weekends

Are weekends like bookends? Are they meant solely for propping up the days with more meaning/importance? Do they serve their sole purpose as empty little days just to make the weekdays look nicely put together?

NO. TOTALLY NO.

I love weekends.

I hardly left my apartment yesterday and today, and now that I think about it I pretty much wore sweatpants for almost the whole 48 hours.

I watched a LOT of TV. Sex and the City marathon continues every Saturday night with L & S, and we simultaneously ragged on Carrie for never wearing an effing bra while stuffing our faces with delicious home-made guacamole.

Then today...I thought I would be productive today. I got up, turned on the TV as I made breakfast, and the first thing I heard was..."you're watching the next iron chef MARATHON!!" Oh god, there goes my productivity.

This show has my mouth salivating and my heart pumping and my mind running for the best foods that I have ever experienced. And it inspires me and my roommate to cook more deliciously. And it lengthened my mental grocery list.

Places I want to visit/find over winter break:

-The Red Crane

-The Counter

-Tamarind

-Yiassoo

-Boiling Crab

-Amber Cafe

-more authentic Indian, Mediterranean, Japanese, Korean, Mexican and Vietnamese places

-Downtown Mtn View/Palo Alto

-SF

...and basically find ALL THE BEST FOODS, EVER!!

I STICKY.

I decided to not even bother to figure out the time differences and how to switch between HK and CA. Instead, I am adopting the recently acquired camping philosphy that time is of no importance. I mean, I'm on vacation, after all.

After a pretty fast 13 hour flight (consisted of Running With Scissors, 17 Again omgzacefron, & SLEEP), we landed in HK. Immediately after stepping off the plane I was greeted with a cloud of humidity and instantly my pores started filling with sweat. Apparently the fact that it was 5 in the morning does not stop HK from being an already sweltering 87 degrees Fahrenheit.

We left the airport and went on an adventure. After getting picked up by a rollicky double decker reminiscent of the Knight Bus in Harry Potter, we transferred buses a couple more times, stopped at a 7/11 for snackage, and then took a ride through dense greenery to arrive at the Big Buddha. Can I first just say -- Hong Kong is breathtakingly beautiful. It's extremely lush, it's seriously GREEN everywhere you look. The mountains are amazing to look at too, and the ocean view is just as nice. Pictures do not do it justice.

So according to my mother, the story is that if you touch the lotus leaves that the Big Buddha is seated upon, you get to make a wish. We made our way up the many many stairs and soon found ourselves at the foot of the statue. Unfortunately we soon found out that to actually get close enough to touch the lotus, we would have to pay a fee. Any spark of faith in spirituality fizzled quickly...sigh. HAHA. Moving on.

After this little side-trip we went to our hotel. L'Hotel. It's QUITE swanky and I enjoy it immensely! We have a room on the 33rd floor and I absolutely love it, unlike my dad who has a fear of heights. Glancing out the big glass windows and being greeted with a view of high rises and bustling city streets far below fulfills some sort of happiness within me. I sat on my crisp white bed and soaked it in for a while as my sister flipped through channels. We couldn't decide what to watch:
1. A program called "Let's Speak Korean!!" taught by an entirely too enthusiastic Korean girl to an entirely too white man. Pretty entertaining.
2. A (BAD) soap opera where the main character is a white girl who speaks English with a Russian accent, but speaks in Mandarin to her father, who looks EXACTLY like Gimli (complete with beard/grunting) and has recently been diagnosed with diabetes.
Needless to say we found our way to MTV soon enough and fell asleep to Colbie Caillat and Taylor Swift music videos. LOVE!

Random HK tidbits:
-Conversation between me and my mother (some of you know she was concerned about my clothing being not conservative enough.)
Mom: (pointing at girls wearing t-shirts) see, those girls aren't wearing tank tops
Chery: they also look like they haven't seen sunlight in fourteen years. I have a tan to show off.
Mom: (laughs at me. SIGH)
To fit in amongst the HK girls I would probably have to lose 20 pounds and get 30 shades lighter. And then take a trip back to 2006 and give myself lawnmower bangs again.
-My enthusiastic urban studies professor's voice has been in my head because HK is full of...
1. ROUNDABOUTS!! A great way to divert traffic! (drift off into a personal story about getting lost in the roundabouts in Paris)
2. High rises galore!! High density, affordable housing! (insert another miscellaneous story from his well-traveled life)
Seriously, I can hear him echoing in my brain. But I'm interested in all this city stuff and city life is fascinating for me right now so I'm fine with it...
-MINUS the fact that I wish I had...very limited parental attention. Haha. Clubbing & Happy Hour are not activities to bring Ma and Pa along on. NTS, come back with friends. I am dying to explore the city without parents.
-like I mentioned earlier I have 2 bug bites already, more than the rest of my family combined. I don't know whether to be flattered that the bugs love me so much or just plain annoyed. One has swollen to nickel sized and the other to poker chip sized. Incredible. My body really just amazes me sometimes.
-HUMIDITY...I STICKY, ALL THE TIME! The immortal words of Katherine Hu, spoken almost EXACTLY a year ago (!!!) hold extremely true at this point in my life. I don't remember what it feels like to be non-sticky. SIGH, southeast Asia. How you tickle my fancy.
-LOTS OF DRAGONFLIES! They're huge. I also saw these bright red spiders with creepily long legs, and a praying mantis the size of my hand.
-peoplewatching = much fun to be had. Also there are billboards of girls who look like they could go to UCI.

