sweatysleep.com

So today is the first day of classes... Time to actually get some work done I guess. I'm waitlisted for both of the classes that I am going to today, but I'm first in line for both (most of you know that I would follow that by saying suckkkkaaaaaaa lol). It is actually so humid here that my hands always feel sticky, and my sheets always feel damp; so I got this genius idea last night that maybe I should turn on the fan in my room... You know its bad when the boney front part of your shins is sweating... At least I can enjoy the fan for free, we have to pay everytime we want to turn on the air conditioner in the room.

I finally decided to go buy some hair products so that I can wear my hair curly and not have to curl it all of the time. My product of choice was "Sifone soft wave defining mousse", BAD decision. If by soft wave defining they meant, turning nice curly hair into a big puffball looking like albert einstein, then this crap is doing it's job. I'm hoping big hair makes a comeback SOON.

Last night we decided to live a little and go to a nice-ish restaurant by the campus bar. It was the biggest western menu I have seen since I got here, a meal without rice, yayyyy. I decided ona cheeseburger that came with "fat chips" and "salad"... You might wonder why I put salad in quotations, the reason being that I never really found out which part of my meal was the salad lol. Fat chips=fries, easy enough, but the burger came open faced, and on one side of the bun was lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes, but there was also a little dish of salsa witha pickle stuck in it... We spent a decent part of the dinner debating which one it was. Everyone came to the conclusion that more than likely, it was the salsa and pickle... I just gave up. Time for class. Wish me luck.

Someone ship me a mini fan and some hair stuff. STAT.

Thank heaven for 7 11 =)

Soooo, the past few days have been pretty crazy, super hectic, and tons of fun. After the insulin-fridge-thought it was freezing debocle we went on a Chinese heritage tour. And yes, it was just about as itneresting as it sounds... Not very. It ended up raining and my beautifully frizzy hair became what I would refer to as a fricken DéSASTRE! After the day randomly walking around some temples, parks, etc, we decided to check out some Chinese culture of a different type (muahahaha). There is a district in central HK referred to as LKF (i'll get back with the actual spelling of the real name at a later date), people say it is similar to Bourbon Street with tons and tons of bars and clubs that pretty much open right onto the street... My favorite part is the fact that you can go to one of the many 7 11s, buy a huge bottle of beer for about 1$ CDN, and legally creep through the streets drinking it with no shame... Perfect. We checked out a few bars and decided on Club 1997... Ohhh I also forgot to mention that it was ladies night, meaning everything is free.... Cover, booze, everything. The bar we chose had free cosmos for ladies alllll night, thank you!

We spent the night dancing and losing dignity and then cabbed back to HKUST (ps. cabs are ridiculously cheap here). Needless to say, orientation the next morning at 9 am was a bit painful. My friend Tobias sat beside me and snored through the entire thing lol. It was one of those days when I promised myself that I was going to have a nice long nap later in the day, nottttt so much. The american boys decided that they were going to teach the Europeans how to play beer pong and flip cup at the University bar (referred to Unibar from here on out). We had a ridiculous night playing drinking games, and drinking the bar dry of beer, as well as glasses to drink out of... Plastic cups for the rest of the night, classy.

Yesterday we had "buddy day", where we met up with our assigned buddies and had a fun-filled day haha. Started off with a light brunch, that for me consisted of many many mini tarts and a few shots of insulin. We then went to "Stanley Market" where there was lots of shopping, and lots of food. I MAYYYY have had a chocolate chip cookie after lunch, noooo willpower over here lol. We then went to Victoria peak which is a famous mall/observatory where you can see the city skyline, although it was super foggy so there was really no point. We then took a tram down to the bottom of the peak and I thought of my mom the whole time thinking how she would have been losing her mind, it felt like taking a really slow roller coaster ride, not my cup of tea. Just because it was Saturday, everyone decided to go back to LKF... Everybody headed down and once again hit up the trusty 711. After wandering into a few sifferent bars we decided on Fevar (I have a large blue stamp on my forearm reminding my of this), it cost 250$HK (about 35$CDN), for an open bar. i wasn't really drinking too much so it wasn't realllly worth it for me but I clearly wasn't going to stay wandering the streets alone lol. The bars here get just as crowded as the streets, as I could hardley fricken move in that place... Never again.

Sidenote: took the mini-bus home from the subway station by myself yesterday, felt like a big girl haha.

