Three Weeks of Close to Nothing

So, it's been about three weeks, but I'm back. To be perfectly honest, nothing interesting happened in those first two weeks which is why there haven't been any new posts. Now I actually have enough stuff to talk about.

First off, I would like to talk about how my life and sanity has been saved by finding........an international grocery store. This may sound like a small matter to most people, but in a country where noodles in soup seems to be a staple of life, a grocery store with western food that I recognize and trust is a big thing. It's at the grocery store, Taste, that I found Post Raisin Bran and Terra chips. It's at Taste where I found Oscar Meyer turkey bacon and Swiss cheese. ( Although any form of cheese is super expensive here. Asians don't really eat cheese, or most dairy products for that matter, making it more than twice as expensive as it would be in the US. Imagine paying $20 for a small hunk of Swiss cheese. It's ridiculous. This is why I settled for the less expensive Munster for my sandwiches.) I can now make all the western food I could ever want in my dorm's kitchen (although we don't have an oven, so maybe not all the food I want.)

The next exciting thing that happened was this Monday when my church friends decided to invite me to go bike riding with them. Apparently there is a place two metro stops away from me where people can rent bikes and go riding on a specified bike/running path that runs along the Shing Mun River in Shatin. The views were gorgeous and the company was great. I ended up sweating quite a bit during the 20km (12 mile) trip. I definitely plan to go again.

Part of the river view from the bike trail. There are tons of mountains in the area



Tuesday was a dull day until 9:00 when one of the batch one students of the IBCE program (I'm in batch two, the two batches overlap during the summer) told us about this half-price sushi deal at this nice place called Sushi One. The restaurant obviously gets all of their fish fresh daily, so to avoid having to throw out the fish that wasn't used that day, they make all of their sushi and sashimi half price from 10:00pm to midnight provided that each person spends $80 HKD. By the way, that's really easy to do with sushi even if it isn't full price. They had some of the best salmon sashimi I have ever tasted. It was amazing. I highly recommend it for anyone who is in Hong Kong and craving sushi.

That's really been all that's happened in the past few weeks. Other than that I've just been going to class and doing homework. This week I had to give an 8 minute speech about myself in Chinese. I made it to 7.5 minutes which is a great accomplishment in my mind. This was without reading from a script, just a notecard with my outline in English. I consider this a great milestone in my Mandarin-speaking education.

I was going to go to Shenzhen, China again today, but two days ago I got bitten by some small creature (I think it was a spider) and now my left foot is swollen like a balloon and I can't comfortably wear shoes. Does anyone have a good cure for this?

Over the River, On the Subway, to Mainland China I Go!

So yesterday marked one month since I moved to Hong Kong. My classmates and I celebrated by going out to Lan Kwai Fong (LKF), a road in Hong Kong island that is famous for its nightlife. Now, the interesting thing about LKF is that not only is it filled with clubs, but the people there make any excuse to throw a huge party in the area. We went on June 30, which was a Thursday. That night was crazy because not only is Thursday traditionally ladies night in the area but, June 30th is when the Canadians in the area throw a celebration for Canada Day (the celebration is punnily called Canada D'eh). The entire street was decorated in Canadian flags and booths on the side of the street offered cowboy hats with the Canadian flag on it or flag tattoos for answering Canadian trivia. I can only imagine the celebrations LKF will have for the Fourth of July. Alas, I have school on Tuesday so I can't stay up late. Oh well, we are planning on cooking burgers and hotdogs, and acting as annoyingly American as possible.

Now I suppose you're wondering how I went to LKF on a Thurday when I have class on Friday. The answer to that is that Friday was a public holiday in Hong Kong celebrating the anniversary of the British returning Hong Kong to China. Nothing much exciting happened that day.......except that I went to CHINA!!! That's right, I crossed the border into mainland China. One of my classmates, Sheimaliz, and I had been planning on going to Shenzhen, the Chinese city directly across the border from Hong Kong, and so we talked about it with our afternoon teacher, who is from Shenzhen. She kindly offered to take us there and to help us get through customs. We met her at the train station at 10am and set off on the 30 minute MTR journey. Getting through customs wasn't difficult, especially since we had visas for Hong Kong and mainland China. It was a relief once we got across the border, though, because I was finally able to read signs and understand people (to an extent). Signs in Hong Kong are written in traditional characters, which I cannot read, and people speak Cantonese, which I cannot understand. But in China people use simplified characters and speak Mandarin, both of which I am learning. So, going to Shenzhen made for great Chinese practice.

Our first stop was to our teacher's house to meet her family and eat lunch. She had graciously offered to have us over and called her mom ahead of time to tell her that we were coming. The homemade Chinese food was amazing. We had the most tender beef I have ever tasted, amazing tofu, and a whole fish with its head (our teacher told us that this is how fish is usually prepared because it shows that it is fresh). For dessert, we had melon and lychee (a fruit that reminds me of mamones). During lunch, we talked to her mother and little sister in Mandarin because neither of them spoke English. I must say that for only taking one year of Chinese, I was able to carry on a decent conversation. After lunch, we watched some of the weather report so that our teacher could see if we picked up any vocabulary from the weather chapter we had just finished in class. We also were able to look at her father's artwork. He is a traditional watercolor artist, and the beautiful paintings filled their house.

After leaving our teachers house, Sheimaliz and I went to find a street market called Dong Men. It was a shopping paradise where I could use my Mandarin skills to haggle for almost anything. The street was filled with clothes, jewelry, shoes, cosmetics, hats, electronics, anything you could want, and all for extremely cheap. Well, the "prices" weren't cheap, but the real point of going to one of these markets is to haggle,  and if you know how to bargain, you can get almost any price you want to. I've learned that the secret to haggling in China is to lower the price at least 70% at first, and to be able to walk away if they give you a price that you think is too high. They will almost always run after you and give you the price you want. of course it was even more fun for me since I was able to bargain entirely in Chinese!!!! Points for Chelsea! I ended up getting two dresses that fit me except for the fact that they are much too short because I am much taller than curvier than the average Chinese woman. However, I also found leggings to put underneath the dresses, so I'll look decent.

Afterwards, we walked around the ritzy part of town and then tried to find the tourist spots so that we could take some pictures. We didn't find any tourist spots, but guess what we did find.....WALMART!!!!! That's right, we found a Chinese Walmart. Of course we had to go in. I ended up buying a few DVDs. After that, all we had time to do was get dinner before we returned to Hong Kong and to the dorm. We were planning on a nice hot pot dinner where you cook your own food in a broth, but we didn't have enough time, so we ate Subway. By the way, Subway is not a good food chain to open in China because they don't like to eat cold, uncooked food.....unless it's sushi.

We ended up getting back to the dorm around 10:30 after having to get through customs by ourselves which still wasn't all that hard. Saturday and Sunday were fairly unexciting, especially since I have come down with a case of laryngitis and cannot speak. However, tomorrow is the Fourth of July and I am very exciting to celebrate.

Me in front of the Shenzhen Walmart