Chicken feet and apple cobbler

This morning (Friday) I went to the grocery store and bought: ginger flavored tofu, frozen octopus balls, mystery flavored ramen noodles (the ones I tried today contained sesame seeds), taro filled buns, maize-carrot juice-and-meat dumplings, and strange pears. While walking past the meat section I freaked out because I thought I saw a pile of baby monkey paws. They were pink, wrinkled, and chopped off at the wrist.

Like these.

Chicken feet. Phew...

Next I went to the library to scan in my absentee ballot for our mini-election on International Day. This turned out to be more difficult than I'd thought.

1. I need to insert my Octopus into the machine even though there's no charge for scanning.
2. Even though there's the option to save the scanned file to an SD card (which I'd brought) there're no slots for inserting one. I must have looked ridiculous.
   
3. So actually, I needed to select a computer (each one is numbered) to send the file to.
4. At first the file didn't appear.
   
5. Then it did. But after cropping the image to include just the section on President and Vice President (I'm pretty sure Lingnan doesn't care to vote for the continuance in office of judges at large in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals) I needed to paste the image into a Word document.
   
6. Here I encountered two sub-problems: a) No comprehension of Chinese characters. b) No experience with the latest version of Microsoft Word.
7. After pasting the image I wanted to rotate it and resize the margins to fit two on a page. This never happened.
   
8. With some help from a friend, I managed to resize the image so two would fit side by side.
9. Finally, with no more complications, I printed the document.
   

Unfortunately, I forgot to actually bring the paper with me to the Town Centre this evening (so the print shop can make us numerous copies) so, mission: incomplete.

After the library I began my five hours of classes. Blech. Although I learned a visit to the vending machines for chocolate in between Economics of the Law and Environmental Economics makes everything more pleasant. I might be the only person in the world who doesn't look forward to Fridays.

For dinner I went to the canteen; coincidentally, one of the dishes contained chicken feet. Namely, "Octopus, Chicken and Chicken Legs with Rice." Yum (?). I think I need to start selecting from the made-to-order options. I was handed a plastic bowl of rice topped with an almost gelatinous layer of chopped up octopus and chicken, and two chicken feet. Everything kind of stuck together and tasted bland. The amount of meat on the feet (ha--a rhyme) surprised me though.

Then we (an American friend and I preparing for International Day) went to the Town Centre to buy American decorations and ingredients for apple cobbler. At Jusco (a department store that sells EVERYTHING) we found cinnamon sticks (amazing! the Park 'N' Shop at Fu Tai doesn't sell any spices besides pepper!) which we figured we could grind up easily enough, blue garlands with stars, red garlands without stars, markers, plastic mixing bowls, and a fruit knife.

At the larger Park 'N' Shop (this one actually is significantly larger than Fu Tai's. One time I went to Town Centre to find the larger Park 'N' Shop a friend recommended and was disappointed. Turns out the Town Centre contains at least two Park 'N' Shops) we found apples, sugar, brown sugar, ground cinnamon, oatmeal, flour, aluminum pie tins and foil for storing the cobbler, plastic containers for microwaving it, and a pumpkin.

We didn't buy nearly enough ingredients for 400 servings--our fingers nearly fell of carrying the bags as it was. We'll send the other Americans out for the remainder tomorrow. Tomorrow! Apple-cobbler-baking-movie-marathon fun!