Ap Lei Chau and Other Places

Number 2   12/31/13

Soundtrack of the day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkknDFu1BJQ

Sexy!

I woke up at around 7 am today, which is quite an accomplishment for someone who couldn’t sleep past 4 for the past few days. This might be too much information, but my stomach doesn’t feel quite right after last night activities, but I am getting ahead of myself (no – it doesn’t have anything to do with drinking.  I haven’t had a drink yet since coming to Hong Kong! We will see if we can change that on New Years Eve).  We are planning on taking it easy today because we pushed it a little hard.  Little did I know, that in one of the largest urban environments in the world, one can still get lost in the woods.  I am not quite sure how we do it, but we consistently find areas where people do not live and that look like upstate NY or anywhere in Michigan.  I guess it is a skill?  Yesterday, after our normal breakfast and hour workout in our hotel, we decided that we would try and hike from Aberdeen to Victoria Peak, which is near midlevels.  When Deborah talked to a staff member at the hotel, she laughed in our face.  “Oh no, it is much too far  - may I get you a taxi?  I will write information in Chinese on a card and you can give it to taxi!”  We must look pretty incompetent.  In this part of Hong Kong – where the MTR is being built, it is quite easy to get from point A to B by bus.  While HK has lots of people, it still is just a set of relatively small islands.  Buses either go north/south or east/west.  If you have an idea of the name of the place you need to get to, there is a bus with that name on it.  For instance, Daniel lives on a small island named Ap Lei Chau (which according to Wikipedia is second most densely populated island in the world) and we can just hop on the bus with the same name and get there in no time. Anyway, we had decided that walking 10.0 kilometers was very doable because we hike that much on a pretty regular basis.  Also, we wanted the experience of being able to say that we quite literally walked across of good chunk of Hong Kong Island.

          

Pretty!

  So, we headed off without our breakfast bars and bottle of water into Aberdeen proper.  You literally can walk straight from our hotel and 30 mins later be in the middle of the woods.  The idea was to walk up to the Aberdeen Reservoir to see some of the views of the island and then to cut back through the woods, which would lead us to Pok Fu Lam park and then eventually would be able to climb Victoria Peak at the end of our journey.  Daniel assured us that this was possible, which it is, but we didn’t end up making it quite that far.  His directions were pretty sound, however, some of the landmarks have changed and therefore we kind of got lost.  We ended up walking about 10 kilometers in large circles around the park without making it into the western section. On our way to the park, we walked up a giant road that was almost at a 90 degree angel that ran near a temple and several schools.  One school that I remember was called Saint Peter’s Catholic School.  The area was quite beautiful with small rivers that to the side of our path.  At points, the drop-offs were quite steep and you could tell that a bad rain would make the hike very dangerous, but on a sunny and warm day it was an excellent time.  We cut back and forth through the forest and sometimes would see glimpses of huge skyscrapers and parts of the harbor. 

Graves!!!!!!

Eventually, we started to head back down to Aberdeen in defeat.  As we were walking down a new path, we happened upon a couple of cramped headstones. I wanted to explore more, although I was a little nervous about the cultural expectations of random white people taking pictures on sacred ground.  I figured I could just play the dumb tourist role, so we started to walk through the graveyard.  Due to the fact that there was such limited space, you literally had to walk on top of the graves to get to other sections.  As we moved further, we were surprised to see that the graves went on and on and on.  The cemetery was massive! It had been built into the side of a large hill and took up miles of space along side views of huge blue and green skyscrapers on one side and wooded mountains on the other.  It was beautiful, but also pretty eerie. The stones were all in Chinese, so I couldn’t really tell when the people were buried, but they almost all had black and white images of the individuals.  It was if the dead watched us as we hiked through their last resting place. You could almost feel their eyes on you as you stumbled from headstone to headstone. Finally, we made it to a path that led us back down into Aberdeen and into the city proper.  We headed back to our hotel, both of us exhausted.  My legs still hurt from the incline of some of the hike. 

           

Ready to cook live things in!

