Dispatches from Hong Kong: Part 2

Day 2

(Photo: Hong Kong Nights, from my balcony)

My goal for my second day in Hong Kong was simple: don’t go to sleep. It seems easy enough at first blush, but trust me, it isn’t. My body is fighting me as I try to adapt to this inverted time zone. Yesterday, after I got back from my walk, I planed to head into the city and start to feel my way around. It was about 12:30pm and I decided to lay down for a sec, big mistake. 10 hours later…. I awoke to find that not only had I wasted the day, but I’ve also thrown off my ability to get on schedule for another day. So, I Skyped with the family for a while, cooked some food, did some dishes, worked on a blog post and watched my one TV station to pass the time. Quick aside: CNN International is so much better than the US version, it’s shameful. But this only got me to about 3am, so I took some sleeping pills and slept until 5am. My promise to myself was that I would not go to sleep again until this evening. So, now you understand the reasoning for my simple but vital goal.

In order to succeed in my plan, I had to get out of the house. For the time being, my apartment only gets one TV station and I don’t have Internet service. My sponsor has been kind enough to allow me to come over to his unit anytime I want to get on the web until I can figure out how to obtain service for myself, but I don’t want to wear out my welcome. So, that means that there isn’t much to pass the time at home. I have plenty of books, but if I’m tired I cannot read, it just hastens my slumber. So, I gotta get out of here.

Since I don’t have web service once I leave the compound, I have to study my Google maps well for the journey ahead. I’d like to take another quick detour to thank God for those fine folks at Google, by the way. I don’t know how anybody found anything in unfamiliar cities before GPS. Consider that for hundreds of years, people would just sail blindly into the night, over entire oceans, not knowing what they would find on the other side, if anything. The courage that takes… staggering.

So, armed with the bus schedule I wander down the hill and make the first of what would be many routing errors of the day. While I found the right bus stop and the right bus, I got on going the wrong direction. No problem, I thought, I have no schedule today, I’ll just ride the circuit and get to my stop eventually. These busses, its important to note, are the huge double decker variety. So, I was seated on the top deck, in the front row with my knees pressed against the glass to get the best view possible. I also had my headphones blaring while I enjoyed the scenery.

(Photo: view of Hong Kong from my 2nd-floor bus seat)

This, however, reduced my ability to be aware of my surroundings. I couldn’t see what was happening behind be or below me, nor could I hear any announcement being made. After a while, once the bus turned around to head back the way it came, I noticed that it hadn’t stopped in a while. I turned around to find that I was the only person on the bus, which was standing-room-only when I had first gotten on. Uh-oh, I thought. I began to think the bus is out of service and the driver has no idea I’m up here. But since I had been staring at the maps a lot the past few days, I noticed he was heading towards downtown which is where I wanted to be anyway, so I decided not to alert him to my presence until we got downtown. Once we got to the bus depot, I came downstairs, to his great shock, and asked if I could kindly get off here, please. He was happy to be rid of me. He didn’t even allow me to pay, “Just get out of here!” I imagined him thinking. To my great fortune, the bus depot was across the street from the stop I was hoping to get off on all along. So, it took me an hour longer than it should, but I made it.

The place I was heading was a restaurant called Tim Ho Wan. I classmate at AU spent a great deal of time in Hong Kong and couldn’t speak more highly of this place. “It changed my life,” he’d tell me. “I still have dreams about it.” A bit hyperbolic, to be sure, but it seemed as good a place as any to have my first locally bought meal. It isn’t the type of place you would stumble on just walking by; it is tucked away in a train-station/shopping mall. But once you find it, you know you’re in the right place. The place was spilling with people; it looked like the Apple store on a new product launch day.

