Hostile Traveler

When I woke up this morning with plans of going to Macau, I looked out the window to find the rain coming down sideways and the wind howling. Not a good omen. I talked to the concierge about going to Macau, and he looked at me, looked outside, and basically told me that unless I was going to hide out in a casino for the day that it probably wasn’t going to be a lot of fun. I had to agree, so I wound up spending the day wandering around Honk Kong island. Besides, I’m a little tired from all of the work stuff, and I’ve somehow managed to do something farily evil to my knee, so I’m trying to keep walking to a minimum. I think maybe the Buddha joke yesterday is coming around to kick my ass. Karma’s a bitch.

I went across the harbor into Hong Kong and wound up wandering through Central and Causeway Bay. It started with shops like D&G, Louis Vuitton, and so on, and ended up at some dodgy food vendors. I call that a successful wander.

People often ask what it is I eat when I’m in Asia, and the answer is that I try to eat what people locally would, within reason. There are times that I break down and do Western stuff just for the ease of it, but I truly do like Asian food. The issue is that Chinese food in particular tends to be…well, varied. Just because you can eat something doesn’t mean you ought to eat it, if you know what I mean. Also, I try to avoid anything that is termed a “delicacy” because invariably it’s something I have to concentrate to choke down.

So here’s an example of a typical family-owned restaurant in Hong Kong:

Basically, the kitchen is in the front window, and some reporesentative bits of what’s on the menu is hanging in plain view. So, as a westerner with zero Chinese skill, I tend to look for the places that at least have stuff I recognize hanging in the window. If I have to study the stuff for awhile to figure out what it is, I’m probably not gonna eat there. The other issue is that unless you’re with a native speaker, there’s a lot of pointing and such involved, or you can just try the random menu choice technique, which I don’t recommend. I’ve had some truly frightening things put in front of me when doing that.

One of the best things about Asia is the fruit, and there are lots of types available. I personally love Star Fruit, which you can also get in the states, but it’s pretty much a raisin by the time it gets there…nowhere near the same. I also got turned on to Pomelo, which is like a giant orange, and has a slightly bitter taste to it. There’s a dessert I really like which is basically a bowl of milk with mango pieces, pomelo, and tapioca beads in it, and it’s really just a nice light way to end a meal. A typical fruit stall looks something like this:

The big green things in the center back are the Pomelos. Okay, so that’s the good. Here’s the bad:

(Sorry for the blur, but I was trying to be a bit subtle. I kind of don’t like having “Look at me! I’m a tourist!” branded on my forehead. Also why I use a really tiny digicam that takes kinda shitty pictures instead of a massive SLR that would take great pictures.)

So, welcome to the meat market. Refigeration? What’s that? I suppose if it’s cooked it really doesn’t matter, but I dunno - it just freaks me out. Intestinal parasites could make good friends though….I mean, they’d always be there for you.

Next we come to another type of restaurant, which is the hawker. These guys usually set up on the street and do a few different dishes. The thing is, if you can overlook the conditions, the food can be really good.

The kitchen for the above. Gas-fired wok that looks like a blowtorch, and the special of the day appeared to be some sort of tripe dish. Pass. I’m not a big fan of innards.

Finally, we come to another type of street vendor, but this type is an exposed storefront. This place is selling snacks of different kinds, but after giving it a once-over and getting a good healthy dose of the aroma, I don’t think they’re the kind of snacks I want. If you click on the image to make it full-sized, you can get a better feel for the assortment of tentacles-onna-stick (yellow or purple, your choice), octopus balls (do octopi have balls?), various sausage of dubious origins, and the ever-present bubbling pot of cow stomach.

Anyways, enough about the food. While wandering through Central, I took this big system of escalators that bring people up the relatively steep streets. While doing so, I started to take a look at the buildings around me. Based on past trips to Beijing and Taipei, it seems that the outside of buildings are just not important. the insides are immaculate, but the outsides are…well, very grey.

Engrish of the day…sorta. I guess it’s proper English, but what’s an ‘Ear Wax’….and I’m especially intrigued as to what a ‘Tummy Candle’ is. Sounds kinky.

It finally cleared up towards the evening, and it seems that the rain has washed some of the crap out of the air so that I can get a clear view of the Hong Kong skyline. Forgive the quality of the photo, but taking night shots with a compact digicam and no tripod is damn near impossible I have some others from my last trip that are far better that I’ll post sometime. Anyways, looks pretty nice at night:

Today is, as you know, Saint Patrick’s Day. Lots of the pubs and bars and such were celebrating Hong Kong style, which basically means that the locals watch bemusedly as the expats make drunken asses of themselves. I went to a local Irish pub that had a Phillipino band playing cover tunes and had myself a couple pints o’ Guinness and some bangers & mash. The band was quite good - it seems that the Phillipines cranks out a lot of talented musicians based on other bands I’ve seen in the past.

