Hong Kong Trip, Part 3
Last installment! The following photos follow two major themes: World Cup love and more food.



Soccer is a huge deal outside of the States, and I've been trying to make the switch from saying "soccer" to "football." I mean, the logic makes sense. It's football. You move the ball with your feet. Why is American football called "football" when the only thing your feet are doing is running? Still, you can't undo years of calling something "soccer" overnight, so everytime I talk about the sport, I have to stop to think about it for a moment before saying "football."

Anyway, I've grown to appreciate the sport and am learning more about it everyday.



There are huge World Cup promo displays everywhere, and I just liked the way this scoreboard was set up.




A closer look at the scoreboard, the photo being taken last Monday or Tuesday. Organized, stylized, and updated every day.




Of course, the major sportswear companies had to claim their stakes in the World Cup, too. Adidas designed a series of trainers representing the participating countries, which I thought was pretty awesome. I wonder what their best-selling pair is.




A close-up of the shoes. I thought the US design was a little too subtle for my tastes... the Brazil and Australia shoes were much more interesting with their greens and golds.




One of the highlights of our trip for me was finding a Vietnamese restaurant (with actual Vietnamese people working there!). There's no good Vietnamese restaurant in Beijing, probably because proper Vietnamese cuisine requires fresh herbs in their cooking, and you can't get that kind of freshness in anything in Beijing. But out in Hong Kong, where the weather is tropical, the seafood is plentiful, and the ports are always busy, a good Vietnamese restaurant is possible. It also helps that Hong Kong is near Vietnam. Pictured here are the spring rolls.



Dan and yet another one of his food action shots, enjoying his beef stew vermiccelli.




We couldn't leave HK without having dim sum. Problem was that we didn't know a good dim sum restaurant. The great thing about HK is that almost everyone speaks some English, so when we stopped people on the street asking for directions or advice, it was a 2/3 chance that they spoke English. (Incidentally, I got stopped a lot by people asking me things in Cantonese. More on that later.) Anyway, so the few people we asked pointed us to the general direction of nearby Chinese restaurants, but none of them could think of specific dim sum places. We found a place that didn't really specialize in them. The kitchen for dim sum that night was closed, but the waitress did her best to oblige us and got us what we asked for. It was really quite nice of her, and the dim sum was tasty.




This was the last HK photo from my camera, taken at the subway station. :)



As I mentioned briefly, a number of Cantonese people walked right up to me asking me questions in Cantonese. And naturally, I had to respond back saying I couldn't speak their language. Unlike being stopped in Beijing, however, there was no guilt about not knowing the language. It seems a little strange because, in either case, I'm not Chinese--so how can I feel guilty about it at all in Beijing? Maybe I felt more guilty about it because I've been trying to learn Mandarin and not Cantonese. But I know if confronted with the same situation in Spanish, I probably still wouldn't feel as guilty as I do with Mandarin.

I came back to Chinese class the day after we returned, and the whole week of English-speaking and not studying has made me fall behind a little. I worry that my regression will grow worse after I return to the States. Fortunately, I've had many offers for language partners, so I may consider having more than one (maybe two or three?) to keep up my studies.