Time to go shower as I am the biggest greaseball in all of asia right now. The shower heads are really low and I have to bend down to get my hair wet, my head also pokes over the top of some of the bathroom stalls. I'm THAT creepy white girl peering into everybody elses stalls lol. I'll add some pictures later. If you don't like scenery pictures then suck it. =)

Wowww

So this morning almost turned out to be disasterous (about 5 minutes ago), I went into the mini fridge in my room only to realize that my yogurt was frozen... Immediately I freaked out because all of my insulin is in the fridge and if it freezes it's no good, and i'm a huge idiot for putting it somewhere where that could happen. I grabbed one of the drinks from the fridge and shook it, it sounded fine and not frozen, so then I grabbed my boxes of insulin, literally ripped the packaging off in .05 seconds and shook one of the tubes... Of course the tubes would be so full that you can't tell if it's frozen or not when shaking it. So being the genius that I am, I decide to put one of the tubes in another pen and see if anything came out of the top when I pressed it. To my delight, turns out that the only reason the yogurt froze was because it was right under the tiny icebox in the top of the freezer. Just had to share that, as I almost had a heart attack imagining my parents response if I would have had to tell them that I haven't even been away from home for a week and I already put my life in danger lol... Mom would have notttt been impressed. Needless to say, I turned the fridge down to about 2/5 and will leave it there for the rest of the semester in order to avoid further heart attacks. I'm going to go check out the gym, time for my first crazy asian workout.

Unidentified vegetarian dishes... I'll stick with Starbucks.

Today ended up being very eventful... We started the morning off by jumping on tour buses that took us to Lantau Island where we rode cable cars on the longest cable in all of Asia. The cable car took us to a little town at the top of a mountain that is home to the largest Buddha in the world, the thing was 31 metres tall! After getting out of the cable cars we took over 230 steps to the very top where we could get up close and personal with the buddha himself. We then creeped around the touristy street of shops where a bunch of us located a starbucks, jackpot! It's amazing the tiny things that get us excited over here, a frappucino never looked so good! Our visit to the buddha was followed by a vegetarian chinese lunch served in a monestary. I excused myself to the washroom so that I could take my shot before I ate, much to my surprise, when I finally located the bathroom, it was comprised of a metal seat in the ground; needless to say, I opted for an empty bench out back of the restaurant instead lol. So back to this vegetarian lunch, I honestly could not even tell you what it was besides green tea, rice, some large springrolls, and some vegetables, everything else was unidentifiable. There was some dish made of "taro", people said it tasted similar to mashed potatoes, but I thought it looked like a strange looking light purple blob..

After our trip to Lantau island, we visited a small fishing village where we got to explore, as well as go on a little boat to the ocean to look for dolphins. The village was like nothing you've ever seen before; shanties everywhere, where the front part of the house served as a store in the street market. There was dried seafood EVERYWHERE, and the streets reeked of fish. In the middle of this poor village we found a store that sold cans of beer for about 1$, clearly we had to take advntage of that lol. After looking around for a while it was our turn for the little tour boat, not only did we get a glimps of a "pink" dolphin, as well as a blue one, but we also got the luxury of witnessing someone taking care of business in an outhouse. You might ask how we managed to see this... We actually just saw the "business" dropping from the outhouse directly into the water we were boating along... Lovely.

We ended the tour by checking out a couple of big bridges in the city, not very interesting if you ask me; but we had some engineering students on the tour, so maybe it was for their sake, who knows. After we returned from the tour a bunch of us got ready and decided to go to the racetrack for the night. I took the MTR (subway) for the first time, it's amazing how easy it is to get around on that thing! It took us a while, but we finally got into the racetrack, it was amazing, not to mention huge, and in the middle of the city! I bet on 4 races and won nothinggggg, bothered. Most of us bet $10HK on each race, which works out to be just over 1$CAD, so we really didn't lose much.

It's funny how open all of the exchange students are to just asking people for their phone numbers. Everyone just wants to keep in contact and get as many friends as they can, it's really funny, but also super awesome since everybody is doing the same thing. Not bragging or anything but I already have 14 new friends in my chinese phone, nbd. our tour tomorrow isn't until 2:15, so I'm looking forward to a nice long sleep, I was thinking of going to check out the gym in the morning; but who am I kidding, probably not haha.

stay classy sandiego, until next time =)

skype = crying

So good thing my roomate knows how to properly set a clock, I had set the time on my cell phone 2 hours behind and definately wouldnt have been up in time to make the tour today, way to get things off to a great start kendall lol. Last night was much much much better than the night before. Although getting a duvet that contains camels wool might not have been the brightest idea I ever had, woke up a few times with some minimal night sweatiness... Time to go get ready for this Lantau island tour that we're going on today, I hear it involves climbing like 600 stairs to see the worlds largest Buddha or something, hopefully I'll make quick friends with someone that can piggy back me =)

Over and out from Hong Kong

cry baby. not in friendly manitoba anymore.

