Hong Kong
Hong Kong Ding Dong King Kong Falun Gong
…well, my blog won’t be listed by Google.cn now.
Anyway, lame jokes aside…
I’ve been in Hong Kong for a holiday. I got to spend Chinese New Year in China! Hooray! I got a few more stamps in my passport! HOORAY!
L, my new travelling buddy and all-round-nice-girl, took me with her to Hong Kong where she had “family obligations” according to her time-off request. Me, I just wanted to travel, and in Hong Kong I’d be getting free accommodation!
Hong Kong was - first and foremost - warm. On the Narita Express from Yokohama, we could still see snow in the fields and on some roofs but in Hong Kong it was a toasty 18-20 degrees. I even managed to get sunburnt a bit on the third day. But I’d say that has more to do with UV rays being magnified through minute particles of smog. Dang that pollution is bad. I thought Japan verged on dodgy when all you could see of Mt. Fuji was the snow on the peak. But Hong Kong was spectacular in its invisibility. The mornings were worst. I couldn’t see the mountain that was outside my window until about 11am. Surprisingly though, despite the pollution, it wasn’t a smelly place.
Chinese families are a bit like Polish families, in that they expect you to eat eat eat eat EAT EAT EAT what’s wrong with you? You didn’t finish your dim sum! Are you ill? To be honest, I’m not really a fan of Chinese foods, which in my limited experience has been pork, seafood and chicken feet. So, to save myself some embarrassment from having to say “uh, no thanks” all throughout the New Year, I decided to pretend I was vegetarian all week. Yes, that’s right, Chidade went vegetarian for a week except twice when she managed to have a moment alone in a McDonald’s.
My plan worked perfectly! All the vegetarian food I was offered I was quite happy to eat, but they still managed to offer huge amounts of it >.< Faaar too much for any normal person to eat.
L had tons of relatives to visit, so I was basically left to run around by myself. Suits me fine! I armed myself with her Octopus card (like the Suica card but works on every possible kind of transportation - even the tram that runs up to The Peak) and set off for Hong Kong Island.
Hong Kong is one sixth the size of Melbourne but has twice the population. They don't have to worry about earthquakes like Japan does, so 60-storey apartment blocks are completely normal. Not many of these buildings have balconies though, which is where you hang your washing in Japan, so the Hong Kong solution is to stick 2-metre long poles out the window and hang the laundry off that. It amused me no end zip past on trains and see these giant concrete and glass monsters with spikes sticking out of them. It looked like it had been in a battle, with scraps of torn and bloody material stuck to it's spines, waving in the wind...
I think I watch too much anime.
Anyway.
Hong Kong Island. It’s mainly a business district, with many elaborately designed towers that often get ruined by the big company logo on top. All the buildings are along the shoreline and stretches for a few kilometres, so it looks like a kind of beach. Behind this “beach” of buildings are some mountains, including the famous Victoria’s Gap and The Peak.
Behind the mountains are….errr….well, not sure. There’s no train line that goes there and when you look at a tourist map of the place, it shows the Harbour, the business district, the Peak at the southern most point and then cuts off. Apparently there’s still some land there but there’s no map of it. And it’s supposed to be an island so now that I think about it…it must be some kind of dead zone! Unexplored territories! Dragons Be Here! Ha, dragons…Chinese New Year! I made a funny!
Anyway, I didn’t go south of The Peak.
The Peak wasn’t very spectacular for me. It was raining so there wasn’t much in the way of views. Wasn’t hungry either, and I wanted to save my cash for clothes shopping, so I was up and down (via the Peak Tram - scary) in less than an hour. The Peak Tram was kinda cool. It seems like the company in charge of it has a lot of paranoia about it failing one day. Warning signs and explicit details on fail-safe systems abound. I suppose they have a point - if it did fail, it’d be a very fast and lethal trip down - it’s almost vertical. You’d have a great view before you died, at least. If it wasn’t rainy and smoggy, that is.
Central is, well, the central part of Hong Kong Island. At least, historically. Not much here besides office buildings but I did manage to spend a lot of money on clothes.
