Sunday, February 10, 2008

“I guess I’ve just finally accepted that I don’t really care that much about my grandparents” -Meg

In another unexpected turn of events Amit and I are leaving for Thaliand tomorrow on account of unseasonal cold and rain in Hong Kong and year-round high prices and expat banker residents.  We got to Hong Kong, thrilled to escape the cold up North, and delighted to be in Meg’s care.  Off the coast of Hong Kong Island is a smaller, former hippie colony-turned moderate-expat colony called Lamma where Meg lives.  The island is beautiful, covered in quaint tucked away towns, tiny well-manicured farms and gardens and paved hiking trails.  The  only cars on the island are the fire trucks and the ambulances which are about as wide as a 5 year-old child is tall.  It stands as a delightful contrast to Hong Kong’s packed city streets, austere clubs and restaurants and juxtaposed poverty and extreme wealth. Today we put some battery powered speakers in a tiny backpack to make music clothes like lots of Chinese locals wear and introduced the Chinese to Reggae, Manu Chau, Cher, Jamiraqui, Kanye’s Workout plan and a little bit of Thai rap.  

In the evenings we went over to Hong Kong island, about a 30 minute ferry ride from Lamma, which only runs until 12:30am, leaving us stranded til 7:30 on nights we went out drinking, sitting in the only 24-hour diner in Hong Kong, and being reprimanded for falling asleep at the table.  Some nights we went out with Meg’s investment banker friend Niel and his investment banker friends to some of the most “exclusive” clubs in Hong Kong which was really fun until he started ordering us drinks we would never order and then giving us the bill for it.  Despite not wanting to spend a lot of money and wanting to avoid areas densely populated with witty British hedge fund managers we always seemed to end up there.

The most beautiful thing about this place has been the sightings of two other IHPers. Finally Zeno returns to the blog. THank heavens cuz this thing could really use a little spice.  He was flying through Hong Kong on his way back from New Zealand to visit his sick grandmother.  His friend Irra called us and had us meet him in a Confucian temple of all places.  Amit and I practically ran there in the rain to see him.  I couldnt believe that after not seeing him for nearly two years we finally meet again in a Confucian temple in Downtown Hong Kong. He emerged from the clouds of smoke from the incense like the second coming of the savior on his white horse..ok I’m being a little flowery in his honor.  He was actually just leaning up against an alter, dressed head to two in black with an even larger mass of necklaces hopelessly tangled around his neck.  An embrace of epic proportions.  We spent the day wandering Antique markets where he bought an enormous Ancient Chinese legionnaires’ helmet, and Amit and I bought him yet another necklace.  He told us stories of strip searches, and getting into the backs of vans with Hookers; he clumsily danced me around the floors of a busy upscale restaurant and everything was in its right place.  He barely made his flight on time and we sent him off, casually, and unabashedly cutting in line in front of all the other people at the ticket counter.
 
Then there was Clay!  What a treat.  Clay’s parents are teaching here at an international school, so while they were away on vacation we came over and stayed at their spacious apartment where meg and I could sleep without having to spoon each other to fit in the bed and for warmth, and Amit could…continue to sleep on the couch even though he had a bed available to him.  Oh and we did this…
I’m excited for the first use of multimedia in the blog as well as my frist known appearance on youtube.  We were a little weary of the pricey Hong Kong nightlife so we opted for movie marathons, home cooked meals, and drinking games that turned into dance routines.  One of my best days of the trip was the day that Clay and I went to Shenzhen together (big city on the other side of of the Chinese border) so I could milk my Chinese visa a little.  Shenzhen is basically a shopping megalopolis where people will comfortably pull you into their stalls offering copy watches and purses and dvd movies.  I will never forgive myslef for not buying that gel-filled, pig-shaped, slap bracelet watch.  We ate a lot of unusual Chinese candy that tasted like objects not usually found in food, and went to a Chinese equivalent of Luby’s for lunch since it was the only place where we could ascertain with our eyes that the food we were eating did not contain whole squids, fish bodies, or chunks of other unknown animals.  It was lovely.
Despite not wanting to leave Meg, we have decided to spend the rest of the trip in Thailand because it is a little bit easier on the wallet and the cold here lends itself only to hibernation and heavy drinking.  In reality, Hong Kong is just New York without the radical scene, the history, and the bagels.  We did really enjoy the Chinese New Year Fireworks, which we celebrated in the usual way, falafel, bottles of Franzia (who knew they sold it in bottles?) and surrounded by crowds of Chinese people watching it from behind the screens on their cellphone cameras.  Otherwise Chinese New Year isn’t that fun unless you are Chinese, which we aren’t so so long Hong Kong.  Time for something I’m a little more used to: heat, humidity, jungle, disproportionate attention for light color of skin.  I guess that is all I really know about Thailand.  I’ll let you know more when I do.
Gersh Alert
Posted by Andie at 17:15:29 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Sunday, February 3, 2008

“Well the Earth died screaming while I lay dreaming. I blame it on you”

The New Great Wall of China (a firewall that prevents the chinese people from accessing video sharing websites and other forms of email and online information networks like wikipedia) has determined that my blog is innappropriate content for the eyes of chinese readers so it blocked it.  Now that I am in Hong Kong, though I’ve been here for a week, I can finally publish something of what I’ve been up to the last couple weeks.

