Hong Kong

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So a lot has happened in the last few weeks. First of all, I got real sick. It took about 2 months, but I finally caught a Chinese cold of death. Basically it consisted of me hacking up my lungs at all times of day and a never ending flow of mucus. LUCKILY, it was during the weekend so I didn't miss any classes though the FAO was prepared to let me have a day off to rest should it come to that. Our FAO's are pretty awesome actually. BUT, it sucked because A) I missed English corner because of it and B) We recently were invited to judge an English Competition at some school. But since I was super sick, my head was all congested and terrible and I couldn't hear very well and I was coughing and dying all day so I had to cancel. They were real disappointed and I felt really bad because I said I would do it. But I can't choose when I get sick and I wouldn't be helping at all if I went. So although I felt really bad, I think they understood. I hope. I don't know....they probably don't. Anyway i've been listening to a lot of Jay Chou lately. He's really popular with the kids here in China and i've got to say it's really not bad. In fact i'm really enjoying listening to him. Even though he's your typical girls go crazy heart throb male singer, he is cool because he grew up studying and learning classical music on classical instruments. That and he actually does his own songs and composes his own music. So it's kinda uncommon for male artists to do this kinda crap these days. And his music isn't super gay like guys like him are in the States. This album is the #1 selling album in China right now, and so ofc I just downloaded it. C'mon mang, i'm not gonna spend 10 yuan on this when I can just download it. So that's what i've been doing; learning Chinese songs.

So then we get the awesome news that we have to go to Hong Kong ASAP. Apparently, when we got our Residence Permit, in someones infinite wisdom, they decided to give us a Residence Permit for a completely different province than the one we lived in. So I guess we can't get a Residence Permit without a valid visa which by now ours was expired. (Don't freak out, the RP acts as a visa after it expires, so there was no need for me to update my tourist visa after it expired.) So that means that we have to leave the country to apply for a new visa......great. Hong Kong is considered out of China even though it's part of China..don't ask why because I have no idea how that works still. The Chinese even need permission to go there unless they are a registered Hong Kong resident. Luckily, since it was my recruiting agencies fault, they are paying for it. Jerks. So Friday the 21st, we set off.

There is no Shaoyang to Hong Kong train. I first had to go to Guangzhou. So the train to Guangzhou was a 12 hour ride. We left at 8pm on Friday, and didn't arrive until 8am on Saturday. I bought a sleeping cabin which just means our "Seat" isn't a seat, it's a bed. So it's pretty cool. The cabin is like a little cubicle type deal with 6 beds stacked up to the ceiling. My bed was the top bed and it was awesome. Because there was like a foot and a half of space between the bed and the ceiling. It was cool though, I had my privacy up there so people couldn't stare at the laowai while I was sleeping. In the middle of the night though the woman on the bottom bed stared having the best dream ever. I wake up and i'm barely conscious and I just hear this woman moaning going, "Oh yeah, oh yeah" over and over again, and then I swear she was saying someones name, but it could have just been Chinese. So me and my roommate had a real good laugh about that in the morning. Always an adventure.

In Guangzhou we had to switch trains to go to Shenzhen. Thank god the ride was only an hour. The train was real nice though, it was like a airplane cept with more room and a better view on the way. Then from Shenzhen we walked into Hong Kong. It wasn't as cool as I hoped since we were underground in the train station the whole time. It seriously was just like going to another country in an airport. So THEN we still weren't even there. We had to get on ANOTHER train that took us from the Hong Kong border, to Kowloon island where we were staying. Actually, we didn't even have a place to stay at this point but it shouldn't be to hard right?

So after the million train rides we arrive. It was about 12pm and we couldn't check into a hostel until 3pm so we had to run around for awhile. First we went to the Hong Kong Avenue of Stars which is basically the walk of fame. I've been there before so it wasn't terribly exciting. The view was about the same, still beautiful but that was it. After 30 minutes we got bored so we went to find food since it had been almost 20 hours since we ate. We found a Pizza Hut and was about to go in, but then we saw a Subway and sprinted to it. It was soooo good. I've been looking forward to finding a Subway since I got to China and I must say, that it really did justice. That night we ate at some place called Spaghetti House which was pretty good. They made a really good seafood Alfredo dish which again, hit the spot. The food was so expensive everywhere that seriously McDonalds was the cheapest to eat. McDonalds was about 23-25HKD's whereas every other restaurant was 100+ HKD per person. Ridiculous. Hong Kong is seriously just as expensive as the US. Heck, the whole place is basically a Western city. It could easily fit in in America. Well....I guess it would need more fat people to fit in perfectly, but hey, they'll get there.

