Tempest7: Blogger

Shopping in TST at Harbour City

Today is a special Saturday. Hong Kong is celebrating some special holiday. All I know is that some king's official sacrified himself and so people through these kind of rice dumplings wrapped in leaves to the fishes so that they don't eat his body. It was nice getting the day off though Saturdays are the worst for me, because the school is so busy then.

I made plans with Clara to meet in Tsim Sha Tsui for lunch. She got up a bit late and told me to kill some time by wandering Harbour City. Harbour City is this shopping mall in TST that is just simply huge. It just makes Eaton Centre/Yorkdale/Square One look so sad. I really got lost in this place, I couldn't even locate the food court. The shops are so good as well, so many high fashion shops there. I stopped by the Lacrose store and wanted to buy up half of the golf shirts there. I was tempted to pick up a few Puma tshirts as well. I ended up wandering to one part of the mall that had this JC Design shop their motto is that they "make life INreresting" (http://www.jcdesign.jp/). Actually since I have been looking to get an armband for my ipod shuffle If this case was functional and cheaper than the typical Apple official armband then I thought I would go for it. I had an interesting experience, Rui would laugh so I might as well write about it. There were two girls in the store working, and I wandered in to take a look. I was wearing my ipod shuffle so they noticed me walk towards the display case where the ipod cases were. One of the girls decided to speak to me in English and told me that "they two have ipod shuffle". Now, I took this as a friendly conversation and I said "Oh, you two have an ipod shuffle as well?" and they proceeded to look at my strangely, so I decided to try my chinese. They didn't understand me the first 2 times... unless they were switching modes. Eventually they did and they were really friendly there, asking me about my situtation and helping me try on different cases and deciding on the pattern. I ended up with a camo green plain design, which as one of the girls put it, looks great in the summer. The strap seems fine, good enough for running and the gym. On my way out I also noticed they sold umbrellas and they managed to convince me to pick one of those up as well. The umbrella is pretty nice functionally though some of the little work detail was left un finished it seemed. We stopped a stranger and took a picture as well.

Clara got ahold of me shortly afterwards and directed me to find the food court. I totally missed it and got to the end and turned around and still missed it. Eventually I convinced her to meet me near the Wellcome store and she took me around. I found it interesting that you order your food in the food court, and then bring the bill to another central counter to pay for it before returning back to the original stand to pick up your food. So we went to a stall to order ramen noodles, another stall to order a fruit drink. We went to pay for it and then walked back to those 2 stalls to pick up our individually purchased items. We talked and hung out for a bit and I decided to walk her home before leaving myself. When we got close to her place a man ran out of a shop nearby calling her name. Apparently Clara's mother is travelling and left a lot of pictures to be retouched or developed. I wasn't exaggerating when I say a lot. She had a gym bag full of pictures and a small box, both fairly heavy with photos. It was perfect that she had a guy walking with her, so I took her stuff up to her place and hung out and played with her dog while she was changing for her interview later.

I headed home after and met up with my roommate Ceci infront of our apartment structure. She found some new bed sheets while we were shopping around and decided to help me look. She took me around to different areas to look at sheets and I ended up buying a whole set of Casablanca (250 thread count) sheets for $339 HKD and a matress protector for $119 HKD. The set included a fitted sheet, 2 pillow covers and even the comforter (and the cover for the comforter). While I was buying everything the sales lady's fish tried to escape. Okay, apparently she bought a fresh one for dinner and it was stored in a box. It had jumped out and was in one of the isles near us. We headed over to a $10 store to buy some cups, chopsticks, and a container for my showering items.

After we took everything home, I decided to wander out myself to pick up a few more items. I headed to the Watson (drug store) to buy some shampoo, conditioner, and some hand soap. While inside one of the ladies who stands around and tries to sell people make up decided to approach me. She physically dragged me to her station and started to apply some sort of toner to clean my skin. She tried to describe somethings and I just tried to explain that I'm not interested. She kept laughing at my accent saying it was so cute. I eventually escaped and decided to go back to deciding which type of conditioner was good for me since I could not read the Chinese in the back. She came by again to explaing the differences and to help me choose items to buy. I have to admit at least she was helpful, I paid for my things and left.

I stopped by the McDonalds near my place right after to get some icecream. They have a normal cone of ice cream that they dip into either hot mango (syrup?) and a chocolate. The coat freezes ontop of thier drinks so they need to eat through it to get inside. The counter girl also was laughing at my accent, but she was really nice. She put a lot of effort into making my icecream. We had some miscommunication when I ordered and instead of turning my plain icecream into a chocolate dip, she decided to make a new one. There was even a guy there telling her to just turn the old one into a dip.

Is it really true that my Cantonese accent is cute? Or is it just simply annoying as I feel it must be?

posted by Tempest7 @ 01:00