Damn it!

I can never look at this logo the same way again after my Austrian male friend pointed out how it looked like upside down :(

Shen Zhen

Last update for the night because it's already 5am and I really need to reset my sleep schedule. I've been sleeping at this hour for the past week or so >.<

I went to Shen Zhen last weekend with some guys and Melody. The first thing we did there was eat some expensive but yummy dim sum （蝦餃 was 32 yuan!!!) Later we went to Xili Lake Resort because we didn't have enough time to see Windows of the World. We were walking towards the mountain it was situated by when this lady walks buy and told us she would get us in for a cheap price of 10 yuan instead of 15 yuan. Wei Png was shady enough to actually accept (I guess he could be shady if he was in the Elite Section for the National Service in Singapore for two years). The lady then gave us 6 booklets and I'm wondering...wtf is this? Some sort of passport? It was so scary going through the front gate :\ The booklet was actually for monks to get into temples for free (there were temples in this mountain). Apparently we could pass for monks O.o



The temple looked nice all and the lake was nice too I guess...I don't really know what to say about it....it was all very scenic I guess. Here are some pictures

This a picture of the lake. If I brought pondzie, he would be in this picture.



bottle of coke for just 1 yuan!!! So cheap once you cross the border!



Rock that looks like a person :P



By the end of the night, the friends I was traveling with wanted to a have a massage. Of course I'm wondering, do you they want a massage or do they want a "massage". Luckily, they wanted the first one, but when they asked a man for directions, the man thought he wanted the other "massage" and they kept telling him that he can't find this place and they were all laughing "with him". It was kinda weird..my friend couldn't run away fast enough :P In the end, they found a decent massage place :)

It's already 6:40 am. It's about time I went to bed and stop watching 下一站幸福 :P

Gambling

I went to the Jockey Club in Happy Valley last last Wednesday. The first thing I did when I got there was order some McDonalds for dinner. It was becoming a routine, especially late night McDonalds when it's 24 Hour FREE DELIVERY (after 60hkd)!!! Anyways, back to the jockey club. I just watched a couple horse raises from some bleachers for the first 20 minutes while eating my McDonalds and then went up against the fence so I can actually see horses when they ran by :P After my friends lost some money betting on horses, I thought I'd put some money on the line for "Sleep Well", number 11.



He seemed like he had good stats, won some races before and does well in long distance races so I told my friend to put 10HKD for him to place and he put it for him to win! Gah! I was so frustrated, I thought that my 10 HKD was lost forever but it had a great finishing sprint and won!!! yay!!!



my winning ticket!


and me!



I won a 12HKD profit the first time I tried to gamble..yay! Don't worry, it won't turn into a habit :P

Little Sheep Hotpot And Centurion

I honestly don't remember much about this hotpot experience. There's a Little Sheep in San Mateo and San Diego and if I remember correctly, it's really expensive but yummy. We ordered tons of food till we were full for around 8 people and it totaled to around 140 HKD per personvincluding service charge--which means less than 20USD for awesome hotpot! :) (buffet style = 138 HKD/person before service charge). It was a little troublesome ordering the meat because the beef were basically labeled different types of awesomeness (A 級，高級，超級，等等), so yea, we just chose the medium priced one which tasted very good already. So I was satisfied :)

The toilets on the other hand was very bad. First, it wasn't sanitary (liquid all over the floor). Second, there was no handle to flush the toilet with. Instead, you go out towards the sink and get a small bucket full of water from the big bucket(trashcan size) and pour it down the toilet bowl to get it to flush >.<>

Here are some random photos from that night:

Yin Yang Style Hotpot (Spicy and Non-Spicy House Special Soup)

Mushroom Mixture

Squid Balls (Very mushy pre-cooked :P)

Middle Grade (according to price) Lamb?

Middle grade beef

We should do hotpot together again when I get back to UCSD :)

That night we also played centurion which is just one shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes but we didn't have enough beer so we just did up to 50 :P I had enough sense to stop at around 25 or 30 because I could feel that I was getting a bit tipsy but everyone else kept going until around 31 because they ran out of beer. So Andrew and I ran to Queen Mary's Hospital's 7-Eleven to see if there was any beer but I guess they didn't keep any in stock cuz it was on hospital grounds :P. So we just taxi over to the nearest gas station and bought out all their refrigerated beer and taxied back :P Everyone else at that point finished their 50 shots of beer (yay...).

Ooo and the birthday boy (Cel) was given a shot of vodka midway at 12:00am which made him throw up a little (w/in a minute of downing that vodka) but he was ok in the end :) This kind of went against him because we played "I have never..." after Centurion and someone said "I have never thrown up one minute into my birthday" haha.... Some people said some very revealing and semi-uncomfortable ones such as "I have never had sex", "I have never had a three-some", "I have never kissed ______" etc. It was mostly guys who drank to those, tsk tsk. And some where mean like the British guy saying "I have never been to the United States, Australia, Singapore, North America, (and any other country represented by some present except the UK)". Pretty much everyone drank :P People were pretty messed up by the end but I was ok thankfully :)

Centurion (click to enlarge photo)!

