What a Long Strange Trip It's Been, pt 5
2005-08-31,

Sorry it's been so long since my last trip update; work and home have both been crazy for the last week or so. Here's hoping I can get us back home from China by the end of the week. Not bloody likely, but it's nice to dream. Anyway...

The rest of Po Lin

Where did I leave off? Oh yes, Buddha innards. The rest of our visit consisted of taking in the amazing view, enjoying the sea wind, meeting a nice couple from California who were on the tail end of their vacation, and trying out what is now one of my new favourite drinks, chrysanthemum tea. Thank you, Vitasoy.

The hour getting late, we headed back to HK, via another white-knuckled bus ride and, this time, the metro system (mainly so we could say that we'd tried every mode of transport available - plane, bus, ferry and train - all in one day), where we learned that Di$neyCorp was putting the finishing touches on a new park there in HK. Oh joy. So we got back to the Shangri-La to finally get our room, only to find out that they'd run out of standard rooms due to it being the weekend and our group being so large, so they were forced to upgrade us to a deluxe suite. The humanity! How would we survive?! We spent the rest of the night getting some late dinner from a place around the corner (as well as some ice cream from a 7-Eleven) to bring back to the hotel, and bought Ocean's Twelve on pay-per-view, through which we took turns sleeping. Between the two of us I think we cought about two thirds of the movie. I guess we were a little tired*.

Hong Kong Day 2

Next day we were herded along by our guides to a jade jewelry manufacturing shop. I was put off by the whole thing, mainly because it felt so contrived and touristy. We did manage to have some fun there, though.

As convention goes, the more one seems disinterested in something/someone, the more someone else wants to convince you that you need it/them. This proved terrifically true in the sales area of this place. At first I was miffed that we were using up a good chunk of our day in a jewelry shop, thus not looking at anything, especially the junk they had on display in the lower cases (everyone knows the god stuff's always in/on the back shelves). Eventually we started admiring the artwork of some of the jade statuettes and other nicer objects; when that happened, the sales folk, in typical (as I'd learn eventually) style, started pushing whatever is was we were looking at on us, reciting their spiel on the jade quality and whatnot. Apparently we were looking at the right stuff and in the right way, because suddenly they were offering us tea (something no one else in the room seemed to be getting) and being especially nice. We carried our aloofness around with us around the room. I began to think of the sales folk as sharks, and me as a quick but tasty fish. I'd stay looking at something particularly nice, and when I saw one of the 'sharks' out of the corner of my eye coming my way with spiel in hand, I'd casually move on, feigning disinterest but presenting an aura of wanting to spend a lot of money on something that might catch my eye (a few things almost did, but practicality got the better of us). What fun! What I thought would be a waste of time ended up being a casual morning of poking a stick at the Sales Machine. Something like this will get me killed one day, certainly.

After jade-watching, we hopped into the bus and headed up Victoria Peak, purportedly the highest point in HK, and on which the richest of the rich live. We wandered for a bit out onto the outdoor areas of a mall that wasn't quite open yet, and looked down onto the city. Pretty amazing view from up there. We only got about a half an hour, sadly, and had to rush off to our next destination, a boat tour of a fishing village. It's a boat tour, because everyone in the 'village' lives on their boat. It was off-season (letting the fishes replenish themselves during a mandatory 2-month period), so all boats were in and packed pretty tightly into the bay that served as their neighborhood. Apparently there were two boats per family; the one they lived on and one they took out for trolling. It's said that many of them are born, live and die having never set foot on land. Small boats were zipping all over, even in the downpour that started just after we got underway (it was a canopied boat). It felt a little odd, gawking at what amounted to people's homes as we made our way through. I'm pretty sure the tours funded the village, though, at least in part.

After that, we were done with the group stuff and were on our own for the rest of the day. We decided to get a look at the city from the pavement, so we headed down the main drag of Kowloon and sightsaw. We had a plan of finding a place for dinner along the way, and definitely had to traverse the Temple Street Night Market, which is basically a side street that's taken over nightly by trinket vendors. We found three sets (six pair total) of jade chopsticks that we haggled down (haggling is a must - it's insulting to the seller not to) to $80 HK, or what amounted to about $12 US. We really need to go back there one day.

We saw lots of things along the main street: Indian men offering to tailor me a suit; typical folding-table sellers of cheap watches and girlie mags; stores with bags of just about everything edible from the sea dried and ready to eat; a 'Sony' store on practically every street corner; a lot of (surprise) Chinese-style restaurants; the occasional massage parlor; a video game place, featuring a game that's like DDR but with a full simulated drum kit (want one!); a Japanese-style bakery, which unfortunately did not have maple melonpan but did have a stock of Vita chrysanthemum tea; and people, lots and lots of people. As we were walking south back down the street, we noticed flashing lights over the cityscape near the water, and the occasional pbbbt of some small fireworks. We made our way toward the action, but ended up missing it because we couldn't for the life of us find a way across the busy street to get to the harbour (HK, like many Chniese cities, has underground crossing areas, and it wasn't until after the show that we found one). We made our way to the water anyway, as the cityscape lit up for a Saturday night was still something to see.

We had dinner there along the boardwalk at a place called Blues, mainly because we could eat outside and they had live music (which consisted of a coffee-house-style folk group singing in Chinese). There was a wait, so we sat at the bar, each had a Chinese-made beer and watched the attractive bartenderess do her thing. Dinner consisted of H having some sort of veggie dish I can't remember, and I had something that was basically some slightly spicy fried noodles 'with prawn'. I expected a bowl of noodles with little curled up bits of prawn meat mixed in. What I got was a bowl of noodles and a gigantic, 8-inch-long whole cooked prawn, googley eyes, antennae and all, cooked lobster-style. And it was staring right at H. Once I came to terms with the presentation (and knocked the head off so it was no longer ogling the vegetarian), I dove in. Tasty. Slightly disturbing, but tasty.

After that, it was sleepy time. After all, we had a big day the next day, what with the getting a baby and all.

More to come.

-- End Transmission --