when i woke up this morning, i was pissed. i didnt get much sleep and was making myself go to the gym. at 9:30, i wish i knew how great of a day today would turn out to be. i went to the gym, got some breakfast (beef omelette with rice @ hk$38) and got ready for school. i went to school and had my favorite teacher for 2 hours and then akiko and I decided to take a walk. at this point, 2 great events took place:
a) we planned on going to the nike sportswear store to catch up with my buddy miles (american name) cause he said they were having a small sale today. we first stopped and picked up these rice noodles that were amazing and only hk$13~us$1.75. delightful. we stopped in the sogo and failed and then went to the onitsuka tiger store which may be top 5 stores in hk. awesome shit and hot girls wearing cool sneakers. damn it. akiko got some sweet velcro silver patent lo's and i kept it together and was able to not buy the black patent sapporo 72's as hard as that was. we did however finally make it to nsw and i did buy these bad boys at a steep discount......
fuck. that means until yesterday i owned nearly 100 pairs of sneakers, none of them being dunk mids. and now within the past 2 days, i've bought 2 pairs. talk about not giving a shit. these are sweet and i can't wait to rock them in hk. and then?
b) on the way home from the nsw store, after parting ways with my classmate, i smelled the sweet odor of street food. typical street food in hk is fish balls or waffles. in this case, sweet potatoes. thats right, my favorite food in the whole world: sweet potatoes. this mobile oven was literally across the street from my apartment, as it has been since i've moved in. sadly, i've been too much of a vag to stop and try it. sometimes i fear people. in this case, i'm furious at myself for waiting this long. so for hk$10~us$1.50 i bought a whole baked sweet potato. it was fucking awesome. that's right. bold letters. i am going to eat these everyday til i leave this place.
what a day! sweet kicks and sweet potatoes. shaboom!
i suppose i forgot to mention how the bus error actually took place. in hong kong there are two sets of buses, public buses, and what we call "mini buses" which are more like mini sized buses. they seat 15 people and only go to very specific destinations. they're shady as shit but pretty useful. many people use them regularly to get to and from places.
anyway, as it turned out, amy was hinting for me to take the mini bus, but as you may have read above, i was on a double decker bus, what a mandarin speaker would call a shang gong gong gong chi che (hong kong public bus). so i was screwed from the beginning. plus the almost-getting-hit-by-the-car incident and the shotgun incident. it was a long night.
and to wish myself off to a pleasant sleep, i just got these.......
yesterday me and amy met up in TST to check out this totally sweet store which turned out to be called reach. this dude kevin there speaks great english. they have all kinds of cool gear like subcrew and some other shit. anyway after we caught some mango pudding which was amazing, she was like ok, come to divya's house for this dinner party tonight. i was like ok cool but how do i get there? shes like yea just take the #10 bus it goes right in front of her place you'll recognize it. seemed simple enough. then things went slightly awry.
i went onto the world wide web to find out where the bus was gonna be picking me up and it was pretty close to my place, so that was an early sign of inevitable failure. how could it be that easy. while walking to the bus stop, i looked the wrong way crossing the street and some fucking speedster had to swerve to make sure he didn't kill me. i mean who wants to kill people before 10pm? right. so at this point i was like, ok, i'm definitely fucked.
i got on the bus and went upstairs and rode that thing. it was a cool tour of queens road west, which i hadnt spent much time on besides looking at a tiny apt there when i first got here. so, i had my ipod, i jam'd the shit out that thing, and took the ride. it was cool and finally the bus stops and everyone gets off. shit. the bus didn't stop in front of div's apartment. as far as i knew, i hadn't fallen asleep (like that other time i woke up on east 145th street with no money and a dead cell phone) so i was like oh sweet i just took the wrong bus.
i got off the bus and thought i should call amy. no answer. i called div. no answer. i bbm'd div's brother. no answer. big fucking surprise. ok, no worries. i have no idea where the fuck i am and have no cash but whatever. so, i go to an atm and get some money. in the atm were 2 guys who were allegedly fixing one of the machines. however, did they work for the bank? unclear. one was holding a shotgun - no joke. the other was in the machine with a screwdriver. wait, was i witnessing a robbery? why did it take me til now (24 hours later) to think this through. odd. this dude definitely had a shotgun. im glad i made it out of there.
