Procrastinating

On Saturday I decided to neglect my work and have fun instead :P I bummed around for the first half of my day and then I went ice skating! It was really fun playing tag on the ice but confusing at the same time because i never know who is it until I was tagged! There was a surprising number of people practicing ice skating at the rink which was extremely crowded. People liked to link hands while they were skating really slowly and it was like a massive barrier so I couldn't really skate that fast. There were a lot of couples and people practicing skating backwards weaving through all the people on the ice. So skilled...

After ice skating, I experienced for the first time taking very asian photos in one of those picture sticker photo booths. The machine makes you take photos like every 5 seconds and we're all scrambling trying to make a pose. It was very amusing. It's my first time witnessing how one of these machines were used and apparently you pick backgrounds and then take photos. After you have your photo taken, you go outside the booth and decide how you want to decorate the photo by writing words and drawing on it. I didn't draw on the pictures myself but it was very interesting watching my friends do it because they seemed very pro!

look at our Asian poses!

For dinner we just had hotpot at Little Sheep buffet style :) It was 192 HKD (including service charge and other miscellaneous fees) which is just 25 USD! Super cheap and delicious. We just kept ordering and ordering more meat. I wish they had cheap buffet style good hotpot in the states :( Do they even do it buffet style at Little Sheep in the states?

Oh yea, work is piling up :(

Must. Stop. Procrastinating. :P

Goals

I feel like I haven't achieved my initial goals for coming to Hong Kong. At first I wanted to meet a lot of the locals and know the culture in Hong Kong better. I wanted to know Hong Kong as if I was a local. The problem is, I haven't really done anything to meet that goal. I figure I need to put myself out there more often, but it's really scary. I'm not comfortable enough to get out of my bubble. Yes, I've formed a bubble while I'm abroad. I don't really go out of it because I feel like it would be too awkward. I feel like I haven't changed at all since I've come here. I'm still procrastinating and using studying as an excuse for not going out as much. Should I be letting go of this attachment to do really well in school and just have fun? But my ultimate goal in life right now is to become a doctor, and in order to do that, I have to get good grades. But....do I really want to be a doctor?

We're talking about how identity is formed right now in my Hong Kong Pop Culture class and it's really making me wonder, who am I? I don't really have any attachments to anything and I feel like I'm just a person that my parents tried to mold myself to be. Do I want to be a doctor? Am I doing what I want to do? I'm confused as to what do I want to do with my life. I always felt that things will fall into place, I'll go to university, get into medical school, someday get married and have kids and then that would pretty much be the end of it. But I realized, these things don't just happen, I have to fight for them. Since these things require effort to achieve, I've been seriously considering whether these are the things I really want. I can't be my parent's puppet my entire life, I have to do things that make me happy. But at the same time, I feel like I have to do these things so that my parents are happy. I mean, they are the people that raised me, isn't this how you repay them? I'm really confused as to what I should do....

wow, all that up there is like cliche questions people ask about their lives. lol. ignore all that. That was just my rant.

Sick

I'm sick for the second time since my exchange!!! Gah! It's probably because I'm eating a lot of unhealthy food like deep fried stuff and lots of Andes chocolate. They're so good though :X Back to talk about being sick. I feel so awkward being sick here since people look at me funny when I cough or have a sniffle or something. After SARS, I guess it's understandable that they are weary of sick people but I refuse to wear a mask! It's so uncomfortable to wear one and I'm pretty sure i'm not spreading some sort of superbug. Maybe I'm being a bit inconsiderate :\

Still Procrastinating

Gah..half way across the world and I'm still procrastinating with manga and dramas. I should be going out and exploring Hong Kong but it's just too hard to get rid of old habits. Why does HKU love making us do presentations. Each class has at least one and I hate doing it! Ugh! TAing for genetics one quarter hasn't made me any better at public speaking. So much work to do....if only this really was a vacation. *rant rant*

At the beginning of the school year, I felt that courses were a bit slow with only two hours of lecture for each course each week so I didn't really try to keep up, but now all the assessments are all bunched up in the next couple of weeks. I haven't done any work really and it's really going to be a bitch to catch up. My cell biology class has a final exam worth 80% and I have a lab report due in 8 days. I have two presentations this Thursday (50 min lead tutorial with a 20-30 min presentation at the beginning and 3 min for my contagions and disease class), another the week after that, and another on the Tuesday after that. The more I feel pressured to do work, the more I feel like procrastinating. I'm starting to feel a bit stressed here.

Now I'm beginning to think about the things I have to do back in the real world. I have to apply to get into a lab when I get back to the States. I have to try to get a TA position (I don't even know what to TA for besides genetics). I have to pick classes for winter quarter. Finally, I have to maintain a decent GPA so I can still apply to medical and get into somewhere decent. Just thinking about what I have to do once I get back is making me feel even more stressed. *sigh*

I'm also starting to wonder what exactly I'm doing in Hong Kong. Am I supposed to learn something from this experience? I haven't really talked to the locals so I don't exactly know the culture here. I haven't been to that many places in Hong Kong so I don't feel like I've actually lived here for two months already. What exactly am I doing? What am I trying to achieve? If I am asked what I learned from my abroad experience, what do I say? I really wish this was just a vacation with no responsibility.

Thailand and Singapore Airport

I wrote an entry for Thailand, but then I kinda deleted it sooooo just look at my facebook photos, it says it all :P I'll just tell you about my airport experience. The reason why I had to sleep at the airport last week was because I was forced to change my flight to 6:50am the next morning rather than 4:30 the previous afternoon. So, being the cheap college students we all are, we decided to just camp out on the floor of Singapore airport.

Initially, I thought we could just sleep on the benches but it's like the designer made it so that no matter what position you're in, it'll just dig into your side or your back. Since that planned failed, we had to go with Plan B which was the floor. The problem is there's no carpet floors at all, so it's just cold hard solid floor.

