After a morning of work (and heartily berating myself for not having completed the work before I left), I set out for a little exploring. David was off at CUNY, soaking in his fair share of syntactic processingy goodness. I thought I’d check out the Greenwich Village first, as I’d heard it was a good shopping neighbourhood. However, not checking my subway map closely enough meant that I ended up on an express train bound for the Brooklyn Bridge. Not in any particular hurry to get to the Village, I decided to explore the Financial District a bit first.

David and I spent a tragic amount of the beautiful, warm, perfect-for-romping-about-New-York morning plugging away on final papers. Not able to bear the thought of spending all day in my hotel room, I skipped out to check-out SoHo, while David headed off to the first day of the CUNY conference. Clad in a bright red dress, I cheerfully made my way through the historic district with its cobblestone streets and lined with beautiful cast iron buildings.

We caught a cab and headed into Manhattan, and I was soon thrilled to be catching a glimpse of the New York skyline. The travel bug that had been forced into dormancy at the start of grad school was soon awake and chirping again. We dropped our bags off at our hotel and headed out into the city to, sadly, get some work done. During our walk to the nearby Union Square, we happily discovered a Tim Hortons, which I hadn’t realized had expanded to New York. Eager for a little nostalgic taste of home, we ordered a couple donuts and a coffee for breakfast before heading on our way.

The weather had cooled down nicely, relatively speaking, so Jen and I, along with another conference goer, headed over to the Mong Kok markets. The streets were awash with people and filled with artificial daylight from an impressive amount of signage. After a brief stop in a badminton shop for some badminton supplies for our friend, we dove into the thick of it.

The second conference of the trip, the Psycholinguistic Representation of Tone, was not, unfortunately, nearby our hotel. It was being held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the New Territories, about 50 minutes away by train. We had thought to perhaps take the taxi through the tunnel from Hong Kong island to the Kowloon side to minimize the number of transfers.

I soon met up with my fellow SFU congress attendees, and we wandered off towards our dim sum destination, the East Ocean Victoria City Restaurant. Much like last night, we simply marked down the number we wanted of a particular item. There were three pages of choices, and there were a plethora of options for everybody, including a few more unusual choices, such as pig’s blood and chicken feet. Everything I sampled, mind you I was fairly tame in my selections, was delicious—baked BBQ pork buns (super tasty!), shrimp dumplings, deep fried eggplant, etc. And the food kept coming!

My plan was to head up to the Peak, which apparently affords a 360-degree view of the city. I hopped on the MTR and whisked my way over one stop to Admiralty Station. I was slightly turned around as to exactly which direction I needed to go to find the Peak, but I tried heading through one of the malls, Pacific Place, which naturally got me side-tracked.