Busy Bee

Hello people. After returning to Oulu, I kept myself superbusy by working about 5 diaz a week, going to school, and playing basketball, while dedicating almost all of my free time to skyping with my better half. Needless to say, days and weeks went by really fast. Had I not had all these preoccupations, my head would have inevitably imploded from the exessive boredom that my dear old city exudes. Nevertheless, by early November, as days began to grow darker, I knew i had to escape the darkness.
And so I did. On Nov. 4th, around 16:40, I hopped on the plane to Hong Kong. After spending the previous night on a train, accompanied by an old drunkard and three annoying manga-crazy teenage girls who kept blathering constantly for eight and a half hours in a fairly high pitch and volume, I had no trouble sleeping on the plane.
So, on Nov. 5th, around 08:00 Hong Kong time, my nice little autumn break begun as Colina picked me up from the Airport. I didn't have time to get nervous about meeting her family members, because we had lunch AND dinner at her granma's place the same day I arrived. The Tangs are very nice, sincere people. No extra courtesy or fake smiles for the white guy, but a warm, real, welcome. And the food was excellent. I think grandma cooked us food about five times, and she always made me eat too much. And even though my Cantonese is limited to phrases like "thank you very much" and "how are you?", we got along just fine. I also learned the phrase "go ahead and eat"...hehe.
The trip went as planned and we had a great time. In the first week, we stayed a couple of days on an island called Cheng Chau. We had a nice, recently renovated little room at a B&B (which did not actually include the other B...). Cheng Chau was ok. It's a nice little island, but not nearly as nice and laid-back as Lamma Island. Lamma is very nice, the whole island is oozing with a relaxed ambience that is really infectious. One of my favorite establishments in the whole Hong Kong peninsula has to be Bookworm Café, a small restaurant with nice bright-coloured interior and a long bookshelf filled with copies of national geography and travel literature, offering fresh salads and various other forms of veggie food made from organic products. Lamma is also full of dogs, which is nice. Dogs are cool.
I also got used to picking Colina up from her workplace, a Quicksilver store in the bustling Mong Kok, and I met many of her colleagues and schoolmates, and friends aswell, of course.
Hong Kong people love to dine out, so we met many of these aforementioned people at various restaurants. We had Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and of course various forms of Chinese food, and we somehow managed to fit in European cuisine as well. It was a very nourishing trip to say the least, although I did suffer a slight case of diarrhea at one point, which marked the first time my stomach got upset in a foreign country. The funny thing is that it was a fairly domestic and familiar product that caused this abdominal malfunction: an IKEA shrimp sandwich. Having eaten menu items such as fish stomach and duck feet, the IKEA quality delicacy really caught me (and obviously my digestive system) off guard.
Notwithstanding the rectal explosion episode, my second trip to the autonomous region of Hong Kong was, in a word, GREAT. I will definitely be back there, hopefully during the springtime of 2008.
Since I returned to the dark, cold Finlandia, as could be expected, I continued working and studying, the usual routine. Luckily, time goes by very fast, and soon my better half will fly here, accompanied by her lovely friend Hazel, to experience snow, Santa, and Aurora Borealis for the first time. Kinda cool. Anywho, that's the latest from this little piggy. Peace. I'm out like democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe (for example).