One funny bit was when the bartender kind of sheepishly asked me what St. Patty’s was all about. I explained to him as best as I could remember about Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland and such. He looked at me very strangely for a minute and said, “Why he do this? Snake taste good.” And there you have it.

Well, that does it for Hong Kong. I leave for Sydney in the morning, so I guess the next chapter starts then.

Just to clear things up, I didn’t post anything yesterday because it was kind of a boring day and wasn’t really worth its own post. Basically I taught class all day, ate lunch at a place called ‘Happy Face Noodle’ (I shit you not) and then went out with my coworkers from Singapore for a bit after class to an area called Wanchai. Now, most expat areas of cities tend to be a little gritty, and Wanchai is no exception. The thing is, there are some fantastic restaurants and pubs to be had if you can run the gauntlet of girlie bars and old women yelling out ‘massagee! massagee!’ and such.

We started out at a local bar called Joe Bananas, a pretty typical expat hangout that is open to the street. After a couple of beers there, we went to eat at a Thai place called Chili Club, which did a pretty good job of clearing out my sinuses. To cap off the night, we went to see a band at a dodgy little place called The Wanch, where the bartender tried to show me a magic trick involving a napkin and a lighter and wound up nursing a rather nasty burn. Remember, kids - don’t drink and try to do shitty magic tricks.

Today was a half day of class which wrapped up just after lunch. Some dim sum randomness to fill my stomach, then off to Lantau to get the hell out of the city for awhile. I was getting pretty tired of neon overload and massive overpopulation, so going somewhere with trees and such seemed like a good idea.

Lantau is an island west of Hong Kong island, and it’s much more sparsely populated. More trees, less neon = good. Anyways, I went to see the largest Buddha statue in the area called Ngong Ping. To get there, you take a train that goes out past the airport and leads to a really long cable car run that takes you up the mountain (okay, hill) to where the statue is. The photo below gives you an idea of the view as you’re climbing. The car rocks a decent amount in the wind, so it’s not exactly a good idea for those afraid of heights. Also, all of the development to the left is the airport you fly into when visiting Hong Kong.

Once you finish the cable car trip (about 15min) you get dumped off in a pretty touristy area that was built around 5 years ago when the statue was erected. Yes, I said erected. It’s Buddha - have some respect, dammit. It’s a short walk to get to the foot of the Buddha…

…or so I thought. It’s never that easy. Stairs. Gotta love em.

Okay, stairs aside, the statue itself is very impressive. It’s called Tian Tan Buddha, and it’s 34m high, which in American terms is…fucking huge. It’s cast in bronze and there’s apparently a bell inside that is rung for special events.

Now, most people don’t realize this, but Buddha was one of the original pimps. The pic below is of a few of his bitches bringing him his tribute. (I’m hoping any Buddha fans reading this truly do adhere to that whole non-violence thing right about now…)

A view from the top that overlooks the temple called Po Lin. More on that in a moment, after I finish trudging down lots of steps…

A view of the main temple building. It’s a very serene, peaceful place, which made me feel a bit uneasy because I so don’t belong there. Incense burners, flowers, monks - the whole deal.

Inside the main building was truly amazing. There’s the obvious gold statues, but everything in the temple is so intricate it’s hard to describe. In front of the statues are rows of orchids and potted citrus trees, and there are offerings of different foods on the tables. Lanterns hang from the ceiling, which is also decorated, and the sides of the room are covered in pads upon which to kneel.

In all, a very worthwhile excursion, and I think it helped my soul a bit to escape the city. But, then again, I’m a hypocrite and I know it. Buddhists are supposed to not say bad things about people, not drink, and not eat meat, amongst other things. So, when two hours later I was sitting at a pub eating a steak and drinking a beer while wishing hateful shit on the weather….well, you see the problem. And yes, I know I should be eating local, but I’ve been doing so all week and I finally broke down.

Tomorrow I’m going to head to Macau. Maybe. I’ll let you know.

Pretty unevenful day today stuck in the windowless closet that we call the classroom. We escape for lunch, but other than that we’re jammed in there together like one geeky little family. Lunch itself was kind of interesting because when we walked into the restaurant, all I could think of was that it looked like a bad wedding hall. In fact, it was a bad wedding hall, and the head table was still set up with ‘Congratulatons Raymond and Lucy’ above it. I guess they don’t waste any time converting it back into a restaurant. Hmm…I wonder if they play the Chicken Dance at a Chinese wedding…

A coworker of mine from Singapore wanted to take me for traditional Cantonese food for dinner, so we headed into Mong Kok (yes, the same place as last night). I managed to snap a couple of pics without looking like a total tourist (or so I like to tell myself anyways), and you can see just how deserted the place was. Very tasteful signs you can barely notice too…

I didn’t even notice this when I took the picture, but note the white sign on the right advertising the hourly rates for the hotel. Guess they don’t make it much of a secret here.