Wan Chai is closest to the Golden Bauhinia Square. I don’t know why but I don’t like gold. It looks so tacky most of the time. White gold is fine, and gold that looks matte is fine as well, but not this Goulden Bauhina flower thing. It’s big and gleaming and about as tasteful as…as….as an untasty thing. Bleh. Built to commemorate the return of Hong Kong to China, it makes me wonder if it Britain giving up it’s colony was really a good idea.
Wan Chai might’ve been more interesting for me if it wasn’t the New Year period and lots of shops were closed. Apparently there are two large computer shopping complexes there. But I think that I wouldn’t have bought anything anyway, because I plan to build a computer made from parts bought in Akiba.
Luckily I went to Causeway Bay before New Year. My gods, the shopping! The SHOPPING! I plan to come back to Hong Kong on my way home just for the shopping! Heck, I should come back just to build up my Harajuku wardrobe a bit more, coz the choice and the prices are better than stuff I could actually buy in Harajuku! I went a bit nuts in Times Square shopping mall, it knocked out most of my money.
From Wan Chai you can take the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon, which is on the mainland. Kowloon is where stuff happens. You can see the Hong Kong Island skyline (very cool, has knocked out New York from it’s first place standing) and do tons more shopping. The Avenue of the Stars is also here, with the statue of Bruce Lee and imprinted concrete stars. Nice, but the view across the harbour is nicer.
I think I stumbled across the grand opening of a Sogo department store too. The tourist guides all say that Sogo is in Causeway Bay but in Kowloon it seems like a smaller version has opened up, focusing on ladies fashions and cosmetics. Or maybe it was not a grand opening at all, but just a New Year Celebration. Either way, I don’t regret it, because it was kick-ass!
Sogo hired some lion dancers to perform along with the accompanying band. There were 8 or 9 lion dancers - they’re the ones that are made up of two people. The dragon dancers are one long line of people. I like the lions better though! The acrobatics involved are impressive and they’re just so darn cute! I want one as a pet!
Actually, now that I think of it, I kinda have one as a pet! Ragnarok Online has these monsters that are actually dragons even though there are only two pairs of legs underneath. Now to lobby Gravity to make them pets in the game…
L said that just about all the men in her family have been lion dancers. That’s ….so cool! I love the dancing lions~! Apparently if you touch them, it’s good luck. No worries there, one of them decided to knock my hand so hard that I nearly lost my camera. Kawaii!
The other cool thing of note that I did was go to the Giant Buddha on Lantau Island. It’s part of the Po Lin monastery complex and is the largest statue of Buddha in the world, but somehow, less impressive since it was built 20 years ago. As opposed to Kamakura which is about 800 years old.
Walking up the stairs was a workout. All that walking I did in Hong Kong plus the vegetarian diet must mean I’ve lost weight. At the top is a nice view, again, were it not for the smog. I don’t understand why the view was that smoggy. It was a fairly remote area. But then again, the only way to get to the Giant Buddha is by tour bus, which takes about 40 minutes from Tung Chung on a single-lane winding road. Plus, while I was there, there was some accident that caused all the buses to be late and people lined up all the way back to the restaurant. So yeah, I guess all those idling engines could’ve made the smog…
About that restaurant, it was cool! For the stupidly cheap price of HK$20 (like AU$4, you could have a vegetarian meal in the monastery. It was nice stuff too, rice, tofu, mushrooms, this salad that’s a bit like kimchi (from Korea) and so on. Very filling, very cheap, very delicious. Plus, you could watch the young kids apprenticed to be Shaolin monks play soccer outside.
Ok, that was a lie. They were mucking around though, with l33t Shaolin moves.
So, Hong Kong wins. I’ll probably be back there on my way home to do heaps of shopping and explore what is south of The Peak. Apparently you can do a day trip to Macau by ferry too, but I’m not sure if I’d need an extra visa for that. Ah, I don’t care, it’s extra decoration for my passport.
Next time, South Korea.