(Tim Ho Wan, poppin' off)

Every other restaurant around it had 3-4 people eating there, but Tim Ho Wan had an hour-long wait. I think these other restaurants are only here to catch the residual business for people who come there to eat at Tim but don’t have time to wait. I then started asking people in line what the process for getting a table was because the scene was hectic and the process was hard to discern. I met a nice couple from Sydney, Benny and Nichola, who showed me the ropes. Their number was about 20 spots higher than mine and they said they’d been waiting 45 minutes already. So I settled in for the long wait. But to my surprise, when they were called for their table a few minutes later, they were given a table for three for the two of them and they invited me to come sit with them. Lets take a moment to tip our hats to the kindness of strangers. The world is a better place with folks like this in it.

(My new friends, Benny and Nichola)

(the famed Pork Buns and Steamed Rice Rolls)

The meal was great. I would stop short of calling it life changing, but it was worth the wait and lived up to the hype. It was the perfect opening salvo in what I hope to be a parade of culinary delights in Hong Kong.

It was now about 1pm and I still had more time to kill before I could go home. I decided to see if I could catch a flick before heading home. The free Wi-Fi in the train station was a godsend. I’ve found that there aren’t as many public Wi-Fi spots as I was expecting. Maybe its because there are 7 million people in this city and they want to discourage loitering, or maybe the culture is different, but not even the Starbucks I found had it. The train station and the mall have been the only two places I’ve seen with free Wi-Fi and they limit you to 5 sessions a day at 15-30 minutes each time. They clearly don’t want you hanging out on their bandwidth. But the 15 minutes was long enough for me to find the nearest theater and route my way. The surprising thing I found during my walk to the mall was that there were hundreds of women sitting on cardboard boxes underneath the overpasses. It was a confusing scene because they weren’t panhandling, and they were all dressed well enough with enough new-looking consumer products that it was obvious that they were not homeless, but there they were by the hundreds. What were they doing here, I wondered.

(These women had nowhere else to go)

It was explained to me later that these are the Filipina domestic servants of the Hong Kong elite. Sundays are their days off and they have nowhere to hang out—Hong Kong has a surprising lack of places to sit and relax—so they build these makeshift cubbies and spend the day here. That was surprising to me. A city as rich as this one should surely be doing a better job of providing public spaces for its residents to meet. 

I ended up walking the wrong direction for a while, so I ended up taking the famed Hong Kong subway back where I needed to be to make up time. The system lives up to the hype and puts every US transit system to shame. The only US parallel you can draw is the trains at Disney world. Sleek, pristine, smooth, and quiet. Its hard to believe that this system transports millions of people daily. The Stations look like someone just mopped it 10 minutes ago. Wide-screen TVs are stationed every few feet to entertain you while you wait for the trains.

(I was surprised that Mickey Mouse never showed up to sell me something while I waited for the train)

On the trains themselves, instead of only providing a map of the system and leaving it up to you to figure out where you are and what direction you’re headed, these trains have maps that show you where you are and where you’re going. They even have a light that tells you if you’re facing the side of the train that the doors will open on next or not. Very impressive, Hong Kong.

I made it to my movie just in time and enjoyed 2-hours of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson saving the world in San Andreas. If you’re from California, however, don’t watch it. It will terrify you. You guys built a civilization on a bomb, by the looks of things.

The trip home provided the most important lesson of the day, however. I found the bus station I needed and was there as my bus approached only to watch it sail right by me. Curious, I thought, I’m pretty sure that is not how this works. It turns out that in Hong Kong there are several bus lines that share the bus stations, so from the bus driver’s point of view, just because there is someone standing at your stop doesn’t mean that they’re waiting for you. So, you have to flag the busses down. A few minutes observing the other passengers made this clear. So, that mistake cost me 30 minutes, but I made it home nonetheless. I was excited to prepare for my first day of work the next day and then getting to bed early. I had succeeded in not going to bed all day and I was surely going to be on schedule now. I had been up since 5am and went to bed at 9pm with a 6:30am alarm set for the morning.

At 2:30am, however, my body had apparently had enough sleeping. This was going to be an interesting first day….