Asia Day 16: Home!

October 8
Finally, the day came that it was time to go home. My flight was just after lunch, so we headed to the airport mid morning so I could make it through the pesky customs line in good time. I had some money left over so I tried to spend it as best I could.

Obviously, I bought a Hello Kitty phone charm. Clearly the best use of money.

My trip was great, made better by all the appearances by family. I don't know if I'll go back in the next few years, but it'll be on my list of places to return to eventually!

Movie list for the flight home?

• Bon Cop Bad Cop
• Mr. Popper's Penguins
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon
• Just Go With It
• Bad Teacher

Clearly I didn't sleep on the plane. Unlike my flight TO Hong Kong, my flight BACK did not have a free seat next to me. In fact, I probably had the worst seat possible. I was in the middle seat of the middle row in the plane. Next to 2 asian guys who were keen on overstepping the armrest into my seat. Also, I pee A LOT!!! =(

By the end, the lines to go to the bathroom were over 10 minutes long! And there was only ONE LADY in front of me!!!

I met a lovely man in the line (har har hilarious) who turns out had circled the globe in the last 2 weeks. Wow!

We chatted while in line before getting back to our respective seats. I waited for him when we got off the plane and we chatted until my luggage came off the carousel (which was a very very long time =[) We switched cards and I guess we... are fb friends now?!

Anyways, I am glad to be back home! And I believe I am now caught up in my blog posts! Yahoooooo...

A whole year? Already?

Adam and I celebrated our 1-year anniversary this past weekend, so we decided to go back to where it all started...

Yes, my friends. We went to...

Greek Garden.

Delicious! I really do like that place so I was glad to get to have some Greek food again. As in, I was glad to once again have spanikopita that I don't have to labour over myself.

I left work a bit early so we could pick up a GPS from Future Shop on the way home.

That beauty of a baby set me back quite a bit, but all in good intention. This way we don't have to keep borrowing Jen's GPS and I get the excitement of owning a new fancy gadget.


I came home to some gorgeous delivered flowers, that was dropped off at the neighbour's since they came too early.

Then for a "fun" game of darts in the backyard where I clearly excelled. Darts because Adam was awful at winning me any prizes when we went to the CNE this year. So he made his own game so that he could "win".

Obviously, I am way better.

Some prizes didn't quite fit...

But clearly, I won them all.

Greek Garden was busy (busier than I'd ever seen). We were a bit early for the movie so we stopped in the bookstore first to peruse. I picked up another Michael Pollan book to add to my growing collection and we went to watch The Help.

I hadn't read the book so I was hesitant to watch it, but it was sort of the last chance to see it, so I figured, why not.

The movie was fantastic, and if movies are always worse than the books, then the book must be absolutely incredible.

It was a fun night and I was totally pooped out. Good thing everything in town is so close, home was only 10 minutes away!

Asia Day 1-"4" : Kowloon, Hong Kong

September 23
Yay! I left Toronto with a 19kg suitcase on a 10am flight to Hong Kong. Expected arrival? 1:15pm September 24.... -sigh-

My flight was.... okay. I had an empty seat next to me, so I was lucky. I got to lie down on my pillow with my feet outstretched into the aisle and try to catch some zzz's, but was unlucky on that front. So much for pulling an all-nighter and being zonked out on the 16 hour flight...

My in-flight movie entertainment of choice?

• Something Borrowed
• Hall Pass
• another movie that currently (and still) escapes me

September 24
I arrive at the Hong Kong airport to meet my cousin Chris waiting for me. We meet up, chat, and wait for my parents to arrive from Shanghai the following hour.

After getting to the hotel (Cosmo Hotel in Mong Kok - 旺角丽悦酒店) and my cousin leaving us be, we meet my uncle (mom's brother) in Tsim Sha Tsui (尖沙咀) for dinner at iSquare (國際廣場) and some later evening shopping. I love how everything is open so late! (I later shall probably vent my frustration at how late things open...)

September 25
My cousin Priscilla's wedding, we had dimsum for lunch, did some shopping, went back to the hotel to change, and went to the restaurant for the tea ceremony and dinner reception. Many many hours later are we finally fed... It was such a long day!


September 26
The next day we did some wandering around the Tsim Sha Tsui (尖沙咀) area again. I needed to check out the prices of custom made suits for Adam before it was too late to get one made.

Unfortunately, the prices just weren't quite right so we opted out of it. However, there were some beautiful sights there, including awesomely large tokidoki art pieces (above) and rows of flower boxes orchids lining the streets (below).

