The funniest thing I’ve seen in a loooooong time hahaha oh my god I had to stifle my laughter because I was in the library. BUT SO GREAT! Please watch each and every gif carefully.. and over and over again. So so so great: Animals That Are Huge Jerks
Haven’t updated in a while, but I’ll try and go chronologically:
1) Friday, Feb 22: Shenzhen
2) Haggling
3) Softball and Hiking at Dragon’s Back
4) Cambodia and Thailand, bad exchange student habits and being afraid of my Chinese teacher.
5) 15th day of the lunar month (Feb 24): making glutinous rice balls 湯圓 😀
Connecting the East to the West. 😀 haha
1. FRIDAY FEB 22 – SHENZHEN
Shenzhen is where all the foreign shopaholics/cheapaholics go for their consumerism fix. AKA, cheap cheap cheap shopping. We took the MTR to Lo Wu（羅湖), walked across the border, and then took the Shenzhen Metro two stops over to Dongmen (東門). Getting to Dongmen was easy enough.. figuring out where the damn shopping area was a bit more troublesome. We got out at exit A and walked left, kept to the left, and then walked straight for a bit until we hit an area that looked like a mix between Causeway Bay and Mongkok. We asked some people along the way but they were just like “this IS dongmen”.. so helpful.
Anyways, we found the place after about 15-20 minutes, and then we shopped for about 8 hours. IT WAS GREAT! GREAT! I need to expand my vocabulary…. Anyways, I ended up getting 3 pairs of pants (including green ones, so that I now have an ALL GREEN OUTFIT. That’s right. ALL green), 3 iphone cases and 2 packs of iphone stickers (mostly gifts for others), some souvenirs, a white dress shirt, and a giant new shiny red backpack, all for about HKD$420, or CAD$58.
Shenzhen wasn’t sketchy at all and I didn’t have to wear my backpack in front of me like a lot of people suggested. I DID see a mother using the sidewalk sewer vent as a public washroom for her toddler, and while this would probably be considered an act of vandalism/indecency/public defacement back home… it’s obviously not in China.
2. Haggling, for those who are curious.
I’m still getting used to haggling. Sometimes a shopkeeper would tell me an item is $260, but that they’d sell it to me for $220, to which I’d say “no” or “I’ll look around and come back.” The most common response is “there’s no need to look around!” or “name your price then, if it works it works and if it doesn’t it doesn’t, doesn’t hurt to name a price” OR, if they were the type who was tired of haggling: “look, are you interested or not?”
Sometimes I’d just ignore what they said or smiled and walked away, and as I did they would yell prices at me to get me to come back. This is a good way to gauge how much you should maybe be paying for an item. This is what happened with the bags. The bags (all different kinds/sizes/functions–from purses to school backpacks to traveller’s backpacks) are ridiculously cheap at Shenzhen; regardless of what kind of bag you’re getting I wouldn’t pay more than 50-60 yuan (about CAD$7-9), but you can get them as low as 38 yuan (CAD$5-6). I’m probably going to get another backpack before I leave to go back home since the build of the backpacks seem pretty durable and they have styles that we would never find back home in Vancouver.
For the white dress shirt, the lady said it was ~$260. I said “no,” they told me to name a price, I said $40, and they would scoff and say something like “impossible” or “no way, no one would sell it for that much!” When I walked away, they would accept my offer of $40. Doesn’t happen all the time, but happens often enough. I have a feeling that I still overpay for everything since I’m a foreigner and don’t know the prices yet.
3. SATURDAY AND SUNDAY: SOFTBALL AND HIKING AT DRAGON’S BACK
Had our softball game against St John (Aquilas) on Saturday. From what I know at HKU so far, you need to be either 1) rich, 2) good-looking, and/or 3) powerful with connections to get into the St. John’s hall. The selection process to get into their hall is a lot more stringent than other halls, and so obviously they’re a bit more intimidating. I built up this whole image of them as being so “elite” that I was scared to play them, but actually they weren’t as good as I thought they’d be… I mean we still lost 10-5, but I thought we would lose like 20-5 hahaha.
The view before we started hiking Dragon’s Back.
Does this look like a dragon’s back to you?
Some of the girls 🙂
On Sunday we went hiking at Dragon’s Back. The trail itself is only like an hour long, and then it takes another hour or so to get to Big Wave Bay (the beach area). The trail was scenic enough but I was kind of expecting more… when we got to the end of Dragon’s back my response was “… That was it? That was dragon’s back? We’re done?” So I guess the feeling is that you finish it before you think you should. At Big Wave Bay there were lots of people surfing and flying kites; nearby are rental shops and shops selling all kinds of beach goodies to keep you amused. The beach was more foreigners than locals, ha.
Big Wave Bay. Would be a really nice place to spend the day.
Big Way Bay
You see the surfer?! There were more I swear… and the waves were okay, didn’t get too high. From my poor memory and sense of judgment, I’d say the waves were like 10 feet?
The group at Big Wave Bay. Stole the pic from a friend on facebook hahah thanks Dana!
4. SUNDAY NIGHT AND MONDAY MORNING: PANIC, CHAOS, LATE NIGHTS
I’m now officially spending my reading break in Thailand and Cambodia! Thailand from Mar 7-13 and Cambodia from Mar 13-17. Booking tickets was stressful and comedic at the same time; we realized at 11:30pm that the deal we found ended at 12am, so we were forced to jump off into the deep end and just go for it.
When we were buying the tickets, my friend’s transaction went through first and then the rest of ours got declined; turns out she bought the last ticket for that flight time LOL. So my friend and I chose a different time, but then her debit card got rejected, then her credit card was rejected, and in my haste to buy the ticket I forgot to uncheck the box that asked if you wanted to check-in luggage (which costs more, about USD$15 each way). So I paid $30 more for my ticket than my friends did, and my friend had to help buy tickets for the friend whose cards were rejected. We ended up buying everything RIGHT at midnight, right before the promo prices ended.
Then I walked into Chinese class monday morning to the announcement that my presentation and midterm is on March 8. I WANTED TO BANG MY HEAD AGAINST A CONCRETE WALL. God I never would have dreamed of doing this back home, but exchange has made me stupid and my fear was amplified by the fact that my teacher reminds me of Cristina from Grey’s Anatomy. I was so sure that the teacher would hate me and forever deem me as that exchange student who cares only about pass/fail and has terrible study habits, but when I asked to do my midterm/presentation earlier she was surprisingly cool about it. YES, RELIEF!
I’m just really excited for Cambodia. I want to see Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields of Cambodia!
5. GLUTINOUS RICE BALLS!!! 😀
It’s a tradition to eat glutinous rice balls on the 15th day of the lunar month. The girls on my floor made some from scratch, and we put hard rock sugar/dark chocolate/milk chocolate inside. The soup was just melted rock sugar, ginger, and hot water. So so so yummy and comforting. I love mine with sesame filling inside but apparently sesame is fickle to work with.
Mixing the rice flour and water together to make the rice balls 🙂
Ignore the scary butcher knife hahaha.
The finished product! The green ones are the ones that we put matcha powder inside.
A girl on my floor made these for her boyfriend. Isn’t it cute?!
Also, dear HKU: who the heck manages your central air conditioning?!?!? You should fire them for wasting energy. It’s freezing inside the classrooms but outside is all humid and warm. You really don’t need to use air conditioning this early on in the semester. It’s not even that hot yet.
VANCOUVERKONG. 