Wednesday, January 24, 2007
so, its the third week of orientation and i happen to have a few minutes of extra time to type this post. for the past week, i have been part of the mugging phenomenon of NJC. apparently, J2s and teachers say we (J1s) need to get a life, so i'm trying to get a life while typing this post out.
basically, this is about my HK trip, which happens to be about one month ago. this is what i call "time lag". same as the one that we learn in macroeconomics, but just need to change here and there a little bit, or so call the "application" section in the essays we write.
so after a 4 day trip to tokyo, it was a 5 hours journey back to HK with my parents and my 3rd aunt and uncle. (and yes again on business class)
The trip back to HK was indeed a fruitful one and could be summarized into 3 words: shopping, eating and reunion. i was so happy that i decided to extent my stay from leaving on the 21st to 25th dec. if not for OGL camp on 26th to 28th dec, i would have stayed longer.
Shopping!
you can shop anywhere in HK, but the most important thing is to know to shop at where to get the cheapest price. so the first "mission" was to head to this street at mongkok known as the "sports shoe street" or "波鞋街". there are about 40 shops selling sports shoe and apparels of brands such as Nike, Adidas, Reebok and LeCoqSportiff. The price is really dirt cheap down there due to intensive competition of sales between these shops. So its really important to walk down the street on both sides to check the price you like. For people like me, who are very particular in what i want, it took me two days to clear 75% of the street before i gave up in checking the prices and get the shoe i want. talking about checking prices, its important that shoppers keep these prices in your memories and not to note it down on paper, this is because the shop owners are afraid that you are a spy of another shop to check prices and reduce prices of their own shoes accordingly. that is how intensive competition are when u are in the country with the most free market system, haha!
at the end of the two weeks stay, i bought 2 shirts, 2 shoes (both are nike sneakers) and my new badminton bag. oh... and the price of the two shoes are about S$80 - dirt CHEAP for real stuff!
there are many other times where i went shopping but i shall not include them here, shan't make you guys jealous...
Eating!
there are lots of good food that i ate in HK, ranging from fast food to high class one. Cafe de Coral and Fairwood are the best and most popular fast food restaurants around and they are so fast that they can prepare one PROPER meal ( XXXX rice + drink + soup + appetizer dish) as fast as producing a value meal at macs, and not to mention that the food is hot and delicious. This is very important especially if it was winter in HK back then and nothing comes better than a good cup of milk tea and a hot plate of charsiew rice.
i also ate other specialty dishes from HK such as roast goose and roast pigeons. these two dishes are not available in Singapore and even if you can find one, most probably it was hand carried back from HK to the stall, which means it will be very EX.
moving on to the high class one. dishes include, sharks fin soup, lobster, fried oyster, crab meat soup, grilled canadian beef steak (which my aunt hand carried it back fron calgary) just to name a few. the reason why there are so much good food is because of all the family reunions. so its important to really have a formal meal to sit down together and chit chat a bit.
Reunion
This is the most important thing that made this trip a really fruitful and memorable one. 2006 was really the year where most of my direct relatives from both paternal and maternal are back in HK. Only one of my cousins from the paternal side didnt went back to HK and two from maternal side who actually went back to HK during Nov. my fav cousin, andrew gave everybody a surprise after "MIA-ing" for 6 years as he had to focus on his studies while working a part time job! he brought back a piece of good news that is he will be signing a permanent contract this year and he will be getting official holidays where he gets to fly back to HK or singapore for reunion with our relatives!
Andrew
a little bit more about andrew. andrew is about 15 years older than me, but 6 years back, there is no such thing as a generation gap between us. he loved to make little games and tamiya cars and play with me as well and he was so sad when he saw me changed so much in the past 6 years - i evolved from a little kid running around the place. he made the biggest mistake during his secondary school years in HK and dropped school. after some time, he decided to migrate to australia and start afresh. he had many difficult times picking up again and had to work several jobs at a time just to pay his school fees. there is this thing that i admire him the most - determination and the fighting spirit. my aunt's family is actually quite rich, but my cousin opted not to reveal his financial difficulties to his parents and did all these work under their nose hoping for his parents not to worry about him! when he realised his mistake, he picked himself up and went to many years of university and got 3 bachelors degrees (computing, accounts and business i think). he knew that he would lose out to other graduates who are fresh in the pool of talents hence he worked really hard for to get these 3 degrees and scored several high distinctions in his modules as well. His determination really set a benchmark for me as well as for his peers.
another thing i like about him is that he is a truthful and honest friend. when i ask him some really profound things (sometimes about the family), he really take time out to share with me what he knows and at the same time sensible enough to remind me not to mention some things he shared with me in front of other family members as it is rather sensitive. Given that i'm the youngest member in my maternal family, what he shared with me really made me understand the relations within the family much better and know the stories behind some of my other cousins as well.