So remember how I said finding a place to say shouldn't be hard? Well......yeah, it wasn't. So we walk up to this big building and this crazy Chinese guys like "Need a guest house? Ok lets go" and we went right in, booked the room and that was it. The room was aight, I don't need much, just give me a bed and a toilet and i'm cool. Not like I was gonna be spending a lot of time there anyway. It was probably the cheapest we could find in HK too. It was where all the Africans and Indians and Arabs and stuff stayed and there was A LOT of them. But w/e just don't rob us and we're cool. But HK is just how I remembered it from 2005. Filled with Indians and Arabs trying to sell me "Tailored suits," watches, and other useless crap I don't need. Oh, I did have a guy like lean forward at me and say real softly, "You want some marijuana?" It took like 3 seconds for it to register that this guy actually asked if I wanted some weed and by that time I had already ignored him and kept walking. Then I was like wtf? Pretty surprising considering the consequences for being caught. Well, I don't know if it's as severe in HK, or even for weed, but in the Mainland if you're caught with drugs or using drugs you basically get the death sentence. It's pretty awesome. I should have pointed that dude out to the police. So the hostel/guest house/whatever we stayed at was basically a giant building with the bottom two floors being like crap shops for Indians and Indian restaurants and stuff, then everything over that was hostels. So the building really was filled with nothing but Africans and Indians. It was kinda scary. There was this one African guy, probably about my age, who I kept seeing everywhere and he was staying in the same hostel as us. And the last time I saw him I gave him the wave and junk just b/c we kept seeing each other and he did the craziest wave/salute/"i'm gonna kill you" gesture. It was basically like how our Military salutes, cept he did it across his body and at the neck level. So I couldn't tell if he was like greeting me, or telling me via hand gestures that he wanted to kill whitey. He didn't try to kill me so I assume it was a crazy African greeting.

I also found something very awesome on the Avenue of Stars. That's right. HONG KONG SQUASH OPEN 2008! OMG This is pretty much what i've been waiting my whole life for. I managed to arrive in HK just in time for it! YES! Actually, I only ended up watching it one day which was the semi-finals. So I learned Squash is basically like racquetball with a smaller ball. I don't know. Apparently if you suck at tennis, suck at racquetball, and just suck at life in general you play Squash. It was not interesting or exciting to watch at all. In fact, most of the time I couldn't tell if they were practicing or actually playing for points. It was really that lame. I am going to upload a video for it just so you can see how unexciting the sport is. It was all over the TV though. The first time I walked up I somehow managed to stand right next to two coaches or something. They started chatting and gossiping about the players, who is the best and blah blah blah worthless Squash jargon. It was worth it because the woman mentioned there was gonna be a light show from the buildings on Hong Kong Island so that was what made it worth it. I kinda giggled though. People seriously discussion Squash. lol

Sunday we went to the Hong Kong Museum of Science. We were bored ok?! It was actually a lot of fun and somehow we spent 2 hours in there. Mainly to the fault of them having a fitness test there. There was like 16 stations and you grab this fitness card and just run to all the stations and test your mental and physical fitness. I think i'm dying because my resting heart rate was 90BPM. That was the first station, so maybe I was just really excited to take a fitness test. The whole place was pretty cool though. We were gonna go to the Museum of History afterwards but we really needed to head to Victoria Peak. So we headed off to Hong Kong Island. We ended up having to take the ferry way too many times and it was annoying but w/e, it was the cheapest way to get across the water. So we set off up the mountain which was awesome because most of the way up was all escalators. And there were restaurants and bars and crap on both sides of the escalators. This is when I realized that I really hate Hong Kong. There are WAY too many wai guo ren (Foreign peoples). There is seriously nothing but white people there and it just angers me. Hong Kong isn't even China, it's little Britain (Which makes sense since Hong Kong only recently went back to China - 1998) so it's just not even China at all. The official language is English for goodness sake. I hated walking by a Chinese woman and her kid and she's sitting there speaking English to him. What is that? And people walking into bars and stuff asking for directions in English. Ugh, it just infuriated me to no end. I hate big cities - HK is a big city, I hate white people - HK has a lot of whitey's. ANYWAY. We ask this one guy for directions and he points us to some stairs and like "Take a taxi, it's a 2 hour walk." i'm like um what? Maybe you walk slow and he just kept insisting it was really far so i'm like w/e I don't believe you. So we walked off. Well. It turns out that this guy gave us the worst directions ever. We ended up climbing a bunch of stairs and going the complete wrong way. Eventually we found a road with signage to the peak. So we started off. It was straight up hill and difficult for my fat and out of shape self, but it took 30 minutes. 30 minutes. Not 2 hours. Crazy slow walking Hong Kongo's.

