大家好! 我不会在这里继续用普通话因为上网的时候找汉字比较麻烦. 我就想告诉我的家人和朋友我的普通话还正在进步. 别担心!
Hey everybody! Don't worry about the stuff up top. I know most of y'all can't read it. Basically, it's just me saying that my Mandarin's coming along well, but I won't write the whole post in characters because it's too troublesome. First things first, I thought I'd send everyone a poor college student's "postcard." How about it? Is this photo postcard-worthy? This view is very close to, but--alas!--not part of United College. All in all, though, I'm now convinced this is where they took all those advertisement pictures they put in the CUHK brochures.
My weekend was pretty fun, by the way. There was no class on Thursday due to festivities the night before. Friday, though, classes were scheduled to resume. Despite being a little bummed, I at least had only one class: Mandarin at 1:30pm. Well, I got there before the teacher and waited with all the other students for about 20 minutes. The teacher still hadn't shown up so I called the Language Department to ask if class had been canceled. While I was on the phone, the rest of the class had had enough and decided to leave. Only Alice and I remained waiting for the Language Department to call back once they discovered the problem. Only a few minutes later, they returned my call and told me the situation. Apparently, Chen Chen Laoshi (bless her heart!) mistakenly believed that class began at 2:30pm. Whoops! Now she wants us to do a make-up class, but I doubt it'll actually work out because of everyone's tight schedules. I'll let y'all know how that goes.
After our non-class, Alice and I walked over to her dormitory at New Asia College to talk about the Macao trip. It looks like, unfortunately, we won't be able to stick with our original plan. Macao's just too expensive around the holidays (although at other times of the year it's rather cheap so long as you don't gamble). We're sticking with Hong Kong for National Day, and probably watching the fireworks show at Victoria Harbour. We'll do Macao another weekend and, actually, because it's such a small place, we can probably see everything we want if we go early in the morning and return late at night.
In regards to the rest of the evening, the Mid-Autumn festivities continued! A long while back, the IBCE kids all planned to have a Hong Kong style BBQ on Mid-Autumn Night at the Shaw College BBQ pit. Of course, it turned out that all the local students' families wanted them home for the holiday, which I understand, and the waiting list for the Shaw College BBQ pit was almost a week long. The plan needed a little tweaking.
What we wound up with was rescheduling the BBQ for this past Friday night, and having it at some local place in the Tai Po district. Probably about 60-70% of us attended, as well as Glos Ho and a few people's significant others. We all met up at the MTR station at 6:00pm and rode one stop to Tai Po Market. From there, we rode the double-decker 75K bus almost 20 stops before getting off in the middle of nowhere. The only thing in the vicinity besides the bus stop was the sign for the BBQ place:
Inside, it felt a lot like a campsite. Echoes of past church cookouts at Arrowhead, anyone? This place was legit:
By the way, it turns out Hong Kong style BBQ involves very little in the way of actual barbecuing. No sauce, no slow-cooking, no cole slaw or baked beans on the side. Although it would have been nice, I can understand the last bit since that's a rather "Western" way of doing things. Still, for all you carnivores who ever wished for a place where you could stick giant hunks of raw meat into a fire and eat it right off the skewer, congratulations...and welcome to Hong Kong.
I find it intriguing that America has this reputation as a "meat-eating country." We do, admittedly, go a little light on the vegetables sometimes in favor of more beef, chicken, or pork, but a Hong Kong BBQ pit makes Outback look like a Vegan Cafe. Yikes! Want to know what was on the menu? (Spoiler alert for Sophia: Even I find it cringe-worthy.)
