Nearing the end

5 weeks till the end of the Hong Kong adventure. Time is beginning to drag a little bit now and I'm beginning to think of things that will be so much more convenient in Britain. I got was waiting on the lift with my favourite security guard the other day (he is old and small and wrinkly and always smiles and buzzes the gate open for me!) and he said hello and asked if I was a teacher, and then said something else... but I couldn't understand him! I'm sure he was trying to speak English, but I just couldn't make out what his question was and we spent the whole of the journey to the 11th floor in the lift being awkwardly silent. Whilst in Britain I probably won't have a security guard, and if I did he probably wouldn't be so friendly, I am looking forward to understanding the conversations that other people have in lifts rather than standing in the corner feeling like a mono-lingual colonialist.


Still... even after all these months in Hong Kong, there are things left to see, so I've been trying to shake the negative feelings off by going and seeing them!


Last weekend I went for brunch at the Fringe Club, as suggested on this list of HK brunch venues http://www.hiphongkong.com/restaurants/brunch_restaurants_hong_kong.htm (I've also been to the Brunch Club and would recommend both!) with Jennifer, Olisa and Lily. It costs $99 for the brunch buffet, but that includes eggs, bacon and a sausage as well as helping of cereal, fruit salad, fried stuff, toast and (strangely) curry! The brunch is served in the Rooftop Terrace and last Sunday was just the right level of humidity for sitting on a rooftop fringed with palm trees in pots and pretended to be on holiday. Afterwards, I took Jennifer and Olisa to see the Zoological and Botanical Gardens, as they'd never been. The lemurs were cute and the jaguar was visible (for a change) but the mosquitoes were also very active. My big tip for visiting the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens is.... WEAR MOSQUITO REPELLANT!

Brunching at the Fringe

School this week has been a frenzy of painters and cleaners and rehearsals for the big Official Opening Ceremony on Saturday. It was possibly the most organised school event I have ever participated in, with the whole of Friday afternoon dedicated to a full school rehearsal and the school providing the front row of the choral speaking team with new socks so that all the socks looked the exact same length from the audience. I spent most of the day running around backstage, helping Carrie (one of the local teachers) with the choral speaking team, although I did get to go on-stage and talk through a powerpoint introducing the drama club performance. After the big day, Mr Poon (our school principal) took all the staff out for a meal to celebrate. As Nicole (another local teacher) explained - British people go out to the pub and keep drinking all night, Hong Kong people go out to a restaurant and keep eating all night!

Video of our dinner table

So Sunday was my day off this weekend, and I went on an afternoon adventure to Cheung Chau with Olisa and Jennifer. Cheung Chau is one of the more accessible of Hong Kong's islands - ferries leave from Central every half hour - and is apparently where a lot of Hong Kong locals go to hang out at weekends and public holidays. The waterfront town where you arrive is vaguely reminiscent of a British seaside resort, with stalls selling sarongs and flipflops and shells made into humour looking animals, but then you wander a little further from the ferry terminal and find yourself surrounded by bicycles, boats and boards of fish drying in the sun, which would never happen in Britain! It was like a breath of fresh air to see a horizon devoid of skyscrapers and hear the sounds of insects and bicycle bells instead of car horns and beeping pedestrian crossings (although in Hong Kong, the air is anything BUT fresh!). We wandered along the coastal path and didn't find the beach until a bit too late, but it was a lovely day out.

Strange looking rocks on Cheung Chau

Drying Fish

Today I was also off work. Schools in Hong Kong seem to have a habit of having a recovery day after any major event (sports days, swimming galas...) so today was to recover from the Official Opening. I had to visit the Hong Kong Police HQ in Wanchai to arrange a police check for my teaching course next year, but was also determined to go and visit the bank buildings which are mentioned in my guidebook. The Bank of China tower is my favourite building in the HK skyline and today I finally got to go up and visit the viewing platform on its 43rd floor. The views were pretty good as today was cloudy rather than smoggy, though the glass windows were annoyingly reflective. I then popped in to the Bank of China's arch-rival - the HSBC. My guidebook tells me that whilst the HSBC building has some of the best feng shui in town, the Bank of China building's crazy lines and points and triangles send bad vibes out in its direction. Personally, I think the HSBC looks like an evil headquarters from a sci-fi film, but I wandered underneath anyway and survived my escalator ride to the 1st floor and back (although the security guards looked at me a bit oddly).

