Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Monday/Tuesday, May 5/6

Monday/Tuesday, May 5/6th

So I was happily chomping on a piece of herbal flavor Extra gum last week when I heard a crunch. I’d eaten a boiled egg earlier, so thought “oh, some of the shell made its way into my mouth”. Um, yes, that must be it. Pulled a few little white pieces of something out of my gum and then headed to the bathroom to check it out. Cracked my tooth!! I think it’s the tooth with a crown (from the Potbelly incident a few years back). Of all the stinking luck. I do not want to find a dentist here. It doesn’t hurt, and I think I’ve worn down the pokiness over the past few days. Think I can wait until I get back in June…Chris is going to the dentist next week and asking her advice.

Paper products are so scarce here. You get 1 napkin at take out places (or none at Mak’s noodle shop or dim sum). Kleenex travel sizes are super tiny! Credit card size and about an inch thick. And they come in scents. Much needed for the daily walk by the meat market! Gag. And apparently you carry them everywhere with you to use as napkins and toilet paper. The rolls of paper towels are laughable. They’re about ¾ the height of the ones in the US. Yet they still use regular size paper towel holders?! I do think it’s forcing me to be a bit greener. They have a huge campaign here to recycle the plastic shopping bags. It’s kinda nice. I now carry two cloth grocery bags with me, since we buy groceries every day. Tiny fridge/no freezer.

Our apartment looks onto the rooftops of a few buildings. You can always find laundry hanging and people doing exercise. It’s not Thai Chi. More like an aggressive stretching or possible even exercises left over from the Mao era? One exercise looked like very energetic marching. Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it. But nice to see people active and feeling free to do exercise whenever and in whatever they’re wearing.




Learning in Hong Kong. Did you know that a great place for kids to learn their numbers is in the elevator? Nick is starting to recognizing his numbers. Or maybe just memorizing (12 is our house, 2 is the management office, 6 is laundry, G gets us to the fish market…) Except for the missing number 4 (thus no 4, 14 or 24). He’ll go back to school counting “1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7…”.

View from my shared-office window.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Wait - I don't think I know why there aren't any fours?

Heather said...

Something about the word for "four" being similar to the word for "death".