The peak was great. Beautiful and had two malls up there. So we spent awhile up there and saw the sun set from the peak and got some good pics of the city from way up there at night. That's whats great about the peak is that you can see everything from there. So that was that night. Monday we went to the embassy first thing. I got a pleasant surprise when I got there. Turns out it costs 1020 HKD for an American to get a Chinese visa........hey that's awesome. My roommate's visa cost 150HKD for being Canadian. The world just hates Americans. So we opted for a rush service because otherwise we'd have to stay in HK for another 3-4 days and tbh I was sick of it there. AND it was cheaper to spend the money on the rush service than to have to spend 3 more nights there. So the rest of the day we went to a Zoological and Botanical Garden which was really nice. Lots of Monkeys. Monkeys are silly. So getting on the ferry to go back to Kowloon island, I noticed a band playing instruments on the sidewalk. I was too lazy to walk over there so I just watched from the ferry area. I immediately thought it was strange that the drummer was hitting stuff and there was no sound. Then I noticed there were no amps for the guitars. Then I noticed a camera man. So this band was shooting a music video. It wasn't interesting really, just standing there fake playing with the song playing on loudspeakers. I don't know who the band was but it was cool that they were shooting a video. So anyway we go to eat at TGI Fridays and I swear to god the guy from the band shows up and is eating like 3 tables away. It was him, some random, and some official looking guy that was just lecturing the whole time. I swear it was him. I dunno though, i'm probably crazy. I asked the waitress if she knew who the dude was and she was like "um no." so maybe i'm crazy. Or maybe she's a hermit and doesn't know any celebrities.

The way home was happy. I was so happy to be going home. I missed my students, I missed my home, I missed my Shaoyang food. The whole time in Hong Kong I was homesick. But not for the USA - but for Shaoyang. It felt really pathetic that I missed this dirty nasty amazing town so much. I don't know, it's a really weird feeling to miss this place. It has it's flaws, but going to HK made me miss those flaws. HK is so proper, so westernized, so NOT Chinese that it just felt weird. Uncomfortable and everything about it was annoying. The view is what saves it since it's a beautiful city, but there was way more pollution there than Shaoyang. Plus I got so sick of seeing tourists, and wai guo ren everywhere.

So before we left we stopped in Sha Tin to see the Monastery of the 10,000 Buddhas. Which was pretty cool. There were wild monkeys everywhere stealing fruit from Buddha and just being monkeys. It was cool to be standing there on the walk way and a monkey seriously just walked by us 5 feet away. It was great. We got lost and ended up at the actual Monastery part. The Monastery and the 10,000 Buddhas are separate for some stupid reason, so we went the wrong way since there was a sign we later found hidden around the back part of a building where I suppose you could have seen it if you were a mole with really good contact lenses. Anyway the Monastery part was way cooler than the 10,000 Buddhas. It was this huge area with literally thousands of memorials for people who have passed. There were so many rooms and every room was just littered with these peoples pictures and stuff. It was really sad but interesting. So then we went to the 10,000 Buddhas which was a path up another mountain which Buddhas lining the whole way up. It was really cool........until I touched one of the Buddhas and realized they were all plastic. So after that it was ruined. The whole place is so artificial it's bloody obvious there was a couple Buddhas at the top and they needed a way to entice people going to Hong Kong Island to stop in Sha Tin. So that was disappointing a little bit. But hey, nothing you can do.

