Girl and City

I was in Hong Kong for a full week, which felt at times too long and at times too short. FBB turned out to be a typical ibanker-douche, so I have absolutely nothing to say about him. His apartment was sweet though, even better than staying at a hotel. However, his kitchen didn’t function, so I had to eat out almost every meal, even when I didn’t have anyone to eat with. Those occasions aside, I spent less time alone than I would have thought.
I spent the first half of the week mostly with WAF and her boyfriend’s relatives, who were all super rich and made me understand some of the “class distinction” my friends had warned me about before coming to Hong Kong. I spent the latter half of the week with various classmates from TheBusinessSchool who were now working in Hong Kong, and whose work hours were so terrifingly long that it made me dread starting work myself¹.

My entire week consisted of two principal activities: shopping and eating. I did far too much shopping for my own good, considering things in Hong Kong are actually more expensive than mainland and I don’t have any luggage space for Singapore whatsoever. I also did far too much eating considering the food was mostly Western food that I could have had anytime I wanted in Canada. I did manage to slip in two dim sum trips, because how could I go to Hong Kong without having some dim sum? I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves².

Lunch at a tiny but busy Japanese joint near Causeway Bay MTR. They are known for their fatty tuna sashimi.

Lunch at an apartment-turned-restaurant near Sham Shui Po, Western-style cuisine, prix-fixe menu that included appetizer and entree. The dessert (every single dessert on their menu) was compliments of the owner, who seemed to know my friend’s aunt.

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1. I often had to wait until past midnight to have “dinner” with them because they didn’t get off work until midnight or 1 am, and even 10pm on weekends! [↩]
2. Unfortunately, there are three fantastic meals I didn’t get pictures of because my camera ran out of batteries. One was the first dim sum meal at a Shanghainese restaurant. The second was a Western meal on an island where they only travel by golf carts (no cars). And the third was a midnight excursion for some street food, including curry fish balls, lobster meatballs, roasted octupus and deep-fried calamari. [↩]

If you have any sense of foreshadowing, you’ll know are only two types of posts that could follow a three-night sleepover with HB:

1. Juicy, emotionally confusing, and morally questionable
2. Sensible, uptight, and boring

You’ll be happy to hear that my post is of the first variety. While it ranks high in the entertaining category, it ranks low in the my-proudest-moments category. So don’t judge, k?

I arrived at HB‘s to find him vacuuming. Apparently, he cared about making impressions, although this was not the first time I’d stayed at his apartment. Neither of us had planned anything for the first night, so we had dinner with his brother at a Korean/Japanese restaurant nearby. Then, we engaged in our favourite activity: wandering around The City. We walked through urban parks and impromptu art displays, we sat down on benches and stone garden walls, we held hands and linked arms. We were completely in-tune with each other, and conversation flowed endlessly. He never mentioned his relationship status and I never asked.
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So last night was The Business School banquet. I wish I could say I kept my composure. I didn’t.

When I arrived at the banquet hall, I realized that they were frisking us and checking our purses for alcohol. I had, unluckily, brought with me two (250ml) bottles of alcohol. I chugged one and hid another one beside a vending machine, which I planned to retrieve later. Chugging a 250ml mixture of vodka and coke (mostly vodka) at 6pm was not the smartest decision I’ve ever made. Within 20 minutes, I was undeniably drunk. Luckily, and let me just throw this out there because I am quite certain of this, I am the best drunk in the world. When I am drunk, I can act completely sober. As in, no one at my table knew I was drunk (other than the one person I told), not even my accounting professor, who was sitting with us. I talked to her for a good 15-20 minutes about the course, designations after the course, and career prospects. According to the one person at the table who knew I was drunk and witnessed all of this, I made some very sensible comments. He was in absolute shock of how composed I was. No one realized I was drunk – much less how drunk I was (the room was spinning and I probably could not walk in a straight line if I was asked to). Ergo, I am the best drunk in the world.
But because I couldn’t keep it to myself, I let a few more people into the loop about my drunken state. Since they were so shocked at how composed I had been throughout dinner, the word spread quickly, and soon, half my class knew I was anything but sober. While this was funny amongst ourselves, a few professors overheard, and my operations professor (a very old and pervy man) came over to talk to me. This was weird, obviously, because when I see him outside of class, we never exchange more than a courteous “Hello.” For most of the conversation, he was looking down my dress (I was sitting and he was standing, which was probably not a good call, but I didn’t trust myself to be standing) and had his hand on my shoulder. May I remind you that the man is a million years old?

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UC Berkeley was a half-hour BART ride away. I was so impressed with the organization and simplicity of the SF public transit that I had convinced my mom not to pick up the rental car until Day 4 of our trip. And although the BART/Muni system of San Fran did not disappoint, we did fumble for a good half hour in front of the automated ticket booths. They kept rejecting my mom’s credit card! After finally finding a Real Live Person to talk to, we were told that we can’t use the same credit card to buy tickets within 24 hours. What kind of rubbish rule is that! Anyway, I ended up using my credit card to buy our tickets and away we went.
But all did not go smoothly. When we got to the Berkeley station, I couldn’t exit, because the turnstile thing wouldn’t accept my ticket. Turns out the magnet on my camera case de-magnetized the strip on the ticket, so I had to get a written slip from another Real Live Person. Bah!

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I’ve always dreamed of spontaneous road trips to exciting cities with equally exciting friends. This weekend, my dream was realized. Early Saturday morning, my friends and I piled into SRB‘s car and headed to Montreal.

Montreal, one of the largest French-speaking city outside of France, the city of smoked meat and designer fashion, Canada’s cultural capital, and the birthplace of the Montreal bagel.
For us, it was a city with all this and more. It was a city where you can buy wine and beer from any dépanneur (convenient store), of which there were many. Suddenly, we were no longer constrained by the short hours and sparse locations of the LCBO (the only licensed retailer of alcohol in Ontario) when we felt like filling up with wine instead of food. It was a city where you couldn’t turn right on red lights. It was a city where we were immediately identifiable as aliens because we spoke English¹. It was a city where there was a boulangerie (bakery) on almost every street, and every single one was better than any bakery I’ve ever walked into in The City. It was a city where people were better dressed, better dined, and better wined.

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1. Although most people in Montreal are bilingual, certain parts of the city contain more English-speakers than others. We only encountered one waiter who couldn’t speak English almost at all. Nonetheless, French is the preferred language, and some locals treat Anglophones (especially tourists) differently. [↩]