Planet Olin

Hello, everyone! I'm going to blog in pictures today, because I'm super lazy. (I wonder when I'll hit my upload limit - I'm not resizing my pictures...)

For lunch today we went to this place that makes rice noodles fresh when you order them - you can get rice noodle wrapped shrimp, fried dough, beef, or whatever [ha cheung/cheung fun, for my chinese readers...not many, i imagine :)]. tasty! Plus, I had tasty curry fish balls for you, Janet! :) (P.S. Janet, what must I eat/do when I am in HK? I saw an ad for snowy mooncakes from Wing Wah today and I am definitely going to try them!)



We went to the fish market...tons of stores, all with displays of these bagged fishes (and plants, too!). We caught them in the morning when they were just putting everything out. I imagine that they sell most of these fishes a day - can you imagine?? [Please to click for better detail!]



To fulfill our sightseeing quota of the day, we also went to a public garden, temple, and nunnery (Chi Lin Nunnery, Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple, Nan Lian Garden). Look at these two trees that are intertwined...



Then we had tasty dessert! I had another crazy awesome drink, plus fresh fruit and this really good sago-coconut-ice cream-pomello thing...
 
 

After playing Paper Mario (N64 emulator - addictive!), I got my dad out of the hotel to walk around and explore the area around the hotel. We came across two dessert places within a block - score! I can't wait to try them...

We went to Mong Kok, which turns out to be only about a ten minute walk from the hotel. It's a pretty happening area of HK with some of it closed off as pedestrian only. One of the streets within the area is the famed 'Ladies Market' that is open until about 2am and has stalls and stalls of purses, clothing, jewelery, and cutesy stuff for sale. Anyways, we went to the Mong Kok computer center - my dad wants to get a Chinese keyboard for my grandpa and I just wanted to look around at the vast amount of goodies available. The selection is amazing...it's a total geek'gasm! (maybe the next time I go I'll take pictures..but if you've ever been to a computer show, it's like that, but more dense, modern, and well lit, with lots more cutesy things.)

Then, one of the best things about going out with my dad, is we ate lots of tasty tasty food and spoiled my appetite. I had this tasty drink that had mango jelly and milk/cream of some sort and grapefruit juice with pomello..or something..who knows! It was really good...and not at all like bubble tea. The mango jelly was mostly solid on the bottom and it was jello-y and not tapioca-y. Then we had the tasty little cakes that were coconut flavored, yumm! And THEN! Then, ladies and gentlemen, we had TAKOYAKI! Well, I mostly had takoyaki...I haven't had takoyaki in a really long time (and the stuff in America doesn't really cut it). It was good but not as good as in Japan..but just as I had finished my takoyaki (from a street vendor), we came across a store that made JUST takoyaki, and all different kinds!! MMmm I will try that tomorrow. And then I had taro bubble tea. :)

so here are the promised pictures...and I promise that soon there will be pictures of non-food items, too. =)
 

I'm in Hong Kong (after 20 hours of flying!) and even though it is two in the afternoon my parents are jetlagged and sleeping next door. So what else is a girl to do besides blogging when everyone she knows is sleeping....? ;)

I'm in Hong Kong for five days, Guangzhou (southern China) for a week where we're staying at my uncle's place and using it as a base to go back to my dad's village, Shenzhen, and for lots of bargain shopping, then on a 12 day tour of Guilin, Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu (panda bears!). Then I'm back in Guangzhou for two days, HK for two days, then back home on Oct. 1st. I'm going to be here for the MidAutumn Moon Festival!! Veryvery exciting...mmm moon cakes, and lantern parades... And so the Lee family trip around China commences...(and also, because the US dollar doesn't suck in Asia like it does in Europe, we'll be staying in nice hotels...woohoo!)

On your way out of the Hong Kong Airport, much like they have customs or passport control, there's a 'Temperature Detection Section.' Signage indicated that it's used to detect SARS...isn't that crazy? They check out everyone that is walking by on infrared to see if they're running a fever...stinks for you if you have a cold. :)

It's hot in Hong Kong and is all hustle-and-bustle in the Asian way. I again wish that I was a better Cantonese girl so I can communicate with people. I'm surrounded by mountains again, but instead of the ice capped gloriousness that is the Swiss Alps, it's hot, smaller, and majestically rising out of the water mountains that are the Hong Kong islands.