In a surprsising turn of events, our flight out of Japan to Shanghai had been canceled due to maintenance, an advantageous position in the airline perks world that had Amit salivating at the mouth.  We quickly browsed through all the other places that we could’ve gotten a free flight for then and there and settled on Beijing because we didn’t drop $130 dollars on Chinese Visas just to decorate the passport.  So off we went to Beijing with an airport provided hotel and breakfast that they didnt technically have to provide awaiting us on the other end.  We knew we were really someplace quite different when amit decided to steal a small hand towel from the hotel room to wrap up a donut he borrowed from the all-you-can-eat-here buffet, and seconds later the desk agent at check out inquired, “where small towel?” and amit had to go run and “locate” the small towel that had somehow made its way “under the bed.”  No more stealing in China.

In Beijing I was visited by three very dear old friends:  food poisoning,  culture shock, and seasonal depression.  Since everybody loves diarrhea/vomit stories I’ll start there first.  A liter bottle of Tsingtao in China costs approximately 40 to 60 cents even with restaurant markup, so after pouring two of those on top of a steamed sweet potato I got off a bucket on rolling street cart and a pizza from a questionable travellers cafe, and getting blatantly and bluntly hit on by the only Mexican dude in China, I had an all night vomit fest that left a ring of splatter around around every possible recepticle within puking distance from my hostel bed.  Amit’s sleep was more or less undisturbed and I was mostly better the next day.

Then came culture shock. Hadn’t seen this one in a while.  We’re talking irrational contempt for your surroundings, feelings of wanting to escape, putting familiar things on pedastals and asserting their superiority…all that jazz.  I think most of it was rooted in the fact that people in China just do NOT speak english with any consistency so never have I felt so totally and completely inept.  The best english speakers we found in China were very well-educated chinese university students running what foreigners call “tea scams” in Tiananmen Square, where they approach you and talk to you, invite you to a few pots of tea which you find cost around $70 each and next thing you know your smacked with a 250 dollar bill they get a comission off of and an urgent need to pee.  We avoided this like pros but did get caught up in buying a 13 dollar painting of a pig somehow from some “art students” who brought us to their art exhibition.  Aside from the frustration, we found ourselves excited by China, the hustle and bustle, the street culture, how cheap everything is.  It was quite a contrast to block after block of trendy people, vending machines, and places that look like time square.  Though in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics, China has issued 7 changes that the people of Beijing should make to become more agreeable to Westerners like me.  They have to stop spitting in the streets, tucking their shirts up into their armpits on hot days, littering, cursing loudly and profanely in the streets and they have to start lining up more for subways and buses like in Japan.  Based on my short experience in Beijing, the Chinese government will never be successful in accomplishing these tasks, and most certainly not by September.  It amazes me that the Olympic committee was impressed enough with Beijing to select it for the summer games as it was offered up by the people of  China but now has to undergo a good thorough cultural cleansing.


My final visit was from my buddy seasonal depression. Hello there.  Haven’t seen you since around this time last year!  Beijing was the kinda cold that felt like it was cutting flesh off.  After a few days of trying to brave it to see Tienanmen and the Forbidden City, and that not wanting to leave our hostel because we didn’t feel like spending the entire evening defrosting to have dexterity in our hands enough to use chopsticks to eat, I plummeted into the darkest environmentally-induced depression Id experienced to date.  I would’ve licked the Xanex residue off of the nostrils of an angsty 14 year-old suburbanite if I thought it could raise me out of this.  It felt like our basement hostel room was getting deeper and deeper every time we entered it, and I found the some of the most creative ways to dislike myself and the world around me, charting some new self-hatred territory I never even new was on the map.  So I basically rolled out the mental red carpet for culture shock, and had dinner prepared.  Oily non-vegetarian dinner with fish disguised as squash.  The depression only abated after we had a train ticket to Hong Kong and a trip booked to hike 10K along the Great Wall of China.  This was the best hike I’ve ever done.  It turns out that the only things certain in my life are death and hiking, so I tried to embrace it and I’m glad I did.  We hiked from the Jinshanling portion of the great wall to Simatai, about a 4 hour hike up and down from tower after crumbling tower along the wall admiring spectacular views of the wall snaking up and over the mountains.  Finally blue skies and sunshine on my face.  I credit my success on this hike to my dedication to step aerobics.  It was my favorite day in China.  We spent the evening drinking cheap beer at a nearby hostel with two American guys from Nicaragua who kept saying “Bring me more food Bitch!” to our waitress at the restaurant we ate at after, among other profanities since she didnt speak English.  

The train ride to Hong Kong was frozen.  The train was frozen.  The faucets were frozen. The windows were frozen.  The trendy Mongolian girls sharing our berth were frozen.  They loaned me their leg warmers because I didn’t have any clean pants and my legs were bare. 26 hours long. Now we are in Hong Kong and today was the first day since we have been here that we saw sunshine.  I think I will write later about Hong Kong because Beijing was a lot to tackle in one blog and I’ve been trying to write this freakin thing for 2 weeks now.  It is wonderful to be with Meg and Clay.  We even had a special guest appearance by Zeno!  More to come.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday,

Andie
Posted by Andie at 19:20:53 | Permalink | Comments (7)