massage - Hong Kong style

I asked Colleen, the girl who's helping PBU's program, if there was a place I could go to get a massage. She said yes pretty quickly, which got me excited, since it made me assume she knew of a good place to go.

The wife (Corinna) of one of the PBU students is along and she's not doing much while her husband is in class, so I thought she might like to go along. Colleen arranged appointments for the two of us, and so 3pm Wednesday afternoon we were set to go.

We walked to Citi One, a nearby shopping center, and once inside, Colleen dropped us off and said, "Have fun!" We were on our own, and quickly realized they don't speak ANY English. Next thing we know we are being brought back to the changing area. They give us keys for lockers and then show us the showers. Mind you, the whole time this is happening, we are speaking English and they are NOT understanding us. So we resort to hand motions. We realize they want us to shower before our massages, and we keep giggling. We shower, and decide to keep our undergarments on. We take our clothes to our lockers and attempt to lock up our stuff. I lock mine, but I turn to Corinna and realize her key has snapped in half. She's saying, "oh my gosh, oh my gosh" and we're laughing so hard b/c we don't know how to tell the staff what's just happened. One of the staff walks back, and we show her the key. I try to motion that it just broke in half.
All to say, they got her a new key, brought us glasses of hot tea, and walked us to our massage rooms. We were split up, bid our adieu, and off we went.

I got into the massage room, and the woman tried to communicate that I needed to derobe and lay on the table...then she was going to cover me with towels. Oh, this whole thing was so funny...I wish I could speak their language. The massage lasted for an hour...I kept wondering what was coming next, since I didn't know what to expect. The massage ended, and she gave me my robe back and showed me back to the showers. I met up with Corinna and we just laughed and laughed...here we were, two Americans, unable to communicate, and trying to act as though we knew what we were doing.

After we walked out of the salon, we did a little window shopping. I tried to ask this guy at the customer service desk where I could go to exchange more money; he put a sign up on his desk that said, "be back in a few" and walked briskly to show us the bank. A guy was standing outside, and said in fairly good English (with a hint of a British accent): "How can I help you?" I said I wanted to exchange money and he told me they had just closed. We went into another little shop and bought Corinna an umbrella - it's rainy season here - and decided to head back to campus.

As we walked back to ICS, it began to rain. We laughed as we tried to open Corinna's umbrella. It "opened" but didn't want to snap in place. We finally made it back, parted ways, and I went into my apt., cooked myself some dinner, and read. Went to bed around 8:30pm and (no shocker here) stayed asleep till 7am this morning.

The students have one more day before they finish their first week of class -- Theories of Learning. I'm still trying to confirm plans for going to the market on Saturday. Hopefully all will work out.

All in a day's time.......

What an afternoon.