Venus, Dorothy and Wilson
These three good friends are my kindergarden-mates when i was in Yiu Chung International and we still stay in touch even after 10+ years of separation as many of the original class migrated overseas after graduating from kindergarden. i'm so happy to see them again after a reunion we had two years ago (the year before i came into IP) and to see them growing more mature in their looks and their thoughts as well. Venus was still Venus, a little brainy girl, but still taller than NSTs. Wilson and Dorothy are just like Winnie the Pooh and little Piglet. Wilson is just like a godzilla of my height while dorothy was still dwarf-ish with the little,pinkish oval face. however, their personalities are a world apart. Wilson continued to be as vulgar and blunt in his talking while his English remained as poor as ever (about thrice worse than mine). Dorothy is still the soft spoken girl who somehow managed to laugh when Wilson speaks of something bad and notorious about his classmates. This was the first time that we iniated a gathering... or i should say, i initiated it coz the three of them aren't studying in the same school and are living at different parts of HK.
Venus
A little bit more about Venus. I hope u readers can tell that it is a person name and not a planet as im not going to tell you about the concentrated carbon monoxide composition in the atmosphere. Disclaimer: she is my good friend, nothing more than that. somehow my male kindergarden-mates like to brand us as couples. so... wadever...
Venus is one of the smartest girl among the same batch of kindergarden-mates whom i still keep in touch directly or indirectly. She is also one of the most discipline and organised people that i know. She only use the computer to do work and views MSN messenger as a distraction and hence she rarely comes online. Since i added her about a month ago, she only came online for once! For the past four years (since the 2003 reunion), she was the only person i managed to keep in touch via email. but due to some really weird reason, her email account go deleted (!!!) and we lost contact for the whole of last year. This trip back to HK, i brought along the her residential phone number and prayed hard that she didnt move to somewhere else. and i thank God for giving me this friend again as she didnt move. the moment i heard her bro's cute little voice on the phone, i knew god just gave me a miracle. (before u think im lying that i dont like her, this situation was similar to how i anticipated for wilson to pick up to phone, so nothing special)
so i went out with her after she "knocked off" from school and watched Eragon at Tsim Sha Tsui. thank goodness venus is not that much of a movie-goer, coz the movie was really bland. its like the teenage version of "Lord of the Rings" and the plot was not really exciting and original. but one thing i knew about her from that movie was that she is really a timid girl... there was this scene where the little dragon ate the mouse and she was the only person in the theatre to turn away from the screen!
after that we went to a food court nearby to have dinner. we talked lots of stuff, like what i did in IP, what places i visited when i was in Japan. we also talked about the syllabus that i had in IP and im so surprised that she is such a well-read person when it comes to current and historical affairs. then i found out she is an arts student and currently taking econs, commerce and finance, history, geography, maths, english and chinese. btw, ppl in HK learn about AD-AS too! so we were happily chatting about our common knowledge and im quite amazed about her opinions and views (all the evaluation and applications parts of the essay) of current affairs i.e. increase taxing to increase government budget for spending on the old aged (this was like integrating econs, politics and human geog together).
on another day, the four of us went to watch the movie 伤城 (confession of pain) by tony leung and takeshi kaneshiro. so the two timid girls really had "fun of a lifetime" in the theatre everytime they flashed the parts where tony leung brutally murdered his father in law. one funny thing happened when i told Venus to look away when takeshi took an empty beer bottle and walking up to another fella.
then she said, "what look away?"
and i replied, "just look away..."
the bottle was smashed down on the head and she screamed. LOL! i was still laughing when i was walking out of the theatre.
these three people really made this trip back to HK a little more different and i finally realise that friendships can stand the test of time, its up to us whether we want to cherish those fun, loving and caring people around us. i wish Venus and Wilson all the best for their HKCEE (HK's version of O levels) and promotional exam for Dorothy, after failing to get promotion last year when she missed the passing mark by just an "inch".
All in all, this trip back to HK and the holiday in Tokyo was really a fruitful one, but reality is just so cruel and i had to come back for schooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL.... :( thank goodness there is still an orientation for me to stay in my holiday mood for a few more days.
How's your holiday? Too short.
Read, You Must...1:55 AM