back to the fragrant harbour

---

after everything, it's nice to be back.

we took a train from changsha the night after the gig at the freedom house, which was a very relaxed (read: exhausted, with sickness and sleep deprivation both doing their parts) gig to a small crowd downstairs at the freedom house. the freedom house is a really cool bar, with three levels of intimate little seating areas, and across the lane is the gig venue. unfortunately this hadn't finished being refurbished when we got there, so we were playing next to the bar downstairs. people clapped and smiled, and that was about all we were asking for. after we finished playing, i went upstairs and had a nap until it was time to leave.

another night of crashing on mattresses and couches on some random floor. meng ni had gone back to her uni dorm, so we were limited to sign language and a few simple words with our host for the night. that was ok, all we wanted was to sleep anyway.

the next day we fought our way through the incense markets outside the local temple, finally found a taxi willing to go to the train station, and we were on our way to guangzhou.

i'll spare a word for hard seat trains here:
i'd never actually taken a hard seat, because for some reason i thought they were literally hard - like plastic chairs or something (after being in china for 5 months all up, it would not have surprised me). and i thought it was really really cramped and crowded, imagining rows and rows of plastic seats with old chinese men spitting binlang or something on you (binlang is an intense-tasting kind of seed or nut that people chew in hubei and hunan provinces especially. you see spat-out ones all over the road).
well, i was pleasantly surprised the first time i took a hard seat, at 5 in the morning a few towns back. the seats were fairly soft, with rows of two or three, facing another two or three, with a table in between. overhead space for bags, under the seat space for bags, and it wasn't too crowded. true, they're not the comfiest seats if you've gotta be on a train for more than 8 hours, and it's pretty hard to find a way to sleep that doesn't involve waking every time your head flops forwards (if you're not in the aisle, leaning against a window isn't too bad), but you can do it if you're tired enough.

so, eight hours to guangzhou. on the train we met viola, a sweet young chinese girl who was studying economics in guangzhou, and had been visiting her friends in wuhan. i gave her a book i'd finished reading, and she gave me a bag of what were essentially sweetened balls of dough. stodge-a-rama. but that's been another feature of my time in china, and i have come to love the stodge.
viola helped us to get tickets to shenzhen, and after faffing for 20 minutes or so, we were on another train.
this train was deluxe-o, looking more like a plane, complete with "in-flight magazines". kt and i ate noodles and settled back to count down the hours. after an hour, though, we were at shenzhen (we thought it took two, so we were stoked).

suddenly, everything had changed. getting out of the train and following the signs that said "hong kong", we noticed that we weren't really in china anymore. not china as we knew it. suddenly everything was cleaner and fluoro-er, and plastic-er, and whatnot. even the smell was different. "i can smell the ocean", kt said, and i realised that that tangy flavour in the scent i associated with hong kong, that was the sea. it had been months since i'd smelled it.

we had the usual boring business of going through immigration, filling out departure and arrival cards (i fucking hate those things), and me cursing the weight of my piano accordion, and the fact that meng ni was no longer there to help me carry it, and that people took too long to do anything.......
finally we were through. kt bought a drink and a newspaper for $18 HK. that's right - back to expensiveland (although i should point out that $18 HK is actually less than $3 AU, so it's no more expensive than back home - probably less so, even).

we got on the mtr, which was weird - so familiar, and yet, so strange. it had been six months since i'd been in hong kong, but it felt like yesterday. we scrambled for seats and got them, then settled down for another half hour of train journey.
finally, we made it to central, where we were meeting christina. she and mick had a "date", and she was also helping us with accomodation for the night. all of our accomodation-finding efforts had proved fruitless so far, so christina had suggested me and kt could stay in an oft-unused classroom at her uni. provided we were discreet, we could stay there for a little while. for lack of other (free) options, we went for it.

we met christina in lan kwai fong. it's a relief not to be stared at so much. i mean, ok, people stare at me sometimes even in australia (whether it's the piercings or the hair or just the whole package, it varies), but not like they did in china. hong kong, with such a huge proportion of foreigners, and also pierced or "alternative"-looking people, doesn't have as many people interested in staring at me. i am no longer such a novelty.
lan kwai fong, being the "rich foreigner clubbing district", was full of the usual skanky hos and businessmen with too much cash to throw away on them, so we waited outside 7-eleven (wow, 7-elevens again! source of cheap-ish beer!). then christina came, and we got on a bus, and were shown our new home.

