First full day in Hong Kong! I woke up at 6am and had some breakfast that I bought at a supermarket the night before. The supermarket is called Taste and is likened to Bayview Village Loblaws. It's not my first choice because it's expensive. I'd rather go to Wellcome or Park n Shop which is like No Frills.

More views from the hotel but during the day! It alternated between cloudy, raining, and sunny all day.

All the teachers met up in the lobby for 9:15am to get to the school for our 10am meeting. We were charged a flat rate of 60 HKD to get there and we shared it among 3 people in each cab. Then afterwards we found out we got ripped off because the school is only a 5-10 min cab ride. After the meeting, one of the teachers cabbed home and found out it only cost 30 HKD...d'oh. Well now we know. We agreed that we would take a cab each morning with 4 people in each cab to school since we didn't want to be all sweaty but we could bus it home (5.9 HKD but takes 20 min plus waiting for the mini bus that only carries 16 passengers) if people were leaving at different times. Walking is out of the question. A bunch of us tried and barely made it alive to the closest MTR station. Too hot and hilly roads.

During the cab ride, we saw some  really weird anti-cult signs. My colleague Michael probably got a better picture. The one on the bottom right says "Resist the cult poison" and the one on the bottom left says "Eliminate the Cult".

The school is nice. Not many pictures because it was sort of inappropriate at the time but I will take more on Monday. I found that taking pictures with my iPod touch was a little more subtle so there's a mix of camera and iPod pictures.


This is looking out from the cafeteria courtyard. It was raining.

The following pictures are from the staff lounge that we get to borrow for lunch. It's very impressive! A wall of mugs from the day staff, 3 fridges, two tanks hot water, several pitchers of room temperature water, 6 microwaves, couches, tables with stools, a TV.
 

Hong Kong is very efficient. 6 microwaves! I also feel like they're quite good at avoiding arguments over possessions because even in my hotel room there are two sides and everything is labelled B-side or C-side.

So we got a tour of the school, saw our classroom, etc. After time at the school, a bunch of us went for lunch across the street at a local diner. It was full of half-naked old Chinese men. They were all super excited to see all the white people and assumed that Michael and I didn't speak English. In fact they said, "Do they understand us? You think they know what we're saying?" Then we proceeded to help figure out where to sit because there were 6 of us. It was the kind of place that had dim sum, rice, soupy noodles, and stuff but specialized in congee. The waitress was very excited and brought out trays and trays of dim sum and put them on the table. No one there spoke any English but she said to take what we liked and give back what we don't like. How helpful to the white people since the menu was just Chinese words written on construction paper taped to the wall. And Michael can't read Chinese. So they choose their food and I helped them order congee and wonton noodles as well. The white folks were treated like celebrities and everyone was so impressed when they demonstrated their Cantonese by ordering "gai lan" and saying Thank You (mm goy). The other customers joked and told the waitress to reserve the table for us so that we could come back all the time. They were very happy that we were there. After all the food, the total came out to...134 HKD total! That's roughly $3 CDN per person. Sweet! The entire restaurant (including the customers) said thank you and good bye as we left.

Afterwards, we walked down the street to see what was around. Lots of hair salons (25 HKD for wash and blowdry!), congee and noodle restaurants, and bakeries (half a dozen egg tarts, the good kind, for 15 HKD!). We also found a Wellcome. So after work, we can buy breakfast, lunch foods, fruit, etc. and then take a cheap cab home. After we stumbled sweating to the MTR station, we split up. Half of them went to Shum Shui Po (the technology area, similar to Akihabara in Tokyo) to get a SIM card for their phone and the other half, including me, decided to head back to the hotel.

So Michael, Patricia, and I headed back to the hotel. We got to the MTR station and then attempted to take the mini bus back. It's not actually a far walk but we didn't know how to get back and it would be a quick, direct route if not for the giant army barracks in our way. However, we noticed a giant line-up for the mini bus. Mini buses, as I mentioned before, only carry 16 passengers. No one is allowed to stand. This particular bus seems to come every 5-10 minutes and the line was long enough that we would probably be waiting for the 6th bus. Not worth it! So Michael, having walked back the night before, led the way. We later found out that he took the longest possible route (not on purpose) and that if we had got out at the correct MTR exit, it would have been a quick 10 minute walk back. Instead, it took...well I'm not sure. Time blurs together when you're slowly melting. But it was much longer than necessary.

I knew that if I stayed at the hotel, I would want to nap and since that's not helpful for jet lag, I set out once more for Lok Fu Plaza.

Along the way, I found a park. Parks are great for teens who want to play basketball, kids who want to play on the playground, and seniors who want to do exercise.

  

Just because Ryan doesn't believe I'm really there...here I am!

Finally, I walked over to Lok Fu Plaza. It's very close to the hotel. It was a 10 minute walk and probably quicker if my feet weren't tired and I wasn't sweating my life away. It's a very nice mall! But heaven was found in the form of two arcades. I had to resist the urge to play.

This was the first arcade I found. It had lots of coin dozer games! $2 HKD per token. 

  Then I found this one with the life size 鹹蛋超人 I can't remember his name in English. 

At this arcade, tokens were $1 each and there were no dozer games. Instead, they had these:

Hello Kitty Piano Car

Shoot stuff into the Cup Noodle (I couldn't see what we were shooting)

Ice cream claw machine (hagen daaz on the bottom right) I'm assuming it's a Play Until You Win type or this would suck!

I circled the whole mall, catalogued in my head some things I wanted to buy and their prices for comparison. No use buying now. I can walk here all the time! I headed back to the hotel to shower and change for dinner. For dinner, the program director took us all out to a restaurant in Mong Kok. People thought the food was excellent! It was not...but I kept that to myself. Just regular but it's definitely better eating with Uncle #5.

A few of us walked back to the hotel (~20 min) and it was humid but breezy, then it rained, then went back to humid and breezy. After the rain, it was quite cold so as soon as I got back, I had shower #2 for the day. I think that 2 showers a day will probably become very common.

That's it for today! More fun tomorrow before the stress of school sets in.