Explorations and Navigations

While Frank did his routine sixteen mile walk and Carrie and the girls went to dragon boating I went to town. Instead of walking the four miles which was my original plan, I took the minibus. It was busy in Sai Kung today, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. So I just waked around looking in all of the stores until I found a Starbucks. I took my homework with me, so I sat down outside and went to work. One of me assignments was to sit and write what is around you for a half hour. It was so funny, Chinese people have no problem staring at you and talking about you while you are right there. It makes me very uncomfortable! I would be writing and old ladies and men would walk by very slowly and look at what I was writing and look at me. I would glare back but it didn’t faze them one bit.

While I was there I say the French man. I can never remember his name, but his accent was so think I asked him to repeat himself ever time he spoke. A while later this couple sat down at the table next to me with the tiniest dog I have ever seen. A couple people who worked at Starbucks cleared the table off so that the little dog could sit on it and just stood watching the tiny dog. Everyone who walked by would coo and ask if it was real. Kind of weird to me, but I have to admit the dog was pretty cute.

After that I just walked around some more. I would be walking and all of a sudden realized I had been in the exact same place minutes before. The places I wanted to go back to I could not find. By that time I had to pee really badly, for my venti tea. So I waited in this huge line for the public bathroom and then realized that all of the toilets were the traditional Chinese style ones. I practically ran out while everyone in line looked at me like I was crazy. I am just not the squatting type.

I then stumbled into Alex, she said that she had been searching for her mom and couldn’t find her anywhere. I told her that her best bet was to stay just where she was and wait, or go to the park where I remembered Carrie telling the girls to meet a couple days earlier. She wouldn’t listen to me of course and just biked off. I tried to follow her but she disappeared. So I called her mom on my 2 something a minute phone and told her I had just seen Alex. Carrie was so frustrated and had been looking for her for an hour and a half. She thought that Alex would come back to the 7 eleven so Catherine, Carrie and me waited around there for a while. When that didn’t work, I waited with the car while they went looking for Alex. Finally, all three of them came back, and Alex walks past me and says “See I found her.” This made me laugh since if she had only waited for 3 more minutes at the 7 eleven like I had said she would have found Carrie 45 minutes earlier.

Later that night we met Carrie’s paddle boating friends and their husbands at a Gaisi. There is a wet market on the first floor with fish, meat, and vegetables. They have exercise places, shopping and things like that on the other floors. On the top floor is a food court of sorts. It isn’t pretty, but the food is amazing. They used to be on the streets with cock roaches and rats running around your feet every once and a while. Yuck... but now the health and sanitary codes are so strict that they have moved or shut down almost all of them off the streets. We had Thai food there and I had a mango smoothie. They were amazing!

Gary, one of there close friends, who is native to Hong Kong, told me the manners of the table. He said “Stop worrying about making a mess! The bigger a mess you make means the more you enjoyed it here!” This is so different from our culture it was sort of hard for me to get used to, but it makes eating a whole lot more fun. You just through stuff on the table and don’t worry about anything! Mandy, Gary’s girlfriend sat on one side of me and had me try a coconut. It was great too, definitely the best I have ever had. Everyone there was really nice and they had the people working bring me out forks, but I didn’t even use one once. The chop sticks here are rounded and so hard for me to use! We took a taxi home and everyone was wiped.