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Well, I don’t know, but my previous roommate is gone and a new one (a local as tall as I am if not taller, by the name of Alex) is here. Glad nobody told me.

Psycholinguistics was bigger than I thought: the classroom was full. It seems to be an education requirement and more focused on acquisition. That’s still cool. Nobody wanted to sit near the white kid, but the number of people in the class forced the issue.

I’ve heard many people are having to drop classes because the readings are in Chinese. Apparently the definition of “English” in the class list is flexible. I have only one class (other than Mandarin) from a Chinese professor—it’s tomorrow—so there’s only one chance for that to happen to me. We’ll see tomorrow afternoon.

Had the first Mandarin class and almost every exchanger is in it, that should be fun. Unlike learning Mandarin. Who came up with tones?

On the other hand, I should have a Chinese name by next class.

I think I can handle the four (five? neutral should count, right?) though. As for the 5-9 of Cantonese, uh.

You can’t check VHS out of the library. Boo. On the other hand, the movie and serials collection (DVD and VHS) is nothing short of fantastic. Hopefully we’ll get a group together to watch Airplane! in a study room tomorrow night.

I’ve uploaded a few stolen (from Cassie) pictures of Jessalyn’s birthday celebration.

Tomorrow morning is my first appointment with Hong Kong’s bureaucracy (since entering the SAR)—I’m to be at the Yuen Long immigration office at 0945 to apply for my HKID. I’ve never actually been to Yuen Long, so I’m not sure when to leave, but the office is in some kind of shopping center so I’m sure there will be something (FOOD) to spend time on. I guess I should try to be out of here by 9 just in case.

Today I went up to Chung Fu and ordered a pair of eyeglasses with a titanium frame and higher-index plastic for what looked like a reasonable price. Since they took a credit card I have leverage if anything’s wrong with the product, which I’ll pick up next Tuesday.

The various trips have returned and we were all on campus today to get ready for class tomorrow. But first things first—it was Jessalyn’s birthday, so a group of us went out to the Pizza Hut in the Town Centre (someone had cravings?).

This is a Pizza Hut unlike one you’ve ever seen. It looked to one girl more like a Cheesecake Factory, and it had a dessert menu nearly as big. Of course, there were pizzas: “regular” a hair bigger than a US Personal Pan, and a “large” which could comfortably serve two people.

The big special, advertised in front, is a pizza with salmon and cream cheese in the crust. We didn’t get the special.

We did, however, get cheese, veggie, pepperoni, Hawaiian (which comes with chicken, not just ham, in these parts), and meat lovers’ pies. And for a mere fifteen—sorry, fifty (who made those two prices sound alike in English? They’re making a killing here) HKD we got a Kodak moment (I’m hoping to steal pictures soon): the entire staff gathered around, singing Happy Birthday (sadly, in English). They also distributed the ice cream cake (itself distributed in dry ice—the cake-makers don’t fool around) a couple people had sneaked off to buy earlier.

Later, after playing the “how many foreigners does it take to cross the street?” game, we made it to a bar that some of the others had discovered previously. The Argentina v. Brazil game was on, which was a nice touch. The seating area was pretty good, the mandatory couvert charge (mandatory snacks, 50 HKD) not so nice. There we stayed (with two of our group bringing mattress pads picked up at Japan Home in the mall along with them) until just too late to catch a minibus or Light Rail back (0030), landing us in the green NT taxis I’d so far avoided.

And after the small hike back from Fu Tai, we’re back and I have class in a bit over eight hours. I’ve set my alarm for quite a bit too early. My roommate, of course, shows no signs of being close to sleep. Should be interesting. After class I should be able to pick up my real Lingnan ID, and then …? Probably more law application work. We’ll see. It feels a bit like the end of RA training, right down to moving in two weeks early. I’m exhausted from the past two weeks of running around, and now I have to handle classes too?

Expect a report on POL 301 (Global Environmental Politics) in the near future.

Though I’m up late—I’m looking to call a professor with office hours from 1:30 to 3:30—the cough isn’t quite so bad. My strategy of lethargy may be working (or I may just be getting over it).