So what should’ve been a 13 hour flight turned into a 17 hour flight after having to land in shanghai due to mechanical concerns, longest day of my life! Finally arriving in Hong Kong was overwhelming to say the least, thankfully my buddy “Fanny” met me at the airport to take me back to campus. This girl is soooo nice and helpful, it’s unbelievable. The worst part is that she didn’t know the flight was delayed, and had been waiting for me at the airport for FIVE hours, what a trooper. We cabbed back to the hotel and found my room, I’m on the tenth floor of a building overlooking the ocean, can’t get that kind of view in Winnipeg for $200 a month lol. I had told my exchange coordinator about my newly discovered condition and she put a fridge right in my room so I can keep my insulin in it, talk about clutch! I bet all of the non-diabetics on the floor are jealous, for once. My roommate is a French girl from Paris name Anaise (I’ll get back to you with the correct spelling later), her and I both sat on our beds crying late last night … It’s just super overwhelming being here, being pretty alone in a world you hardly understand. She was crying mainly because she missed her boyfriend, I was crying mainly because I looked at my tiny bed and realized I had no sheets; you don’t realize how something like that can affect you until you’re a million miles from home and your roommate has the comfiest looking bed ever. Needless to say, I made it through the night thanks only to air Canada, meaning that the tiny pillow and blanket I sniped from the plane comprised my bedding. I also decided to roll up a hoodie and sleep on it because my one inch thick pillow was really not cutting it. I would like to thank auntie Shauna for giving me the travel pillow containing a blanket because that was the blanket I used for my upper body, while the airplane one was used strictly for my lower half lol.

For the first time in a long time I had a hard time sleeping in this morning, so I decided that I was going to talk a little walk around campus to try and find some breakfast. Talk about unproductive. The campus is a maze of steep hills, and countless escalators and elevators, of which I knew nothing about. It was after walking for about 20 minutes and getting really upset and frustrated that I couldn't find food that I decided to turn back. Good thing I brought those granola bars. I found my way back to the residence which was still completely desolate and went into our common room on the 10th floor, there was once chinese girl in it at the sink so I decided to try and make my first friend... No sooner did the words "Hi, how are you?" leave my mouth, than she looks at me, says "I have training, can't talk", and beetled out of the room; definately not friendly Manitoba.

My buddy Fanny came and met me before lunch to help me get some things done around campus, we actually did so much running around that I was physically exhausted by the end of the day... Paid my residence fees, got my student ID, got my internet set up, applied for an octopus card, bought a phone, bought bedding (much needed), and about a million other things! On the brighter side of things, I rode both a double decker bus, annnd a "minibus" (small bus/big van driven by a crazy asian man that has no mercy when it comes to traffic or speed limits). Today also proved to be the day that I would have my first meal on campus, Fanny suggested the cafe which has a wide selection of "western" foods. After deciding I didn't want to have to pump myself full of insulin, I decided on what was called a "smoked salmon salad", expecting to get some sort of salad topped with a piece of salmon... Turns out it was indeed a salad, but had pieces of raw salmon draped over it. Shocked at first, and admittedly a little scared, I decided that when in Rome... Not the best choice I ever made, but definatley not the worst.

sidenote: it was 16c here today, with humidity of 75-90%, so much for bringing my straightner and curling iron... crazy afro hair here I come.

Tmrw is a big day, on the agenda - Lantau island tour.

ps. apparently nobody uses tampons or eats rice cakes here. weird and extremely inconvenient.

bathroom junkie

first complaint of the journey... the stupid keyboard on this mini laptop has magically switched back to providing me with weird symbols when i try and use question marks, apostophes and whatnot, so excuse the messiness of this blog until i get this madness figured out lol.

As soon as I got off the plane I walked through the airport for about 20 mins to figure out where I have to board later on today.... pretty sure that counts as my workout for the day, maybe I shouldve thought about the possibility of long long walks when i packed two carry ons that way about 100 lbs each! okay, slight exageration, but theyre pretty fricken heavy. After locating gate 51, which happens to be the second furthest gate from where I started out, I wandered aimlesly through the airport trying to find some diabetic-friendly food; painfully walking by starbucks where a week ago I would've stopped for a toffee almond bar, a peanut butter cookie, or possibly both. Since I was already pretty much drooling over the glass filled with treats that I will no doubt be dreaming about for weeks to come, I decided to grab a pamphlet entitled "nutrition by the cup", and to my excitement, discovered that I can still have my sugar-free caramel light frappucino! (without my usual extra whip and caramel of course, something's gotta give thought right?)

I felt a little bit like a junkie sneaking into the handicap stall in the airport bathroom to do all of this blood sugar shtuff, between trying to add up the carbs I was about to eat, and trying to correct my already high blood sugar levels, I must've been in there for at least 6 minutes. The worst part of the whole thing was that I put down the toilet seat lid so I could sit on it while doing all of the above and every time I moved the toilet kept flushing! Kiiiiiiind of awkward when water sprays out of the crack in between the seat and the lid. I can tell this is going to be a comical trip already haha.

sidenote: I can already tell that I'm going to be one of those "side dressing/sauce etc" girls from now on. Believe me, I'm just as unimpressed as the servers who get annoyed when you request to have the good stuff on the side... Don't judge those people anymore, the next person who does it could have just had a traumatic experience getting soaked by toilet water in the handicapped stall while craving toffee almond bars and trying to shoot up on insulin.

Well that's all of the excitement so far, can't wait to get some good pictures to put up here!

ps. shoutout to my mom for my new bling. aka medical alert bracelet. engraved with "insulin diabetic", i'm planning on using it to pick up guys. nbd.