Wednesday, 06 June 2018

Hong Kong is a weird combination of opulent and seedy.  Adam and I were last here exactly eleven years ago, in June 2007, for a business trip.  We stayed in a massive and luxurious Holiday Inn.  As we walked down the corridors to our room after checking in, we heard theatrical sex noises coming from room after room.  The hotel bar was filled with elegant, bespoke-suited businessmen from all over the world, hookers buzzing around them like flies on a corpse.

This time we’re here for a much more fun reason than a business trip: Isabella’s high school graduation gift from us is a 6-week family trip to Asia.  She graduated with honors and earned the Zell Miller scholarship.  She will be attending UGA in the Division of Biological Sciences in the fall.  This summer may end up being the last long trip the five of us ever take together so it feels a bit more poignant than other trips.

Our first stop is Hong Kong.  We found an Airbnb apartment that happens to be across the street from the hotel Adam and I stayed in last time.

The street level of our building contains glittering luxury shops; Rolex, Patek Philippe.  We found the elevator to our 6th floor apartment and crowded in.  When the doors opened again, it was like steeping into Bethesda’s video game Fallout.

The halls are a rabbit’s warren of dingy, corroding concrete.  CCTV cameras in cages hang from the ceilings.  The building opens in the center to a huge grungy courtyard, the windows from every apartment open to it and their occupants visible.  Across it we can see a boxing club operating in the gloom, shirtless gloved men punching each other in the face.  Drying laundry hangs in the corridors and on lines criss-crossing the courtyard. Tired-looking people drift through the halls in a daze. If this were a movie set, the atmosphere is what they call “gritty.”

Our apartment is very small but clean and comfortable.  The only water available is in the bathroom; there is no sink in the kitchen, which we neglected to notice in the Airbnb photos. (We didn’t think to look specifically to see if the kitchen had a sink.)  It does have a small refrigerator and freezer, a tiny microwave, and a little station with an electric tea kettle.  By contrast, the bathroom is huge.  It has a fantastic shower, two sinks and high-end finishes.  The air conditioning units work well, which is a necessary luxury in Hong Kong’s oppressive heat and humidity.

There is a 12-hour time difference between Atlanta and Hong Kong.  We arrived at 7:30 p.m. in Hong Kong (7:30 a.m. to our Atlanta-acclimated bodies) but we’ve been awake for nearly 24 hours and fell gratefully into our beds.

Thursday, 07 June 2018

The girls and I slept almost all night and woke up around 6:30 a.m. feeling relatively refreshed.  Holden and Adam were up for a large portion of the night so the time change may be harder for the two of them.

Our building’s grungy and depressing courtyard.  This is an interior shot, not the outside of a building.

We woke up early (around 5:30 a.m.) and discovered that most breakfast places don’t open until after 9:00 a.m.  Adam found a place serving early called Cafe de Coral (Hong Kong’s largest, most successful Chinese fast food brand) and we walked over.  We weren’t expecting much but were pleasantly surprised.  The food was very cheap and quite good.

Hong Kong is under a typhoon warning for the next few days (Typhoon Signal No. 3).  The weather is gray with intermittent rain, very hot and humid.

In spite of the gloomy weather we had a very enjoyable day.  The kids love Asia better than any other region we’ve visited and all three were palpably excited just to soak in the atmosphere.

Before we left home, Isabella was a bit reluctant to spend the summer traveling because she felt she should stay home and get a job to earn money for college, which is what most of her friends are doing.  We told her that by earning the Zell Miller scholarship she paid for more school than she could ever earn at a teen’s summer job and should just enjoy the opportunity to see another piece of the world.  Once we landed in Hong Kong, all of her doubts melted away.  On the taxi ride last night from the airport to our hotel she looked out the window and said, “I want to live here someday.”  This afternoon she said, “Hong Kong is now my favorite city in the world.”

Buying water. The kids are working out HK money and the vending machines that are all over town selling water and other cold drinks.

Statue of Bruce Lee.

Hong Kong is very lush. View of the area near where we are staying – we’re in the neighborhood Tsim Sha Tsui – on the peninsula and just north of Kowloon bay (two block walk to the water).

