who's a citizen now, biatch?!

i got my HK adult id card AND i got 3 stars. apparently that means i get to vote and other special privileges. (i later find out it means i got permanent residence).
that's better than what my sister has and she was born in hong kong hah awesomesauce.
i guess this means i can work in hong kong w/out hassle whenever i want. key words: "if i want"

hi, my name is helen

and i can't spell my middle name correctly, my english middle name! security customs guard w/ his disapproving tone, used his liquid whit out and corrected it for me, all while my mum's gripping my hand underneath the table. i could practically feel the fear of rejection radiating from her body, thru her arm and into my hand... with a slight touch of "you moron" hey, can't argue w/ her on that especially after she had stressed how important it was that i filled out the forms correctly!

no peace allowed

there never seems to b a place for one to sit and feel peaceful. everybody's always on the go and there are SOOO many ppl everywhere that even if i'm standing still, it feels like i am moving. it's not like europe where if you're tired of walking around and need a rest, you can just chill in a cafe and ppl watch. my mum says you can, but it's hard to find and very costly, a bit elitest and not their way of life i guess.

nonetheless, i am tired after a few hours on the 1st day (the day i've arrived) and w/ ppl EVERYWHERE, no where to rest and feel peaceful, we went back to NTT to sleep. i slept 14 hrs that day i got there!

a gathering of sorts wtf

it's a sunday. what up w/ the philippinos gathering at Central, Hong kong side? and i mean TONS... like not to sound racist, but it looks like every single philipeno worker had descended on every corner block around the central station. my dad said that is the only day the nannies, maids, etc have off so they usually come together to i guess... commiserate?

so anyway, there are all these workers who gather together in this one particular corner by this giant shopping mall, there had seemed to be some market of sorts, though they weren't selling stuff to ppl like me or even the locals, but they had seemed to be trading or packing random crap into those giant chinaman bags. i couldn't tell if they were goods from hong kong to be sold in the philipines or stuff from family in the philipines and being used/sold in hong kong to each other. either way it was just weird and kinf of looked 3rd world... can i say that?? you know what, it's my blog, i said it. it is what it looked like....

cheaper is better lunch

for lunch i had meatball ho-fun only $4 canadian!

we ate at a little hole in the wall on the hong kong side. it totally looked like one of those places in a chinese mafia movie, w/ the little stools, the old men, the small round tables. they even had all their drinks in glass bottles! obviously, i took a photo, you might've as well stuck a "foreigner" sticker on my forehead. fresh off the boat foreigner, except the boat was a plane.

cheaper is better

my breakfast, yesterday, only cost $2.50 canadian!! awesomesauce x 10. i had sausage macaroni, toast, egg & sausage w/ hot lemon tea.

now, don't get all excited, the sausage was american hot dog sausage, and was cooked via boiling.

sausage macaroni

sausage macaroni in soup seems to be the canton chinese staple b/c i think it's all i'll be eating for breakfast this whole week

pause

i should interrupt my blog posting and say i kept a journal in my moleskin and now i'm digitizing it as i didn't bring my macluvin', so that's why all the posts are posted around the same time. not b/c i'm bullshitting all this.

me speak no english

so it never occurred to me that the taxi driver can't speak english or understand the street names in english. epic fail. good thing mum wrote the direction/area in chinese. the driver was nice, spoke cantonese and showed me some "sites" like the queen elizabeth hospital, suppose to be the biggest and best. hah i guess i know where to go if i get sick!

an education

13 hrs wasn't so bad, slept thru most of it so it felt short, watched "an education" w/ carey muligan. it was sooo good. SHE was SO GOOD! i heart her. can't wait to see her in future flicks

take off

arrived sunday morning after a 13+ hr re d eye flight. tons of screaming babys, one in particular i think was sick. at least that's what his throw up indicated. at take off i felt like zach braff in garden state, in that scene, you know when ppl are screaming and the oxygen masks come down and you have this out of body experience where everything is moving slowly... except it was screaming babys and thankfully nothing was falling down. out of body experience was the same.

due diligence

did you know there are THREE types of HK notes floating around b/c they're issued by 3 different banks, all valid tender? AND scheming, lying shop retailers will give out chinese yuan instead of HK coins just to trick the foreigners? due diligence indeed.

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS?!

it's daylight savings this weekend?! ok i know it won't affect HK, but i'm going to be soooo FFFF when i come home... both flights are red eye and w/ the time difference + DST... oh man. oh well, sleep is for the weak right?!

back to the motherland

unfortunately, it's not my adaopted motherland of europe, but going to hong kong. won't lie, i feel trepidation with some excitement