Imagine a bucket about 2 feet long and 1 foot wide with sides that come up to about 6 inches. Now imagine said bucket overflowing with raw meat: marinated steak, shao mai, hot dogs, sliced squid, fish balls, sardines, chicken wings, pork chops, spare ribs, and sausage. Everyone gets a skewer--the kind we used as kids to roast marshmallows--and goes at it caveman style. Case in point:
The CUHK kids decided to change things up a bit and brought out several bags of bread. In Hong Kong, the big thing is BBQ honey, so everyone just began lathering up the bread slices with BBQ honey and toasting them in the fire. Diana and Jiayi, though, were hopeful for some marshmallows:
We had all paid HK$60 for unlimited BBQ supplies, which meant all the meat and bread we could eat. That, by the way, is a lot. Around the time people were halfway through the second bucket, some of the girls desperately began missing their vegetables. Our ensuing quest resulted in the discovery of gigantic tin-foil wrapped sweet potatoes, each of which was an extra HK$5. Several of us bought them and threw those babies on the fire. Veggies at last! Unfortunately, though, sweet potatoes (especially ones that big) take forever to cook in a fire.
In the meantime, we had fun with a little Mid-Autumn Festival celebration. Here's Jordan with his lantern:
As you may have noticed, some of these pictures are rather fuzzy. I guess that gives some idea of how smoky it was out there.
We all had fun...although I don't want to even see another steak for at least a week. Eventually, we 4 veggie-loving women were able to use the skewers to fish out our delicious sweet potatoes, and it was a much-welcome change from meat, meat, and then more meat. Diana and Jiayi even got their marshmallows, although they had to share with everyone else. This led to the creation of the Marshmallow & BBQ Honey Sandwich. Sounds about as appetizing as a fluffernutter to me. No thanks.
So what did we do after polishing off 2 giant buckets of meat? Top it off with mooncake, of course! That's right, more mooncake. For those of you who don't know, your typical mooncake is no light snack. It's a complete gut-buster with just one normal-sized cake packing upwards of 800 calories! To be fair, the average mooncake is around 6.5 ounces, which is about the size of your fist.
Thankfully, Karen was in change of buying mooncakes and she brought a large variety. Most of them were regular-sized traditional lotus-seed paste mooncakes, like you saw in my previous blog. However, she also brought several "Snowy" mooncakes, which are popular in Hong Kong. They're only about 2 ounces, filled with frozen custard instead of lotus-seed paste and with fruit instead of egg yolk. I had the mango-flavor. Delicious...but I was still miserable from too much food. What's more is that Karen bought way too much mooncake so she insisted we all take some home with us. Among the choices were many varieties from the Mainland provinces because, as you can guess, there are unlimited varieties of mooncakes. I chose one with no egg yolk that was filled with jujube paste (mmm, date-flavor). At least it's a slight change-up. The thing is huge, though, so I'll be eating on it for several days.
I got back pretty late Friday night, which was unfortunate considering that I had to wake up super-early on Saturday. Remember I mentioned going on a one-day excursion to Tung Ping Chau, Yan Chau Tong, and Kat O Island? That trip was yesterday (Saturday) beginning at 8:15am. Since I had to get dressed, eat breakfast, and walk to the assembly point, that put me waking up at 6:45am. Too...early...
Nonetheless, I dragged myself out of bed and eventually to the Pi Ch'iu Building in Central Campus. Thankfully, Su (a friend from Fujian Province who I've mentioned a few times before) was also going on the trip. We sat together on the bus, ready to sleep for 30 minutes or an hour or just however long it took to reach out first destination. That was a grand total of 2 minutes. As it turns out, we were just riding the bus to the pier so that we could travel by ferry:
Ferries can get a little boring after a while. It was Su's first time on a boat, though, so we had some fun. The scenery was also rather beautiful (although reminiscent of the Lijiang River Cruise).
We were in Tolo Harbour, by the way, which is the harbor beside campus. The buildings in the background are in Ma On Shan:
Despite not sleeping much, both Su and I had gotten over our tiredness...well, mostly:
However, we might have been the only ones. Within minutes, all these seats were filled with sleeping exchange students:
The view of our wake:
The dam:
Finally, we began to see some signs of our first destination: Kat O Island! Of course, those signs were all in the form of fishing dinghies:
Within minutes, we reached the actual Kat O Fishing Village:
The fishing village was slightly similar to Tai O, which I visited over the summer. However, I think Kat O was much smaller and newer. Whereas Tai O was 800 years old, Kat O is only 300 or so. Like all the other fishing villages, though, dogs are very popular. I'm glad eating dog-meat is illegal in Hong Kong (not that this lazy pup is the right breed for eating).