That night, we decided to go to the Daniel and Monica’s apartment to go out to dinner with them and the kids.  I have found that having children in a massive city involves lots of time doing anything.  Getting from their third floor apartment to the lobby takes several false starts and some tears (mostly from the adults).  Monica is very picky about the food that her children eat, so she makes all of their food to take with us. So, we often wait for her to cook before we go out to dinner.  Another obstacle to our eating out plans has been the lack of child seats in Chinese restaurants. Rebecca is only like negative years old or something, so she has a tough time living let alone being able to sit on a chair or do other normal human things.   So, the solution is to drag a full high chair (including detachable legs) with us whereever we go.  I was in charge of carrying the chair.   Now, I often like to pretend that I am a suave James Bond type when I travel in large cities.  Sometimes if I am feeling saucy I imagine myself as a Bruce Wayne or Indiana Jones.  It really is hard to do this when you are carrying a bright red chair through the mean streets of Hong Kong.  So, we hop in a cab with 3 adults and 2 children.  I always have to sit up in the front with the driver because I am the largest thing that Hong Kong has ever seen.  I often share an awkward glance with him as he asks me “Where go?” and I never have any idea and have to get people in the back to save me.  The drivers also seem to have 6 to 7 cell phones attached to the dashboard of their cars for some reason.  I try not to ask too many questions.  Another tradition of these trips is that nobody knows where we are going.  There is never a plan other than eating somewhere. So, I could quite accurately answer the driver with, “Go eat!”. We ended up in Aberdeen and we all wandered around (me with a red child plastic high chair seat) until we found a traditional Chinese hot pot place.  This was the only restaurant in HK that I have been in where nothing was in English.  I was quite excited to try some more authentic food. 

       

     As we enter the restaurant, everyone stared at us.  I assume that most of these people had seen white folks before, but probably not carrying a red chair with super loud three year old speaking in English who also likes to touch everything and everyone.   Monica has eaten at these places before, but she was wrapped up with trying to take care of/feed her children.   So, the wait staff seemed kind of annoyed that we weren’t eating our food in the right way.   A hot pot is a pot of hot water and noodles and other things (depending on what you ask them for) that boils in front of you on a hot plate in the middle of the table.  The staff brings you out options for a sauce concoction that includes some sort of liquid with hot things and nut type things.   THEN, they bring you out food to cook in the boiling water.  Being a veggie that dabbles in the fish world, I thought that I would be pretty safe with seafood options.  So, I ended up having very traditional fishballs, shrimp, and tofu.  What I didn’t realize was that the strip would include their heads, legs, and other shrimp type things.  I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to eat the head bit, so I kind of just ripped that part off.   Halfway through the dinner, Deborah pointed to one of the not-yet-cooked shrimp and exclaimed that it was still moving!   Sure enough, the shrimp was far from dead.   My stomach dropped a bit after that revelation, but overall, I am really happy that I had such a traditional meal.  We survived the night and headed home with the children.   Writing the next day, I realized that perhaps I should take it easy on the traditional Chinese food, because my western guts are quite adjusted to it.   

Hong Kong is pretty awesome.

FIrst Entry

Jetlag is something that I always feel like I have conquered on my last trip abroad. I get home and think, “well that wasn’t so bad” and I forget about the many sleepless nights that lead up to adjusting to the new time zone.  Today, I woke up at 4 am (it seems like I am reverting back to eastern time) and couldn’t go back to sleep. Deborah gave me half of a sleeping pill, but I think that my body needs a lot more drugs to get my brain to slow down.  Half of a sleeping pill just makes me feel more stupid and not really any sleepier. So, I decided to finally start a travel blog to document my journeys so far. I have always been a big fan of reading books about travel or novels that take place in mysterious parts of the world.  One has this romantic idea of an author sitting down to his/or her typewriter with a drink in hand at some Parisian (the fantasy almost always takes place in Paris even though my short time there was spent in freezing rain) typing away about their Indiana Jones-type adventures from the day before. In my own experience, I have found that it is not so romantic.  One has to take advantage of sudden inspiration and just go with it.   At this exact moment, I am sitting no a toilet in my hotel room in Aberdeen with my laptop on my lap and my feet up on the bathtub.   Apparently, most of my inspiration comes from being on the toilet…

          

