SuperPass Dinner

My hall had a dinner to encourage everyone to "super pass". A super pass is to get a grade average at or over 3.0 (the highest is 4.0). The dinner is something they do every year and there are many traditions attached to it. All in all it was a fun and chilled night with lots of food.

They usually serve pork for the super pass dinner. A whole pig is placed on each table and then the idea is to cut it in half in one go. This year we had hotpot instead. The girls at my table could tell me that the reason was that a few people got a bit too eager at last year's dinner. Apparently quite a few table got ruined in the pursuit for the perfect chop.

Some of the girls on my floor eating hotpot.

Alt kler den smukke - muligens med unntag av denne t-skjortå. Hege and Xi-Wen posing in front of beautiful golden bird.

Hege the Giant and Justine under some sort of wise words.

They gave us little red envelopes with 1 dollar 30 cents in them at the end of the dinner. Apparently 1.30 sounds something like 3.0 when you say it Chinese - therefore it means luck. At the dinner there was also some sort of instruction about eating vegetables with a spoon because spoon or vegetables or maybe the combination sounds like super pass - ergo it means good luck to do so.

Beijing

I just came back from a hectic long-weekend in Beijing. It is a really impressive city, especially compared to the southern Chinese cities I have visited.

The Summer Palace

The Summer Palace is an impressive sight with its massive "gardens" and fancy buildings. The area is huge and the five hours we spent there was not enough time. It used to be the playground for the emperor and his family. I would hate to be one of the "commoners" that funded this project back in the day.

Pretty flower tree in the Summer Palace.
Empress Hege

Empress Lesley, Empress Sally, Emperor Andrew, Empress Hege

Peking Duck

We had Peking Duck at a very famous restaurant that has been around for nearly 150 years. Peking Duck is THE food Beijing is known for. The duck's skin is separated from its body by pumping air into it before it is roasted in an oven. This makes the skin particularly crispy. The duck is then eaten with some sort of pancake-bread and onion. I do not really like duck that much, but it was a good thing to have tried.

The Beijing Olympics

We made time to see some of the Olympic structures. The building in the background is the "bird's nest". It looks absolutely amazing.

The five Olympic mascots. There are shops selling Olympic souvenirs all over Beijing. We found these shops so fascinating that we visited them every single night we were there.

The Great Wall

The wall was pretty fun too. There were a lot of people there though, but I guess that is what you get when you visit the part closest to Beijing. From time to time since I came to Asia there has been people, especially from Chinese cities that do not get a lot of foreigners, that want their photo taken with me. This was also the case in Beijing, especially at the Wall. At one stage it got somewhat crazy and I literary had to flee the masses. I guess it is not everyday they get to see a Viking.

It was actually a bit of effort climbing the wall. It was horribly steep at times and there were all these tour groups consisting of old, pushy little women trying to make their way to the top in the least amount of time.

The Forbidden City

The Forbidden City was the palace of the emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasty. It is absolutely massive. The guy in the picture is Mao.

Random Pictures

After continuous threats from my mom I decided to get my act together and make another blog entry. This is pretty much just random pictures from Hong Kong and Macau.

Dim sum brunch in a fancy Hong Kong restaurant. Dim sum is pretty much just many small dishes. The waiters walk around with trolleys and you just point to what you want. The dish closest to the camera is something like rice pancake with shrimp inside. It is one of my favourites.

The IFC tower is the tallest building in Hong Kong. It has 88 floors (8 is a really good number in Cantonese, because the word for eight sounds very similar to the word for money). It is also interesting to note that they have skipped a few floors that have numbers with bad connotations attached to them. For example there are no 14 and 44, because the words for the number 14 sounds almost like "definitely fatal" and 24 like "easily fatal".

Went on a day trip to Macau during my Easter break. Macau is a special administrative province of China that was under Portuguese rule for over 400 years. It was handed back to China in 1999. I love Macau. It has such a European feel to it.

The great church of Macau, or the wall that is left of it. It is a pretty impressive sight.

The church wall from a different angle.

Macau is also infamous for its many casinos. Gambling is more or less illegal in mainland China, so the Chinese flock to Macau to get some action.

I kind of like all the blinking lights. Artificial perhaps, but pretty in its own way=) It takes about an hour by ferry to get to Macau and you have to go through immigration and get your passport stamped to get in. If it wasn't for this (and the rather expensive ferry tickets) I would go there all the time.

The Travelator is the world's longest escalator. It consists of of three moving walkways and 20 escalators. It can be reversed, and runs down in the morning and up in the afternoon, so people that live at the top of the hill can get down to work in the morning and back up again in the evening. Around 50 000 (almost the population of Sandnes!) people make this 20 min trip every day. You can walk on and off at several points along the route. I have never had the patience to take it all the way to the top.

Hong Kong just had a bad case of flu and all the primary schools shut down for a week. All of a sudden these masks mysteriously started popping up everywhere.

Funky people handing out free Coke.