Hong Kong | Day 2

Last night I took a bus back to the airport to meet Abby. It was nice reuniting after about a month and a half since our last rendezvous in Nagano. Our first night at the Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong was surprisingly OK, despite the shady characters loitering in the entryway and the back-alley dildo shop that doubles as the hallway leading to our hostel (there are at least 30 different hostels all competing with one another in the Chungking complex--we’re at the Oriental Pearl--which looks more like a housing project than a guest house).




[ Top to bottom: view of other rooms from our room’s window (lilies courtesy of Abby); view of our cozy room at the Oriental Pearl inside Chungking; Chungking “lobby,” which hosts a multitude of Indian restaurants, outlet clothing stores, and sex shops; and the Chungking Mansions, in all its full-frontal glory, from out on Nathan Road ]

Today we slept late. We ate muffins and drank coffee for breakfast on a bench overlooking the harbor, which reaches out toward Hong Kong Island (We’re on Kowloon). Rustic fishing and cargo boats putter back and forth, and at one end of the pier is the Star Ferry, which you can take between Hong Kong, Kowloon, and other outlying islands such as Lantau, where the big buddha, Tian Tan, resides in the Po Lin Buddhist Monastery. The Star Ferry operation is kind of legendary in itself having been used to evacuate residents of Kowloon during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong.

Around noon we met up with my friend Robert, who happened to be in Hong Kong around the same time as us. Robert’s from Greenbay, and he and I met as fellow classmates at a weekly Japanese language course in Chicago. Robert--who also teaches English on the JET Programme--is one of the most genuine, stand-up fellas I’ve ever known; sadly, however, he was placed in a prefecture far south of mine called Shimane, which rubs up against the Sea of Japan and is pretty close to Hiroshima. Straightaway, the three of us went for a great dim sum feast at the Jade Garden, which looms over the sunny bay on Kowloon. The place was packed. We ordered a ton of food and lingered for over an hour.

After the glorious dim sum feast we took the subway up to the Mong Kok area, where we fumbled our way first toward the flower market, which was this incredible complex of small shops mingled with outdoor flower stands (there were people straight-up selling armloads of plants on every corner). Abby bought lilies from one of the street shops to spruce up our room--the nice smell they added to our place seemed totally anachronistic to the atmosphere, but was lovely nonetheless. Eventually, the flower market led us into the Yuen Po Street Bird Garden. This is difficult to describe, but picture a beautiful, lively aviary at some well-intending zoo--now picture all the colorful birds in cramped, brass cages. That’s basically the Yuen Po Street Bird Garden.










Kind of a depressing place. So we took off in search of some fruit and a nice park in which to have a rest. We bought oranges and an unfamiliar pear-like thing and hung out here until evening:




Around the corner some men were involved in a pretty intense game of table tennis (literally lunging into the table and cracking the ping-pong ball every few minutes).

Later we ate chinese noodles, “greens,” and drank cream soda at some streetside noodle joint. There was a slew of cats playing in the window of a loft above where we were sitting. Then we wandered through the Temple Street Night Market, where Abby and I bought mid-century Beijing posters advertising cigarettes and cosmetics in the most ridiculous manners. Here’s Robert and Abby at one of the markets trying on crooked spectacles:


Then--yep, it never ends--we went for an overpriced drink at the top of the Peninsula hotel, which offered a nice view of the bay. At this point we had been joined by a fella named Todd whom Robert had picked up at his hostel. He was from Brooklyn, but was living in Russia working as a journalist. (He was only in Hong Kong long enough to find a travel agent who would sell him a cheap ticket to Thailand.) Later we four bought ice cream from a truck and strolled the boardwalk past midnight.


1 Comment Manage Comments for this Entry
Val
You really pack a lot in a day!
Wednesday, January 24, 2007 - 00:39 AM