Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon is going to be hit by a typhoon Friday a week. And I’m going anyway.
I’ve come all the way to Hong Kong and the best airfare I find is on United Airlines. I’ll be going to SGN from late 27 to early 31 Oct for the princely sum of 1275 HKD tax-in r/t. Rock.
Might hit Macau again this weekend, too. Got to get out of this place more.
Chopsticks aren’t the only wooden slivers of Chinese culture slipping under my skin here, but they’re part of something I meant to mention in my previous post (I’m not as shallow and unappreciative as it might seem when I’m muttering about some tiny injustice).
Sharing dishes at dinner is the only normal way now. Hepatitis immunizations make the luxury restaurant option of serving chopsticks unnecessary, as we all poke in to piles of delicious food with our own two sticks. We can usually get away with ordering one or two dishes fewer than the number of diners. The two times I’ve sat down to an individual meal in the past month or so, I’ve felt weird. That’s just not done. Food is for everyone. I like that a lot.
There is no update. I didn’t burn. Excellent.
One of my textbooks has changed from a three-hour reserve reading to a seven-day reserve reading. Checked out through Tuesday. This isn’t helping me prepare presentation materials for Monday.
Dinner last night, at the infamous Mei King (where we eat when we say “Fu Tai”), was very good—we ordered well. Dishes I hadn’t tried before included some type of Egg Foo Yung (Chinese omelet), Singapore vermicelli, and Indonesian boneless pork (with sizable bones and covered with some sort of salad dressing, disturbing, but somehow still good).
I can write my Chinese name. Everyone else can write most of the words we’ve studied so far. I’m not used to being this far behind in a language class. The method everyone recommends does work—I learned my name by mindlessly writing it over and over. Unfortunately I’m not at the level of detachment from my surroundings required to do this in class like everyone else does. I don’t know that I’m writing it correctly or recognizably, but I can tell what it is.
I can write 哈达能, though, so I’m going to be proud of myself for a while. I might add it to my name tag on my door, if it doesn’t mean something bizarre in Cantonese (Curtis?).
Our excursion to Sai Kung ran into choppy water, so we went to Lamma Island instead. After attempting to put in at a beach where our small boat couldn’t safely dock, we settled for what is known as Power Station Beach. It was just as charming as it sounds. I had some fun, though, and came back slightly burned for my trouble (though we rarely saw the sun peaking through the clouds/haze/smog).
The boat trip was exciting in a disagreeable way, with heavy pitch and roll along with scattered seasickness and a seizure on our way out. The ride back was less traumatizing but just as erratic in quality.
I got dumped all-too-easily from the “banana boat” into some of the nastiest salt water I’ve yet had the pleasure of having forced down my throat. Attempts at beach volleyball and Sea-Monkey in the Middle were more fun and required less effort. Stepped on (but did not break) a light bulb during the volleyball. I’ll take that as an omen of luck.
Well, not new, but new in part to me. I managed to snag one of the Lingnan copies of HK Magazine (free English-language nightlife weekly) and after getting a chance to read all the way through one I’m floored: for WVians, it’s what Graffiti would be with competent editing and a world class city full of exciting things to do. You can dream about that while the mercury flirts with freezing, and I’ll just stick around here for a while.
It won’t win any awards for subtlety: it carries the always… interesting “Savage Love” and this week’s cover story is titled “How Drunk are We?” But it also tells me what this weekend’s “Street Carnival” in Lan Kwai Fong is about (Hong Kong isn’t very good about putting Mardi Gras in the right half of the year or so) and that a new Almodóvar film is opening. Cool.
Almost all of tomorrow will be sucked up by an OMIP-organized excursion by boat to Sai Kung, in the North-eastern New Territories. We’ll be going the scenic way by boat from the TST public ferry pier, which I don’t quite understand. If the included lunch is as big as it sounds, I’ll get over it quickly. I’ll go back to being bitter if we are “grouped” and forced to satisfy the local fetish for “educational” “games” most of us thought we’d escaped some time after second grade or so. Afterward I should be thoroughly pooped but will probably let myself be dragged to LKF.
I’m starting to get tempted to ignore my promise to not travel [how many times can I type “to?”], as low-ish fares to Taipei and semi-workable flight times over the Cheung Yeung long weekend (Monday 30 Oct. is off) beckon. Hm.