Friends on the hard floor (one on his beach towel) and the super uncomfortable chairs

Apparently, some guy behind the counter was staring at us for like thirty minutes until he called me over. He just told us where there were carpeted floors, so he was harmless. Then he asked me if I was Filipino (thats for you Wen), but yay for carpeted floors! So I go to wash my face and brush my teeth in the washroom but it was very awkward since apparently in Singapore, they have workers in the washroom overnight to make sure you don't do something fishy I guess. Just slightly awkward :P

Afterwards, we try to look for the area the guy behind the counter told us about and we walk to this slightly secluded museum part of the airport. The signs deliberately said to not sleep in it but there were at least ten people already camped out in all corners and even some of the structures in the museum. It was basically all guys in the museum (ranges from age 20-50) so I felt preeetty insecure. I seriously thought about pulling an all nighter so that nothing would happen -___- Most of the guys just slept like it was the safest place in the world...guys, they don't understand. In the end I fell asleep and everything was ok :) Got on a plane at 6:10 and I was on my way back to Hong Kong (lots of turbulence though, kinda thought I was going to die. apparently a typhoon was expected to hit Hong Kong at the time. Good thing I made it back alive).

where we camped out :P

Singapore, Day 2

Not much happened today...I was tired this morning from a bit of studying last night until 4:30am :P I had some Char Kway Teow because my Singaporean friend recommended it to me. It was a combination of some chow fun and chow mein with some sort of shell fish I think. It was quite tasty but oily like beef chow fun.

We were wandering down the downtown area (similar to Market St) and it was alright I guess. Lots of expensive stores that I would never buy stuff from, but inside one of the malls, there was going to be a fashion show or something because there was a catwalk and lots of flashing lights. We didn't have enough time to wait for the show to start, so we had to leave early :(.

Later in the day, I had some Indian food which was pretty good. I asked for some nan instead of rice, but the guy didn't seem to understand me. Is the Indian bread not called Nan? Afterwards, we wandered around for a little bit and then a couple of my friends decided to go to the night safari. When we got to the subway station where we would take the bus to the park, we were approached by some women saying that they would bring us to the safari for free. At first we thought it was pretty sketchy, but since we had two white guys and one asian guy with two girls, it should have been ok :P We had to triple check the tickets we got from the just to make sure it was legit :P

The night safari itself was really fun since it was Halloween themed. We went on a tram ride which must be very similar to the wild animal park in San Diego. We were on a tram with an announcer telling us which animals we were passing by. The announcer seemed pretty into Halloween and tried to make everything sound scary even if it was the boringest thing in the world. There were also random people on the road trying to scare us on the ride so I was on high alert throughout the entire ride because I get scared so easily >.< The scary trail we went on afterwards was pretty funny. I started off saying "This is a really good spot to scare someone" and then someone just jumps out and screams at me, me being me, I screamed :P And then afterwards, one dude in grass camouflage gear scared my friend on one side of the road and I was looking at him going back into formation and I was like "dude, that is soooo good!" and another guy in the exact same gear just jumps out and scares me! Lol...they are so smart, a continuous attack on the pedestrians. I was preeeetty paranoid after that :)

After the night safari, we came back to the hostel and joined the random bbq they were having. It was pretty nice, I ate a hot dog in a slice of white bread lol. Singaporeans must really like sliced bread because they're ice cream sandwiches are wrapped in bread too lol. I was quite surprised (it was tasty though, had a durian ice cream sandwich).

Random Taiwanese phrase: chow fan (fried rice) -->having sex (I always thought it was just making out..oh well)

Singapore, Day 1

I got into Singapore two nights ago and I'm super glad this hostel has computers. Yay...Singapore's buildings are kinda old yet new at the same time, in that the buildings not in the center of the city have this...I want to say wild wild west kind of style and the city center has typical tall buildings like any other big city, and they're also into columns, you can see it everywhere. The city seemed fairly western after being in Asia for so long. People actually drove properly, pedestrians have the right of way, and the streets were very wide. One more thing I noticed about Singapore from the airport, is that there are a lot of trees planted on the streets, like one every 5 meters on the freeway. It was quite nice to see grass, I don't even remember the last time I saw it :P

There was absolutely no trash on the streets, but the strangest thing was that there also wasn't a trash bin in site until I walked for like half an hour. It wasn't even in the subway station. How do these people keep it so clean?!

The weather is just like Hong Kong: hot. The only difference is that you can actually see clear blue skies! I guess there is less pollution here. The heat was a bit strong for me though, so I felt very very sleepy once I stepped outside. I felt guilty that I felt this way, but the sun was sucking all the energy out of me...so sleepy, I could just lay down on the floor and fall asleep.

I haven't really had any Singaporean food, but I had some Laksa, which was a noodle soup that was slightly spicy with some seafood. It was quite good. The majority of the time here, I've had food at food courts, but these aren't normal mall food courts, these are like food areas on the street that just has like 50 restaurants in it. You can find it in multiple places here, it was quite weird how these food courts aren't in a mall and they actually have a term for these places, but I don't remember.

One more thing I want to mention is that they have so many languages here! People are speaking Mandarin (I think that should be your default), English (second default), and there were some that spoke Malay. I saw tourists from Japan and India yesterday as well, they were a huge bunch of people and they took pictures with my Caucasian friends. So awkward.

Lastly (for reals now), I don't think I can buy souveniers from here since the dollar is 1:1.1 and the numbers prices are around the same. Too expensive! A can of soda is already 1.20! Sorry guys.

I miss you guys (this city is too western compared to Hong Kong so I can't help making the comparisons and thinking of home in the States).

(I still have to update on what I did in Taipei, Taiwan...lol)