Cute tokidoki's and beautiful flowers! I wonder how they get them to bloom so nicely even on the sides of the streets. Damn Hong Kong and their gorgeous weather!

One Day

Cheap Tuesday = movie night.

Girls night = chick flick night.

Cheap Tuesday + One Day = bad chick flick evening.

Needless to say I did not enjoy this movie too much. It wasn't severely great acting, and the 20 year time lapse during the movie failed to yield any aging on Anne Hathaway's part.

Having not yet read the book, the ending came as a unexpected plot twisting shock. That was probably another big factor as to why I didn't like this movie. One does not expect, upon entering the theatre for a romcom chick flick, to find such disastrous reality-check type endings.

Lackluster acting, disappointingly predictable, unpredictable and then predictable again plot twists, it by far wasn't anything to write home about.

CNE

I had a lot of fun at the CNE last year, so thought I would head over to it again and show Adam what it's all about. My cousins weren't joining me this year, but Heather was up for it so we had a party gang going!

We went to lunch at House of Gourmet first, where Naeem and Alan came to hang with us. An hour and 4 plates of delicious food later, we were full and needed to get on our merry way.

This guy had one of the most impressive sand sculptures that we could see. It was only the 2nd day of the ex, but what he had already completed was amazing. How does that cloth covering all their faces stand up without support underneath? Amazing...


We also saw Joannie Rochette skating at the ice show they had, and saw the human cannonball guy shoot himself out of the cannon.

How does one get into this sort of career???

The ex was a lot of fun, we played a lot of games and won some prizes. Unfortunately the rides were so expensive by way of individual tickets that we skipped out on them.

I got my yearly fix of mini donuts and walked around the fairgrounds enough to burn off a whole day's worth of calories. It was definitely time to go home.

We watched Fantastic Mr. Fox that evening at Heather's, with some stove popped popcorn (delish!) before literally passing out for the night.

Cluster-cuss!

Gladiator

"I can't believe you haven't seen this before!"

Ironic. Coming from Adam.

But I really hadn't seen it before.

It was playing on TV the other day so I had to sit and bear through it. Although it's actually quite good..

I'm not an epic historian or anything of the like. In fact, if you've watched movies with me before, you would most certainly know how much I dislike watching movies about wars or history.

Gnomeo & Juliet

I love animated movies. Although I don't think I've actually seen any since last summer's "Despicable Me". I've been wanting to watch this for a while but never really found a time or mood to watch it.

Lucky me (really?), headaches have been ruining my life as of late so I took an evening off of staring intently at word processor documents for at-home mani pedi's while watching a movie.

Cute! I love the spin on a Shakespearean play, and animated!

Even the character names remain the same, I loved how true to the original this film was.

I recommend this for anyone. It's such a cute movie, with lots of entertaining bits to make it more modern. Even Shakespeare himself makes an appearance (albeit, as a statue, but still)!

How Do You Know?

The answer? You really don't... Unfortunately.

Kendra and I hadn't hung out in a while so we decided to chill out at home (where central air is a godsend) and watch a movie.

We walked to Blockbuster and spent some time deliberating about a movie to rent. It was a toss up between Jennifer Aniston's "Just Go With It" or Reese Witherspoon's "How Do You Know".

Too bad for us, we clearly chose the worse movie.

Sucky! I really like Paul Rudd, so it was disappointing for this movie to be so lackluster.

My recommendation? Don't watch this.

How do I know? I just do.

The Illusionist

This movie is from quite a few years ago, but I never got around to seeing it because I was drowning in trying to make sense of The Prestige, which came out the same summer.

We saw this on netflix, so decided to watch it Friday night. I thought it was good and was able to make sense of this movie a lot easier than The Prestige.

I won't give it away for those who still haven't seen it, but I highly recommend it.

Classics

Gotta love classic films.

Yes yes. I know. Kung Fu Hustle is hardly a classic, it's not even a decade old. But this will become a classic.

I was scrolling through NetFlix this weekend and saw that they actually had good movies! First up was Kung Fu Hustle.

I haven't seen it in a while but am glad I watched it again. I forgot how boring and hard it was to follow at the beginning, but things fell in line quickly.

Everyone has to admit though, that Weird Science is such a cult classic.

Adam's never seen it before, which totally blew my mind. My brother and I grew up on this show!

I was surprised to see that NetFlix had quite the random assortment of movies available, considering the other week I spent about 20 minutes looking up movies I wanted to watch and not finding a single one.

Yay for re-watching some of my favourite old movies!