View from the 43rd floor of the Bank of China

Inside the skeletal HSBC building

Things to do in a Level 3 Typhoon

It's a Level 3 typhoon warning in HK today, which means lots of rain (the kind that soaks you by rebounding off the ground whilst you hide under your umbrella) and gusty winds, so I'm staying inside for a little while and thought I might post a few photos.

Reflections on Nathan Road

Bamboo Scaffolding! They're doing repair work to my building

How to Behave in a Hong Kong Park

I've started working Saturdays, which is rather tiring! I'm teaching a 6 week 'Phonological Awareness' course on Saturday mornings in Causeway Bay. The girls I teach are lovely and the lessons involve lots of silly songs which is fun, but it's still an effort to get out of bed on a Saturday morning. To add to that, next Saturday is my school's Official Opening Ceremony so today and last Saturday I had to go straight from Causeway Bay to Tin Shui Wai to help with the choral speaking team practice. I can't really complain though as the local teacher who I was helping had been in all morning doing drama club rehearsals and is taking a group of drama club students to a perfomance tonight which finishes at about midnight! People out here work an incredible amount. I don't think I could keep up if I had an ordinary Hong Kong job.

Last week's excitement was that Oasis Hong Kong airlines went into liquidation, meaning that I (along with lots of the other people I work with) had to rebook my flight home. It's quite disappointing as Oasis were great - their flights were constantly reasonably priced and although they were 'budget' you still got meals and drinks and a blanket and pillow on your flight. Apparently they were losing money on practically all their flights so I can't understand why they didn't make some changes earlier to try and recoup their losses. There are various forms to fill in to try to reclaim the money I spent booking the ticket but I'm pretty exhausted at the minute so putting all the phonecalls off till next week.


Tom that Rachel and I met at the Great Wall in China is passing through Hong Kong this weekend, so we've been showing him around in the evenings. Last night we went for dinner at a stall in Temple Street Market. It's in all the guidebooks as an authentic Hong Kong experience to have, so I found it quite amusing that all the tables around us were full of tourists!

A very civilised dinner at Temple St Market

Beijing - the City of Multiple Palaces with Auspicious and Prosperous Names

My weekend in Beijing was fun. Exhausting, but fun. Rachel and I didn't have time to take in all the usual tourist sites, so there was no hope of us getting a taste of 'real' Beijing, but everything we visited seemed to have more than it's fair share of Chinese tourists so the experience wasn't as 'Disneyfied' as I'd read in some guidebooks.

We flew into Beijing on Thursday night and took the airport shuttle bus into town (something I'd highly recommend if you don't want to spend a fortune on a taxi) and then a taxi to our hostel (http://www.xihuahotel.com/eng/zhide/index.asp) where we enthused over the TV in our twin room and then promptly went to sleep. When you're on a weekend tourist mission you don't have much time for bars and clubbing!

Friday was Ching Ming Festival, which was a public holiday, so the Forbidden City (or Palace Museum as the signposts in Beijing call it) was swarming with visitors. This doesn't detract from the immensity of the various palaces and halls inside the city, or the huge courtyards in between them, but it does add to the sense of claustrophobia when you've taken a few turns through the narrower alleyways and then find yourself face to face with a few locked gates. I'm not sure what I was expecting of the Forbidden City, but it didn't really fill me with awe. I could be impressed by the scale of the buildings and admire the intricate details and paintwork on the roofs, but perhaps it was all just too big to take in at once. The most interesting bit was an exhibition in one of the smaller, shadier courtyards, about the imperial concubines! It was full of little artefacts like snuff bottles and dominos that you could connect with on a human scale.

