On Friday, we had our first house party since we got here. Leap day poker party with Ben's coworkers. We invited them for dinner and poker, only to find out the night before the party that our landlords had also scheduled someone to come fix our cracked counter on Friday. Fine, it will be nice to have it fixed. Turns out that fixing the counter means removing just about everything from the kitchen into the living room and involves 2 hours of of cutting out the cracked part and replacing it with a new peice that fits perfectly into the part that has been removed...which requires use of a saw, and a sander...which means that 3 hours before company was to arrive for our first dinner party the enitre contents of the kitchen had been spit up into the living room and the ENTIRE kitchen, every possible surface, was covered in varrying amounts of white, powdery, saw dust like countertop powder. I was saved from panick by the thought of ordering pizza and quickly began the clean up process after the countertop man left. In one hour the kitchen was clean, a few things had been moved back in and everything else had been moved to the office or guest room (nothing allowed on the counters and no use of the stove for 24 hours). An hour before company was to arrive I decided that dinner was still on. The taoster oven in the office was still working. So, Ben and I made cookies, beer bread, and stew in the office. Prepared salad and a fruit plate in the kitchen. Heated water for cous-cous in the micro wave, and wa-la a few hours later we were eating a tasty meal. It was a crazy beginning to a fun, relaxing evening. Unfortunately, we did not break the curse of hosting and lost our money for the night.
Ben and co-workers Pramod, Dhanush, and Madhu, and Madhu's wife Ranjani.
We had a warm, sunny weekend and took adventage of getting out to enjoy the nice weather. On Saturday we went with some of Ben's co-workers into the northern part of Hong Kong and rented bicycles. We spent about 2 hours bicycling along a path that runs up the coast. It was pretty except for the polution that turns the mountians into hazzy lumps instead of vibrant green hills. As evening set in we saw a beautiful sunset and found that there is one, if only one, mildly redeaming quality for all this pollution...it refracts the light perfectly for a beautiful, although still hazy, sunset. We enjoyed being on bikes again and had fun getting to know Ben 's co-workers a little better. We finished the evening at an open-air Thai restaurant and ordered enough food to feed an army. We probably could have fed another 2 or 3 people. Instead we just stuffed ourselves, and regreatabley, left some food on the table. Sunday was our relaxing day around home. We slept in, had a good breakfast, spent a few hours soaking in sun on a nearby beach, and had a 2 movie marathon in the evening. It was a good, mostly relaxing weekend!
Ben cycling along Plover Cove Resevoir
A bus stop along the bike ride
Sunset ove the sea
Snoozing at Discovery Bay beach
Oh, I also had my day trip into China last week, which I don't think will end up turning into much PT work, but I did get a great meal out of it (can you see a theme here?, there is an awful lot of talk about food in this blog). I got to join 3 PTs and an OT for the chinese new year dinner. We went for seafood and had an array 8 or 9 of dishes all chinese style, and surprisingly they were all quite good. As soon as we sat down everyone poured the tea out of their tea cups into their bowls and started vigorusly washing their bowl, spoon, and chop sticks with the tea, then poured it out into a bowl in the center of the table, which we later used for rinsing sticky seafood parts off our fingers. I learned how to eat crab, shrimp, and clams chinese style, and will now know the procedure next time I venture into a chinese seafood restaurant. So, I did learn something new!
No comments:
Post a Comment