turns out i was in kennedy town, which is an interesting area. i walked around a little while and planned my solo evening with whatever restaurants/bars were within sight and prepared myself. just as i was about to enter some place that didnt have english on the menu, divya called me back. shaboom! she said something along the lines of, 'get in a cab, give the driver the phone, and i'll tell him where i live'. [as most hong kongers say when you get something right,] bingo.
i got in the cab, got to her place, and mingled among her family's friends. i ate some spicy indian food but really liked it! my tongue is getting better with spice, although i wonder what the affect of the earlier enjoyed wine and cocktails had on my tongue last night. whatever, it was awesome.
next time you're in hong kong (or anywhere really) at an atm and you see a dude with a shotgun. don't hesitate - just fucking run!
this week has been full of all kinds of hangouts with amy and divya. it's been super sweet. i feel like i have a small community of people i know here. it's a distant feeling that i haven't really had since i left ny. pretty awesome.
more good news: i bought another pair of sneakers. check em out here.....
i don't know how often i'm gonna wear these bad boys, nor did i know how easy they were to find on the internet, but either way they're absurd. its amazing there are friends of mine in hk who dont know what monopoly is. i mean they also dont know other things as we learned last week, but thats another story for another day.
last week i went to this vietnamese restaurant with my friend and she convinced me to try this duck egg. i wasn't thrilled. here's the progressional evidence......
and here's my stupid face eating this shit. does it look like i liked it?????
i was hoping at the very least i would get a chance to vomit as i felt like i had eaten something bad earlier in the day anyway. plus it would make more room to drink more pi jou (beers). it tasted like bad brisket. my d-bag friend literally ate the duck eye and loved it. this is the same asshole who ate the pigeon head the other day. either shes underfed at home or just a fucking moron. i'll stick with the latter. talk about some nasty shit. i ate like 15 chewy japanese candies after this. i still have the flavor in my mouth its basically torture.
we went to happy valley and bet on some horses the other day. i guess i didn't take any photos. good work. i managed to trade my nintendo ds (from korea) in for a psp which has worked out amazingly. i can download games for free. i feel like a 13 year old asian kid. i'll probably get bored of it in a week and sell it to someone for double what it ended up costing me.
i ate congee today for the first time. then i was told that in fact i drank it. i used a spoon so maybe there was some confusion. i have however been looking for a good breakfast and this is probably it. it's a watery mix of rice, vegetables, and a meat or fish of your choice. my choice today was chicken and it was delightful.
im really starting to feel like my mandarin is getting somewhere. my tone still sucks but if i speak fast enough, native mandarin speakers kind of get an idea of what the fuck i'm talking about. oh, i learned how to say fuck. cao (tsao).
i guess it's been a few days which i suppose is a good sign of me being busy. ive been slowly finding myself with more and more things to do so that's awesome. it's been a tough few days of going out. i met up with mike and sara (those amazingly generous friends of mine who let me crash when i first got out here) on thursday night and got into a little bit of trouble. i can't say i remember how that night ended. amy got in last night! so we all met up and made it a late one.
before i met up with amy and divya, i was in tsim sha tsui with a few friends at a place called bubbles which i had been to before in july. we played all kinds of games, most of which were new to me, including a multiple person thumb war. these local idiots have some pretty creative/impressive games they play. i wonder if its so they don't have to socialize at bars. unclear. anyway, after a few drinks we decided it was time for me to teach them some english curse words. pretty much exactly what i want to be doing, so i'm psyched. ok so we go through fuck, shit, bitch, asshole, and then some more of the harder ones and i ask my friend jj to tell me something using one of the words. this was me practicing my teaching skills, in case i want to start educating somewhere in asia. ok, so here she goes........ "if you don't drink that, you are a bitch!" great job, jj. you're really understanding me. then thomas......"you're an asshole, i don't like you." ok thomas, also good job. jj says she wants to try one more......"i want to fuck you with my mouth." ummm, what? she continues "i want to fuck you with my mouth." thomas thought she was right. i wasn't totally sure what was happening. so i asked her what she was trying to say and she got more to the point with "i want you to have the feeling of fuck you and i want to use my mouth to say it to you." ok jj, you're getting somewhere here. i tell her "i think you meant, i want to say fuck you to you". she says "YES!" so i say, "fair enough, don't talk about it just say fuck you!" so she screams out "fuck you, asshole!" the lesson was finished.
