Transitioning Again

Since I lasted posted on here, I have spent more time with family, eaten more good food, visited some tourist attractions, and said goodbye to my mom. :(  

Bye Ma!

I also visited Hong Kong's Wikipedia page to find interesting things to share on this blog post.  (I swear I'm a creative person.)  Some fun facts:

Hong Kong is the most vertical city in the world.

I took this horizontal panoramic of the most vertical city in the world at 太平山(Victoria Peak). 

#instagram #victoriapeak #hashtagsarepointless #whyamidoingthis

We ate at the Peak Lookout which is a famous, touristy restaurant on the Peak. It was Valentine's Day, so pretty much everyone else was there on a date.  Meanwhile, my nephew relishes in his singleness and carrot sticks.

Fish and chips at the Peak Lookout.

Just to make you jealous.

Again.

There are nine public universities in Hong Kong, the oldest of which is the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

A friend of mine who is a student at HKU gave me a tour of the campus. These are some Korean tourists occupying the main entrance.

While on campus, I met my friend Sun Yat-Sen.

They have these colorful cubicles in their libraries along with some very studious students.

Hong Kong's steep terrain and extensive trail network with expansive views attracts hikers, and its rugged coastline provides many beaches for swimming.

My newphews.  Ready to go hiking!  We went to a stream pool called Bride's Pool . Legend has it that a bride drowned their on her way to meet her groom.  We just hiked there to barbecue.

Another cute person for your viewing pleasure.

Catching fish in Bride's Pool.  No bride to be found.

Had to have dim sum a few more times before leaving.

So that concludes my Hong Kong trip, probably the most Western place I'll be in for four and a half months.  I got pretty comfortable staying here and going out on my own every day to meet a friend or do some shopping, but alas, my time has come.  Preparing to leave for temperatures below freezing and record-breaking air pollution makes me shudder a little.  And yet, the thought of adjusting to a new place to face the challenges which come with it fills me with a sense of exciting uncertainty.  I'll be meeting the other UC students from my exchange program tomorrow and moving into my dorm while learning to read personalities and developing first impressions of them.  Mandarin with a Beijing-er accent will be spoken everywhere and I won't be able to avoid it.  But first, I should start packing.  Sound familiar?

Also, my grandma knows kung-fu.

恭喜发财！

Youth can not know how age thinks and feels.  But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.  --J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

While in Korea, I experienced a lot of generosity from friends and strangers who hosted me even though I don't have any kind of familial, let alone ethnic or cultural, ties with them.  In Hong Kong, I'm hosted by blood relatives who've known me before I was even born.  These extremes have made me think a lot on the nature of hospitality, how it feel different when we're receiving from our family.  And since the Lunar New Year is about relatives gathering, I've also been able to experience a lot of the changes in my family.  In the states, I occasionally hear about a relative here or there who passed away or a new one born.  Finally seeing them in person makes me a little nostalgic.  As much as my relatives boss me around and bring up shame-inducing childhood memories to tease me, I sometimes still wish I could live in Hong Kong and be around them more often.  Not to mention all the extra red pocket money I get for being here. ;)

My cousins are popping out so many nephews I lose track of them sometimes.  This one is really into the paper plane I made for him.

HK style milk tea.  One of my favorite things.

Having New Year's Eve dinner with a small fraction of the family.  Didn't want to disturb the good meal to take a good panoramic.

汤圆tong yuen is like a rice cake stuffed with sesame paste which we have for dessert during New Year's.  Though in my household, I probably ask mom to make it at least once a week when I'm home.

The Cantonese are into a New Year's Eve tradition called 行花市 hang fa sze where hordes of people stay up late to go to a flower market where hawkers yell out their good deals on flowers, New Year's decorations, and other useless things.  I had never experienced it before, so I woke up my mom and aunt in the middle of the night to take me to this one.  It was crazy in all the ways I was warned it would be.