And yeah, I finished reading Running With Scissors. Which I HIGHLY enjoyed & highly recommend. I remembered a recent conversation I had with C about getting really immersed into a book and then starting to hear the narrator in your head...because now Augusten Burroughs basically lives in my head. HAHA I'm starting to feel a little crazy, but yeah there is a narration going on in my mind right now. It's fine. Seriously though, that book was CRAZY good. And CRAZY! But really good.

Oh, and I have been writing entirely too much...someone please buy me an electronic journal with a QWERTY keypad so I can write ALL THE TIME. Being on vacation = too much free time, too much free time = too much thinking, too much thinking = too much writing = hand cramps and chicken scratch handwriting. WiFi would be good too, thanks.

But yeah, I am enjoying Hong Kong so far! I'm not really jetlagged, I guess because my sleep schedule at home was weird enough for me to not feel 13 hours of re-scheduling. Whatever. Ok, goodbye from the lobby of my swanky L'HOTEL! Until the next time the computer is freee...

this, i miss

Walking home by the railroad.




Cupertino in the summer time.




Walking to the park.



Stillness and beauty...& being alone to appreciate it.



The chemistry and the crazy and the "THIS IS IT" factor.

---

I'm getting antsy; I can't stay still for long. I need a change of scenery. Talk of escaping to Pasadena and NorCal and LA are especially enticing right now.

I want to go on a nice hike and see the view. Not the smog, the view.

In other news, my midterms remain un-studied for and my tan lines have become more definite. I am half pleased.

GG failed.

Another thing on my mind: project 365. One photo every day for a year to represent each day. It's not too late to start, right? And I finally have a working camera, thanks to friendly people and some Scotch tape. I'll start tomorrow!

The Grand Slam breakfast tomorrow at Denny's! Waking up bright and early, 5:30 AM. Good thing I am getting all my REM.

catching up but not

I am blogging rather often lately which can only mean one thing: there are so many other things that I should be doing. Like, for instance, catching up on Humanities Core? Right now we are studying the Bolshevik revolution and the Weimar republic and Dadaism and Communists and art...and I'm still trying to figure out how it all pieces together. Mind you, I am not trying that hard, as I am two for two in choosing to catch up on Z's during lecture instead of trying to figure out what my professor is yammering on about.

I have to say, though. He is a really interesting guy, from what I've seen and heard thus far. Granted I've only been conscious for about a third of the time he's spoken, but what I got from him so far was that his lectures are interspersed with funny tidbits, he loves Project Runway, and he would probably be a great person to take a really long road trip with. He's just one of those people who are filled with random interesting-ness, like for instance today we talked about this:

Which I thought was really funny. I'd never seen it before, maybe you guys have because I'm stuck in my little non-politically involved shell, and I must say Irvine is really not the most politically active campus either, but yeah. I lol-ed and thought of Tina Fey, and seeing Russia from your house, and then thinking of Russia made me think of the Bolsheviks, and that just reminded me of how confused I am, so my lol-ing ended pretty quickly.

But then he also does things like make us stand up and sing communist songs. And standing up and singing "The Internationale" for four minutes is much too exhausting for me, so I conked out after that. I would be the worst commie ever, hoo-hah.

Anyway, I also have an assignment on Berlin Cabaret Culture due for my discussion in approximately one and a half hours. Surprise, surprise: I have not yet begun.

My Beatles class also deserves more attention than I am giving it. Yesterday we watched a clip of the Beatles performing at Shea stadium, and it was CRAZY! There were girls screaming and crying and fainting and running on the field and getting dragged off of it by grumpy looking cops. The sound of the Beatlemaniacs was so deafening that I doubt John, Paul, Ringo, and George could even hear themselves singing. (Hell yeah I am on a first name basis with them. And I must say, I have a rather giant crushes on Paul and Ringo.) It was cool though cause you could tell they were having an amazing time, John was going nuts and playing the keyboard with his elbows and George couldn't sing for laughing so hard. This class seriously never fails to put a smile on my face. And yet for all my love for this class, I still am seriously behind. Like 300 pages behind, to be exact. Plus like nine playlists of music. I'm a winner!
Madness. The 60's must have been such an amazing time for life! Jealous.

I've also been catching up on TV shows, like Grey's Anatomy for instance. I have that show to thank for getting me started on actually following television shows, so I do have a soft spot in my heart for it. At the same time, I do want to slap a hoe across the face and maybe cry and scream at the television. Izzy is SO frustrating and just...her storyline is not interesting at all, and things are going in circles and getting boring and just not intense anymore. It saddens me to see Grey's shriveling so, but PLEASE! It's hurting me.

This made me laugh though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JImyMGNQSs&feature=related

Points of interest:
-Meredith's bangs are SPOT ON. #1 annoyance of the show prior to Izzy's storyline.
-I just grey'sed your anatomy! HAHAHA
-I'm right, right???

Okay, I should probably start being productive. Which is really hard when your next door neighbor is blasting Britney Spears. Don't get me wrong, I love listening to Brit-brit and I'm so glad her downward spiral spiralled upwards, but it's different listening to her and listening to her through a wall.

Oh I also had a dream that I broke my leg but walked around crutch-less. DEEPER MEANING, anyone??? What my little dream book says is that a broken leg forecasts a period of unhappiness...but I feel like my period of unhappiness is over. And in my dream, I was walking around all fine and not really lamenting my lack of crutches, just wondering why I didn't have any. But I was a trooper! So maybe I'll have unhappiness but be fine and march on regardless. OR MAYBE I'm analyzing too much and should focus my brain power on Berlin Cabaret Culture!