We passed some local shrines as well. The religious fabric of Hong Kong is rather complex. Traditionally, Chinese society is primarily atheistic but also superstitious. While no highly-structured belief system like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam is native to China, there are many shrines and temples to local gods and goddesses. China has its own mythological figures, but those figures aren't credited for having powers similar to the more familiar gods of Greco-Roman or Norse mythology. Instead the powers of China's traditional and local gods are limited more to simple magic, a little trickery, or general goodwill. Imagine, if you will, that the local god at a small village like Kat O has all the power of an Irish leprechaun. As time passes and fewer people come to worship or bring offerings, he becomes less and less "Darby O'Gill" and steadily more "They're after me lucky charms!"
To be honest, I think the whole village of Kat O could use a little TLC:
There seemed to be only one thriving industry, and it (ironically) wasn't fishing. Nope, it was selling snacks to tourists! The little black things are sesame balls:
And the white things are glutinous rice balls filled with mung beans:
Su and I split a variety of snacks, all of which were quite tasty. Afterwards, we walked around the island for a bit:
This is called the "Lovers' Tree," and is perhaps the 3rd or 4th "Lovers' Tree" I've run across in my travels. I've concluded that this is just a way for a relatively uninteresting place to claim a tourist attraction. "Hey, you know that funny looking tree by the beach? Let's call it the 'Lovers' Tree' and see how many tourists take pictures of the stupid thing?" I just raised their tally by one.
Hints that you're in the middle of nowhere: Public Toilet is one of the 3 things listed on the street sign at "Main Street."
Another do-it-yourself tourist attraction: random ball of rock. Let's call it a monument! If that doesn't work, we can always try for modern art.
At least the temple was interesting:
Soon, though, it was time for lunch. We ate at the only restaurant on the island, which wasn't bad but wasn't great either. For me, the highlight of the meal was a big plate of good ole boiled shrimp. To my amusement, I found out that I'm the only person accustomed to peeling my own shrimp. I don't know how most of these people made it to 20 years old without knowing how to take the shell off a sea-roach, but they all looked terribly confused. A few girls even squealed about how "Omigosh, they still have heads!" I showed Su how to efficiently peel a shrimp, which I think cut her time in at least half. People are so funny when they're clueless.
Once we finished lunch, it was time to hit the harbor again for Tung Ping Chau and Yan Chau Tong (which might as well be the same place):
We got there in about an hour. See below, Tung Ping Chau:
Beautiful beaches:
And tacky tourists (seems like they turned out in droves this time):
Although the village at Tung Ping Chau was slightly bigger than Kat O, I think it was slightly more...Third World. Here's an interesting factoid, though: even though the houses in the old traditional Hong Kong villages are hardly more than deteriorating shacks, many of the residents are quite wealthy. This is because, unlike the rest of the Hong Kong population, their little pieces of prime beachfront real estate have been in their families for hundreds of years. So, yes, this is what you call sitting on a fortune:
There were also a lot of nature walks. Su and I took this one and, to our horror, soon discovered that either (1) the army ant is native to both South America and Hong Kong, or (2) the Queen of England needs to commission another voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle because the Galapagos Islands aren't the only ones with crazy isolated mutant species. I seriously had nightmares about those ants last night. Bleeeeeh!
Enough about the ants. I need to stop going on about it in case I can't sleep tonight. Miraculously, I didn't get bitten.
We also saw some graves. I thought y'all might be interested in seeing the kinds of graves that are more common in China. This is a mausoleum for a well-to-do family:
And this is one for a more wealthy family:
We visited the beaches:
Of course, there were some temples to visit:
This is where people write down their prayers and tie them to this tree:
Finally, an OK end to an OK day. Su and I were both pretty worn out so we decided to chill out on a bench at the pier. Even though it was really hot outside, the breeze felt wonderful and the ocean was really relaxing.
For any future exchange students, I'll offer this bit of advice. Don't bother signing up for this trip. It was still kind of fun and definitely cheap, but you could find better things to do with your time.
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