I know, she asked herself, that has worked in the civil service, has worked with Ministers, who is in HK and free right now?

That’ll be me!

2-3 months of work for the FCO begins next Weds with a conference in Beijing (!), and then holding the fort until a full-time person is found, including several Ministerial visits to HK.

Four big benefits of this:

1)      Familiar-ish territory to kick off HK working life

2)      But pretty different to what I’ve done before - great for CS CV

3)      Once you have had one post in HK, everyone keeps telling me, it gets much easier to get more work. I already have some verbal agreements to offer me contract work as soon as this post is done

4)      Some money earned.

*On the translation, we are greatly enjoying slowly learning Canto. It had a completely different structure and logic to it, which sometimes is much more sensible than English. So this sentence literally, character by character, means “I go English neck matters hall [the logic for that is a bit unclear] do thing!”

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