Just like orientation week!

Wow, lots has happened in the past week. Classes, new people and new experiences.

Classes seem promising so far. Of course, that's what I said last year before the cruel truth revealed itself. Ahem. This term I'm taking:

• Beginner Putonghua 2
• History of US-Sino Relations
• Introduction to International Politics

And I don't know what else. I'm trying to sign up for Introduction To Comparative Politics, but I'm not showing up on the class list, so I guess I'll have to try again. I have to admit that I'm pretty psyched about the International Politics class. Well, maybe not about the class, but about my T.A. He's freakin' hawt! (For mom and dad who need a translation from cool-speak, that means "hot" :P)

I also made a new personal mission for my first few weeks of the new term. I'm working hard to meet the new exchange students. It's a bit tough for us old students because we didn't participate in the second orientation week, so the new students don't know us and have kind of clumped together.

However, I did manage to infiltrate a few groups. After the first day of classes, Peggy told me about a "Tea Party" for new students at main campus, so we headed down there to take advantage of the situation. Well, turns out it was a tea party for the new students and their hosts, but they let us in anyways. (Yay free food!) I sat with a random group of girls and ended up going out to Ikea and Shatin with them the next day. They invited me out this afternoon too, but considering what I did last night, there was no hope in hell that I was going to do anything else. (Don't worry, last night's details will be covered further below.)

I don't really remember what I did the next morning, but as mentioned, I hit up Ikea and Shatin with the girls, had dinner with them, got mocked for pimping Mong Kok so much (I really need to stop spouting how much I love that area) and so on. Antonette was with us too, but we ended up having to leave around 7:30 because we were expected back at I-house.

Why did we need to flee back to I-House? That's because there was a snack party to go to! What's a snack party? It's a smorgsdaborg of food. Hee. Because all of us had just finished a plethora of travelling, we decided to get a bunch of snacks together and gorge. (It was Ida's idea first because she brought a bunch of snacks back from Finland.) We had cheeses and goodies from Finland, candies from Thailand and Taiwan, candy from Sweden, cookies from Malaysia, Pringles from Singapore and so on. It was so fun. More pictures from the snack party can be found here.

The snack party is also where I met Becky, another new exchange student. I volunteered to take her out the next day and show her where she could get her Chinese visa, so off we went with her friend Emmy after the next day of classes. Unfortunately the office I took them to didn't process American visas - apparently only their consulate can. Whoops. We ended up going to Mong Kok afterwards.

As mentioned many times before, I love Mong Kok. But I have to admit, it was refreshing to see it with new eyes. We wandered down the Women's Street and Emmy and Becky loved it. They need to work on their bargaining a bit more though - and learn their exchange rates. Becky was pissed because she bought 4 cheap cardboard street signs of HK areas for $45HKD each... Meaning like, $4USD - a major ripoff in my opinion. Oh well, we all make dumb purchases once in awhile. (Mine was a brown purse with a sequin dragon on it - I found them for cheaper and better quality at a mall 15 minutes up the road.)

That night we went to Lan Kwai Fong. I'll admit that I had never been to LKF before - I'm not a huge clubbing person, and I therefore I missed out on a lot last term. I decided to rectify the situation by latching on to Becky and meeting her friends. Anyways, we got to LKF around 12:30 and it was a freakin' GHOST TOWN. (Of course, it WAS a Wednesday, so it shouldn't be too surprising.) To make a long night short, we ended up not finding a place to dance, not having anything to drink, and going home by 2:30. The bonus of the night was meeting a french guy from our campus and chatting with him. I never knew him that well but we had a good time on the taxi on the way home.

Luckily the next night was better. Thursdays are Ladies Night's, and Antonette wanted to go out to LKF for one last time before returning home to America. Once again I got to meet some new people (although they weren't literally new - I had just never met them the last term). Waiting for everyone at the KCR station was amusing though. So many other exchange students were going out - we filled up half a KCR car! I think the locals were afraid of us.

Anyways, LKF was fun. We were such a large group (seriously at least 30 students went out) that we split up. Our group went to Edge for some free drinks at first. Hoo boy, we sure drank quickly. We only stayed at Edge for like an hour because it was too crowded, but when we left, I was dizzy from guzzling my alcomohol. (And if I was dizzy, can you picture how the little asian girls I was with were feeling?) We stumbled our way down to Hei Hei, a slightly more higher class club (err, in comparison to Edge), trying to sober up a few members of our group.

I have to admit, I much prefered Hei Hei to Edge. Hei Hei had a nicer ambience and was less packed. They also had a cool lounge on a balcony outside (a novelty in the urban HK jungle). I met a nice Canadian guy who just finished his semester here in Hong Kong. Nothing terribly exciting happened though.

We then decided to go over to the Wan Chai district and meet up with some of our friends there. Well, Wan Chai at night is very different from day. Our frickin' taxi driver took us to the furthest possible location that we wanted to go to just to rack up our fare and it took us probably around 45minutes to locate our friends. This is when we met Mischa and Max, two guys from Germany, both thoroughly wasted.

We moseyed on down to a place called Strawberry. If you're ever in Hong Kong and want to pick up a hooker, Strawberry's the place to go. They were there in droves. There was also a live band. We mainly just sat with some alcohol, but after awhile, Mischa decided to get up and dance. Well, try to dance. Or maybe he was only stumbling around and pointing at the floor. Let's put it this way - no one knew what the hell he was doing. Even the hookers were avoiding him. Amusingly, but also not, one guy approached Antonette and proposed to her. (Err, in the hooker fashion, not the marriage fashion.) We dunno why the hell he'd approach her when there was an entire table of prostitutes at the table beside us. Aiyah.

But the time we left Strawberry, it was 7am. Peggy wanted to have breakfast, so we bid Mischa and Max goodbye (poor Annelie had to help Mischa stumble back to campus) and found a cheap noodle house. [Edit: Apparently on the way back to campus, Mischa kept asking people if they had eggs.] I felt bad for the guy who ate with us. He's super friendly and kept wanting to chat, but I was so exhausted, I couldn't focus on his conversation.

I ended up dozing most of the way back to CUHK (by now the trains were running again) and sadly, had to walk half way to I-house in my heels. The walk had awakened me slightly, so I decided to have a shower before going to bed. :) So now I've woken up (around 2pm). Yay for lack of sleep and disturbed sleeping schedules. The plans for tonight include relaxing and going for Hot Pot (cook your own meal/chinese deal thingie) with Antonette.

Toodles!

P.S.
Oh, I wanna show you guys this picture. It's a huge wasp/gnat/creature that I saw on Limin's window sill. I swear to god this thing was nearly the length of my thumb. If I didn't see it fly up and land, I'd honestly have though it was a rubber insect or something. It was creepy!