I'm so lucky to have been able to travel so much this summer - and I cringe at the thought of my carbon emissions. Maybe once I get a job I'll calculate how much it would cost to offset my emissions (a rough calculation says over $500. ouch). I'll probably be periodically updating (with pictures, even!)..so stay tuned! (Only two more hours before my parents are scheduled to wake up from their nap...time to play games!)

 
Yummy yummy!
There's a supermarket right across from our hotel, so we chose some tasty treats...
here's the cutest package of doufufa (it's a sweet soy bean dessert) ...
i love the cute things in Asia (i know, so bad for the environment )

4,294 miles later...

Back at Olin.

My wonderful friend Meena, has made me realize something I have been missing in my life. It is called Explodingdog. It is like a comic that has no real goal and does not quite make sense. And, it makes me feel a little better about my sanity. The thing I like best about the pictures is that they often convey an emotion that cannot really be explained. Take this "Love is complicated..." picture for example. This is how I have been feeling about relationships recently. It really just sums it up right there, no additional words needed. They also accurately portrays some of my aspirations. If I ever became a teacher (not actually in my future plan, but if I did), I would want to teach like this: "I teach math." I must admit that not all of the pictures make sense in any way, shape, or form (like "That dog smells"), but at least they are funny in that insane sort of way.

In other news, my brother recently got engaged and I was asked to be in the wedding, which will be in about a year. I'm very happy for them and excited to be in the wedding! I also started my first rotation at work, which I will blog about soon. Overall, I feel like this: "Time will never stop."

Houston driving is an adventure.

back home in NY, with enough Swiss chocolate to keep me fortified for a long while yet... :)

Because I have nothing better to do, really, I've uploaded photos already on Facebook for your entertainment pleasure! Now, perhaps I will relearn my Chinese for my trip...we're leaving on the 29th to go for a month!

Sortof sad about leaving all of my YES friends...and about not going back to Olin in a week.

Rural Montana looks like a work of modern art.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=48.826305,-108.521233&spn=0.12906,0.376282&t=k&z=12&om=1

Today turned into a beautiful day - the fog lifted and the sun shone. When I first arrived it was like this, and I didn't fully appreciate how lucky we were to have such wonderful weather until it became blinding white outside with fog which obscured everything. After the last lecture today, we had an hour before dinner started and two and a half hours before the next planned event, so a bunch of us decided to take advantage of these rare free moments to go visit a waterfall that we had seen on a previous hike.

Now, I am not an outdoorsy person - I am a city girl. I've gone hiking only a few times before and certainly didn't have the right shoes for it (just sneakers). As it turns out, there is no path that goes to the waterfall - so as intrepid explorers, we (there were eight of us) decided to climb up the mountain, through the forest, to the waterfall. I've never done anything like this before - it is probably the most exposure I've ever had to dirt. We were climbing up the steep slope, with lots of squishy moss and plant growth underfoot, rocks and faller trees, and other nature-y things. It was beautiful and the air smelled like thyme...but I was mostly scared the whole time. We were climbing over rocks and below fallen trees, over plants and up hills. Most of the people I was with are much more outdoorsy than me and they really helped me out...I almost gave up when I accidently grabbed this ridiculous plant that stings you. The pain is not excruciating, but it hurts and doesn't go away for like 12 hours. Anyways, when we got to the waterfall, it was incredibly beautiful and majestic. I'll post pictures later :)

The way down was super hard because of the steepness - sometimes I felt like I was just barely controlling my fall down the mountain. The natural wetness of the forest made me slide down onto my ass a few times, but luckily I never slid very far. I made it back down, though, only to run ~15 minutes back to the hotel (partly uphill) so that we would have enough time to eat dinner before the movie...needless to say, we greatly enjoyed the cold waterfall water that we brought back. :) The hike was an amazing experience, even thought I was frightened half of the time...I think that I will stick to real trails from now on. :)

At night, after dinner and a movie about peak oil with the producer (it's actually quite crazy how much they plan in a day - for example, today the last thing ended at 11:20pm and the day starts at 9am. there are some breaks in between, but they're short coffee or meal breaks), a few of us sat outside on a terrace, watching the stars. There's some sort of meteor shower going on, so I saw my first shooting star, as well as many others after that one, too. It was so beautiful and great.

I have never been in so much contact with nature and it's pretty amazing.

Yesterday I had things to do, tomorrow I will have things to do, but today is an entirely free day--I may do as I please within these 24 hours.

All I really want to do right now is clean my whole house.