Good Joss

Hey everybody!  This one's just a quick update, but I suppose it's better than nothing.  As you can see in the not-so-good picture below, I finally got a haircut.  I can't remember when I last had a good trim, but I think it was probably about a year ago, which is way too long because my hair grows fast.  Lately, I've noticed a lot of split ends.  Add that to the fact that having lots of hair makes an already sweltering Hong Kong even hotter, and you can probably surmise that I'd just about had it with my hair.  Meme, Heather, Sara, Nirali, you four in particular will be happy to know that I didn't give into the temptation of taking a buzzer to my unruly mane.  Instead, I finally ventured down to "Comer Hair Salon," which is on campus and suspiciously cheap.  There, I got one of the hairdressers to give me a good shearing--probably about 4-5 inches gone.  My head feels a lot lighter (and cooler), but I wanted it long enough to still be able to pull into a ponytail.  I wanted to offer up a picture for everyone's scrutiny, but it's hard to take a picture of yourself.  I decided to stand in front of the mirror so that I could see the reflection of the camera screen.  That made things a little easier, but the picture's still not so great.  Even so, here's the haircut.  I'll see if I can do better later on:

As usual, this Sunday I went to church and afterwards went to lunch with some friends.  No one (not even me) really felt like dim sum today so Dora, Hongqiao, Veronica, Youshua, and I decided to go to a restaurant in Shatin.  2 other people were supposed to meet us there, but called me later to say they couldn't make it.  We ended up at a little hole-in-the-wall place that served specialties from Yunnan Province (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunnan_cuisine).  We all shared, which is a common part of Chinese culture, except for Youshua, who doesn't eat chicken.

After lunch, those 4 decided to enlighten me a little more about the concept of "joss" which, for simplicity's sake, I'll simply define as "luck."  People in Hong Kong and in China are really into numbers and so the Chinese have their own form of numerology.  What I didn't realize is that apparently this numerology can be applied to just about anything with numbers on it--including restaurant bills.  Strange, yes, but my friends insisted that I give the "joss lady" my copy of the bill to see how lucky I was.  I didn't see why not because it was free.  I handed her my bill and she meticulously copied all the numbers and input them into a small machine.  After making me press a little button, something flashed on the machine's screen.  Everyone else shouted "Aiya!"  Of course, that can mean a lot of things depending on the intonation, but everyone sounded happy and excited.  The "joss lady" told me my luck was exceptionally good and insisted on giving me a prize.  I'm convinced this whole "joss" business is just a complicated way of giving out product samples.  If you don't believe me, look below.  This is my prize for having "good joss:"

I can think of worse and better things to win.  At least I like oatmeal.  All I need to do is chop up some fruit and Mr. Quaker and I will get along just fine.