Happy December everyone! I hope it's snowing in Minnesota, we have quite a lack of that here. It's been a mix of fog, rain, clouds, and more fog. It's the kind of weather that chills you to the bone because it's pretty wet and all you want to do is curl up in bed and drink hot chocolate. We haven't gotten a chance to do that though, because we've been busy! This weekend I went with a couple of girls to the Ladies' Market in Mong Kok, an outdoor market with very cheap (in price but also in quality) items and delicious bubble tea. Some of the girls went back to the hotel, but my friend Thao and I decided to go to Tsim Sha Tsui, a shopping area nearby. This ended up being quite the adventure! We got off the train and got a little lost on our exits but took an exit labeled "Peninsula Exit." A lightbulb went off in my head and I realized that this was the same Peninsula Hotel that my great-grandma had stayed at in the 1900s, and also the one that I'd read about as being one of the nicest hotels in Hong Kong! Thao and I got very excited and decided to pay it a visit. However, we soon felt very out of place as the first thing we walked into was the hotel's "shopping arcade," filled with designer stores such as Hermes, Bvlgari, Chanel (we actually went in there because Thao loves it and tried to act classy), Louis Vitton, to name a FEW. It was a whole different world, the world where people dress up in the designer clothes of the very store they're at just to shop there. We were wearing jeans and fleece jackets. It was a funny contrast. Anyway, we ventured toward the hotel lobby and it was MAGICAL. Christmas lights were everywhere and a giant tree stood by the main entrance with designer bags as the presents underneath. People sat having afternoon tea and the line was immensely long. Outside, the parked cars took our breath away; there was a beautiful Lamborghini and a Rolls Royce, among others. It was a lot to take in. We snuck around the hotel for a bit, almost crashing some wedding photos and then the same wedding banquet. It was the nicest hotel I've ever seen, and all I could picture was my great-grandma walking around in a fancy evening gown in the 50s or whenever she was there. In the bathroom, I was shown to my stall and my paper towel was neatly placed by the attendant next to my sink so that it was easily accessible to me. After this classy adventure, we walked around Tsim Sha Tsui for a bit more and it was sort of like New York City. Enough about that. On Sunday we had quite the opposite experience. We went from cosmopolitan to rural when we traveled to Lantau Island to hike in the mountains. We took a gondola through the gorgeous mountains and the clouds to get to Ngong Ping, the village where our hike was and where a large seated Buddha sat. We visited him and then hiked all over the mountains. It was so foggy that our views were not quite as they should have been, in fact we didn't see ANY spectacular views. It's been foggy every day though, so we decided not to put off hiking for a beautiful day as there may not be any. We used our imaginations though and it was a blast! It seemed like a spooky fairy tale with all the fog. Today we had a tough quiz for our art history class, but to celebrate finishing a huge group of us went to get dim sum at the nearby market. Our Global friends who speak Chinese (one is from Hong Kong) did all the ordering for us and we received dish after dish of steaming egg buns, pork rolls, chicken feet (these are actually decent), chicken, rice, and nameless dishes. It was all delicious, and a good cultural experience. That's all for now!