X-Men: First Class

Now I'm not a big fan of all the superhero movies that have been raining down on us for the past decade, but I wasn't against going to see the new X Men movie (#95 on my DayZero).

A prequel to the XMen trilogy from recent years, I guess I was intrigued in finding out exactly how Professor X is put in his wheelchair. Other than that, I had no recollection of any of the characters or their powers.

Matt wanted to see it so bad (despite having already seen him opening night), and since Something Borrowed was no longer in theatres, we switched it up to watch X Men. A couple of the girls came too, so it was a fun night.

The movie was long, but not in the sense that you felt it dragging on. More in the sense that my ass was going numb in the seat and I couldn't find a comfortable position.

I liked the movie, it was definitely gripping to watch. I don't know much about the X Men or how closely it fell in line with the comic books, so I can't comment on that. I'd still recommend it to anyone who wants a good summer movie.

That, and I'm downloading the X Men movies right now so I can catch up and know what I was watching...

Bridesmaids

My favourite evening is Tuesday because of cheap night at the Cineplex. A group of us girls went to see Bridesmaids. It was a packed house and the movie was hilarious.

I didn't know it starred SNL actors, so I wasn't surprised after learning that just how witty the humour was. This is definitely not your normal chick flick and everyone should go see it.

Saoirse Ronan

It was a weekend full of this young starlet. We watched Atonement at home Friday night and the new 'thriller' Hanna at the theatre on Saturday.

I've seen Atonement before, but because I didn't know the plotline beforehand, I was semi-confused throughout. We were shopping at Winners Friday night when I saw it was going for $3! Of course, I bought it, and we watched it that night. Great movie, and despite not being able to understand like 25% of what Kiera Kinightley says, it's still good. Saoirse plays the younger sister Briony, who tells a lie as a child and it ends up altering her entire family's lives. She spents the rest of her life trying to atone for her actions.

Hanna is the other movie we watched Saturday night at the theatre that came out a couple weeks ago. I've been wanting to see it , but laziness prevented us last weekend.

The story of a super-operative, trained to kill a CIA operative who is on the hunt for her, I actually quite enjoyed it. It's not my typical type of movie (gory and violent), but it just looked so intriguing.

The only thing I didn't like is the lack of explanation (and reality) in altering the DNA of unborn fetuses to make them stronger, fear less, and be the ultimate super soldier. Can you say unrealistic?

Fun fact: Saoirse's name is pronounced "sersha". Whaaaaaaat?!?!?!?!

Star Trek

So I know the movie's been out for a couple years now, and I've always said "yeah yeah, I'll watch it", but now I finally have. Cross that one off the list, or rather, add it to the DayZero list (#27).

We're a boring old couple (already, I know), and didn't have plans this weekend. So it was another Friday night in, with a vast assortment of movies to choose from. This is the one Adam selected, and since he so adamantly claims he likes chick flicks, I decided to sit this through. Plus, I actually really have been meaning to see it... Nonetheless, I'm sure the glasses of wine beforehand reeealllly helped getting through it.

Surprise! I like it! Despite being confused (nothing new there..) for a large majority, I did end up understanding what was going on. Having only the previous knowledge of "Spock" and the weird hang signal gesture and catch phrase, I think I did pretty well.

I Love You, Man

So this past weekend was a pretty lazy one. Aside from a potluck to attend and needing to do some lab work, there wasn't much else to do. Naturally, we watched a movie. Not one I would ever really want to watch (bro-mance movies aren't my type, whaaaaat??).

Anyways, I didn't flip through many of my DVDs, so I kind of went with the first choice (check for 95 on my DayZero list), I Love you Man. My brother has seen this and I know of many guys who rave on about this movie. I like Paul Rudd. Win win?

Absolutely. Paul Rudd is always a hit with me. Jason Segel cracks me up on a regular occasion, but it's unfortunate that I always only see him as "Marshall Eriksen".

I liked the bro-mantic comedy side to movies. Perhaps I should steer more toward this genre?

No Strings Attached

Natalie Portman has four movies this year (I'm including Black Swan in this) AND a baby. What a year!

One of her movies, No Strings Attached, was the feature of our Friday night last weekend.

Cute. Funny. Sappy. Sad. Loving. All the things you expect a typical chick flick to be. Plus, Ashton Kutcher. Oh. And Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) from The Office.

I'd say this is a good year for Portman, and you should absolutely got see at least one of her movies.

