New habits

I had a big blog message prepared yesterday, but it got erased somehow. So here's my attempt to recreate the original wackiness of my message.

Since I've come here, I've noticed a few small changes about my reactions. One of the most amusing changes is that out habit, I now say "m goi" instead of "excuse me" and "due m jue" instead of "sorry." I accidentally bumped into other exchange students and say sorry in cantonese rather than in English. This will be even more amusing when I tell you that most cantonese people here say "sorry" in English. (Or, with their accent, "sowwy.")

I think one of the main things I miss about UW is the Student Life Centre. At CUHK, there's no place like that on campus. The only place to chill is at the library... Which isn't exactly a relaxing atmosphere, especially since most of the students there actually study. The only other alternatives are going to the main student canteens on campus, but they're always super busy and noisy and not comfy at all. Yup... I definetely have a new appreciation for the SLC.

(Oh, another thing I miss about Canada... Milk. I can buy it here, but it's much more expensive (nearly $3CAD for a liter). Plus, even though I buy skimmed/low fat milk, the fact that I can practically chew the beverage kinda puts me off.

I think my chinese teacher is incapable or giving a student a perfect mark. He gave me 99% on my chinese test... And the only reason I lost the mark is because our textbook was wrong. He's also anally corrective about our chinese characters. On my first homework assignment, he went through and corrected on my characters (the character for "middle") - the only way I could have made my lines straighter is if I broke out a ruler. Even Pei-chin agreed that he was being ridiculous. Despite my mean description of him, our prof is super good. He's always happy. I've never seen him without a smile. (Which, come to think of it, is reeeally disturbing.)

Speaking of my chinese class... My sister completely slammed me and my intellect. And she did it well. We're having a competition to see who gets the higher marks, and I mentioned my 99% in my chinese character quiz. Her response: so what you're saying is that your classes are like kindergarten? You get graded on how well you can draw-- I knew you university students were slackers but come on... ;)

Damn. Should have seen that one coming.

Last night I went to Mong Kok (again) with Pei-chin and Wen Li. I'm glad I went, because I never hang out with them (well, I see Pei-chin everyday, but we never do anything together). We had a blast. They both wanted to buy shoes (I didn't want to buy anything, but I wanted to oggle the wares anyways) so we went to the shoe street of Mong Kok. This street is 2-3 city blocks long, and all it has are running shoes/sports stores. The variety of running shoes here is mind boggling. 5 hours and no purchases later, I finally cracked and had to leave. I don't mind shoe shopping, but I need to see some results of the exhibition.

The bonus of my Mong Kok night was that I finally purchases sustenance from a food stall. (Mom, you would have died from seeing the food left out in the open.) I have no idea as to what I ordered... I pointed to some random meatball looking thing and a roundish idunnowhat. The meatball thing ended up tasting like sausages, and the idunnowhat contained shredded veggies wrapped in some dough/pastry thing. It had enough oil/grease to last me a life time. I estimate that my insides will begin to liquefy and my skin boil off within the next 24 hours. I also had authentic chinese bubble tea finally. It was tea-licious. The tapioca balls were disturbingly squishy in my mouth though.

Oh, and I've finally found out what I want to do for a living. I'm going to be a silk worm farmer! I dragged my ass to my 8:30am History class (emphasis on the History) this morning... The lecture only lasted an hour! And I didn't learn any history in it! We talked about SILK FARMING! GAH! Half the time the prof just copies and pastes his information from Wikipedia, and the other half, it's not history related! Can you sense my frustration?

Tonight the tentative plan is to go see the movie, "Everlasting Regret," starring two of my all time fave actors, Sammi cheng and Daniel Wu. I'm psyched baby.

However, I'm even more psyched about this weekend. Why's that you ask? I'm headed to Beijing for 5 days! For just under $500CAD, I have a roundtrip plane ticket, 4 nights in 4 star hotels, 12 meals, a guided tour and so on. I'm going with several Americans and a local student I think. That means I have to pack tonight, then meet my friends tomorrow at 5:30am. I'm enthusiastic about the trip if not the time.

It's time for me to go procrastinate now. Fare thee well!