Random stuff

Well today's post is pretty low key compared to the past few.  Took it easy this morning waiting for the water delivery man.  He finally came as I was returning from the grocery store.  (Needed more o.j. to go with my peanut butter toast.)  We'd been trying to get it set up since we arrived and even with Carol's help we were having problems - they were out of the tall dispensers.  So finally Beth and Angie got the number for another service when they saw the delivery guy crossing the street.  Good work ladies! So no more running to the store every day for another gallon jug of water - or 2 liters as I suppose it must be.  And, in addition to the convenience of having it delivered, we get the hot and cool taps.  Sweet!  Angie is in love. 

We then rearranged the kitchen and "junk room" to accommodate the new appliances and got rid of some extra crap.  After that I did some yoga, compliments of my YTTP podcasts; went to the outdoor market and got some fruit; came home and ate lunch; organized my desk; ate some ice cream (Have you had Rocky Road lately?  So good.); went out wandering in the night air; bought a reading lamp; came home and put it together and discovered they didn't include the bulb.  Didn't feel like going out again, so I'll read by the light of my florescent overhead light for one more night.  Then I made some dinner.

Better than last night's fiasco, but still needs improvement.  I got some beef bouillon and some sliced beef and udon noodles and choi sum and dried mushrooms.  Made a pretty tasty soup out of it, but I browned/cooked the meat in a pan first and that was not the right thing to do.  Flavor was good, but it was pretty rubbery.  I guess next time I'll just throw it in the soup raw and boil it?  Suggestions, my gifted cooking readers? It was very thin, small pieces, like the kind you would expect to get in an Asian soup.  Oh, I also called a language school near my place today.  I think I'm going to try taking a Cantonese class, but it doesn't start up until mid-September.  In the meantime I'll try to keep learning the basics.

That's about it, but luckily I've been saving up some random shots of Macau for just such a day, and here they are.  (Also, please note that for many of these photos, clicking on them will let you see an enlarged size.)


To the right, a shot of the infamous Red Market where the live stuff is sold.  Also you can see the scooter parking mania.  Above that is a shot of one small section of the outdoor markets we go to for fruit and veggies and all things cheap.

 
Here we have speck, a ham-like substance I ate a lot in Italy, and in fact this stuff was from Italy.  I saw it at the U.S. Mart in Taipa, which has a bunch of Western foods as the name suggests.  But speck?  I was not expecting to find that.









This cool dragon statue/wall was along our path in the Old Taipa Village.

  






This is a cute, touristy part of town near the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral. 

 

And to finish up, this is another video I took when I went down to see the statue of Kun Iam.  I mentioned my reference to "the igloo" in the blog but forgot to include this vid with all the other stuff.  Sorry!  You can kind of hear the eerie music in the background but the wind makes it difficult.  If you can't hear my description, the silver building is a Science Museum and the land mass in the distance is Taipa and my school is right behind the statue.  The big green hills on the right are mainland China.