Today I worked on law school applications, finding myriad errors in every one. The “detail-oriented” nitpicking possible on these is mind-blowing. One application will ask for a date in MM/YY, another in MM/DD/YY, another in MM/DD/YY. Invariably the Common Information Form will fill in the date with an incorrect format.

I had McDonalds today. I know. But they had something I really wanted to try—the Fàn-tastic (where fàn is rice). Take a relatively normal chicken sandwich or beef burger (relatively normal means “including red cabbage,” I’ll admit) and replace the buns with patties of rice and mushroom, “grilled to perfection.” So it’s kind of a mushroom-burger-bun burger. It wasn’t that bad, I guess. I was also able to replace the fries with four big slices of pineapple. It’s still a sad meal, but I had to know what it was like.

While in Fu Tai (where I visited the McDonalds) I stopped by Manning’s and Park n’ Shop, Fu Tai’s representatives of the Hong Kong pharmacy and grocery duopolies (their “competitors” are Watson’s and Wellcome, if you were wondering). At Manning’s I picked up some cough tools, which I may not need, and found that the bait-and-switch practices of Mong Kok extend to simple pharmacies in the semi-rural surroundings of Tuen Mun: a bag of cough drops, tissues, and Robitussin was conspicuously marked $20 but rang up at $36.50. My knowledge of the point-n-grunt method got me the news that the big sticker saying $20 doesn’t matter. If I didn’t know the price would be identical in the Park n’ Shop’s aisles…

In Park n’ Shop I picked up a bag each of dried mango and potato chips. They’re gone. Oops.

This evening I knocked off The Professor and the Madman which was as good as I’d expected. I guess it shouldn’t surprise most of you that a book about a dictionary would excite me. Thanks for the unconscious rec., commenter I shamelessly ripped that book from.

Ten minutes until office hours. Time to go ahead and try (and be humiliated by having recorded an incorrect extension). Here goes.

Since it was so nice, I prolonged my cough by way of a visit to the “Big Buddha,” the 23m Tian Tan Buddha above the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island. Since many of my currently-abroad colleagues went there when I went to Central, I figured I’d increase our overlap.

Lantau is a large island (Hong Kong’s largest, actually) south of Tuen Mun as seen in my pictures from Butterfly Beach yesterday. I took the “normal” way getting there—light rail to Ferry Pier, a HK$15 ferry to the Tung Chung New Town (spawn of the airport), and New Lantao Bus #23 to Ngong Ping (HK$16 today, HK$25 when they went on Sunday). The trade-off for the Sunday surcharge, applicable to all NLB routes, is vastly increased frequency of service, today’s lack of which and my tardiness postponed my visit to the Lantau fishing village of Tai O.

Back to what I did visit though: after lovely views of the South side of Lantau and the small islands and sea beyond and quite a few narrow mountain roads, I arrived in Ngong Ping. Aside: the roads were under heavy construction, often leaving only one lane open. Many times instead of a pair of STOP/SLOW flagmen these pieces were governed by temporary traffic lights which detect traffic at the other side. Way cool.

There isn’t much to say about the Buddha that isn’t said in pictures. The vegetarian meal at the monastery wasn’t too bad. The monastery grounds themselves were very peaceful and atmospheric, but I would have felt like a heel pulling out a camera and gawking at the monks doing their bell-ringing and chanting so no pictures for you.

The last bus for Tai O had left by the time I was done with my meal, and I didn’t feel desperate enough to hail a rare blue Lantau taxi (green up here in the New Territories, Red in HK and Kowloon), so I headed back to Tung Chung and looked around the development briefly. Across from the Tung Chung Crescent I hailed a bus E33, the closest thing to an airport bus serving Tuen Mun. This took forever and was probably not worth the HK$2 savings… traffic was gnarly at 5 p.m., who’d imagine that? I did get to see the Lantau Link bridge by day, though. Very slowly.

I got off at the Tuen Mun Town Plaza, which was bustling—I’d never made it there at the right hours before. A few “puff pork floss buns” and a quick LR ride to Siu Hong later, the adventures are over for the day.

OK, I get the hint—since I’ve been asked this by literally every person I’ve talked to in the States since arriving: Monday 4 September (this coming).