So yesterday was the long-anticipated trip to Sha Tin for some much-needed shopping. The deal was that we were supposed to meet up with Shadow and Nikki at 11:00am at University Station. It's great having a train station on campus, but it's on the opposite side from where I live. Therefore we took the shuttle bus, as always. Since this has become such an important aspect of my life over here, I thought I would show y'all what the campus buses look like on the inside. This is about the emptiest I've ever seen one.
So it didn't take long to get to University Station, but we were all pretty early. Since we knew we could anticipate a late lunch (typical Chinese lunch is around 1:30--2:00pm), we grabbed snacks at the 7-11. I don't know why 7-11 is so huge in Asia. In Japan, they were everywhere, and they're everywhere here too. But I digress.
Using the Hong Kong subway, called the MTR, it takes maybe 7 minutes or so to get to Sha Tin. It's two stops from campus, and a really cheap ride. To make it cheaper, though, I finally purchased my Octopus Card. I'm so excited! That sucker was cheap too. Here's how it works: you pay HK$50 for the card and then add however much you want to put on it. You can keep adding money to the card whenever and however much you want. When you don't need it anymore (i.e. when I come back to America), you give it back and you get your HK$50 back.
Anyway, the train took us straight to Sha Tin Plaza, the absolute largest mall I have ever been in. Mom, Dad, remember telling me about the giant underground mall in Toronto? I remember you telling me how many floors and how many miles it was. Sha Tin Plaza is actually five malls connected to each other--and each one is two or three times larger than that mall in Toronto. The train took us directed to the inside of one of the malls, which was New Town Plaza.
As Shadow showed us around, I took a lot of pictures, but I didn't expect to get photobombed. I didn't know that lady was there when I took the picture, but I can't blame her for looking angry at us. We were kind of loud and all over the place.
All the shops at New Town Plaza were nice and everything, but they were more expensive because they were so close to the station. We kept taking the escalator down as far as we could, and then took a couple of flights of stairs to the very bottom. Want to know what's at the very bottom of Hong Kong's largest shopping center? An underground food market, that's what. Check it out.
Yeah, check out all that awesome Chinese meat market action! By the way, for those of you who didn't believe me, I would like to present Baked Pig's Face, Cantonese delicacy. And no, I haven't tried it...yet.
OK, there were some vegetables too. I took this picture because of all the pretty colors. In retrospect, I should have taken one of the durian melons. Aside from looking like obese green pinecones, they also have such a strong odor that it's illegal to take them on an airplane. I know where to buy slices of the stuff and I am definitely trying it.
Dried seafood here. Stuff like squid, scallops, and so on and so forth.
We eventually left the meat market, and came back up into one of the other malls. This one had almost all Chinese stores, and therefore much lower prices. I took these two pictures for Sarah. Eat your heart out, sister, I bring you the manga store:
Here we were crossing over from one mall to the other. Check out the six lane traffic. Is that a little intimidating for a suburb or what?
We walked by Sha Tin Park, which is both big and awesome. This picture, though, needs a little explanation. You see, all those people in the park are not your typical Hong Kongers--they're almost entirely Filipino, which is the largest minority group in Hong Kong. Unlike the native Hong Kongers, the Filipino population is almost entirely Catholic, but there aren't that many churches in Hong Kong. Therefore, they like to congregate on Sunday mornings in some of the local parks. They visit relatives, have picnics, and sometimes have a service out there.
How about something else that would be weird in an American mall? Try a public library. Say what?
We went back to the mall for lunch (about 2:00pm as expected), and we ate at a pretty cool restaurant. Check out my scrumptious Vietnamese Chicken Curry. Unlike Indian curry, this one is only slightly spicy, and it has chunks of sweet potato in it. There is something funny about this, but it needs explaining. Besides some folks from IBCE, we had a few other people with us. There was Willie, who is from Guatemala, but his family is Cantonese. So he speaks Cantonese, Spanish, and English. He's here learning Mandarin, but he's at Beginner Level 1. There were also two guys from Japan who were also in Beginner Level 1: Kae and Hiroki. The point is, they ALL know how to use chopsticks very efficiently.
So here's the story, and there's a lesson to it. As delicious as my curry was, I was having a little trouble. Now, I've always thought I was pretty good with chopsticks, but this meal about got the better of me. You see, those nice little chunks of chicken had great big ol' BONES in them. Has anyone ever tried eating slippery chicken off the bone while holding it with plastic chopsticks? It's hard. Those three meanies waited until I had meticulously finished eating all the chicken off the bones, dropping it back into the curry sauce several times and making a mess, to tell me that there's an easier way to do it! Apparently Chinese people put the whole piece in their mouths and use their tongues to separate the meat from the bone before spitting the bone into a napkin. Oh...thanks for telling me...jerks...(just kidding, I love those guys)
After lunch we found what has to be one of Asia's most random mini-theme parks: Snoopy's World. Here's Javi with the Snoop.
We walked around the mall some more looking for the cell phone stores so were could compare plans. Everyone's definitely looking for prepaid monthly cell phones because you have to have a HK Resident ID Card to apply for a year-long plan. We don't get those cards for another month or two. It's weird to think that I'll have a card stating that I am a permanent Hong Kong resident rather soon. Even weirder that I can get in the permanent resident line at immigrations when we come back from Shanghai in August.
So we compared cell phones. Since we were only some of the people from IBCE, we didn't buy anything, but we did some comparison shopping at 3 and One2Free, two of the largest providers in HK, with Willie acting as translator. All I can say is that stuff is super-cheap here.
With the cell-phone shopping temporarily at a halt, most people decided they wanted to go on back to campus. I, however, was determined to get a good night's sleep from here on out so I wanted to find bed stuff and a few other things. The only other people who wanted to stay were Kae and Hiroki so the three of us decided to stay together.
Let me just say that I LOVE those two guys. Hiroki is from Tokyo, and he's here working on his MIB. He's going to be here the entire time we are so about 14 months. I'm so happy because we're definitely hanging out. He seems to have the same mother-hen-ish personality as me. Kae's also really awesome. He's from just outside Osaka, and he's an exchange student from the University of Tokyo. He's majoring in engineering, but he's here for the summer to learn Mandarin and to practice his English. Neither one of these guys speaks fluent English, but between us they knew enough English and I knew enough Japanese to communicate perfectly well. Kae said that he liked practicing his English with me because I talked much slower than other English-speakers he had met. I told him it was because I was from South Carolina, and that he should talk with more southerners.
Anyway, the three of us ended up at the largest IKEA store I have ever seen. I got another pillow, a mattress pad, a blanket, hangers, a laundry basket, a cup and a bowl for a grand total of about US$82. Hong Kong, jia you!
This one's for the family. I present to you an item that I admired but did not buy: IKEA Fudge! Well, that wasn't it's official name, but look at it and you'll see what I mean. Here's Hiroki-kun holding IKEA Fudge:
Kae also snapped a picture of me holding the world's funniest pillow. How's that for a square kitty, Dad?
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