Touristic reports from a cybercafe

I'm writing to you today from a cyber cafe on my new street. It's full of people playing role player games so I'm surrounded by the sounds of electronic fights, gunshots and frantic clicking of mouses. It's all rather a contrast to the library where everyone on the computers diligently wears their headphones and taps away in silence.

Officially moved out of the youth hostel yesterday and into the flat. It is still very bare and empty, but the mattresses arrived today (hurrah!) so at least now I have something to sleep on, and I've been out to purchase a kettle and mugs for essential cups of tea. I'm surviving on peppermint tea at the minute cause there's no fridge to keep milk in.

Had a lovely weekend last weekend. On the Friday night the Chatteris crew hit Lan Kwai Fong (imagine Ibiza/Corfu/18-20s holiday but with expats of a variety of ages and flashing neon signs in Chinese) to celebrate surviving another week in this crazy city. In Hong Kong the pubs seem to never close and when I got a taxi home at 4 in the morning we actually got stuck in a TRAFFIC jam!

Penelope, Kristy, Amy and Sat on D'Aguillar St near Lan Kwai Fong

Saturday was a bit more relaxed - a few of us went to visit the Man Mo temple on Hong Kong island. It's a temple to the gods of war and literature (I think) and is renowned for the amazing incense coils that hang from it's ceiling. When we arrived the sun was filtering through some slits up near the room and making fantastic sunlit stripes through the incense smoke. Picture perfect camera opportunity but you'll have to wait for the photos (though I believe there are some in the China edition of Lonely Planet if you want a sneak peak). The temple was full of richly decorated shrines and people lighting candles and incense sticks and leaving offerings of fruit and (strangely) takeaway food, but after about 5 minutes the smoke from the incense starts to REALLY hit your eyes and you have to retreat to the street outside.

Incense coils in the Man Mo temple

Sunday I managed to meet up with Georgia (a friend from my Uganda trip) who'd been train-ing her way through Asia. We went on the Star Ferry which is number one on every tourist checklist of Hong Kong. It's very strange to be on a decidedly tourist-y boat and yet have cargo ships going past you. Georgia and I also found our way to Kowloon Park, which is a huge park and apparently has a swimming pool in it that we didn't find. We spent a while sitting in the shade by a duck pond catching up on gossip but decided to move on after a second group of people asked to take photographs with us! I'm used to the kids in Romania last summer constantly asking to take photos, and expected the kids at school here might want to do the same thing, but to be asked to be in photos with complete strangers on a random Sunday afternoon in a city as multi-cultural as Hong Kong was a very strange experience.

The famous Star Ferry

Georgia on the Mid-levels Escalators

Starting school on Monday, but no teaching this week as it's reserved for more orientation. We get to shadow the teachers for a day or two and have to have meetings with the principal and things. Rich and I were taken to school yesterday (Thurs) for an initial meeting with everyone. The meeting was fine and the school staff are really lovely, but finding our way back became a bit of a mission! We waited about 20 minutes for the right bus to come along, and then Rich started just asking each bus if it went to Mong Kok. Eventually one driver took pity on us and told us to come onboard and change on to a 68 later. However, he didn't tell us exactly where to get off so Rich and I found ourselves whizzing down a motorway to an uncertain destination. Luckily, the bus actually went to Tsuen Wan, which I knew was the end of the red MTR (underground) line, so we managed to find our way home eventually. Not to sure how we're going to get back though!

Off to search for a fridge now, and possibly Ikea again as a bit of scouting around has confirmed that it's pretty much the cheapest place to buy home furnishings in Hong Kong.

Bye for now!

Home sweet home?

Might have found a flat. All v.exciting. We just put down a 5 thousand dollar deposit on it and have to pay about another 10 thousand each to get the keys (that's 2 months rent, 1 months deposit, and half a months agents fees) but hopefully all will go well and we will move in next weekend! Hurrah! The flat is on Sai Yee Street in Mongkok. It has one bigger bedroom and one wee bedroom so me and Tom (my new flatmate) will have to draw straws or something but both the bedrooms have lovely big windows and lots of light which makes even the wee room less claustrophobic. The entrance to the flat is inside a bizarre shopping mall type street that is entirely full of photocopying and digital printing stalls, which I guess is handy if I ever decide I urgently need a few hundred business cards made up. No furniture at all in the flat though so it's going to be a bit of an effort furnishing it, especially as all the furniture will have to be dragged in through the photocopying mall, up 4 flights in one lift, across a lobby area, up about 15 steps, up 7 flights (I think) in another lift and then into the flat. Should be fun.

