The first week of the month, a friend of a friend, W, from Stanford came to HK to start her second job. She graduated from Stanford undergrad the same year as me and then went to Boston to work for the last two years. Now she's out here working for another company. We have some mutual friends from Stanford so we met up at Sham Shui Po and had dim sum. There's a pretty good dim sum place near where I live. I totally forgot about it when my parents were here. Oh wells, next time.
We walked around the neighborhood for a little bit afterwards and then she went off to look for apartments. I tried to tell her that it's not necessary to look so soon but I think she's still on the US schedule of apartment searching. Anyway, I went to work that day. That Sunday, I got some mint seeds and started a mint plant at the office. It hasn't sprouted yet but hopefully there will be something happening soon.
I went to the gym with a friend from work. We've been meaning to do this for a while now and finally found a time that works for both of us. We got there with the intention of joining a class but I think we got the schedule wrong because we caught the last of the class instead of the beginning. We headed for the treadmill and I went to warm up on the elliptical for 5 minutes before joining her. In that short amount of time, she got targeted by a couple of the personal trainers at the gym. They had her working out for an hour or so and then started selling their services. I think she signed up for something in the end. This is one of the very annoying things about HK - people are always trying to sell you stuff. We went for dinner afterwards and then got coffee chendol.
The next week was another busy week at work. I had thought about going back to China for the moon festival but it didn't seem like work was getting any less busy and a friend of mine, A, from Stanford was visiting for the weekend. He arrived on the 10th, Saturday afternoon. I got W to come along and the three of us went sightseeing. I took them to the Big Buddha and let them go on the cable cars themselves. I went shopping in the outlet mall next to the MTR station. I didn't think the prices were that great but there were a lot of sales going on. I wasn't looking for anything in particular so I didn't end up buying anything.
After they got back from the cable cars, we took the bus to Mui Wo and walked along the beach for a bit. Then we got dinner at a seafood place and then took the ferry back to Central. W went to meet up with some other friends so A and I just walked around Central for a little bit and headed back to Kowloon.
The next day, A met up with another friend of his and the three of us had dim sum at the Sham Shui Po place again.
After that, we went to take the Peak Tram. We took our time walking around the mall around the Peak and found out about the moon festival celebration in Causeway Bay. It started at 7:30pm and it would take us more than half an hour on the bus to get there. I managed to convince the guys to do the 3K hike around the Peak in less time than advertised. I think I exhausted them but the view was really nice. It wasn't very hot out either so it was a very nice walk. We got on the bus with a couple of dumb American guys who were trying to flirt with two girls. I was going to die listening to their conversation.
Anyway, we found a huge lantern fish at Victoria Park and it is now my Facebook profile picture.
We then tried to go see the fire dragon dance but there was wayy too much people. The street was packed. So we gave up and headed to TST for the HK Light Show. We caught the end of the light show, which was good enough for A. By the time we finished with the light show, we were all really hungry so we ate dinner at one of the expensive malls. We had Singaporean food that was really good. The owner is supposed to be a Stanford grad. I need to make more friends in the right type of industries...We got dessert at the mango place where A managed to drop his share of the mochi. It was really funny and we laughed for 5 straight minutes.
I went to work on Monday and had a really stressful morning getting drawings printed and signed by four people. Can't believe it's so hard to get four sets of signatures. My boss felt sorry for me and helped me call a secretary and things went pretty fast after that. Since it was the Mid-Autumn Festival, a lot of people left work early. The office was pretty empty by 6pm. I met up with A and we had dinner at Mongkok. There weren't a lot of people out and all the restaurants were lacking customers. We had food at a small place and felt like the waitresses all wanted to leave as soon as we were finished. I decided to go to the restaurant because they were advertising fried mantou:
Even the Ladies Market was not very crowded. I wanted to buy a purse but the lady wasn't in so we moved on.
Then we went to Langhram Place and went up all the way up to the top. This mall has a very small footprint but is very tall. There are over 60 boutique shops that sell very cute stuff. There were statues of the western zodiac on display and A took pictures of all of them as we made our way down. We also played air hockey at one of the arcades.
2 comments:
Yay! Updates and PICTURES! I love the amt of dimsum the three of you ate...and egg tarts, love the Portuguese style, which I couldn't find in BJ, oppose to the other one which I'm just not as familiar with. And I miss fried mantous! Looks like fun. I'm glad you keep getting guests because it seems to make you get out of the office.
Haha I think HK is on the big-city schedule of apartment searching, like New York. There are a lot of open apartments in any given month. In Boston, there's been a scarcity of apartments lately and people were booked for Sept 1 months in advance this year.
Man, SO much dimsum. It's like a tower.. you look so stuffed. Yum!
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