computer crashed

the fish section of the district markets. my mum frequents this stall because the fish- mongtress is really nice (fish- mongtress?).

i went to the ifc yesterday evening and had a club sandwich along with a bottle of orange juice that i sucked up through a straw. it's kinda strange, people use straws here for bottled drinks. it's just the way it is here i guess. i much prefer drinking it straight from the top. much easier.

we've been going there so frequently that most of the starbucks staff recognize us. i guess they're wondering who we are and why we're there so often. yesterday, we met a very shy, soft-spoken young man who worked there. his name is stephen. as he was leaving to change at the end of this shift, my mum motioned him over and asked him about the brownies that they have. we got to talking and he asked who i was in relations to my mum. it was quite hilarious really. i like him. quiet and gentle. yeah, weird way of describing a man.

i asked my mother if she thought i was older or younger than him, and she was like, "please n*gga, of course you're older." first of all, she didn't didn't really say, "please n*gga" cuz ,well, she wouldn't know what a n*gga is. but second, she said it so matter-of-factly that, i'm getting a little worried about my age. i can't believe i'm 28. i feel so immature to be 28. i should be 23. yeah. i should.

oh, and then this morning, after our morning exercises, my mother and i were having dim sum with my grandmother. so grands was saying how my uncle ho was 50 yrs old. and then mum says to her, "shit bitch, even he (gesturing towards me) is 28." my mum sure uses a lot of bad language.

speaking of morning exercises, i'm really out of shape. not surprising of couse. but still. i can't run worth shit. i think i'm going to blame the weather her in hk. muggy. humid. rainy. i could only run three times around a soccer pitch at a time. how pitiful. it's kinda interesting that the majority of pitches in hk isn't made of grass, but rather harden clay. i can't imagine playing soccer on such a hard material. certainly, there's no slide tackle. right?

i'm listening to janice long on the bbc radio 2. good stuff. just now, she played an old talking heads song, road to nowhere. and the only reason why i would even know of that song, given that i'm not a big talking heads fan, is that the song was in the movie, reality bites.

so about markets. there are three types here in hk the first kinda is just like what we have in the states. places like citysuper, wellcome, parknshop, where you walk in and it's clean and everything is placed neatly in front of you in shelves and aisles. there's a citysuper in the ifc mall, and it's incredibly nice. i actually saw a piece of meat from australia that cost nearly a hundred dollars a pound. it's insane. HK$141 per 100g. it's really marbled though.

they also have a hot deli food section there, which is almost unheard of in a hk supermarket. well, not that i've seen anyway. citysuper is of course the creme de la creme of the hk supermarkets. and since space is rather limited, not all the supermarkets within the same company are the same size. near my parents' flat, there's a parknshop that is about 1/8 of the parknshop we saw in tung chung the other day. so there you have your high-end, westernized markets. clean and well air-conditioned.

then you have your district markets, which is less glamourous than your supermarkets in hk. there are 18 districts in hk, so i'm guessing there are about 18 district markets. the one that i usually go with my mother is the sai ying poon distict market. i've seen or been inside several othere districk markets (western, wan chai, central, sai kong, etc.). i guess one of these days i could take a picture of the sai ying poon district market so you can have a better idea what they are like.

generally speaking, district markets are located in a building that contains several floors. on each floor, vendors sell similar goods and produce. for example, at the sai ying poon districk market, there's a floor that only sells vegetables and dry goods, two floors for fish and various seafood, one for meats, and yet another for poultry. the sai ying poon market is a little different because there's a skywalk to another building across the street where you can get eggs (chicken, thousand year old, salted, quail are the several i've seen) and clothes. oh and yeah, it's not normally air conditioned and since the drainage system is on the ground, the floor tends to be quite wet, which equates to being very dirty.

then the third kind of hk markets are the open air markets. during the daytime, most of the open air markets are stalls selling different types of vegetables and produce like tofu. there are some that sells toys and clothes as well. but at night, thats when things get really interesting. on the famous temple street, you have venders selling goods from zippo lighters to pornography vcds under strands of lightbulbs. we know a little something about that don't we mark? ;) there are stalls where they have photo albums of girls, which i personally think is a catalogue of hookers for you to peruse. if you're hungry, there are dozens of street venders willing to feed you fish balls on skewers or bowls of noodles with slice meats. then when you're through with that, at the end of temple street sits fortune tellers waiting to tell you your fortune.

my favorite street vender food is the sweet sheet of bubbled pancake made from egg batter poured into this two-sided iron contraption cooked over an open fire. each side of the iron contraption has connecting semi-circles so that when it's done, it looks like a sheet of bubbles. it's delicious, but my stomach probably can't handle them anymore. the story of my life. damn weak stomach.

and my grandmother, who's about 75 or so, played mahjong until 6am this morning. that's some crazy arsed shit.

okay, time to get some lunch and meet my parents at the ifc. i hope it's not raining too hard outside.

talk to you all later. hugs and kisses.

note: my computer crashed so everything i had after the third type of hk market has been rewritten.