We took the ferry to Hong Kong Island.  The ticket prices come to less than $1USD per person and the ride is only about 5 minutes long.  Anyone over age 65 rides free.  HK has 261 islands, but HK Island is the largest and the center of their banking and commerce sector.

Getting ready to dock the boat.

Kids taking shelter during a sudden downpour.  It rained on and off all day, but luckily the heaviest rain only lasted about 15 minutes.

Waiting for the Peak Tram.

On the tram.  The kids spent the entire day jibber-jabbering with each other over every topic under the sun.

Views from Victoria Peak (locally known as “The Peak.”)  It is the highest mountain on Hong Kong Island.  In the 1800s, prominent European residents built houses up here because the weather is quite a bit cooler and the views are spectacular. It’s still mostly a residential area for rich people, with tourists being able to come up on the tram to see the views and visit a large contained shopping area. (Wikipedia:  In addition to being a major tourist attraction for Hong Kong, The Peak is also the summit of Hong Kong’s property market. At the peak of The Peak, properties are more expensive than anywhere else in the world.)

Despite the heavy cloud cover, the views were still good.  In fact, the weather added an eerie, atmospheric quality that made it special.

We all love the rain forest.  This path at the top of The Peak is unique in that you can see a huge, cosmopolitan city from a place that feels like nearly-abandoned jungle.

Walking along this path, Isabella said, “Hong Kong is kind of a utopia, but also a little dystopian, too.”  I told her I made the same observation last night, but I used opulent and seedy. “I like your description better, though” I said.  “Maybe we could call it a dystopian utopia.”  She said, “Please don’t write that in your blog.  It sounds pretentious and people will think you don’t know what those words mean.”

Viewing area sponsored by the Lion’s Club of Hong Kong.

Back down on main part of Hong Kong Island.

Ferry back to mainland Peninsula. (Blue dress and straw hat is me.)

Adam found Budaoweng Hotpot Cuisine on the 23rd floor of a building across the street from our apartment for lunch.  Fish (grouper) for Josie, beef for everyone else (plus a huge basket of leafy greens and mushrooms).  Josie is a pescatarian these days, for ethical reasons.  She feels guilty eating animals with self-awareness but figures most fish don’t really have any so she feels less bad about them being killed.  This menu offered frog and she was faced with having to decide if frogs are dumb enough to be eaten or not.  She decided “no amphibians.”

The vegetable basket and beef platter.  Everything is served raw and you cook it in that big vat of boiling broth in the center of the table.  The darker side is a VERY spicy chili mix in what I think was beef broth, and the lighter side is a mild vegetable-based broth with tofu and greens in it. Both were delicious.

After the meal, the waitress brought some little soup bowls of orange liquid that looked suspiciously like raw beaten eggs.  She put them in front of us and said, “Dessert.”  I asked, “What is it?”  She said, “Dessert.  You eat.”  The Chinese don’t use an upward inflection at the end of sentences, questions or otherwise, so everything they say sounds like a command.  Every encounter ends with me feeling like a little kid who just got yelled at by a teacher.  If their speech was in text form, there would be an angry face emoji at the end of every sentence. Have a nice day. 😡

The dessert was warm, and the best we could tell it was mango puree thickened with tapioca or rice flour.  It was weirdly sweet, slimy, and felt like it shouldn’t be warm.  Holden took a little taste, glanced at the waitress hovering near our table, and whispered to me, “Are we going to get in trouble if we don’t eat it?”

After lunch we went to Marks & Spencer (in the same building across from our apartment) and bought some things for dinner: fruit, cheese and crackers, a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, a box of weird little banana cakes, box of cereal, bottle of wine, apple juice, tea.  We don’t have much in the way of a kitchen in this place so we had to get things that need very little preparation to eat.

We dropped our groceries off at home and headed out for one last stroll in our neighborhood before calling it a day.  By 3:00 p.m. Adam was dragging pretty hard.  The kids and I felt surprisingly good considering our jet lag but everyone was done by 4:00 p.m.  We went home and ended up not bothering with Wine Time or dinner.  We figured out how to get our Netflix account working and the kids watched SpongeBob cartoons and reminisced about their childhoods while Adam took care of some work and I did this blog.  By 6:30 everyone had turned in for the night.