We got back to Guangzhou fine. So we go to buy our tickets back to Shaoyang and there was some confusion with the woman behind the counter. This is what I miss about actually being in China (not HK) is that they all don't speak English. So I get to try to use my Chinese which just ends up confusing everyone listening. I don't know how, but the woman heard me say Sanya instead of Shaoyang. Shao and San don't sound alike. So at first I didn't know what was going on. So I tell her I want 2 tickets for Shaoyang in the sleeping cabin and she's like for today? so I say yes. So the price comes out to like 768 yuan. I'm like whoa wtf is this. I am thinking because it's last minute so I ask to leave tomorrow. So she pulls it up and it's like 420 yuan. I'm like oh my god. We HAVE to leave because at this point it's Tuesday and if we leave on Wednesday we won't get home til Thursday and basically miss a whole weeks worth of class. So I'm like w/e tomorrow is fine. So I pay and she throws the tickets at us and I walk away and i'm like WTF SANYA?! I don't want to go to Sanya. Well......I do......just not now. Sanya is on Hainan Island and was one of my choices of locations to teach at. But no schools in Hainan signed up for Buckland teachers this year so that was a loss. After seeing that they wanted to send us to Sanya I was like uuuuugh. So we got back in line with the same girl and when we got there I was like "I said SHAOYANG" and I held up the ticket from Shaoyang to Guangzhou. The look on her face was priceless. She had the "oh god, i'm an idiot" look and laughed. So she fixed the problem real fast and I got like 60 yuan back. Now the only bad thing was it left at 11:30pm. Ugh. So we waited around Guangzhou for 5 hours. We did nothing at all. Loitered in a McDonalds for about 2 hours. Then I don't even know what we did the other hours.

So we got home this morning at about 10am and I was happy to be home. The first stop we made was our FAO's office. She told us not to worry about teaching today, just rest all day since we've been traveling all day and stuff. That was great news. So I slept for another 5 hours this afternoon and i'm about to go to sleep again. Unfortunately I have to get up at 8am to go to the Police Station to get another Residence Permit now. Ugh.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and it's the first time i'm away from home for any kind of major holiday. I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. I probably won't do anything special since I have to teach tomorrow. It's just another day for me :D

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Photos

Hong Kong night view
Welcome to Hong Kong

Sanpan
First boat I saw in HK

Hong Kong
Overcast day. It hasn't changed much :(

More HK
On Kowloon Island taking a picture of Hong Kong Island

Cruise Ships
Ugh, cruise ships. These brought over all the laowai.

Hong Kong Park
There was a "Don't feed the birds" sign right next to this. Crazy Chinese.

Hong Kong Park Maze
Random maze. I got lost for 4 hours. :(

Beijing Olympics Countdown
Just missed it!

Hong Kong Nights
Booful. They did a light show where the building lights went nuts to some dance music. My camera didn't pick it up very well though.

HONG KONG SQUASH OPEN 2008!
OMG I got here JUST in time!! I actually watched it and sat next to two coaches or something seriously gossiping about the players and stuff. It was sad. Who cares about squash?

SQUASH!
Proof I was here. Oh wait, no one is playing....

SQUASH!
Ripping good game! These dudes are ranked like 3 and 5 in the world or some crap. Course only 7 dudes total play Squash.

More Night Views
Booful

Hong Kong Reality
This is what Hong Kong actually looks like. Pollution for the win.

Mall on Victoria's Peak
This is the mountain in the background of the Hong Kong pictures. Yes there's a mall up there. Yes there's Starbucks, yes there's Haagen-Dazs, yes there's McDonalds. Cool looking mall though.

Sunset on Victoria's Peak
Great views up there too

Sunset with the adjacent mountain
Yup

Garden
This was on Victoria's Peak. And this was seriously the "Dog Playground"

Code of Conduct for Dog Garden
Please use the doggy latrine.

HK Zoological and Botanical Garden
Interesting WWI and WWII memorial here.

Fountain
Pretty nice day.

Comments

[That Squiggly Guy]

Happy Thanksgiving
It's a day late, but you'll get over it. Also my birthday was this week! Anyway, I was shown this clip of the Macy's parade and you should check it out if you aren't firewalled from YouTube: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FdDGbPY2RA0