some small victories

I bought a mahjong set at the Yau Ma Dei night market. It's quite nice (although the case it came in seems to be used, the tiles themselves are new), and it required some bargaining. Unlike *all* of my previous negotiable-price failures, I came into this one with information gleaned from previous indecisive attempts to buy a set. Suggestion: in all future bargaining endeavors, know how much a similar thing costs somewhere else. Don't ask the proprietor how much the item costs, instead throwing out a price probably 25% less than what it cost elsewhere. They will flat-out refuse, possibly insinuate that you are stupid, show you other, smaller/lamer versions of product. Ask how much it actually costs, express dismay, offer first compromise price (a little larger than initial offer, but not too much). Proprietor will again refuse, expressing disdain for bargaining skills, make counter-offer. Pick price slightly below the average of your most recent offer and their most recent offer. Cross fingers. I got a set, priced at HK$238, for HK$180, and I'm pretty sure I didn't get ripped off too bad.

I think I have a multi-entry China visa. It's in processing, so I don't want to say too much and jinx it. Will update.

I struck up a conversation with the attractive young woman seated next to me on the night minibus last weekend. As you probably all know, I'm unhealthily curious about how I am perceived by others, and in HK, this resolves mostly into a question of racialization/guesses at national origin. Of course, most people just tell me I'm really tall and leave it at that. Or, as one kid in the elementary school asked, as though an interrogator, "Why you get so tall?" But this conversation, with the woman on the bus, was the exception. My lead-off question was, "Excuse me, do you play mahjong?" with the intention of asking her where to buy a table to play on. Her response was, "Oh! Are you Chinese American?" and it made my day. Maybe even made my week.

She then answered my question about the table by telling me about a little store in mong kok that sells mahjong things, like tables, giving me the name of the street it's on. Mong kok is of course so dense and ridiculous, and the street she gave me was a longer one, so I had little faith that I'd actually find it. But wednesday afternoon, I dragged Jane along after lunch to survey a few blocks and try to find it. The first three blocks were lower-level retail plus stalls in the street, so that you could only see about a third of what was being sold in one pass. Then, Fa Yuen Street turns into the street with all the athletic shoe stores, which is where I comparison-shopped for Nikes a couple months ago. Tucked into the middle of what was going to be the *last* block we were willing to search was a storefront, not even a retail space but a counter facing the street, that sold mahjong stuff. So I bought a table. And I took the set and the table to work this afternoon and played a little. It was great.

On tuesday, I took Laura's Spanish Language Corner shift because she was going in for surgery (good luck with convalescence!). I figured that nobody would show up, and if they did, they'd only have had two weeks of class, so it would be a lot of practicing "Como esta' Usted?" and possibly, maybe, me teaching them "Hola que tal" and "Sale" as useful expressions. As it turned out, one student came in and wanted to chat. And I'm not sure where, but she'd had the equivalent of maybe half a semester of spanish. So we got to chat about stuff, and I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I remembered. It almost made me want to volunteer to help teach spanish or something for the students here (since they're starting basically from square one). But it also made my day.

I also very nearly made it through a relatively complicated McDonalds order in Cantonese last night. I think I would have made it, too, if I had asked the cashier to repeat her repeating of my order more slowly, instead of giving her the blank look which caused her to call over her manager. Any practice is good practice, especially when I jeng hai sik siu siu a.