Sai Yee Street

Went to visit my school today which was quite exciting. It's a new school that was only opened last year so the building is all shiny and clean and new and they have lots of exciting stuff like projectors and whiteboards in all the classrooms. Because the school's only been open 2 years, they only have two years of students. We met the new first years today and they were all very enthusiastic and had a much higher level of English than the kids we've been working with the rest of the week. Looking forward to starting teaching now, although the 1 hour commute out to school might tire me out quite a bit.

My School!

Off to find some celebratory dinner now!

Kids and kareoke

Started our proper orientation training on Monday. We spend our mornings learning about different things we can do with the kids, then get an hour and a half (ish) to have lunch and come up with a plan for the 2 forty-five minute sessions we have to run in the afternoon. Monday afternoon was absolute carnage as we were all (about 20 teachers and over 160 teenagers) in one assembly hall trying to carry out our activities in small groups. The kids kept wandering off to join other groups and anyone more than 4 paces away from you couldn't hear what you were saying. Things got a lot better today though as we had them separated out into different classrooms. My activity for the day (with Rich, who I'll be sharing a school with, and Jennifer) was a slightly more complicated version of scrabble called 'Upwords' so our classroom was actually very calm and peaceful, good thing really as it was Rich's birthday yesterday so he was feeling a little worse for wear.

Had my first experience of Hong Kong kareoke last night. It was pretty crazy. There were at least 30 of us in a private party room with shiny metallic wallpaper and big leather couches. To begin with, people were gingerly singing into one mic at a time, but as the evening wore on and the songs got cheesier and cheesier (think Spice Girls, Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys) the group mentality took over and we were all singing along so loudly you couldn't HEAR who had the microphone.

Kareoke party

Went out to look at a few flats this afternoon in an area called Mei Foo which is slightly further out of town than here but a good stop on the KCR line that I need to take out to my school. Hong Kong flats are often kitchenless, so the first one we saw today had 1 single ring to cook on and 2 very small sinks. The room size wasn't too bad though, although maybe that's after my year of living in the box room! Both flats we saw today seemed a little expensive for what we were getting, so we're hoping the letting agency can do some bargaining with the landlord. Expect I'll probably be doing more searching though as others have seen at least 10 flats already and still not found quite what they're looking for. Wish me luck!

Just a few days in

So... day 5 in Hong Kong (I think... I'm still a little confused as to what day and time it is!) and I've just had my first taste of busy Hong Kong markets and shopping malls.

We spent the first few days out of town near Ma On Shan at a YWCA summer camp site. I went swimming in the outdoor pool in the dark, which feels pretty bizarre, and we visited Sai Kun which is a little town on the coast known for it's fish restaurants. We walked along the front and each restaurant looks a little like an aquarium with massive tanks outside full of fish, lobsters, sea anemones, crabs and weird slug like creatures. I took a photo of one so hopefully I can load that up sometime in the future. There wasn't much to do on that day trip except wander around town, as it was raining (it's been doing that a LOT so far) so we had a little wander. We somehow got ourselves into some narrow backstreets (just wide enough for an umbrella) that seemed to wind in all directions. At the end of one we came across a little tiled shrine with incense sticks burning on it, whilst half way down another I saw a shop selling apple computers! I suspect that's the way Hong Kong's going to be - lots of traditions and religious stuff co-existing with new technology.

Sea food!

We moved into a more central location yesterday, a youth hostel near Mong Kok in Kowloon, which is going to be our home for till the end of the month. It's nice to wander round the streets and see them full of lighted adverts and signposts that look just like the pictures in the guidebooks. We've also had our first experiences of the MTR (the underground network) which seems amazingly clean and efficient. All the stations are cool and air-conditioned and have shiny tiled floors and the platforms have glass panels that separate you from the train tracks and sliding doors that open exactly in the same location as those on the train. The trains themselves seem really long and bizarrely have no doors to separate the carriages. I haven't been brave enough to take a photo on one yet but I'm sure I'll get round to it.

On the MTR

More news next week when I'll have been out searching for a flat!