East Meets Jess: He's here!

He's here! And he brought me gifts!
A beautiful bracelet from Scott's mom. Thanks Mrs. Novak! :)

And a few nice things from Scott for my bday.

Scott's been here a little over a week now and we've done so much! First up: getting to know our kitchen. Since Scott has some free time during the day, he has spent many mornings getting to know the neighborhood and exploring. He's discovered 3 - 4 local grocery stores yet none of them have added up to a Stop & Shop - or Trader Joe's for you TJ fans. So we've been shopping at different grocery stores in our apt neighborhood and in my work neighborhood.

He's made so many meals for me already, but I only have a picture of a couple. First was this soup with noodles.

Kinda looks like ramen huh? hehe don't tell him, but that's exactly how it tasted too!

He also made me a really great breakfast with eggs, homemade hash browns, and toast. It was perfect.

And he made me his mom's famous mac n cheese. Most of you have probably already seen photos of this, but here he is in action.

And here were the results. Yum!

Me enjoying a cup with chopsticks no less!

We've also been to Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Causeway Bay, and Ikea (more times than I'd like to admit to). And I've taken him out to eat a bunch of Chinese food including dim sum, soup dumplings, thai, thai/vietnamese, and traditional chinese food take out - roast pork and wine chicken on rice. We also can't forget about Mexican though. We love it and so the first weekend he was here, we hit up i Caramba and got ourselves some tacos, enchiladas, sangria, and margaritas. It felt like home. We'll definitely be back.

Oh and we also recently tried out a Japanese place near my apt. Oops, sorry, I mean, OUR apartment. I keep doing that and everytime, Scott catches me and says, "who's apt?" or "who's bed" or "who's tupperware?" hahaha. I'll catch on soon I'm sure. So anyways, this Japanese restaurant was sooo good! It was about $25 USD per person for an all you can eat japanese buffet. But it wasn't like a buffet where all the food is out and you grab what's available type deal. No. This was a buffet where everything was made to order. So you literally order all the things you want to eat with the waittress and once you're done, you order more as desired. It also includes all the green tea and/or beer you can consume. For for food and drinks, it was a great deal! And we had so much sashimi and tempura and miso soup and edamame, we couldn't even have dessert. It was funny b/c we had a great waittress and at the end of the evening, we asked for our bill. She was like what? You don't want to order more? And we were like, oh god no, we are stuffed. And she was like what about dessert and again, we told her we couldn't - we had eaten so much already. Then she looked at us and was like, wow you guys at sooo little. We couldn't believe it. Then since our waittress was so great, we really wanted to tip her. You don't tip in Hong Kong and I told Scott that but he just didn't believe me. There was already a service charge included in the bill (which mind you was 10%) so we thought we could give her just a little bit more, just b/c she was really helpful, attentive, and quick. When I tried to give her the money, she had this look of horror and quickly refused the money and ran away. Scott was baffled. He just couldn't believe her reaction. It was quite funny b/c you would NEVER see something like that in the States.

Octopus anyone?

Sashimi...in rare form!

I also took Scott on his first junking trip this weekend. My cousin Alycia and her friends had planned it and invited us along. Scott absolutely loved it and we had so much fun. All of her friends were super nice and it was a nice relaxing day. We also went banana boating and wake boarding although none of us were able to get up on the wake board. Oh well, there's always next time.

I'll leave you with a few photos of that day.

Enjoying some time out on the water...

Slowly pushing my cousin back towards the boat. She's a little afraid of water, can you tell?

After some banana boating and wake boarding, the guys eventually got a little competitve and starting a little diving competition. Here they are trying to do a back flip all together off the boat.

They didn't exactly start at the same time, but I give them an A for effort. hehe.

Here's another fun one:

I even caught one on video. This is my first time importing video on this blog so I hope it works!

Here's another quick one:

Scott loves being in the water and on boats. Can you tell?

Oh and I almost forgot, we were at home one night just chatting. I was getting tired but Scott was in rare form - actually he was the way he always is - Mr. Chatterbox and I was playing around on my iphone so I snapped some photos of him during his long speech or tangent or whatever it was. Don't remember now, but we laughed about the photos the next day when I showed them to him. He had NO idea I was taking them.

But they are just so funny so I had to post them. The many faces of Scott Hagerman.