Friday, 08 June 2018

The weather today was awful.  A South China Sea typhoon changed direction overnight and hit land just to the east and south of Hong Kong.  All last night and well into today’s afternoon it POURED.

Winds were up to 35mph and the weather service says it rained an average of 2” each hour.  We headed out with umbrellas which quickly got turned inside out.  Even when they worked, it was the kind of rain that still got you wet no matter what you were carrying or hiding under the eaves of stores.

We walked to the ferry terminal near our apartment and headed back to Hong Kong Island because they have a huge covered shopping area.  We needed to find something to do inside.

Josie trying to fix her umbrella after the wind turned it inside out.  

I am reading about a Falun Gong protest and trying to figure out what Falun Gong is and why people are protesting it.  A girl handed me a brochure with some stilted English in it saying that Falun Gong is a cult that becomes addictive and makes people hack up their parents with an ax and then set themselves on fire.  (According to wikipedia, this is not the case; it sounds sort of like a quasi-religious mindfulness practice, combining elements of Buddhism and yoga.  Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted and killed by the Chinese government for years.)

We found a beauty supply shop that carried a special facial cleanser Isabella likes.  They had a lot of new products that we don’t get in the United States so we spent some time looking them over.

Inside a big mall on Hong Kong Island they have a T-rex skeleton.  This one (an actual, not a mold) was dug up in South Dakota, USA.

Asia always gets the best new electronics first.  This is a new 100” VLED 4K TV by Sony.  The picture was simply amazing.  It can be yours for US$76,000.  Adam told the kids that everyone will have one on their walls in the next 10 years.

We spent some time figuring out how to buy Octopus cards (cards for the subway system; the same thing they call Oyster cards in the UK).  We took the train back to an area a couple stops away from our apartment to visit the Jade Market.

It would have been fun to browse around and take it all in, but the salespeople are so aggressive they ended up chasing us away.  They grab you by the arm and won’t let go, or try to clip bracelets on you so that you can’t leave their stall. It was the worst market I’ve ever been to.  Some of the markets in South America have fairly aggressive vendors, but nothing like this … it was downright ugly.  The jade they were selling may or may not have been cool; we didn’t get the chance to find out, although in one booth near the entrance, the lady was a little less physical and easier to deal with.  Isabella bought a small jade bracelet for a friend back home and Josie bought a jade ring.  Then we high-tailed it out of there.

I was disappointed because those are the kinds of markets and stalls I really enjoy poking around in.  We thought maybe it would be easier to go on a day with better weather or a weekend when more shoppers were around so we could melt into a crowd (today we were nearly the only customers there) but when I looked the Jade Market up online later, it got terrible reviews on Trip Advisor from nearly everyone, citing the freakishly aggressive vendors.  I certainly would not recommend anyone go there, which is a shame because it looked like it could have been quite interesting. As it was, we felt like we were being attacked and held hostage.  It was awful.

Interesting fact I learned about jade on the internet, though … in Chinese culture jade represents good luck.  If your jade piece breaks, it’s because bad luck was headed your way and your jade charm took the hit for you.  You give it a sincere thank you and buy a new piece for future protection.

Dim sum for lunch.  Everyone liked their lunch except me.  I ordered a bowl of soup (black bowl in photo) but the broth smelled like dirty dishwater and I couldn’t stand to eat it.  I don’t know what it was.  Today is not shaping up to be my day.  Josie’s vegetarian rice dish was delicious, though, and she shared with me.

A few more pics of our building’s corridors: laundry, garbage, armored CCTV cameras, a rat’s nest of wires, prison bar door grates …

Waiting for the slowest elevator in the world. (FYI, we’ve not yet seen a living soul outside Joyful Guest House.) This place’s vibe is post-apocalyptic.

Weird tangle of wires(?) and an orange hat near the elevators.  Plus a purple wire hanger with nothing on it.  The hallways in this place are downright creepy even during the middle of the day.

Tomorrow, if the weather is decent, we plan to visit the giant Buddha.