Kite flying and Halloween

It's nearly the end of October and things in Hong Kong are starting to get more routine. I no longer expect to be cold when I leave a building and I'm used to people exclaiming 'waaaah!' when they're amazed by something. But there's still plenty to be explored...

Last weekend was lovely and chilled out. On the Saturday I went to the Hong Kong museum of history to get a bit of culture and then headed out to Stanley on the south of Hong Kong Island with Rachel and Scott. Stanley feels a bit like a Mediterranean seaside town, with a market in some winding streets and a promenade full of bars and restaurants. I had an expensive chilled cider outside a bar called the Boathouse whilst Rachel and Scott tested out their offer on fish and chips! The chips, sadly, turned out to be potato wedges, but were quite tasty nonetheless.

On the Sunday there was a Chatteris outing to a place called Tai Mei Tuk in the east of the New Territories. It's an area with a big reservoir and we were all able to really appreciate the clearer 'country' air, particularly since the weather's been getting a little cooler recently. We went rowing on the reservoir, attempted some fishing (no-one caught anything!), cycled along the reservoir wall and flew some kites before retiring to a quirky little pasta restaurant for a good feed. The views from the reservoir wall were beautiful and the breeze coming off the water is just perfect for kite flying. The cycling was a little more dangerous due to the large amount of bike traffic, including some interesting bicycle-buggy type things with stripey canopies that reminded me of Victorian beach huts. All in all a really lovely day.

My rowing skills.

The chaotic cycling route

Kites at sunset

This weekend Hong Kong is celebrating Halloween. Apparently trick-or-treating/guising is not a big thing here, but everyone still likes to get dressed up and party. Nicole (one of my teachers) invited me to a party at the Hard Rock Cafe last night as one of her friends had dropped out at the last minute so I went along. The restaurant was covered with spider webs, big furry spiders and spooky looking paintings in gold frames. There was free face painting, a special halloween menu and a show going on with a bunch of entertainers in crazy costumes. The show was all in Cantonese, but that somehow made the whole experience more chaotic and exciting, and Nicole and her friends (who are all trained English teachers) tried to translate things into English for me (when they understood what was going on!). The Hard Rock party finished around midnight and I took Nicole along to meet up with some Chatteris people at a party. I think she enjoyed it, although she may have been a little overwhelmed at the large number of people, especially as everyone was dressed up and looking even odder than usual!

Scary teachers at Hard Rock Cafe

Today shall be more relaxed day. I'm off to do some shopping as we got paid this week!

I bought a plant!

Beds and booking flights

My bed has (finally) arrived from Ikea! It's made my bedroom seem a little smaller, but at least now I can store stuff underneath it, and it feels a bit more like a home than a rented room now.

In other exciting news... I've booked flights to Borneo for Christmas! I'm going to Kota Kinabalu with Rachel and we might try to climb a mountain if we can get a permit. It'll be the rainy season when we're their, so we might not spend too much time sunning ourselves on the beautiful tropical beaches, but there seems to be plenty in the area to keep us occupied.

Other than that, I haven't been up to much since my last blog. At the weekend it was the Lan Kwai Fong carnival, which made the hectic expat area that is Lan Kwai fong even MORE busy than usual. It was nice to see such a mix of cultures there though, and especially nice to hear European voices that weren't British, for a change. The streets were all decorated with hanging, winged mannequins wearing sequinned, burlesque lingerie and street stalls with luridly coloured feather boas.

Getting into the carnival spirit

On Sunday afternoon I went out exploring to Kowloon Walled City Park. It's an area in the East of Kowloon that used to be a walled city, turned into a lawless ghetto and was eventually bulldozed to the ground and turned into a landscaped park. The park is all carefully designed (apparently in the Qing style) and is very relaxing and easy on the eye. You can almost feel the flow of the plants and pagodas improving your chi. I say almost, because, having appreciated the beauty of the part and explored all of its 8 different areas, I decided to sit in a secluded spot and read a book for ten minutes, and promptly got attacked by biting insects. The 12 bites on one leg (there are more on the other one) managed to shatter my tranquil state and sent me running back to my room in Mongkok with the aircon on full blast.

The Bonsai Garden

Peaceful Pagodas and Pools

Cheese

This evening I spent $100 making a cheese sandwich. It's not as bad as it sounds, HK$100 is around 8 pounds (Hong Kong laptops don't come with pound keys!) and I bought a whole baguette, plus a block of cheddar, a packet of chorizo and an entire lettuce, so I'll get at least 3 meals out of it. Plus, the sandwich was very tasty!

Jude and Fiona's visit went brilliantly, although it left me a bit exhausted! We spent Saturday on a 'junk boat' trip with everyone from Chatteris. Sadly, 'junk boat' is term applied to all sorts of boats out here, so we were on a modern speedboat rather than an ancient, red-sailed wooden one, but we did go off and moor (park, for the non-nautical) in a bay beside an uninhabited island and Jude and I went swimming in the south china sea.

Fiona and Jude on the boat

Chatteris overboard!

On Sunday I took Jude and Fiona to The Flying Pan in Central for breakfast. It's a 24-hour American style diner which does full fried breakfasts, pancakes, waffles and smoked salmon bagels. We needed a good breakfast to fuel up for our trip to the 10 000 Buddhas monastery in Sha Tin. The monastery is up on top of a hill, but the steep, winding path to get there is lined with statues of Buddha in various guises, so you have something to distract you from the climb, although the best statues are saved for when you get to the top. Eventually the path levels out and there's a beautiful big temple, the insides of which are encrusted with miniature models of Buddha, each one with it's own little spotlight. Buddhist temples are so rich and colourful compared to churches at home and this one looks quite decadent with all it's gold and red. We met up with Pollina, Rachel and Scott (more Chatteris people) at the monastery. They had come up by a different pathway (which wasn't lined with Buddhas) so we took it back down and managed to hear, and (eventually) spot two big monkeys on the way!

Jude takes the hike in her stride

The inside of the temple

(it's a bit blurry because there's no flash allowed)

Intrepid Buddha Spotters

On Monday, it was National Day, which meant a holiday from school for me... and MORE Buddha spotting with Jude and Fiona! We took the MTR to Lantau Island to meet up with Nicole (one of my fellow teachers) and go in search of the Big Buddha. The Big Buddha was built in the 1950s but is one of the biggest freestanding outdoor Buddhas in the world. It's a pretty impressive sight, and somehow a lot less ugly and Blackpool-illuminations-like than a lot of the Buddhas in Sha Tin. The Big Buddha is also on the top of a hill, so we were able to enjoy a bit of a breeze and appreciate the green countryside of Lantau, which is much less densely populated than Kowloon (where I live) and Hong Kong Island. Nicole also took us to visit the fishing village of Tai O where lots of people live in huts on stilts and the streets are crammed full of stalls selling dried fish. It's a little bit smelly but amazing to find yourself in an actual, traffic-less village only an hour away from the craziness of Mong Kok.

Big Buddha on the hill

Drying fish

Tai O stilt houses

Jude and Fiona left on Tuesday morning and it was back to school as usual for me. We're slowly getting more out-of-class activities going on in school, which is great.


I took a break from tourist activities last weekend, after being a bit buddha-d out, and spent it trying to pay rent, buying 2 new t-shirts and going for a swim in Kowloon Park instead. The outdoor pool closes in November so I only have this month to experience swimming in the warm, musky air of a Hong Kong evening surrounded by the city lights (and the Hong Kong Scout headquarters!).


Can't believe we're nearly a third of the way through this school term already! I really SHOULD start learning all the kids names...