  I am not sure if the Chinese really enjoy taking showers with people watching them, but all the rooms in this hotel come with glass windows into the room.  During the day, you can get a nice view of the large wooded hill outside of our window while you are taking a shower.  It is pretty amazing, but you also have to remember to close the blinds on the bathroom window or else you will be doing your business practically with the person you are living with.  Deborah and I have not reached this stage of our relationship.  Our room was moved yesterday because our initial booking had been screwed up and we had two double beds for a few days.  The double beds were nice because I could use the other one when I got up early to read comic books while Deborah slept.  As I get older, I seem to sleep less and less while my partner in crime could be out for 12 hours at a time if I let her. When we moved to the new room, we were surprised to find a cradle next to our king size bed. After all of the incessant baby talk over the past few weeks, I demanded that the hotel staff remove the offending object immediately.  Our new room is on the 35^th floor (as opposed to the 22^nd that we were on before) and has a much better view of the giant rolling hill above and below us.  If you look directly down from our window, you can see the outdoor pool, which looks more like a small pond from this height. I have spent a lot of time looking out that window and have even made friends with one of men I see walking along the paths (in my head of course).   Everyday I see a small Chinese man with a white hat walking with several dogs from what appears to be some sort of hut or small dwelling.  I wonder if he has any sense that some American is staring at him from the 35^th floor of a hotel above him. The area that we are in seems to be in constant development.  There is construction going on everywhere and many of the roads are a labyrinth of blocked sidewalks and metal railings. The MTR is being built here has Hong Kong’s public transportation system reaches further out to connect all of the islands further together. On my several bus rides to Aberdeen from Central or Kowloon, I have noticed that this area still has some smaller several story buildings that just don’t fit into the vertical construction of the rest of HK.  I imagine that Aberdeen will look even taller in the coming years.  I do feel privileged to be able to see what these areas look like before they grow into something different.

One night, I was asked to take Selena (Deborah’s three year old niece) to go play at a playground near their flat while they wrapped Christmas presents.  Selena is a pretty affable, energetic child that fears almost nothing.  She carries her own purse around with her own octopus card to use on public transportation.  At age three, I feel like she is much more cosmopolitan than I ever will be. Half-Chinese and half-white, she speaks several languages and is learning German and now Spanish.  I have dabbled in some languages and have been teaching her how to say, “my name is” in French, Spanish, and German. I think she tolerates my pathetic lessons the best she can.  Selena also has the trait of running ahead of everyone when she gets excited. So, while I was perfectly capable of taking care of a three year old for an hour by myself, I was also a bit nervous that I was going to be left in the dust in the dark by my child guide.  I also had no idea where we were going. The Slosberg’s live in a building that has, I would guess, 40 or 50 floors.  Daniel said that each complex has about 1500 people and there are dozens of copycat towers along the harbor.  They live in tower seven on the third floor, so it isn’t too difficult to find.  I was surprised to see that there are elevators (lifts) that are specifically for odd floors and others that are only for the even ones.  Part of living in Hong Kong is waiting and waiting and waiting for the lifts to come to you. Also, I was told that many of the buildings do not have floors that end with the number 4 because 4 also means die or death in Cantonese. Now, that could be complete bullshit and I probably could Google that, but I prefer to live in my own naïve ignorance.  Luckily, Daniel showed me exactly where the indoor playground was in their clubhouse in the middle of the towers. I began to realize that the complex was built similarly to how American style suburban areas are built.  You have apartment complexes with common areas in the middle for kids and adults to play.  They are just a ton bigger here.  So, I was left by myself with Selena with a bunch of kids playing in a relatively small room with a small plastic playground and other random toys.  Selena is not a big fan of sharing and I had to remind her a few times that the amount of presents she received was directly related to her not pushing other kids in the face.  I know that Hong Kong is a really diverse region, however, I couldn’t help but feel like I stood out as the giant white dude with the mixed race child running around beating up any other kids that tried to take her toys.  Apparently, Selena’s toys are all the toys.  I ended up being the only “parent” that walked out into the playground to keep Selena entertained by rolling soft plastic logs back and forth with her.   There was one white kid there that spoke with possibly a British accent.  I don’t like to make assumptions, but my assumption was that he was there with his Asian nanny.  She was very nice and kept smiling my way because this child wanted to order food for Selena, who wants nothing to do with other children.  So, as a I tried to coerce Selena to make some friends that she didn’t want to punch, the kid asked me to order food with him with his toy pad and paper.  I played along just long enough to get the kid away from me before I look like some random giant white pedophile. Luckily, no one else was hurt during our time at the playground.  Well, perhaps some ears were hurt when Selena made me sing some of her songs while she played the drums.

