It ended with, “If you were open (just open) I would pitch and then bring you out to have a look w/out any promises on your part. Let me know your thoughts. A guy can dream, right?“

I chuckled at a mix of disbelief, confusion and excitement. The email had come from a guy I had done a few months of contract work for a year earlier; a guy who h ad met Lisa a total of two times and; a guy who was apparently crazy. The email, titled “My crazy idea,” seemed especially half baked since it was a response to a tweet sent the night before. It unraveled a description of small “internal-startup” of IDEO’rs, a monolithic Hong Kong sourcing company and a couple of seats that, he seemed to think, Lisa and I would fit in well.

For the next 5 months, the proportions of disbelief, confusion and excitement would shift but the mix would eventually materialize into a flight from SFO to HKG.

(Don’t worry, Lisa’s photos will be added as soon as we get them off her hard drive.)

Confusion

Lisa and I laughed about the email every so often for the next couple of days. I enjoyed riding my bike to work through an exceptionally long summer. Lisa played with Rhino at night when she wasn’t planning photo shoots. We prepared for our first Tough Mudder and we ate really well, trying all the great restaurants that Division street had to offer. We had moved into 3105 Division St. only 6 weeks before and it was perfect.

Within a week, we started having Skype sessions about the proposition that further clouded the big idea and our roles in it. We started revising resumes, checking passport expiration dates and wondering if Pugs can fly. Lisa’s mom came to town and I had the pleasure of meeting her and telling her that we might be moving to the other side of the world. But then the weather cooled down email correspondence slowed and Skype went silent.  We ran Tough Mudder, I got buried with the work of a departed coworker and Lisa headed off to Hawaii to art direct Nike Women’s Summer 2015. We all but forgot about the “crazy idea.”

Disbelief

But, as if it this post written to be dramatic, on November 11th we received an email titled “Visit.” “Visit Logistics,” “Intro,”  “Flight,” and “Travel for Lisa+Trevor” followed over the next two weeks. We told our employers that we would be traveling for thanksgiving and we had to tell my mom that we would be opting out of Thanksgiving in favor of our first trip to Hong Kong.

We arrived to watch a hazy Hong Kong sunset over fleets of cargo ships and tiny mountaintop islands. We battled our way through the MTR train system for the first time and arrived at our hotel to sleep for a much needed 5 hours until we woke up at 3 am. For the next few days, jet lag and the eternal fluorescent lights of a busy city kept us awake with time to ask ourselves where we were and what the hell we were doing there.

The first day we did our best to avoid the trains and instead overwhelmed ourselves by getting lost in Central Hong Kong, eventually winding up in the free public zoo. The following day was the first day of two interview days comprised of 8 hour-long interviews and a Design Thinking workshop for managers. I still consider it somewhat of a miracle that we got hired considering my lack of sleep caused me to communicate like a second grader waking up from anesthesia. Good thing Lisa had Nike on her resume.

On Thursday night we celebrated in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel by making a meal out of beer, wine and bottomless mixed nuts while watching the famed but underwhelming Victoria Harbour “light show.” We ate Thanksgiving dinner in a crowded Dim Sum restaurant with a 60 year old waiter who begrudgingly provided exceptional Chinese service.

The next day we woke up to call home to compare the chicken (head and all) that we had eaten with work interns to our parents’ turkey meals. We took it pretty easy with a tram ride to The Peak, a tour of all the places we wouldn’t want to live and a ferry trip to refreshing Lantau Island. We ate dinner and watched a Lantau cow snoozing on the beach. We got our offers and suddenly this crazy idea was as real as the sand between our toes.

Excitement

“Lisa and I are moving to Hong Kong,” I told people. Each time I said it, the words became more convincing. We put in our notice at work, broke our lease, sold all our stuff and negotiated our move.

This section is called Excitement but for the most part, it’s just chaos. In the next post, Lisa will tell you about foreign work visas a record number of narrowly missed flights and flying Pugs.