Monday brings el desayuno con el Presidente, which is something WVU definitely doesn’t do. WVU also doesn’t allow “spirit teams” of sociopaths to stand outside dorms and scream “wake-up songs” in the early morning hours, so I’m not going to beat up on it too much. I’ll also go to Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong for a crack at a few of the “Western Grocery Stores” (which we speak of reverently almost to the point of including air quotes) as Team America shops for goodies for its Wednesday Lingnan International Day booth. I’ve heard rumors on the Internets about the existence of “Sun Chips” and “root beer” and other whispers from my past, and I’m eager to put them to rest—in my stomach.
I need food, bye.
The presentation was OK on Friday. That guy who likes to launch into mercilessly irrelevant blather about Chomsky in class was, on a day when I was discussing his idol, speechless. I was kind of looking forward to some debate from him…
Friday was Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrating the Harvest Moon. Coincidentally, the moon was near apogeeperigee [I’m not an astronomer for a reason, oops] and bigger[-looking] this year. At noon the sky was overcast, but it cleared nicely by the evening. Went down near Causeway Bay and saw the dragons and lanterns and all that, but ended up home early (on a night when trains ran late!) due to a miscommunication.
Saturday was a public holiday (in HK Saturday is normally a workday) to let everyone get some sleep. I did. The Mainland gets a whole “golden week” off for it.
Today, I also slept. Watched a Lingnan U. v. Orange Team football match on the campus pitch. We got killed.
I hope you, dear reader, didn’t have too many mooncakes forced down your throat this weekend. I did get to try some “non-traditional ones” which were interesting (and easier to get down).
Tomorrow: a week of school without any festivals. Ick.
My absentee ballot arrived in the mail today, a day after I asked the Consulate to send me a write-in form. Oops. It’ll go to good use for someone else, though.
The ballot is rather thin this election in my precinct: no school board shenanigans, just one senator, and the usual two-year offices. I undervoted a bit, since several of my incumbents lost my vote over the past few years without having sufficiently impressive or repugnant competition to get me going. I did get to show the Mountain Party some love instead of explicitly throwing my vote away for one office, and that’s always fun.
I could have mailed the (US postage affixed) envelope from the Consulate by APO/FPO for free, but since it’s about HK$40 r/t away I splurged and spent HK$6.10 on local stamps, after getting lots of practice signing my name on the envelope.
On my way, I dared to enter the local stationery store (which looks like a Hello Kitty boutique) and find a padded envelope for something I’ve been trying to send for a while. Sending that gave me the opportunity of licking a $20 stamp for the first time in my life—an important milestone, no doubt.
Enough postage. Worked on the first of my tutorial presentations today, which I will need to remember to wake up for at 9:30 tomorrow. It’ll be a blast. It’d be more of a blast if the class were about psycholinguistics (as titled) instead of first language acquisition, but I’ll survive.
Having relatively important classes on Monday, Friday, Tuesday, and every other Thursday is not doing wonders for my travel plans. I may try to restrict myself to local travel, even on these three-day weekends. The low United fare to Ho Chi Minh is tempting, but the return flight is once a day in the morning—too early to see anything in HCMC that day if I leave Monday, but too late to get me back in time for Tuesday morning class if I leave Tuesday. I guess the three-day weekends may need to stay within ferry range. Zhuhai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen/Shekou, Dongguan, hmmm.
I am officially done (until I panic and send more in November) with law school applications for now. One recommender’s letter is the only obstacle to my application’s getting tossed in front of the committees that will determine my destiny (next Fall, anyway). Some committees, fortunately, are impatient and already reviewing my application with the two letters currently in: cheers to them.
I have an informal presentation in a tutorial on Friday, and a larger one two weeks from tomorrow. A dictation exercise threatens in Mandarin next Tuesday. I guess it’s not exactly a mid-term crunch, but it may be as close as I’ll get here.
Mandarin was distressingly distressing on Tuesday—the teacher led off by asking me a question using a particle she hadn’t taught us. I never really recovered. We ended up getting her on a long tangent with words for different countries (how to express your nationality: I [to be] [country] person, so WÅ shì MÄ›iguó rén). I need to get a binder and organize all my floating workbook, textbook, and chicken scratch note-taking pages.
OK, the fireworks were pretty cool.
It’s the PRC’s National Day today. I’m not that excited.
There might be some cool fireworks over the Harbour tonight—hopefully I’ll get out to them—but as communist as I’m sometimes accused of being I have a hard time celebrating anything to do with the Beijing government.
64.
