Updates for the past week - Wednesday - Dim Sum

Once again, I apologise for not updating my blog over the past week. Plenty has happened within the week but I've been both busy and lazy. I also got my computer reformatted over the weekend and now I don't have anymore stupid pop-ups or viruses. I can finally use my task manager (Ctrl Alt Del).

Hmm....I think I'll slowly update my entire week on this blog. It'll take me ages because so many new things have happened. For one, I've become much closer to the guys and my housemates. I've really spent much quality time with them this hols. OK, because I have so much to write, I'll probably take ages to write everything down. I'll start from last Wednesday and work my way slowly up till today. Readers, you may have to come back and check if this post is incomplete.

Wednesday:
I went for dim sum at Sunnybank with my housemates, Tommy, Wan Shi and Steph. We went out pretty early, about 9.30 am. Don't laugh...9.30 am is early for me. When I can afford it, I usually sleep till past noon. Besides, during winter, the mornings are really cold and I never feel like leaving the comfort and warmth of my bed. As expected, the morning air was chilly and the wind made it worse. However it's still nothing compared to Melbourne so I'm not complaining. We took a different route down to Sunnybank, going from Toowong instead of the city. I guess this is a better route because we save a lot more on bus fare. We arrived early at the dim sum restaurant. I heard that Sunnybank is known as "Little Taiwan" in Brisbane and no wonder, you see Chinese faces everywhere and it feels weird to hear different dialects when you walk around. Anyway the dim sum place people spoke mostly Cantonese. A few of the waitresses spoke Mandarin though. At least I had Tommy and Wan Shi who were Cantonese experts, Tommy being a Hong Kie and Wan Shi speaking the language back home. Wow the food was great. I got to eat all my favourites, plus a few new items. Of course, the compulsory dishes for me were chicken feet, pork ribs with black beans, siu mai, har gao and chee chong fun. Steph and Wan Shi kept raving about the egg tarts there. Apparently it was supposed to be great but when the waitress came with the eggs tarts, she only had 3 left and they sold them in sets of 2. So we took 1 set and decided to let Steph and Wan Shi eat first while Tommy and I wait for them to get more. I also learnt that lor mai kai is not the same as lor mai fan. In fact, in Hong Kong, lor mai fan is equivalent to our lor mai kai. Lor mai kai to them is the lotus leaf rice. Sigh, in the end, we were too full to eat any egg tarts so we ended up da-baoing them. Steph went to ask the waitress how much it cost to da-bao and due to her terrible Cantonese, she misheard/misunderstood and thought that each egg tart was only 20 cents. In our excitement, we ordered 10 egg tarts until we found out that actually 1 set of egg tarts cost $3.50. Alamak....!!! Like that is too expensive to da-bao 10! So we asked another waiter to change the order but it was too late. The waitress had already come out with the 10 egg tarts and when we told her that we only wanted 6, she gave us that pissed off-so troublesome-give me extra work to do kind of look but WHATEVER!!! She can't force us to pay for the extra egg tarts. We made a hasty exit after that. Seriously, what is it with these dim sum waitresses??? Most of them have this sulky look as if they were forced to work there and cannot stand interacting with the customers. I'm not just referring to Brisbane. I notice that this is the case for S'pore and Malaysia. Weird isn't it? It's just something I cannot understand.

After brunch, we went out separate ways. Steph and I headed to Yuen's Market to get Asian groceries. The funniest thing is, we both concluded that we didn't have much things to get, but going in, Steph went berserk. Hahaha, it still tickles me when I think about it. She went on a shopping frenzy. I think it's probably because she's never been to this bigger branch of Yuen's and she seldom goes out to buy Asian groceries. She practically bought something from each aisle. Well, it was nice of her to want to cook white fungus dessert for the house. So she bought red dates, rock sugar, lotus nuts and lots of white fungus. She wanted to get much more but the 2 of us couldn't carry any more. Basically, we went in with an empty trolley and came out with an overflowing one. I wanted to pay for my items first but couldn't dig them out from the bottom of the trolley. Also, when we were at the counter, they had this weird veggie placed there. It kind of looks like spring onions, only that the length and width were uniform, it might be garlic shoots?? Anyway she asked me about those and I said I didn't know what they were.So she went, "Oh ok" and popped them into her trolley. Oh my god, I was really stunned by that. I mean, who actually goes and buys an item when they don't even know what it is? I guess only Steph would be so unique. Carrying everything back was a killer. We had about 6 big plastic bags worth of food and only 2 bags were mine. Steph spent about $66 just at Yuen's. Amazing!!!

When we got back home, we realised that Tommy and Wan Shi weren't back yet. They had been out longer than we had. I met a friend's parents downstairs (the girl who's moving next to Chris). They were waiting in the car for their daughter to come home. They didn't have the key and the girl had gone out with her friends. Hmm....not very nice of her to make her parents wait outside in the car. I kept asking if they would like to come up to my place to have a drink and wait for their daughter but they kept insisting that they were fine where they were. Well, I ended up waiting with them and chatting at the same time. We talked for 1 hour plus until it got dark and the girl came back. At least I found out a little more about her and got to know her parents better. They were pretty nice people, quite easy to talk to. Also they did have plenty of questions about living in Campus Lodge and Brisbane. It feels nice to be able to help someone....heh....Of course they did boast a little about the girl passing her driving with only 4 demerit points and on her first try but I guess it's only natural that parents will want to show off their kid's achievements, no matter how small it might be.

After the dim sum, I was much too full to have dinner. I took something light and it was back to my computer for more gaming and movie-watching.