Summer Vacation, Part 2

Wow, I missed Hong Kong.  August saw my first trip back to the city since I left Hong Kong Baptist University over 6 years ago, and I'm so happy I returned, even just for a few days.  I forgot how much I love the city and with my friend Jonathan from San Francisco living there now, I even had a really nice place to stay with a great host.  I managed to not only visit my old neighborhood and see most of our old haunts, but I even did a few things I never got to do the first time around.

Hei Yin's photo of Tom, me, and Jono at the Peak

When I arrived on Thursday night, Jono and I went to the IFC to meet his friends Tom and He Yin for drinks.  Tom was visiting Jono from San Francisco and our visits overlapped by a couple days.  After getting to know each other, the four of us went to the top of Victoria Peak, which is the best lookout point from which to get a view of Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon peninsula across the harbour.  Again, I'd forgotten how spectacular the HK skyline is at night, with the plethora of boats and skyscrapers and concentrated clusters of lights.  That just can't ever get old.  Later on we returned to Jonathan's incredible 47th-floor apartment in Sheung Wan and I realized that, while not quite as panoramic as Victoria Peak, that lucky bastard gets to see a similar view every day when he wakes up.  I made sure to take some photos in the morning from his balcony.

The apartment is only on floor 47 because there are no floors in HK buildings that end in the number 4 (I believe the number 4 resembles the Chinese character for death).  This means no floor 4, 14, 24, 34, 44, or 13 (for other obvious reasons), so it's probably floor 40 or 41 in reality.

Hong Kong Harbour

Looking straight down. Nearly gave me vertigo.

On Friday, Jono had to work so Tom and I spent the day doing something new for me, a trip to Lamma Island, just south of Hong Kong Island (the opposite direction of Kowloon, which is what is visible across the harbour).  Lamma is the third largest island in Hong Kong after Lantau Island, where Disneyland and the airport are located, and the main (downtown) HK island.  We hopped a ferry from one of the city piers on an absolutely beautiful day and took in the skyline sights as we spent 30 minutes circling HK Island in order to head south.  Lamma Island has no cars but people

These motorized mini-trucks are how residents get around
and transport things on Lamma. Passing each other in the
narrow alleys seemed to pose some problems.

do live there, kind of like Catalina near LA.  After deboarding the ferry, we walked through the most adorable little town/village and then hiked over the hills from one side of the island to the other.  Along the way, we saw some amazing scenery but also one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen, several spiders that were about as big as my hand.  They really freaked me out.  Tom said the spiders are much bigger than that in Southeast Asia, just the thought of which put a slight damper on my excitement to travel down that way next winter.

This photo has no contextual point of reference for size so it really doesn't do it justice.

The view from our lunch table.

Once we reached the other end of the island, Tom and I ate at a crazy fresh seafood restaurant with views of all the local fishing boats before catching another ferry back to HK Island.  That night, we all went out for dinner and drinks and I got to experience a slightly different style of night out than when I was in HK the first time around.  Back then, we were poor university students who would buy cheap drinks at 7-11 and drink them on the street before going dancing at some bar or club with no cover charge.  This time, we were sitting in nice places amidst middle-aged businessmen in suits.  Getting older can certainly feel a bit strange at times.

On Saturday night, after a day of literally lounging in the sun all day (it was glorious), I met up with my old friend Angel in Kowloon.  It was great seeing someone from my HKBU days and Angel in particular was always one of my favorite people.  She took me to a bar with a view of the harbour and the skyline before grabbing dinner near Nathan Road, the garish main strip of the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood.

Double-decker buses on the left side of the road!

I couldn't help but ask Angel about the sight of a huge line outside the Louis Vuitton store in TST.  As she explained it to me, the sheer volume of visitors from mainland China has become so huge in the past decade that many high-end stores feel the need to limit the number of people inside at any time in order to retain some type of crowd control.  Plus, it gives the impression that the stores are exclusive, like trendy nightclubs.  Hence the presence of a bouncer at the front doors in addition to the queue down the street.  The whole thing seemed utterly ridiculous and one of those "only in Hong Kong" moments. Angel had lots more to say about mainland Chinese visitors and immigrants to HK but I think I will save my comments on that until after my trip to China at the end of September.  Needless to say the welcome mat isn't exactly being laid out.