the room was pretty cool, actually. two big couches placed at right angles, and two comfy-looking chairs. a shelf full of interesting books (i am now re-reading sarah waters' "fingersmith"), a kettle and tea and cups, a toilet nearby, and generally, everything was pretty comfortable. we gratefully fell asleep.

most of yesterday was fairly uneventful. figuring out a way to hide our bags in a room which, at first, appeared to have no hiding places (there was no space under the couches) was an interesting challenge, though. eventually, we pulled the couches forward and found that the shelves (obviously) extended to the floor, and that if we did some creative rearranging, we could fit some of our bags down there, then put the couches back in front of them, and nobody would ever notice. it also meant that we found a blanket, and a couple of pieces of batik fabric (it's quite warm here, but you still get cold hands and feet if you don't have some kind of blanket). we then put the samplers and mandolin and small guitar up high on the shelves, and disguised the piano accordion behind some rolled up pieces of carpet.
a job well-done, we left the room, satisfied that we had left little trace of our inhabitance.

we decided to go to our old stomping-ground, wan chai, as mick wanted to buy guitar strings, and we also thought it would be nice to visit our old friend maggie. maggie is a thai lady who owns a thai restaurant next door to our old hotel. we used to visit it a lot, and wound up staying with her for a week or two after we left the hotel. she was overjoyed to see us ("but why you not call me dah-ling? i wait for email, i miss you all so much! i love you, ok?"), and we chatted about various developments (jess' pregnancy, mick's new girlfriend, maggie's new "friend", etc), and what we would do next. promising to visit again soon, we left with bellies full of thai food (our first real meal in a few days).

after that, it was straight back to central, where we looked at street art by our friends, checked out their new stickers and paste-ups, and had a beer in a park, then headed to sense 99, where we were playing a gig that night.

the gig went really well. it was a very small crowd, made up mostly of our friends - kathy, tat and bigmad, the graf artists, christina and some of her friends, mick's friend greg, who he stayed with last time he was in hk, adam and bryan from the band the brown note collective (formerly spermatic chord. we will be playing a couple of gigs with them during our time here), and various other people who i vaguely recognised. kt struggled on womanfully and even managed to beatbox through a whole song, despite coughing every few seconds for most of the day, and not having much air. the microphone situation was interesting, as greg brought one and adam brought another (there being only one at the venue), and us forgetting to ask for mic stands as well........ in true junkadelic style, we rigged one up out of a piece of pvc pipe and some gaffer tape, and then did the jamesian "double-headed dragon" style stand, where mics are attached to both ends of one part of the mic stand (this works well for me and someone tall, ie kt, because one end is about midriff height for me (perfect for clarinet..... well, sort of. i won't go into the difficulties of mic-ing a clarinet), and the other end is way up in the air, which suits kt well.

after we played, there was a jam with bryan and adam and greg, and whoever else felt like joining in (a friend of adam's who plays erhu - i forgot her name already - wailed for a while), and then we got told the bar was closing and we had to go home.
kt and i snuck back into our room and had strange dreams. apparently someone came into the room in the middle of the night - i didn't wake up - so we're thinking maybe it's a good idea to find alternative accomodation as soon as we can. but it's been a good place to stay for the last few nights, definitely.


hong kong........ it's nicer to be back here than i thought. i'm actually quite enjoying the humidity (makes a change from the dryness of some of the places i've been lately), and it's nice and warm at the moment, but nowhere near as hot as it was last time we were here, thankfully. my cantonese seems to have flown out the window (i keep wanting to speak chinese, it's habit now to say dubuqi whenever i bump into someone, and xiexie instead of thanks), but everyone i've encountered so far speaks some english, usually enough to be conversational at least, so i don't feel so bad for sticking to english.
it's great to catch up with friends again as well, and see old sights, maybe visit some of our old favourite bars and whatnot.
and it's only five days til i'm headed home.

---