Hong Kong Day 19 (finally) /22

Right now I am in a state of eternal bliss. I splurged and bought myself a milk chocolate dove bar –my favorite candy bar =) I am so happy that they actually had it at the store –their selection of candy bars is not a vast as in the us –although they have a lot more foreign brands. I was kinda in the mood for a Take 5 bar, but was delighted to find a dove bar. Ahhh. I think I will finally talk about Ocean Park. First though, I will quote some of what I told Dr. Fairweather in my Week 3 Reflections email:

“Week 3:
This was our first full week of work. We continued to read a lot of papers and met several times with Dr. Fairweather. We also had our first presentation in front of the class. Maybe next time we will have more to present? We shall see, after today it is not looking so hot. Work is still frustrating, but I know that is how research is. I just wish things came more quickly to us. I am tired of not being sure what our project’s ultimate goal is. Today Dr. Sun gave us a little bit of a better idea. We are going to try to discover how to solve Poisson equations for RR, DR, and other boundaries using the Finite Difference method and the Finite Element method. Right now we are working on the DR case and proving that there exists n +1 roots. I am not sure how to do this without fixing alpha or n. Blah blah so boring so boring –hate my life as Jess would say-- I worked some on my own this Saturday and Friday night and it made me appreciate having Chelsea to work with.

On the culture side of things, here are a few highlights. People here eat fried chicken using plastic gloves. Most people here do not know how to swim officially –when they are young they do not take lessons like in the US. Many HK people who are 15 to 20-something keep their relationships (boyfriends and girlfriends) a secret from their parents. This is because the parents are afraid that having a boyfriend or girlfriend will make their daughters or sons get lower marks in school. Right now many 18 and 19 year old kids are nervously waiting for the results of a standardized test which will determine if they can go to college or not. Macau Island has a beach with black sand. The style of clothing is very different and it is hard to shop for clothes because you are not allowed to try clothes on in the shops. Sometimes you can try on pants, but most stores do not have fitting rooms. If you must ride one of the public light mini buses, ride a red one. This is because the bus driver for these gets paid by how many people ride his bus, so he will drive a little faster. The green mini bus drivers are paid an annual salary so they do not care how fast they go or how many passengers they pick up. When the buses exceed 80 km/hr there is a warning beeping signal –most red drivers ignore it and some even rig the speedometer so that the speedometer is less sensitive to the change in speed. I went to a local beach and saw models having their pictures taken. I do not think they were that high class of models. I would have taken a picture if I had my camera…maybe they would want me to be in the picture too because of my “hot bod” haha yeah right!! =D HK has immigrants from china just like how the US has immigrants from Mexico. One of my friend’s mother was one such immigrant who came to Macau by boat before meeting a HK man to marry. Golden beach is a man-made beach that is not one of the best beaches. One of the best beaches is only accessible by boat. It is in half moon bay near Sai Kung. There the water is supposedly so clear you can see the bottom. I really like green tea ice cream. I am always impressed by how fast our food comes at a restaurant. I think that many restaurants here would be shut down by the Health department in the States. The locals never put their bags on the floor because they say it is too dirty. Furthermore, they wash their plates, chopsticks, and bowls in the complimentary hot tea because they say they are dirty!! When you answer your cell phone in Hong Kong, say a phrase that sounds exactly like ‘why.’
-Amanda”

Anywho Ocean Park is an alright amusement park. Here is my overall opinion. Because it tries so hard to do so many things, it loses some of the quality. It is like a Great America, Sea World, Zoo, Busch Gardens, Carnival, and little kid park all rolled into one. The rides are not as good as in the States and the water show is not good as any of the sea world shows in the states (granted it has been a while since I was last at sea world –so maybe I just don’t remember sea world being lame, but Shamu or whatever you call that big killer whale is pretty awesome =P. Some of the zoo parts of Ocean Park were pretty cool though (even though there are not many animal exhibits). I enjoyed seeing the pandas and the jelly fish. For the price, Ocean park is very good. I only paid 152 HK dollars for my ticket. I do not know if I got a student rate or some type of discount, but compared to the parks in the States, this was a lot of entertainment for not a huge cost. I do not think I will go to Disneyland here. The soccer kids said that it is not as good as Ocean Park and is more expensive and that more people choose to go to Ocean Park.

To get to ocean park, I met Kinnex and Pui at Sham Shi Po or something like that –wherever the golden computer place is. We went to a local place to eat breakfast. They both got noodle stuff and I got an egg and ham sandwich. This was ham and eggs in 2 slices of bread. It came with a little piece of paper. I was not sure what to do with it and Kinnex told me it was to hold the sandwich. –Side note: people here are very concerned about handling their food, remember the fried chicken deal…yeah very strange, very strange…-- then we met at Central I think and all of us got on a bus to go to ocean park. The people who went were Tony, Ho, Me, Pui, Sean, Kinnex, Jason and his adorable girlfriend named Cindy, Kenneth, Dennis, Justin, and two guys I had never met before… their names were Paul and Chenny (I probably hosed up that spelling!!) There are only 2 rollar coasters. I would say they were below average on the scale of Great America’s coasters. I liked the big drop though –it was good and I liked the rocking boat, but again I am used to more intense rides. It was still a lot of fun =) It was soooooo incredibly hot though. I was like a fountain!! Haha haha, sob =/ Anyways. We would go into places just because it had air conditioning. We had fried chicken for lunch which was not the best but cheaper than what it would have cost at a US park. There was a virtual reality ride thing like Body Wars (which I love hahaha) in Disney World. It was the thing that made me feel the most sick –mostly from the strange jerking and bright lights haha. I am going to post a picture of all of us except kinnex (he went somewhere else for a while ---I don’t even want to know for what reason haha!) before we went into the “caves of darkness” haha Sean said it was very stupid. I will not argue with that!! After the park we went to a mall food court. It was fun. Then I went back and ran for 45 mins because the people from my math group all went out for 10 dollar coronas. Then I worked a bit to make up for the day.

I just found out that Bob (Bob Gorbold) is getting married. Too bad I have a soccer game that day. Although with how the soccer coach thing is going who knows if I will even play. And even then maybe I will miss the game because it is my senior year and I have put up with a lot of crap and if I want to go to a wedding then I think I will and they can just deal with it. I am pretty angry about the soccer situation at school. They refuse to reply to my emails. What jerks! Boo on them. I am getting angry so I think I better go run.