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.