Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
The first destination in my summer itinerary was Hong Kong. This was to be a girls' mini-break for me, Beth and Cat, although we'd have more company in the form of the two PT volunteers we were staying with in Hong Kong, Callum and Jeremy. Despite the best efforts of my phone, which now freezes frequently for indefinite amounts of time, I managed to meet with the girls at Shenzhen station, the point from which we'd cross the border into Hong Kong. I've been very excited about this for a long time because my passport is in dire need of some stamps to liven it up!
Crossing the border was really easy, and you could tell the moment you'd passed into Hong Kong territory because suddenly everything was that little bit cleaner and shinier. Most excitingly, the shops around us no longer sold bags of chicken feet and dried fish to munch on, they sold sandwiches! And Dairy Milk! Salt and vinegar crisps were still scarce (sob) but the farce that is seaweed flavoured crisps had disappeared in favour of sensible things like Sour Cream & Onion, and pizza flavour. The public buses and subway system which we spent the next three hours navigating in order to reach the boys' accommodation in Sai Kung were also lovely and clean, free of urinating toddlers, dead livestock and all those other things native to Chinese public transport. Magical!
Sai Kung, where Callum and Jeremy live, is in Hong Kong's new territories. It's pretty inconvenient: always a long subway ride from wherever you need to go, and their accommodation is another bus ride away from the actual town of Sai Kung as well. The pay-off for all the commuting is that the Sai Kung area is really beautiful. There are trees everywhere, the sea is always in sight and it's blue even when the sky is grey. Not that we went out to make the most of this though! One of the boys' roommates, Chris, was in when we arrived and two more guys who work with them at Outward Bound, RT and Shaun, arrived shortly after so we ended up hanging out with them, watching films and eating all their food all afternoon. We ordered an enormous pizza for tea and, as it had been decided that we'd all go out that night so the boys could show us the Hong Kong nightlife, we all started drinking immediately after. (We'd first been handed mugs of rum and coke at 5 o'clock which triggered some concerned looks between us as we'd agreed to stay out until the metro began running again at 6am the next morning.)
By the time we headed out at 9ish, we'd accumulated quite a big group. First - well, after about an hour on various subways - we went to Wan Chai bar district, and what appeared to be the only non-strip club in the area. Seriously, most of the roads were just full of flashing neon lights and girls sat outside on stools in hot pants and crop tops calling, and sometimes reaching, out to any and every guy that passed. 0/10 for subtlety. The bar we went to, Carnegies, was much more respectable and really good fun. We collided with an enormous party of Extreme Frisbee players in Noah's Ark-themed fancy dress and spent most of our time dancing on the bar. There were guys dressed as camels risking a 4-foot fall with the violence of their dance moves, and other people struggling to dance whilst attached to giraffe rubber ring so it was just brilliant. Next we got in taxis to the Lan Kwai Fong clubbing district which was humming with crowds and crowds of people. I couldn't even count how many clubs we visited, but the coolest was one called Azowa on the 29th floor of a skyscraper with floor-to-ceiling windows so you could look out on the Hong Kong skyline whilst you danced. I lost the others for about 20 minutes here because I skipped off obliviously into the VIP area to take photos of the view and the bouncers wouldn't let them in after me. By the time I'd given up on my photos, they'd all been swallowed by the crowd and I had to wander about for ages before I managed to bump into them. The last club we went to was much less fancy, but they played good music and had an excellent air-con system (not to be sniffed at when the local humidity is so bad!) so we stayed there for hours. We would have stayed longer but the night was brought to an abrupt end when a ran up to Chris outside and smashed him around the side of the face with a bottle. They'd had a minor confrontation earlier over whether or not Chris had knocked into him in the club, but there was no real reason for it. A number of scuffles broke out as other people on the street ran after this guy and as his friends ran in to defend him, we had to give statements to the police and Chris had to go to hospital to get stitches. Eek.
Sunday was our designated girls' shopping day. The highlight was meant to be Topshop, which had just opened its first Hong Kong store the week before, but this was actually quite a let-down: cramped and crowded and more expensive than we'd remembered. Forever 21, however, was five shiny floors of shopping fabulousness and we were all able to equip ourselves with exciting new clothes for our next night out in Hong Kong, planned for Monday night. We cooked spaghetti for everyone in the evening and stayed up watching films, chatting and fighting exhaustion (we were all running on minimal amounts of sleep) until stupid o'clock (4am. Ugh).
We managed our first lie-in on Monday and then caught the bus into Sai Kung for a late lunch of fish and chips. Fish and chips! They even had tartare sauce and malt vinegar, it was beautiful. We were meant to spend the rest of the day sight-seeing, Victoria Peak being our top priority, but it cloudy enough that we wouldn't have been able to see the views anyway so we revised these plans. Instead, we went down to the harbour and then walked back along the Avenue of Stars. This is essentially the Asian equivalent of Hollywood's Walk of Fame, but Jackie Chan's and Bruce Lee's were the only names we recognised and besides, most of the stars didn't even have hand-prints - we think because the Avenue is so recent an addition that many of the actors recognised died before it was made. We did meet two girls who offered to make an instant black-and-white photograph of us beside the sea though, and we got to witness a loud but uneventful confrontation between a van-ful of policemen and a group of young Chinese guys with crazy hairstyles. Maybe my favourite part of the outing was spotting the names of the shop assistants in a pharmacy: Wing, Ping and... Doris.
It was a smaller group that made it out on Monday night: just me, Beth, Cat, Jeremy and RT, and nowhere was as busy as it had been before, but we had a really funny night regardless. Beth and I dominated the dancefloor with our new favourite game, Dance Like A Sea-Creature, the highlights of which are probably The Seahorse, The Whale and The Crab. We were both pleasantly surprised to find that we were able to coax several other people in the club into joining in with these moves, and various other non-animal-related-but-still-ridiculous moves.
We had to be up in good time on Tuesday to make our way back to Shenzhen station. We were all absolutely shattered, but we all loved Hong Kong. I don't exactly know why, I think it's it's partly that it's so busy and full of things to do and partly because it's so much more used to Westerners and Western culture that we're able to feel much more at home than in China - where people turn to stare at us in the street and try to slyly take photos of us when we sit down near them! (I'm writing this on another train journey and the man on the bunk next to me has rolled over on his side to stare at me. I'm pretty sure the weird angle he's holding his phone at means he's taking a photo of me too.) The difference between China and Hong Kong was even more obvious when we crossed back through to Shenzhen: suddenly there was no air-con anymore, the men were wandering about with their shirts hoiked up under the armpit to air their stomachs and there was a tramp by the station doors throwing chewed up seeds at people...
- comments
Jim Sounds wonderfully non-cultural and hedonistic. Will your friends and family ever get to see you throwing shapes as part of dance like a sea creature, you party animal you. I'm supposed to print this out for your grandparents, so they can read for themselves the mature world citizen that you've become. LOL!!
Jo Remember, Uncle Benny impersonates an angel fish as a party trick - the genes will out! XX