January 2011 pt.1

So I haven't posted in a while now. It's time to recap the year so far, and I shall do it in month form:

We started the year with a Friday night out. Borealis was the restaurant of choice, and although I have been before and liked it, I was very disappointed this time around. It was a busy night, so the dining area was pretty full. Everyone around us seemed to have really yummy looking meals so I was excited. Then came our dinner. Adam's looked delish, whereas mine looked about 1/3 of the size. It was a (very) small portion of salmon, even by my standards, with hardly any salad to go with it, hidden underneath. Needless to say, I ate my entire Marble Slab ice cream cone that evening.

For my birthday weekend, we went to see Morning Glory the Friday night. Starring Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, I absolutely loved it. The story of an over-ambitious news turned executive producer who needs to get her two co-anchors together and save the morning news program. I love McAdams so of course I loved the movie. Oh, and Ford and Keaton are great too.

On the Saturday, I had dinner at the Fat Duck with a small selection of my friends. The restaurant wasn't as big as I thought (having gone past it everyday for the past 18 odd months), but quaint and nice inside. Since it was my birthday, I also got a free dessert which I tried desperately to share with everyone, but no one was biting.

After dinner, it was wine and dessert at my place. A smattering of desserts had been made/brought to my place beforehand, and I had a large selection of wines sitting in my fridge and on the wine rack.

Good eats + good friends = good times

On my actual birthday, Adam was insistent on making me dinner, so I let him be. Taken from the cookbook Kendra got me for my birthday, he wanted to make vegetable stew. Delicious for a mid-winter evening. =)

Never Let Me Go

I've been wanting to see this movie, but missed it when (or if it even did), make it to the Cineplex. I was so glad it was playing at the Bookshelf, so Adam and I went to see it Saturday night (add it to the list at #95).

We went to have an early dinner at the Wooly before walking to the movies. I was hoping to meet Kris there, as she said it was the only night she would be able to go, but we didn't end up seeing her before the movie started. Turns out Kris was late coming in, and did see us, but didn't want to come crash our twosome. Shucks on that, because afterward I wanted us to all get dessert, but Kris managed to slip out without saying hi.

After the movie, we went to Moxie's to get dessert, and I have never had such delicious espresso mousse in my life! =)

Anyways, the movie was fantastic. It's a little bit off from the book, as there is way more elaboration of their childhood days in Hailsham, but I still think the movie was very well done. I'm not a huge fan of Keira Knightley, because I think she is a stone-faced stoic actress, but I was pleased with Carey Mulligan. I definitely recommend this movie to anyone who likes good not-overly-dramatic drama movies, or to people who want/need some perspective on life.

Thanksgiving

Anyone looking for some turkey?

Yesterday was Orphan Thanksgiving dinner at my house. Since I didn't have plans for Thanksgiving this year, and a few other people I knew didn't either, I decided we would have our own Thanksgiving. I went and bought a turkey the week before, and found a nice 10lb-er at the store.

Defrost on Friday, roast on Sunday. Awesome! As usual, tackling a piece of meat that resembles it's living counterpart is difficult for me, so of course I went about it wearing gloves... Typical type A huh... A good long marinate in white wine, then a oil herb rub with garlic, stuffed with fresh parsley and a bulb of garlic, and in the oven for 2 hours!

I also made bread stuffing, roast vegetables and a jamaican pumpkin pie. Heather brought a caesar salad (and the pumpkin for the pie), Mina, the sweet potato pumpkin puree I made at the last potluck, Kendra a cold bulgar wheat dish, and Adam the all important vino.

Props to Adam for making the pie filling =)

Thanksgiving dinner was a hit, the turkey was soooo yummy, as was everything else! Walter showed up after dinner, in time for us to enjoy the delicious pie and ice cream. Then we all settled into the living room to watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

I obviously didn't pay much attention to it, as I was up and about either cleaning or doing something else random in the kitchen. Or talking to people in general, as I'm sure not everyone was watching the movie. But, like a good sport, Adam stayed till the end of the movie before he left. What a trooper - first to arrive, and last to leave!

Thanksgiving without family is hard, and obviously different. But with good people around you, it can be just as great, if not better. Despite being away from home for the second Thanksgiving, and really being on my own, I think it's good to start the new tradition of the single 20s and enjoying the special occasions with all the special friends in my life. Thanks everyone to making this year's turkey day so memorable =)

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

BEST. MOVIE. EVER (Add it to the list! #95).

Hands down hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing throughout most of it. Light humoured and slightly ADHD-prone, the movie was well done and humorous.

I'm glad I went to see it! It was a mix of all things I like. Movies, video games, Michael Cera. Not to mention good company at the movies. =)