Honeymoon Dessert

Man, hopefully I remember everything from these past 2 weeks. I'll just post everything in small bits and use the pictures I took to jog my memory :P

I went to honeymoon (http://www.honeymoon-dessert.com/en_us/ ) around two weeks ago and it is a chain store similar to Creations on Geary in San Francisco. The one I went to was in a mall within Mongkok and we went slightly before it was busy so we got seats easily for a party of 10 :) My friend ordered a banana pancake dessert which is basically some cream and banana inside a pancake I think. I didn't eat it, but he said it was delicious :P

here's what the inside looks like after one bite :O

Being the durian lover I am, I was delightfully surprised when they had such a large selection of durian dessert. I decided on a Durian in Vanilla Sauce w/ Green Tea Ice Cream. The yellow ball on the right is fresh durian and on the left is of course the green tea ice cream which was really good :) I couldn't even taste the vanilla because the durian flavor was so strong. I thought the white liquidy stuff on the bottom was durian too until I saw the menu again :P Yummy if you love Durian! Would definitely bring my dad here some time :)

Me (look at my fake buffness :P )

Never Again

I am never going to watch the sunrise near some trees again! These bugs just had a humongous feast on me. I didn't really feel it this morning, but when I woke up at 3pm this afternoon I found my legs just filled w/ these red welts! I counted it just now and I have 24 on my left leg, 10 on my right leg, and 3 on my left arm! That brings us to a total of 37 bites in one go! I put ointment on it just now, but it's going to itch like hell for the next few days. I can't even rub around them cuz they are so dense on my leg! Every time one of my bites accidentally graze something, it starts itching like hell, and since it's everywhere, it starts itching like hell very easily! I can't wear shoes either since I have a bite right on my ankle on the front. Argh!

P.S. I will post about my adventures from these past two weeks within a week hopefully :P

Lecture Halls!

I attended some sociology classes and they're actually held in real lecture halls w/ squishy seats! The set up was similar to Center Hall Lecture rooms and the professors for those courses actually spoke English! One was British and the other had an American accent. It was nice hearing a professor speak English well :) Because my reproduction course was so bad, I decided to drop it. I'll record the lecture tomorrow though so I can justify myself when I go back to the states :P

I was around the Library today and the karate club was doing a demonstration outside. They've been sending out emails and all that other junk just to recruit people. Why are they so desperate...

Also, one last random tidbit for this post on shoes. I saw some cool shoes that zip up from the sides in H&M (they're products are more expensive here than if it were in the States)

And finally, some hideous shoe fashion I saw on the subway:

yes, they are wearing tights/pants w/ colorful socks in sandals. :P

Macau

I went to Macau the other day and I chose to wear the worst shoes: a size or two too small because I wasn't sure about my size at the time. So now I have like 5 blisters on my ankles and foot :(

Going there w/ Wen-wai and Wendy was really good since we hit all the touristy spots really fast and I got to eat some 葡撻 which was delicious! The crust was very flaky and the tart part was very soft. It was just like the ones I had in Shanghai; these things are definitely better than normal egg tarts. I'm going to have to convert now :P

We went to the Ruins of St. Paul's in Macau and explored around there and we found these exercise machines!

You sat on this one and you basically pushed yourself up and down w/ your feet.

You twisted yourself around in this one so I guess it is for your obliques.

This one is like a fake elliptical except it wasn't very smooth so it was sort of awkward.

I'm not even sure what this thing is for...massage?

According to Wen-wai, you turn this thing around and it works your forearms. I didn't really try it.

I'm not really sure what this is for....I just did the running motion on it. When I got off, it swung back and hit my shin T_T Now I have a bruise.

Lecture

I had my first round of classes today and it was quite different. Usually in UCSD, lecture halls can fit at least 200-300 students so this was what I was expecting when I was going to walk into a lecture hall in HKU; however, the lecture hall (as it was labeled on the door) was only a little larger than a discussion room. It had discussion room desks and the floor was flat. My cell biology class at 8:30 had around 40 students in a 50-100 person room and my reproduction and reproductive biotechnology class only had 15. I don't understand where all the students are, it makes me feel very awkward to be in such a small class since I'm used to blending into the crowd. It makes it easier for me to fall asleep if necessary :P

Besides the size of the classes, the accent of some of my professors were very strong too. I had to concentrate very hard to actually pick up what they were saying and I felt that the class would go at a much slower pace because English was not their first language. I mean, it wasn't terrible, but it made me feel like I could definitely get more out of the class if I took it at my home university instead. Reproduction seems like an interesting topic and I don't want to waste it on HKU :\ I guess this is the wrong way to think about it, but I really feel awkward in a 15 student class. I'll give it 1 more lecture and see how that goes.

One good thing about lectures here is that they print out the all the slides for you before class to hand out. They aren't as cheap as UCSD where you have to print everything out yourself :P But then again, it is only a 15 person class.

EDIT: There's WebCT at HKU and apparently where Denise is from too O.o

Modern Toilet

Modern Toilet is a restaurant on the top floor of a mall in Mong Kok. As the name indicates, it has a toilet theme so the seats were toilet bowls and the tables had sinks underneath. The food were also served with a restroom theme but I'm there more for the pictures rather than the food because it was only meh meh. I ordered three items, a entrée, a drink, and finally a dessert. As you can see below, the red bean milk tea I ordered was served in a urinal which was pretty good but not worth 35 HKD.

The curry hot pot dish was served in a western style toilet bowl (79 HKD). It was pretty tasty, but the fish balls and sausages had some cheese in it so it tasted really weird. I thought Chinese people didn't like cheese :\ Guess not.

I was pretty full after eating all that stuff and my drink but I heard about some items on the menu that looked like feces so I got poo looking dessert served in a squatting toilet plate. The chocolate ice cream was a little icy which helped the ice cream keep it's shape and did not melt easily. The dessert was nice to look at, but wasn't tasty enough to cost me 18 HKD.

A picture for my brother.


Here's a picture of a bunny marshmallow I had at some international dinner the other day. It's very cute and the hearts in the background is jello. Met a Japanese guy at the dinner and we're going to go Karoke sometime this week. Apparently he goes Karoke once a week in Japan, so he must be hella expert at it :P. He also thought I looked Japanese which was a first. Usually people think I'm filipino or something. Then some other girl said I looked Indonesian. What exactly am I?!