This is the restaurant we wound up at. No idea what the name is, but it could be “Guy Cooking Random Shit In A Window”. Oh wait, that would describe 99% of the places here.

I wound up with a kind of glorified ramen dish, but it was actually pretty good. I’m sure the oil glistening on it will be rocketing out of my colon like a bullet train by the end of the night.

I haven’t seen too much Engrish here so far, which is a bit disappointing. The restaurant had a really good one next to the restroom though:

Just another Mong Kok street taken while wandering aimlessly.

….and a couple more from the Ladies’ Market, this time at night. The guy I was with was looking for ‘Potato Boy’ DVDs and was all excited about it.

Stil no sun, still overcast, still too many freaking people. But, other than that, not too bad so far.

Last night after getting done with class and going for a brief excursion to Mong Kok (more on that in a bit), I got back to my hotel at around 6:30pm with the intent of dropping my stuff and going out for some dinner. I had been feeling a bit run down, as is to be expected by this time of day, and I took a moment to lie down on the bed and chill out watching some random Chinese game show thing. Fast forward to 3am when I finally woke up, and I’ve been up since. So much for the anti-jetlag plan. Better luck tonight I guess.

Class yesterday was decent, and I was happy to see that the level of English was pretty high. I always hate it when I have to bust out the finger puppets to explain something complicated. Today is the more difficult of the days, so we’ll see how it goes. Normally when I teach I can go on complete autopilot, but when I do that I wind up speaking far too quickly and people start to glaze over, so I’m having to pace myself very deliberately in order to make sure I’m well understood.

Lunch yesterday was pretty good, though high on the random factor. We went to a dim sum place, which basically means you’re going to get about 900 dishes of stuff in flour or rice wrappers that you can’t quite identify. Could be pork, could be monkey brain - you never know. But, it seems the guys that ordered seemed to have kept the “delicacy” (aka let’s see what the gweilo will eat) factor to a minimum.

One quick thing I wanted to point out because people keep making jokes about my height. I’m 6′3″, which I suppose is relatively tall, but I don’t really notice it much in general. Here, though, it’s a different thing. Check out the photo below - I took it at face height, and yes I’m really that close to the ceiling. I think I have maybe 5″ to spare. Combine that with the classroom being pretty tiny and I’m starting to get claustrophobic.

Class on the first day gets out at about 4pm, so I headed over to an area called Mong Kok, which is a little less touristy than a lot of other places in Hong Kong. One of the things worth seeing there is the Ladies Market, which stretches 5 blocks on pedestrianized streets. You can get damn near anything you can think of in the market, both real and fake, though the fake DVDs, watches, and handbags are slightly less obvious than they used to be. The place is absolutely packed, and I think I need to go back sometime, maybe at night.

Now I know everyone back home has been waiting expectantly for it to come on TV, but here is your first look at the next greatest show ever: Potato Boy.

I’m hoping the weather improves a bit so I can take some photos of the skyline and such here - it really is pretty amazing. It’s been overcast since I got here to the point of not seeing the sun yet. But, I have a bit of time left before I move on to Australia, so we’ll see what happens.

Off to class…

Part of traveling to a foreign country is learning how to get around from place to place. Driving in Hong Kong would be extremely expensive, on the wrong side of the road, and among a lot of psychotic drivers with expensive cars, so it just seems like a bad idea. So, I’m at the mercy of public transit - taxis, trains, and ferrys.

Taxis tend to make up the majority of my trips here because they’re fast, cheap, and guaranteed to give you a wild ride. It’s a little more sane to drive here than other places I’ve been, but often that depends on the driver. The guy I got earlier today was wearing those racing gloves with the fingers cut off - never a good sign. Now, most of the taxis in Hong Kong are these ugly-assed Toyota LPG (propane) things, so they’re not the speediest things in the world, but what this guy lacked in acceleration he made up for in pure aggression. He had some sort of Chinese bell thing hanging from his rearview mirror and every time he would pull some insane move to get around someone, there would be a little ‘ding’ to punctuate the insanity amongst the squeal of the tires. So, it’d sound something like this: screech-ding-OMGWTFWE’REGONNADIE-screech. The middle part was in my head as I white-knuckled the seat. I guess there’s a Disneyland Hong Kong, but who needs that evil rat empire shit when you can just ride around in taxis?

The alternative is the subway, which is actually the cleanest, quietest one I’ve ever been on. It’s seriously immaculate and very efficient. But, like other places I’ve been, being the tall gweilo in the car is kinda no fun during rush hour. The car is packed wall to wall with people and they’re all looking up at me. I always like to blend in that way.

Tomorrow on my way to work I’m going to take the Star Ferry over from Kowloon to Hong Kong. The Star Ferry itself has been running between the two for approximately 974 years, during which it has been maintained twice. But, it’s something like a dollar for the trip across, and on choppy days, it’s a kind of fun ride. I’m guessing my students will like me throwing up into a bucket while teaching. Adds color.