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?