            One of my favorite things that I have done here so far was take the ferry across the harbor to get to Daniel’s flat. The ferry is more like a tiny boat that you hop on with a bunch of other people to cross the short distance across the waterway.  He lives on a different island, so you can either get there by taking a bus across the bridge or taking the boat.  The ride is pretty short, but it is quite exhilarating because you can see so much more of the area from the water.  You can also use your octopus card to get on these boats, which is amazing to me because it seemed like a pretty small operation. I also found it interesting because, while it is pretty safe to get on and off, there is an area that you step on that is pretty narrow and doesn’t have railings.  If you were to slip you would go directly into the water below. I really like to pretend that I live life dangerously (even though when I hike back home there is a gap along the boulders at Great Falls where we precariously climb across on a weekly basis that is probably a thousand times more treacherous that anything I have done here). Living life dangerously abroad is just THAT much more exciting.  

         

   We have also spent some time at the Ladies Market in Kowloon and in Midlevels in Central.  The former is a large market place with thousands and thousands of stalls.  It is incredibly overwhelming with endless crowds of slow moving people. It is a giant flee market type environment where you can by anything from live goldfish to Iron man underpants.  Deborah picked up some salted almonds that tasted delicious for our mid day snack.  We went with the Slosberg clan which includes two babies, so finding a place to eat in the area that had a child seat for Rebecca who is like negative months old or something ( I have a hard time figuring out how old kids are when they are young – it seems like my brain power shouldn’t be wasted on such trivial things – either the kid is pooping in their pants, or they are in college).  In our journey to find a place to eat, we started with a Thai restaurant (so exciting!),  couldn’t go there because there wasn’t a place for Rebecca.  Next, we found a vegetarian restaurant ( OMG!!), couldn’t go there because they wouldn’t let the kids eat their mother’s pre-made food (don’t ask) there because it had meat in it. We then move to a Sushi place (drools!), and we can’t go there.  The ONLY place in the area that could accommodate us was an American style restaurant.  In any other circumstance, I would have ran away, but I am a guest and our hosts have been nothing but amazing to us during our stay.  I won’t go into too many details about the quality of American food in Hong Kong, but I would advice that you avoid it at all costs.  The Hong Kong equivalent of Deny’s just doesn’t hold.  Maybe they should add Moon over my Hammy to spice up the meal.  The best part about lunch was that it cost 26 dollars US for four people to eat.  We totally covered that meal.  Another thing about Chinese culture is that it is customary for the older siblings to take care of the younger ones, so we are getting a lot of free meals out of the deal.  While we are incredibly grateful, Deborah and I are trying to figure out how to sneak in a nice meal for their family.  I think that Daniel and Monica don’t realize that we live in a city and that HK prices, while expensive are somewhat comparable to DC exorbitant prices.   

          

Midlevels is more of my style, probably because it is a bit more western and less intense.  There are a lot of western style shops (Patagonia is one that sticks out in my mind) and a great deal of electronic stalls where you can buy phones and cases for a few dollars. Also, there are these huge escalators that haul you up from one hill to the next.  It is similar to Seattle or San Francisco with huge hills everywhere.  I am definitely getting my workouts in here because my thighs feel like jelly all the time.  It might also be that we are working out everyday, in the small, but adequate gym. I just have to work out everyday in a gym that has views of huge falcons and/or hawks ( I don’t really know the difference) that fly right in front of the window for hours.  It is amazing to see these majestic birds swoop down and do tricks in the air.   I love it.

       

     The sun is still down and I am still siting on the toilet in the dark.  I should probably try and get some more sleep, but I will probably just go read instead.  I am excited to start the next day.  We always wake up and go down to have our free breakfast in the lobby.  We are the Americans who are staying for two weeks, so everyone knows us now and says hello.  I grab my hard boiled egg and watered down rice pudding concoction with a croissant or two and grab the Chinese newspaper to glance through.  I saw a story about the booming glass manufacturing partnership between Toledo, Ohio and China. I didn’t realize that a lot of the Toledo glass museum was built with glass from China.  So much for being the AMERICAN glass city…  But the benefit is that both sides are investing in each other and perhaps Toledo will get some financial success out of the transactions. After we finish our breakfast, we head back upstairs, change into gym clothes, and head to the p5 level gym to work out/watch birds for an hour. I have been listening to both the Melvins and Katy Perry recently, which is quite a contrast, but feels appropriate on my Hong Kong trip for some reason. Typically we have a full day before anyone else in the hotel is awake…which is really a great way to spend a vacation.  I do hope to get some more rest over the coming days and to better adjust to the time here.   Perhaps I should take a full sleeping pill?

Victoria peak today!   I also want to make sure that I see the Bruce Lee statue at some point during my time here.   Let’s make that happen!