pei pa koa is delicious!

went over to kowloon tong - what a great place - to meet with ivy about our dell in china project for marketing yesterday and discovered a great store full of useless but super cute housewares! what a great mall. ivy also convinced me to try a chinese cold remedy called pei pa koa. it's loquat extract.... and delish! we'll see if it actually helps...
went to cooking class with some of the girls last night. interesting... the instructor made some great chow fun, the other girls made a chicken stirfry and i got to make kung pao chicken. i think the others were kind of jealous. mine looked cool. loads of chilis and peanuts but no other veggies and TONS of oil! again, looked cool, tasted great but couldn't have been more unhealthy. unless i put the whole tupperware into the deep fryer. or maybe just topped the dish off with some lard. my god - no wonder my jeans are getting tight. good times though.
today, i'm supposed to be working on group projects but mostly i went for breakfast with dennis, lunch with kelly and made frederik make coffee for alle and i. ooh. i drank coffee at both breakfast and lunch too. my head is spinning as i write this.
oh yeah - had to recharge my phone yesterday, which is always an adventure. the first time i recharged the sim card (pre-paid), the service somehow switched from english to mandarin and i haven't been able to switch it back. everytime i need to addd value, i have to find a mandarin-speaker to do it for me. now, in hong kong, people who speak mandarin are kind of few and far between... at least in my limited experience. so, the first time, i got a law student to do it, the second time, i got one of the receptionists at our downtown campus to do it, the third time... i was in the mall. i asked ivy to help me cause she speaks cantonese, but she couldn't understand and we ended up with a group of people standing around our table in the coffee shop, looking confused and talking about my crappy phone card. it reminded me wayyy to much of living in japan and trying to ask about switching over my driver's license. that took 9 people to figure out. so yesterday, i told everyone i was ok and headed to an electronics store to quietly ask them... my goodness... how can such a simple thing get so complicated. i guess i really shouldn't be surprised... oh - and in the end it turned out that i had done everything correctly, but couldn't understand the phone service voice! i need to learn more words than thank you and bridge.
tonight we're all heading to the rooftop patio of the sha tin town hall for drinks with the 1st years and mba office staff. should be good. i'm hoping to maybe hit up a karaoke box after the 1st party. it's been a while...