The best part of my 行花市hang fa sze experience was probably having 糯米糍 lok mei tse.  It's kind of like 汤圆tong yuen but with sesame coating the outside of the rice cake.  Maybe I've been having too much rice cake.

We got us some flowers!  Hopefully it was worth the loss of sleep.

This is one of my aunts, 萍姨 Ping Yi, in all her New Year's glory.  Ping Yi was born with achondroplasia and epilepsy and is unable to walk due to falls which paralyzed her legs.  We picked her up from her disabled persons' home to stay for a couple nights for New Year's.  I remember being a kid and wondering why Ping Yi and I were the same height even though she was my aunt.  Now, my other aunts are old enough and I'm able-bodied enough that I got the job of carrying her whenever she needed to leave the wheelchair.  Oh...how time changes things.

盆菜poon choi (upper left) is a traditional Cantonese dish eaten on special occasions like New Year's and is basically an amalgam of different meats and vegetables mixed in a bowl. We had it the first night of the New Year.  There's supposed to be a lot of cultural symbolism involved in its preparation, but I'll leave that to Wikipedia.

We're playing 麻将 mahjong, don't mess.

My first time meeting a second cousin!

More food, because I can.  This meal cooked by my great-aunt.

More of the nephews I can't keep track of getting a kick out of Agent Dash. No need for legos or stuffed animals these days.  The iPad is taking over.

I just really like this picture.

Today I went to the Tai Po Waterfront Park and biked along the waterfront behind my cousin and her son.

And my uncle bringing up the rear.

The view from the waterfront.

There's an anti-corruption hotline!  Wonder if I can call from the mainland.

I have quite a bit of free time here, so I subscribed to the trainchinese app to try and prepare for my language placement exam at PKU.  It's surprisingly addicting!  And effective as well.  I think a new era of Chinese school is upon us.

Hopefully I'm not boring you precious blog-followers of mine with pictures of food and family.  Realistically though, those are the two things being in Hong Kong has been about, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  Even though Hong Kong is still very much a foreign place to me, there are so many ways the culture and people in this city help me understand myself.  I can look at the way my aunts take care of my aging grandparents or how my cousins raise their children and think about how future family life might be like for me.  At the same time, I can look out in the streets from the 35th story apartment I'm staying in and imagine what the past here might have been like for my parents.  There are so many things I'm going to miss about Hong Kong, but I still get to be here for another week!

Back in the Motherland

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?  How can this queer cosmic town, with its many legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honor of being our home?    --G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Next stop on my trip is Hong Kong where I'm staying with relatives (and my mom!) and celebrating Chinese New Year here for the first time in fifteen years.  While in Korea, I enjoyed being among friends and taking in the novelty of being in a new place.  It was also my last chance to absorb some quality air into my lungs before entering Chinese territory.  Walking the streets of Hong Kong makes it difficult to avoid the smell of cigarette smoke, sewage, raw meat, or some awful combination of the three.  And yet, landing in Hong Kong immediately flooded my senses with a fresh breath of familiarity. Though I'm Bay Area born and bred, Hong Kong is probably the next place in the world I would call home.  Many memories of family vacations and traditions are attached to this little corner of China.  I'm excited to be able to build more before my semester abroad in Beijing begins.

Dinner greets me after a long bus ride from the airport to my aunt and uncle's place. 

My grandma (middle) always gives me the typical Asian grandparent repetitive rant about how I should listen to my parents and study hard in school while my aunt (right) orders me around like a second mother.  And then there's my real mother (left).  Guess that means they still love me.

饮茶 yum cha...pulling at my stomach-strings.

One of my favorite dishes, 排骨饭 pai gwut fan, is spare ribs cooked with rice in a clay pot which makes the rice at the edges of the pot crunchy.  This kind of goodness is hard to come by in the US.

It's almost new year's so the markets of Hong Kong are especially busy.  This is one in Yuen Long where I picked up some dragon fruit today.  Even though my Cantonese has never been as good as my English, I love hearing it spoken all over the streets.  There's a certain crass and aggressive tone to it which makes me feel like less of a misfit than I would among English speakers.

