Farewell Renee...

First of all, I'd like to point this out. I finally progressed from Easy to Medium puzzles on Sudoku. This is probably my best score so far on a medium puzzle. Yay! Average time for solving a medium puzzle is like, 12 minutes, 5 seconds. Soon, with a bit more practice, I'll be into Hard puzzles. (If only I put as much effort into my schoolwork as I do into Sudoku.) (And oh my gosh, so creepy! I'm in the library right now and Minnie just messaged me (she's a floor above me) and yelled, "Stop playing Sudoku!)

More amusement. My Swedish friend Kristin (chinese name: Ke-si-ting) and I randomly chat on MSN all the time. However, most of our conversations are in chinese pinyin. (Mind you, we slaughter the grammar.) Here's an example!

Kristin says:
ni zuo shenme?
莫琳 says:
wo zai tushuguan, buguo, wo bu xue.
莫琳 says:
ni ne?
Kristin says:
ni zai tushuguan? hao!
Kristin says:
wo zai jia
莫琳 says:
jia? home?
莫琳 says:
Xianzai, ni zai nar?
Kristin says:
yeah i'm home! give me some credits!
莫琳 says:
oh. Oooh. I got my verbs mixed up. I thought you meant you were going home.
莫琳 says:
Ha.
莫琳 says:
I suck.
Kristin says:
skip class too often...
莫琳 says:
Shaddup.
莫琳 says:
You should come to the library. I'm going to be here all afternoon pretty much. Minus some lunch time fun.
Kristin says:
zoutian, ni zuo shenme le?
莫琳 says:
wo bu zuo anything.
莫琳 says:
wo xue shao (I studied little?) he wo qu main campus chi fan
莫琳 says:
oh, then wo kan TV
莫琳 says:
and add a bunch of "le"s in there that I forgot
Kristin says:
xiawu, wo xiang (think, not like) qu tushuguan

It's the small things that amuse us.

Some sad news though. :( My good friend, Renee, from Canada, has decided to go home at the end of the term. She was supposed to stay here for a year but since she's originally from China, HK isn't that exciting to her, and at least if she's in Canada, she can get a part-time job. So she'll be abandoning me. I'm bummed out by this because Renee's my movie buddy. Oh well, we'll see each other again sometime while we're both in Canada.

Last night Pei-chin and I had another language exchange. I walked into the room and she immediately pinned me down with questions about when we use the words "oops" and "ouch." Those two were easy to explain, but then she asked me to think of other words like that that we use... And the only one I could think of was "yikes." Dudes, can you guys think of a situation when you say "yikes?" God knows I couldn't.

She also asked about when to use "What the hell"... Now THAT was fun to explain. I told her it was either a way to say "Let's do something without worrying about the consequences" or to express confusion. It was so much fun having an excuse to say "What the hell are you talking about?" or "What the hell, let's go to Lan Kwai Fong!" Language exchanges are so much fun. (And yes dad, I'm also learning chinese through her. I learned how to say "Hao ke ai la!" meaning, "So adorable!" And it's come in handy quite a bit lately.)

This morning I made pancakes for the first time. I managed to buy all the ingredients this weekend. They were so tasty. I need to find real maple syrup though. Wen Li brought over some Golden Syrup stuff... I don't know what the story behind IT was, but it wasn't as satisfying as the real stuff.

The plan for tonight is to have Wen Li (why are all my friends only here for a term? :( ) over for dinner and I'll be making Chicken parmigana.

Today I woke up with a bit of home sickness. Well, not really home sickness, but I missed home a bit. It's a rainy day here, and all I wanted to do was wake up, go flake out on a couch with a blanket and watch TV and have my mom and dad make me dinner. 6 months to go...