你好香港！

Contrary to the title of this blog, my dad and I are touring Hong Kong and Guilin before we arrive in Beijing. Classes start in a little over a week, so I’m taking a week to be a tourist before hitting the books. 

Nathan Road

We arrived last night in Hong Kong at about 7 pm local time. So by the time we got into the hotel at around 9, we had been traveling for 27 hours! Long day…the low point of the 15 hour flight from Chicago to Hong Kong was when I looked at my watch and saw that only an hour and 50 minutes had passed. And I’d already completed three (eating, reading, journaling) of my four (eating, reading, journaling, sleeping) planned activities for the plane. Needless to say I added two new activities to my list: thinking about life and crawling over people to go to the bathroom. Fun fun. Our hotel room is just as my mom said it would be (she looked at the website): sleek, Asian, and modern. No complaints here. After we checked in at the hotel and were in our room, I started playing the game “see how long Dad can go without asking the front desk a question.” For anyone who has ever traveled anywhere with my dad, you know that this game will never last long. Last night? Twenty minutes. Anyways, we went out on Nathan Road, which is a very commercial/shopping/touristy street adjacent to our hotel, looking like our touristy selves. My Dad thought that we didn’t blatantly look like tourists, but what locals walk around ogling the tall buildings and bright lights? Yeah that’s right. But it’s okay, we’re here to tour and that’s what we will do. We decided to walk down to the harbor. Hong Kong at night is beautiful; last night was a little cloudy which made for some cool pics.

View from top of Victoria Peak

Because of the jet lag, this morning we woke up before six. There is a park a five minute walk from the hotel, so I went for a run at 6:45. The park was full of old people doing tai chi and dancing to music coming from little boom boxes. There was also a pool, and it was full of old people “swimming” (a few were swimming laps, but most were just kind of drifting around like leaves). Pretty much everyone stared at me, probably because there were only three other people running. This guy and I crossed paths four times within five minutes, no joke, which was also awkward. We kept running into each other. The breakfast at the hotel is pretty quality: there are a lot of Western options like omelets, pancakes, cereal, and toast, and plenty of Chinese options like congee, fried rice, cold noodles, bean curd, yogurt, and lychee. Our guide picked us up at 9 am. Her name is “Cathy” (are Chinese people’s English names randomly assigned? Because my Chinese name was…) and she is in her mid-20’s and very outgoing. We first went to Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island, where the views of Hong Kong Island, the harbor, and Kowloon are very nice. Then we went down to Repulse Bay, where there is a beach and you can go swimming. Today was overcast in the morning, so there weren’t many people swimming. About 30 feet out into the bay is an arc of buoys that signify nets that reach all the way down to the bottom; they are there to keep sharks from venturing into the swimming area. No thank you I will not be partaking. After Repulse Bay, we drove to a harbor area, where on one side yachts are stored, and on the other fishermen live on houseboats. The juxtaposition was ironic. We took a short boat ride around the house boats so that we could see some of them more closely. Next we went to a Taoist temple, then on to a local food market. Here there were many vendors, each selling vegetables, fruit, fish, or meat. The fish section of vendors was DISTURBING. There were shallow buckets with fish kind of still alive in them, and the vendors would pick the fish out of them and start scaling them while they were still moving. But even more disturbing were the fish laying on a table…their heads had been cut off and they had been sliced in half, BUT THEIR HEARTS WERE STILL BEATING. I don’t even understand how that’s physically possible, but the hearts were beating away. I guess they were really really fresh. But ew.

Repulse Bay

Yacht on the left, fishing boat on the right

Taoist temple, little girl being a diva

Tonight we went to the laser light show over the harbor, but it was raining and the show wasn’t really all that impressive. I think we’re the only people in Hong Kong, maybe China with rain coats. Everyone uses umbrellas. We walked to a bakery near the hotel, and got a couple buns for a light dinner. This will probably be my only post in Hong Kong. I will try again on the mainland, but who knows if I will be able to get past the “Great Firewall.” Until then, 再见！