But I hate using public toilets here!

Goodbye Korea, you will be missed.

Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.  --Luke 14:12-14

In case you haven't noticed from my pictures, I came to Korea mostly to see friends.  I basically didn't plan anything I would do on this trip and haven't had to pay for a single night of living accommodations.  I knew, going into it, that I was getting a great deal.  But so far, I've received so much more than what I expected and what I think I deserve.  While the tourist destinations I've seen on my trip so far have all been great, the highlight of my time in Korea has really been about the people I've gotten to spend time with.  Currently, I'm with my friend Hyuna at her apartment near Seoul.  Before this, I've stayed with four different households, all of which have lavishly welcomed me and expressed hospitality in their own ways.  It's hard for me at times to receive their generosity without the language ability or cultural proficiency to communicate my gratitude.  I guess that's part of the beauty of their generosity.  My Korean hosts have given to me in ways I might never have the opportunity to reciprocate.  And since I'm into using pictures when I have no words, here's a narrated photo timeline of sorts to capture a bit of what I've experienced over the past ten days.

Jiyoung is one of Joseph's students.  I stayed with her family for five days.  Even though she doesn't speak much English, she tried earnestly to orient me into her household and hometown with all the youthful charm and innocence she displays in this picture.

Jiyoung's mom planned ahead and toiled for hours to prepare this extravagant meal on my last night in their home.  The love put into this food was so real, I think I can still taste it.

Me with Jiyoung's family on my last night.

I took a KTX train to the southern port city of Busan where I met Hyuna and Aileen.  Aileen took two days to give us a tour of her hometown and was a great guide.  Here we're sitting on the top level of Shinsegae which claims to be the world's largest department store.

Aileen's mom treated us to yang yang chicken and Korean pizza.  This one is sweet potato flavored.  :9

I told Aileen I enjoy museums and she brought me to two of them!  Here, I'm learning about open-air classrooms and the Korean war.

I stayed with Hyuna's family for a night and her mom would yell the few English phrases she knew to me really loudly and then insist that whenever she needed to say something to me, Hyuna should tell her the English and let her say it instead of translating directly to me.  She's probably the funniest Korean I know.

 More good food from the Lee household.

This is Minjae touching the tip of Namsang tower in Seoul.  Over a year ago, Minjae and I went Black Friday shopping together in the US where she bought the jacket she's wearing now.  Here, we are in the Myungdong shopping area where I got a new pink jacket which I'll probably be wearing in a lot of pictures to come.

This is Seonghyuk.  He might be one of the most studious Koreans I know.  (And that's staying a lot.)  He took his one day off from studying for diplomacy exams to show me around the National Folk Museum of Korea.

Here, we're learning about how, back in the day, Koreans used to take civil service examinations.  Guess things haven't changed that much.

I spent my last day with Joseph and Hyuna.  Here, Hyuna is about to give us a tour of her campus while Joseph and I pretend to be college-bound high schoolers.

Yonsei University was started by an American missionary and has a roomful of paintings depicting Jesus' life Korea!  I think I took a picture of all of them, from the nativity to the ascension.  Here, Jesus is probably having kimchi for his last supper.

 Goodbye friends!  Even though we never took a frowny face picture, I'm sad to be leaving.  :(

Krista in Busan

I traveled to the south of Korea for the past few days, spending a night in Busan with my friend Aileen and then staying with Hyuna in Daegu.  It was great fun to be reunited with them and experience a different part of the country.  More pictures ahead!

Us at the beach with the famous bridge in the background.  (Sorry Aileen, I forgot the name.)

More :9!!  This is kimbap, tteopbukki, odeng, tuigim, soondae (clockwise from upper left)

The view from Busan tower.

Hyuna and I in Daegu.  I just couldn't resist when I saw the booth.