Fly Me To The Moon Cake

As I am sure everyone is aware, tomorrow is the Moon Festival. At DE, we've already been celebrating. We do this by eating moon cakes. When someone offered me a moon cake, I of course accepted, as is my custom when offered anything with the word "cake" in it. As I should have expected, a moon cake is not a cake at all. It looks innocent enough on the outside, but inside is lotus seed paste and a ball of hard egg yolk. It's actually not as loathsomely disgusting as it sounds.

Speaking of new culinary experiences, I ate chicken feet and ox stomach at dim sum last week. I highly recommend the ox stomach. Chicken feet have too many small bones, and I haven't gotten used to the fact that's it's proper table etiquette to spit them out onto the table.

A couple nights ago, a random guy on the street stopped me asked if I was an American. I asked if I just reeked of liberty or something and he said that they were registering voters for absentee ballots. He was stunned to hear that I had already taken care of that before I left--and even more shocked that I'd be sending a ballot to South Dakota. He was even from Illinois--working at a university in Hong Kong.

Saturday, I helped backstage with the kids' show, "101 Dalmatians," doing costume changes and generally attempting to keep the peace during a 7 hour rehearsal followed by a performance. The show went off without much of a hitch, but the epic struggle to reach the theatre was even more dramatic. We knew that the theatre was on the 5th floor, but once we made it through the 3 floors of wet market (I saw pig faces for sale) there were no more escalators up...so after maybe 20 minutes of walking all over the place and going up 9 flights of stairs with no doors, I managed to ask a guy--in Cantonese--"Where is the 5th floor?" And he understood!! I probably said something like, "Five floor, is the where?" But I don't care because he got it and told us where to go to get to the 5th floor. So marks my first successful Cantonese exchange of more substance than "good morning."

Since we're on language, I suppose I should inform everyone that I told my male personal trainer that he was pretty. I thought I said, "Eric, you look nice." No. I said, "Eric, you are pretty." I also ordered death for breakfast at McDonalds this morning (I know, I know, I shouldn't go there anyway) I wanted to try to order by number since I know my numbers so well. Problem was that whatever I wanted was #4 (saai), and since I couldn't remember what tone went with it, I just said it however and ended up ordering death with an orange juice. Sort of reminded me of an Eddie Izzard sketch...anyone else?

I have more pictures. They're all still from last week at Stanley. I have Monday and Tuesday off this week, so perhaps pictures of different places will follow. Statue of Kwun Yam. One of the few female deities.

I had to hike up quite a ways to get up here. Here was the path I intended to take to descend back to Stanley:

I made it about 1/4 of the way down. I turned around after I almost flipped myself over some waist-level intertwined vines and ended up underneath the temple. Sorry, Frost, but I had to go back to the road just a little more travelled by. There were also a lot of giant bugs.

This is not from Stanley. I missed posting this earlier. I took a cable car from Ngong Ping (near the big Buddha) to Tung Chung (where I could get on the train). Amazing views of the landscape.

Chinese cats are the same as American cats. This one was at Kwun Yam and I repeatedly called for him to approach me (in English, Cantonese, and French, just in case) and he never did. Some things are universal.