June 27: Hong Kong Day 3
Today was a rather quiet day in terms of sightseeing. Gen had her presentation with her former UC Davis advisor in the morning. Kathy and I went to that as well as a presentation by a Penn alum who lives in Singapore now. After Gen’s presentation, Kathy, Gen, and a friend of Gen’s from Taiwan/UC Davis, Sophie, went to Harbor City again. We decided to eat at Rice Paper, a nouvelle Vietnamese restaurant in the mall. They had a special lunch menu for four people that cost 500 HK Dollars (about 18 dollars each). There must have been 7-8 dishes on the menu, and nearly all of them were some kind of meat. There was so much food, when they brought us another round of food we thought they had made a mistake. There was cabbage, fried rice, four kinds of meat (including buttery chicken wings that were so good I didn’t miss the hot sauce), lamb skewers, and a free lemon drink. By the end of the meal, we were stuffed.
We left Sophie to shop and headed back to Causeway Bay to do some more shopping. Kathy got an old belt fixed and bought a tropical fruit called mangostine. We also stopped at a fruit place to get mango drinks with chunks of real mango in them. Yum! Around 4, we decided we should get back to the university for a presentation about Hong Kong and Singapore. We took the train to Central, but then had a hard time finding a cab. Many of them were full, or wouldn’t stop where we were trying to flag them down. Gen said it was the financial district and it was late in the day, so many people were trying to get cabs.
We finally got one and made it back to the university about 10 minutes into the presentation. We ended up going back to the room and just hanging out; Gen and Kathy had arrived only a few days ago, and hadn’t really had time to rest and recover from jet lag. And I think the experience of running back and forth had its toll. Around 9, Kathy opened the bloody-looking mangostine like a surgeon and Gen broke out a bag of Trader Joe’s pistachios. Not really in the mood to go out, I suggested we order pizza. Gen had never ordered Pizza Hut pizza in Hong Kong before, but she managed to find the details online (SHE managed to get someone to make the internet connection work for her computer—the power of knowing the local language!). The pizza was a bit small considering the price, but that and our “side dishes” did the job. More importantly, it all gave us fuel and time to do a dry run of our presentation, something we hadn’t had a chance to do yet.
Tags: Asia, Hong Kong
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