Having Fun All The Time

Before coming to Hong Kong, I naturally booked the cheapest hostel I could find. It’s called the New Peking Guest House, located on Kowloon (the peninsula north of Hong Kong Island, considered part of HK but not the island), which has turned out to be the epicenter of tourist traps in HK. 

That’s a bit of an exagerration. The area is not too bad…it’s very city-ish, lots of foot traffic and plenty of large financial buildings around. Certainly not everyone here is a tourist. But it turns out that just about every young person who comes to HK on a budget stays in the Chungking mansions, which is the large building of hostels where my guest house is located, and so a small unregulated market of guys that appear to generally be Indian and African have cropped up in the area, most of whom are relentlessly hawking watches, rooms in cheaper hostels, and a variety of other “goods”, both lascivious and pharmacological. Once you walk a little ways down the street this stuff quickly dissipates, and the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon is just a relatively expensive downtown-y area full of clothing stores, malls and restaurants. So that’s the first thing I saw when I came to HK.

I got to the hostel in the evening, though, and pretty quickly went to bed. Before I went to bed, however, I tried to contact someone on CouchSurfing.com, which turned out to be an incredibly wise move. 

Before I had even fallen asleep the person, a girl whose CouchSurfing page said she was into books and would be happy to show anyone around HK, had written me back, and the next day I wrote her back, and finally we set a time to meet that evening. This was great. I had only been in HK one day and already I was gonna get to make a friend. 

That day, which was Thursday, I took the subway across the harbor to HK Island with the idea of taking the tram to the peak of Victoria Peak. But when I got there I decided it was too foggy to even bother. So I sat and had a cup of coffee. An older couple, maybe in their fifties, came and sat down in the cafe across from me. So I asked them where they were from. The man, in good English with a German accent, told me that they were from Germany. He had a cousin living in Idaho. A son living in South America. They were on a two week vacation and had started four days ago in Frankfort (sp?). Next they were going to Macau, and then Australia. They had also come to take the tram and then decided not to. I told them that I had read that you could go to the 43rd floor of the Bank of China building, which was right next to us, and check out the observation deck they had there for free. So, we all decided to go. 

The deck was kind of lame, but not entirely pointless. Only one corner of the building is open to the public, so you basically just get a view of the harbor. But it was a pretty nice view, with a view of the enormous 2 International Finance Center building.

2 International Finance Center, 2IFC, is the tallest building in HK and apparently the 7th tallest office building in the world. See it? It's that pointy one. I didn't take this picture, obviously.

I asked the German dude his name, it was Axel, which is perhaps the coolest name ever. He was originally from Homberg (sp?) and was interested in my experience in China so I happily filled him in. Then I said goodbye to them and went back to the hostel to drop some stuff before meeting my new CouchSurfing friend. 

The CouchSurfing friend experience was awesome. Her name was Tif and she was friendly from the get-go. She had clearly shown people from CS around HK before, because she immediately was in tour-guide mode and didn’t totally drop the tour-guide thing the whole time. Which I didn’t mind at all, because she was telling me interesting stuff about HK. She pointed me to the light show on the harbor that happens every night, that I will post pictures of when I return to Sanming and can upload pictures from my camera. She told me about SoHo and how to get there, which I explored two days later and turned out to be the coolest part of HK I have seen so far, she took me on the ferry, which crosses the harbor from Kowloon to Central and is about a million times more fun than taking the subway, and after we wandered around the night market, which I will also post pictures of later, she took me to HK Island to go to a hookah bar, which, who wouldn’t love to go to a hookah bar in Hong Kong. Seriously. 

I also recited poetry with another person for the first time ever. She was talking about how she really likes Saul Williams, and apparently I had had enough beer to recite some Hart Crane and Robert Frost at her. So then I was glad that she responded in kind with some Saul Williams, because otherwise I wouldn’t have realized that it is actually pretty awesome to listen to someone recite poetry, and would have felt foolish for actually reciting poetry at a hookah bar. It’s a really entertaining form of conversation. It just takes a willingness to shelve one’s self-consciousness momentarily. 

So, then, after haggling with some taxi drivers, I went home and slept pretty well until the next morning. Since then I have walked about 20 miles throughout Hong Kong, exploring a ton of it on foot, but of course none of it is as fun when you do it by yourself. It’s interesting, sure, and you get to see some cool things, but always as someone who is totally foreign to everything around him. Always with no sense of belonging to any of the stuff you’re witnessing (which is a feeling you get to have when you walk around with a local, who knows it and lives it every day). 

Today it started raining cats and dogs, so I have even given up on walking around. I went to the movies and watched the film about Confucius, and had dinner. Apparently I’m staying here for another five days-ish, at which point I’ll be able to head back to the mainland, which is a very good thing because eating in HK is way, way too expensive for me. And the 3000 RMB the school promised to reimburse me for this trip has already come and gone like it was nothing (which really, HK costs as much as the U.S., and 3000 RMB is about $400; imagine traveling as a tourist to any U.S. city; how long would $400 last you?).

Peace out till next time. 

: )