And for a Dollar Less, You Can Not Waste a Dollar Here

I have the unfortunate travel tradition of getting myself extremely sick from time to time by partaking in the local flavors. Paris gave me a parasite in my stomach for a few months, Moscow gave me a hangover that lasted a few days, and Hong Kong has now graced my innards with an awesome case of food poisoning. I’ll spare you the messy details, but simply ask who doesn’t love a few hours of good old-fashioned dry heaving? Spending a day unable to leave your house is usually tolerable in the States where I have The Price Is Right, my mommy, and endless amounts of movies to entertain myself. In Hong Kong I watched Bloomberg news for six hours and actually got excited to see how the market would do as trading began in London. My day was exactly as much fun as it sounds.

Fortunately I was relatively better in 24 hours, and managed to join my friends for a low-key night out. The tallest building in Hong Kong is the International Financial Center (IFC), and the building has an awesome public space a few stories up where you can sit back, have a few drinks, and look out over Victoria Bay at the Kowloon skyline. Given the way that my stomach was on the fritz I took it easy, and enjoyed watching everyone else slowly make fools of themselves.

My favorite moment of the night was talking to a girl in my program right before I left. I found her curled up on a speaker in the back of the club. Apparently wearing heels out to dance for a few hours makes your feet hurt (duh), and she was taking a break from the dance floor. I soon discovered what ‘state’ she was in as I spent 10-minutes convincing here we were not in fact at a gay bar. She was having none of it, so I left it as a lost cause. When I wanted to leave a few minutes later with some people I thought, why not get that girl off the speaker with the sore feet? I literally got about two feet away from here when she popped up, screamed, ‘OMG I LOVE THIS SONG!’ and ran away dancing. Such is my life here.

If you are looking for a strange experience in Hong Kong, then go downtown on any Sunday and look around. Sunday is the one day a week all the immigrant Filipino and Indonesian people have off, and they spend it sprawled out on the streets of Central. I thought it would be people shopping, eating out, etc. FALSE. They were EVERYWHERE. On the streets, in tunnels, on bridges, everywhere. Basically imagine hundreds of Filipino women taking to the streets of a major city, and then sitting down in gossiping groups in every public space. It was seriously like watching normal people act like hobos. They had cardboard boxes set up as mats to sit on, and sometimes as walls to keep the other clucking hens out.

In the middle of it was a stage that had some kind of show going on. It was mostly in Tagalog, but I watched with my roommate anyways. There were women in traditional dress, some kind of game, and some teenage dancers that were killing their culture via a skanky dance to some American hip-hop song.

Having had enough of that I wandered around central Hong Kong with my roommate, and saw some cool stuff. For about a dollar you can see the Sun Yat Sen museum. And for a dollar less, you can not waste a dollar seeing the Sun Yat Sen museum. The exhibit is boring (though the man who founded the Chinese Republic is fascinating), and seems to be a tribute to the mausoleum in Nanjing where he is buried.

Near the museum is a long escalator that runs up the mountain and takes people through street after street of bars, restaurants, and tourist traps. I mostly appreciated the fact that the city has a giant escalator to take lazy people like yours truly up the hill.

The last thing I saw recently worth mentioning is Chinese New Years. Coming from America, my mental image of how New Years should proceed is a weeeee bit different from how the Chinese do it. It lasted for about two days, and the major attractions were a street festival, parade, and fireworks. The street festival was odd. It was six rows of merchants selling tiger themed stuff (since it’s the year of the tiger), and random things like blow up cell phones. It took about a half hour to slowly make our way down each crowded row, but it was interesting to see.

The parade on the other hand was less than peaceful. To get anywhere near the parade you have to elbow your way through a ton of people who elbow you back, and even then your view isn’t that great. After an hour or so of people craning their necks to see we were able to get semi close to the actual street. None of the floats were particularly impressive, but the Dutch on stilts, Brazilian dancers, and random French group (still not entirely sure what they were doing) were entertaining. When it was finally over at around 10 PM I got some random Turkish wrap that was TO DIE FOR, and we all went to the grocery store.

Now you are probably wondering why we went to the grocery store at that late hour. Everyone told us that the city shuts down on the actual New Years day, so we should get all the food, water, and wine that we needed to live though the day. Not knowing any better we did as we were told, and returned home with a bunch of food. The following day about 60% of everything was open. Lesson to be learned? Mc Donald’s never closes, and most people have no idea what they are talking about.

The fireworks were impressive. That being said, I watched them on TV. Not wanting to risk being late for our flight to the Philippines later in the evening (and also not wanting to walk a mile to see it) we stayed in my room with some Tsingdao and could even hear the show from my bed.

Chinese New Year was interesting to experience, but not at all what I expected. I guess the Asian restraint was something I should have expected, but I can always count on regular New Years to provide me with the kind of out of control behavior I like to see on TV.

P.S. At this point in my trip I should mention Team 1. Team 1 is the name my group of friends has given ourselves (for reasons I cannot remember), and the six of us are basically my best friends here. The group is comprised of-
• Nick- a hysterically awkward Jew from St. Louis
• Marine- a girl from Paris who is my best drinking buddy
• Natt- a Thai girl who is adorable and pretty much makes everyone happy by smiling and being super Asian
• Nikesh- my half Indian roommate who goes to GW and has an odd obsession with McDonald’s and movies
• David- a super chill guy from the Oklahoma and the only person here from TCU

I pretty much spend everyday with some combination of these people, and would probably be lonely/shoot myself if I didn’t have them to live with, drink with, talk to, and go on trips with.