not having a kitchen in my service apartment brings culinary challenges sometimes. i bought fruit at the shi chang (street market) the other day. i wanted some of those asian pears - which every country claims as their own. they are massive here and massively underpriced. in ny at gracefully i used to pay like 2.50 or $3 for one of those bad boys. the price on the box was $12 which is around us $1.50 so i figured F it i'll live a little. but then the dude handed me a bag of 4 pears. the bag was bigger than my head. ive still only eaten one. too bad i don't have fridge. i guess in-room air conditioning is the same same? or different? unclear to me.
last night i had macanese food for dinner. or is it macaunese? or is it macanasian? or macuguese? it was a sweet mix between chinese and portuguese and i had no idea what i was eating. i did however eat some pigeon. of course i made jj eat the pigeon head first which she didnt hesitate to do whatsover. the place we ate at in tst wasnt the nicest or the cleanest, but the food was decent and i was able to last 2 hours afterwards without vomiting which i would consider a victory (not really, there was no food-induced vomiting.)
my trip to korea was a great success although was of course way too short. i got totally fucked by thai airways because of what was going on in bangkok but ended up on great cathay pacific flights which i can only recommend for your future travel arrangements. free beer, good meals, comfortable seats, and decent movies. i watched hancock on the flight back it was pretty sweet. the beer and wine were both delightful as both myself and my neighbor enjoyed both directions. not the same person, but the same enjoyment.
korea was really cool though. i met up with ace and we kicked it pretty hard for a few days. it would take a while to review everything that happened. ace has his own blog where he's so far reviewed our first 24 hours. my first night there i got in after 9, we went for food, continued to get pretty drunk and ended up at a jjimjil bang. here is where things got interesting. a jjimjil bang is like a man-sauna where people (both men and women) can go to spend the night. you pay something like US$4 and they give you sweats and a key. youre then to take your shoes and put them in a small locker (we were too drunk to do this) and then go on to a bigger locker down the hall where you can change and lock your shit up. here's how that went.....
ok so you get the idea. close enough. we made our way down two floors below to where it really started to heat up. literally. there were people sprawled all over the fuckin place. men and women spooning, people in rows, people in columns, just people like all over the place. it was hot as shit the heat was coming from the floor. a few hours later, ace and i [independently] woke up with no shirt [also independently] and confused. it was too hot to exist. we went up to the mens locker room which is basically an hour long shower with men. a guys afternoon in, if you will. we tried to nap on some kind of clean floor against a wall there but were poked to wake up. not a sexy kind of poke, just a poke. we returned down to the 1st underfloor and went back to sleep. this time, when we woke up, ace had no mat and i had no blanket. some motherfucker took my blanket while i was sleeping. i guess i was tired enough not to notice. but as a sidebar, that's fucked up. please don't ever take my blanket from me while i'm sleeping. it's cruel. and how did someone manage to take ace's mat from underneath him while he was sleeping? some fucked up shit goes on in those jjimjil bangs. to get a somewhat decent idea of what i'm talking about, check this video.
yeah i wouldnt recommend watching that whole video it might fuck with your head. im sure i could go on for a while about this place and the story surrounding it but this shit is already getting long. we did manage to sing karaoke twice (nori bang, i think) which was fun......
this may be the first actual footage of me karaoke-ing. and yes, i kicked the shit out of it. we also ate some bloody sausage at this bar playing dvds of korean pop bands doing concerts which was quite captivating actually.....
i know, i look fuckin psyched. the bloody sausage wasn't necessarily delightful. closer to less than enjoyable. everyone else at the table seemed to like it, so whatever works. i would have preferred some sweet potato caserole or some stuffing but we gave up on thanksgiving way before any of that happened. i also didnt bring the appropriate jacket to korea so now i have thoughts of the entire country being a freeze pot when in fact it's not really that cold.
i also picked up a new sweatshirt today from 8five2. these fuckers are the unofficial mayor and mayoress of hong kong, if you remember that earlier post.