The line outside Louis Vuitton

Mmmmm, dragon fruit.
(Or is it a human heart? You decide!)

On Sunday, Jono and I just walked around the downtown area and watched all the Filipina housekeepers dancing and having a street party.  Another thing I had completely forgotten about HK is the massive number of women from the Philippines who live here.  Nearly every foreign family or upper-middle-class/wealthy local family has a live-in housekeeper who cleans and cooks and watches the children, and nearly every single one of these housekeepers is a 20-50 year old Filipina.  They all get one day off per week, Sunday, and so, every Sunday, the streets of HK Island are overflowing with Filipina housekeepers.  Like, literally, camped out on closed streets and under the HSBC building, picnicking, dancing, having prayer groups.  You will be hard-pressed to find anyone else who is not a tourist downtown on a Sunday.  Jono and I also walked through Lan Kwai Fong, one of the two neighborhoods where the HKBU students always used to go out at night, and I bought a beer from the LKF 7-11, just for old time's sake  :)

The futuristic escalators at Festival Walk

Monday was my last day in Hong Kong, and Jono once again had to work, so I spent most of the day with his friend Justin wandering through my old neighborhood in Kowloon Tong and visiting the Festival Walk mall, the park and some old restaurants that I used to frequent.  It was a whole day of nostalgia and I loved it.  After getting off the MTR (the HK subway) at Festival Walk and scoping the place out for a bit (I forgot how expensive it is), we walked to the HKBU dorms.  Sometimes I am truly amazed by my own navigational skills and couldn't believe that I remembered how to get there after 6 years, only making one wrong turn the entire way.  So proud!  It was kind of fun to see the old dorms again, and I had to give props to HKBU for finally upgrading the nasty canteen next to the dorms that served as our cafeteria.  It looked downright nice and the food didn't look quite so terrible.

My old dorm building

Even though I could remember how to get to this place, I couldn't remember if I lived in Soong or Zhou. Oy.

Just something getting pushed across the street in Kowloon City.
A fairly horrific something.

From the dorms, we walked through the old park we used to hang out in and where I had my first ever Valentine's date and I once again managed to navigate us, not only to Kowloon City, but specifically to the Cambo Pho restaurant where I used to eat an awesome pineapple fried rice served in a pineapple.  This was no easy feat since Kowloon City is old and decrepit and everything is no more than a few stories tall and looks the same... basically the exact opposite of HK Island.  The fried rice was just as good as I remembered.  But one thing I'd somehow never done the entire time I studied just 20 minutes away was visit the old Kowloon Walled City

nearby so Justin and I checked it out.  Kowloon Walled City was a mainland Chinese enclave that didn't belong to the British back when HK was a colony and it was cool to learn about the history of the place and how it was this overly densely packed, vice-ridden, crazy place with illegal dentists.  So weird that a place like that existed for so long right in the heart of HK.  As the park it is now, it is so beautiful and almost zen; Justin was shocked that anywhere so peaceful existed in HK and told me I had introduced him to his new favorite spot.  Hooray for nostalgic wanderings!
When we got back to HK Island, we did one more thing that I'd never done before, which was to take the Central-Mid-levels Escalators all the way up.  The system is the largest outdoor chain of covered escalators in the world, stretching almost 1 kilometer up the side of the mountain for pedestrians and commuters to get from downtown HK to the Mid-Levels, where the vast majority of foreigners reside.  It wasn't anything too thrilling, but I was happy to have at least finally gone all the way to the top.

I had to leave for the airport on the first MTR train on Tuesday morning in order to catch an 8 AM flight back to Korea so it was definitely an early day and there wasn't time to do anything else.  At the time, all I could think was how badly I wanted to stay in HK and not return to Korea... I forgot how much I love this totally unique, dynamic city and I simply wasn't ready to leave.  But summer vacation was nearly over and it was time to drop back to reality.  Before I left though, I had to snap one last photo, a photo of one of my all-time favorite things in all the world (because I'm a dork):  bamboo scaffolding.  Whenever I try to explain why HK is so awesome, I can't think of many better examples that say more about the character of the city as a whole than the juxtaposition of old and modern, nature and city, perfectly epitomized in the construction industry's use of bamboo scaffolding.  Please enjoy!

BAMBOO SCAFFOLDING!!!!!  :-D