the other day i ate some beef stroganoff in my favorite russian restaurant while reading The Brothers Karamazov. sometimes over here it is possible to forget that you are in china. oh, but wait, don't let me start on a new topic till i finish the whole hong kong/macao update.
sorry, dear readers, that i left you hanging on that one, no doubt checking this page one, two, eight times a day to find out about the rest of my trip. but now i've forgotten most of it. i was pretty fatigued after all that walking around hong kong (yes sam, i will add the pictures) and didn't get enough sleep, so its all gotten kind of fuzzy. but i will say- my room was fabulous, by far the nicest i've stayed in. there was a chocolate on the bed when i arrived, and also a bowl of fruit that i devoured with alarming speed as it was 8 when i arrived and i hadn't eaten since a very mediocre and early lunch. there was a huge tv, and one in the bathroom, which i watched while i took several long and luxurious baths. unfortunately there wasn't much good on tv, so i was forced to resort to watching terrible sitcoms the likes of which i had never seen. and i've seen a lot of bad sitcoms.
my trip was part of a media tour for journalists, photographers and such from beijing, so our whole time there was planned out for us. i was the only non-chinese, so i had a great chance to work on my chinese- this reminds me of something i wanted to mention. tuesday morning, the day i left for hong kong, i woke up and i could speak chinese. i dunno what it was, but i went around doing my errands and i felt like i could speak fluently. this lasted through hongkong, where i used my putonghua rather than my english to get around (although english is probably spoken more commonly than ole putong), and even the first day and a half of hanging out with my new chinese media buddies. but on the third night of my travels, my ability left as miraculously as it had came. maybe it was because i was really tired, maybe it was because the chinese buddies, having been convinced that i could speak chinese began to speak to me like they spoke to each other, but starting at around dinner time i could barely say a word. this led me to make such stupid mistakes as thinking my friend had said she would teach me korean and saying "oh, you speak korean?" when actually she had said she would teach me chinese. right, like the country i'm living in, the language we've all been speaking. oh the look she gave me when i asked her if she spoke chinese was priceless though. then i was talking to the one guy on my trip about going home for the holidays, and he said that in china people always tried to live near their parents. and i was like, oh well that works if its in a big city, but if your parents live in a small town, not so good." but actually i said "if your parents live in a small market."
um, also there was this photographer in our group that i thought was so awesome, she was one of those really sharp chinese women with a mean tongue on her. it was so funny, she would always make comments about the one guy on our trip like- at one of our dinners, they took a picture of her, him, and a woman on the hotel's staff, and she was like, oh, the prettiest (the staff lady), the oldest (herself), and the fattest (the guy). and then later on she was like, i'm worried about my son, he's getting so fat, almost as fat as this guy. but to be fair, chinese people in general are more open about calling people fat, maybe because the chinese are not as obsessed with thinness as americans.
we ate amazing food from the hotels' restaurants, one italian meal, one japanese, one cantonese, and two breakfast buffets that were hot shit. oh it was so nice to eat well. i also tried a lot of macanese snacks- this really good ice creamy custard, almost cookies, dried meats that were a mix between jerky and fruit rollups, and this sweet soup that's supposed to be healthy and each flavor targets a different problem but actually made me want to vomit.
also while writing my article about this trip, i became obsessed with Stanley Ho, the man who used to have a monopoly over casinos in Macau before the western places came in. he is one of the richest men in Asia, and he has four wives and seventeen children. he started out of a fairly low status, but after he was overseeing an overseas shipment that was attacked by pirates and managed to gain control of a gun and get the pirates of the ship before they could get the 10,000 dollars on the ship, he was promoted. like, what? i saw that on wikipedia. you gotta respect people like that, you just got to.
sorry, dear readers, that i left you hanging on that one, no doubt checking this page one, two, eight times a day to find out about the rest of my trip. but now i've forgotten most of it. i was pretty fatigued after all that walking around hong kong (yes sam, i will add the pictures) and didn't get enough sleep, so its all gotten kind of fuzzy. but i will say- my room was fabulous, by far the nicest i've stayed in. there was a chocolate on the bed when i arrived, and also a bowl of fruit that i devoured with alarming speed as it was 8 when i arrived and i hadn't eaten since a very mediocre and early lunch. there was a huge tv, and one in the bathroom, which i watched while i took several long and luxurious baths. unfortunately there wasn't much good on tv, so i was forced to resort to watching terrible sitcoms the likes of which i had never seen. and i've seen a lot of bad sitcoms.
my trip was part of a media tour for journalists, photographers and such from beijing, so our whole time there was planned out for us. i was the only non-chinese, so i had a great chance to work on my chinese- this reminds me of something i wanted to mention. tuesday morning, the day i left for hong kong, i woke up and i could speak chinese. i dunno what it was, but i went around doing my errands and i felt like i could speak fluently. this lasted through hongkong, where i used my putonghua rather than my english to get around (although english is probably spoken more commonly than ole putong), and even the first day and a half of hanging out with my new chinese media buddies. but on the third night of my travels, my ability left as miraculously as it had came. maybe it was because i was really tired, maybe it was because the chinese buddies, having been convinced that i could speak chinese began to speak to me like they spoke to each other, but starting at around dinner time i could barely say a word. this led me to make such stupid mistakes as thinking my friend had said she would teach me korean and saying "oh, you speak korean?" when actually she had said she would teach me chinese. right, like the country i'm living in, the language we've all been speaking. oh the look she gave me when i asked her if she spoke chinese was priceless though. then i was talking to the one guy on my trip about going home for the holidays, and he said that in china people always tried to live near their parents. and i was like, oh well that works if its in a big city, but if your parents live in a small town, not so good." but actually i said "if your parents live in a small market."
um, also there was this photographer in our group that i thought was so awesome, she was one of those really sharp chinese women with a mean tongue on her. it was so funny, she would always make comments about the one guy on our trip like- at one of our dinners, they took a picture of her, him, and a woman on the hotel's staff, and she was like, oh, the prettiest (the staff lady), the oldest (herself), and the fattest (the guy). and then later on she was like, i'm worried about my son, he's getting so fat, almost as fat as this guy. but to be fair, chinese people in general are more open about calling people fat, maybe because the chinese are not as obsessed with thinness as americans.
we ate amazing food from the hotels' restaurants, one italian meal, one japanese, one cantonese, and two breakfast buffets that were hot shit. oh it was so nice to eat well. i also tried a lot of macanese snacks- this really good ice creamy custard, almost cookies, dried meats that were a mix between jerky and fruit rollups, and this sweet soup that's supposed to be healthy and each flavor targets a different problem but actually made me want to vomit.
also while writing my article about this trip, i became obsessed with Stanley Ho, the man who used to have a monopoly over casinos in Macau before the western places came in. he is one of the richest men in Asia, and he has four wives and seventeen children. he started out of a fairly low status, but after he was overseeing an overseas shipment that was attacked by pirates and managed to gain control of a gun and get the pirates of the ship before they could get the 10,000 dollars on the ship, he was promoted. like, what? i saw that on wikipedia. you gotta respect people like that, you just got to.
posted by Amanda at 12:24 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home