Me in the Forbidden City

Crowds between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Gate

From the Forbidden City, we joined the flow of tourists gushing out the Tiananmen Gate, under the 6-lane freeway and back up on the other side in Tiananmen Square. The square was sprinkled with groups of tourists, in between which there were very serious marching guards in their green uniforms and little yellow camper-van shaped vehicles emptying the rubbish bins. I smiled at some little kids running around with Chinese flags and their mum asked me and Rachel to be in some photographs with them!

Tiananmen Gate from Tiananmen Square

In our attempt to conquer as much of Beijing as possible in one day, Rachel and I then caught a taxi (which we overpaid for as we tried to bargain instead of using the meter!) to the Temple of Heaven in Tiantan park. The temple is another impressive building with a beautiful roof, this time in blue and gold rather than the reds and yellows of the Forbidden City. The park around the temple immediately seemed a million miles away from the buzz of the city centre, even though we'd been less than 15 minutes in our taxi to get there. We heard some music and joined the crowd around a group of (I assume) amateur musicians playing traditional Chinese instruments for a few songs. The crowd and the group really seemed to be enjoying the music and they smiled at us as if bemused that foreigners would be interested in the show. We did take some time to admire the beautiful buildings in the park, but the best bit was when we copied the locals and stretched out on a patch of grass in the shade of some trees. There is very little grass in Hong Kong so to find a whole lawn of it in Beijing was a great suprise, especially as the grass was really lush and green and springy. The park is planted with lots of ancient cypress trees and has long treelined avenues that reminded me of the jardins in Paris.

The Temple of Heaven

Paris or Beijing?

After our busy day, Rachel and I set out in search of some Peking Duck for dinner. The hostel recommended a restaurant to us, but it had a 30 minute wait and wasn't cheap at all so we checked out a few more places close to the Dong'an night market (where they sell interesting things on sticks). We eventually settled on a place that would do us half a duck, but it turned out to be mostly fat with a bit of skin and a hint of meat so we were quite disappointed really.

On Day 2, we were in our hostel lobby at 6:15 to head out to the Great Wall of China. The bus took about 3 hours and was filled with a French school group, which Rachel was eager to leave as soon as we started walking. We walked the section between Jinshangling and Simatai, although we cheated and took the world's slowest cable car to miss out the first 2 towers. This section of the wall is steep and involves climbing up many many many steps and then carefully scrambling down the other side where the bricks on top of the wall are broken and loose. Although there were lots of tourists, it didn't feel overrun, and there was a nice feeling of cameraderie as we all struggled to deal with the rollercoaster like route. Rachel and I adopted an English guy called Tom who was also on our coach trip and was on Day 2 of his round the world trip.

The Great Wall of China!

Me and Tom debate which way to go

At the end of our section of wall ("Cross the chain link fence and then turn left at the second tower" as the guide said) we had to walk down a well paved path to the carpark... OR... take an entirely authentic Chinese zipwire across a reservoir followed by a little boat trip! The three of us stood and contemplated our options for at least five minutes. After our guide whizzed off on the zipwire, I decided to give it a go. We were carefully hooked on with some lower body harnesses and after we'd sat down and kicked off it was all rather relaxing really. It almost blew the fine loess dust out of our hair.

Rachel and I wave goodbye!

On Day 3, Rachel and I had arranged to meet Tom at the Summer Palace - a highly landscaped park where the Emperors and Empresses used to laze around in summer. The guidebook makes it sound a bit like a park, and it's possible that there are park like areas, but the place is SO vast that we only managed to cover a small corner of it. We admired more red and yellow and blue buildings, saw an acrobatic show and girls dancing with long sleeves on the Great Stage (apparently the biggest of the 3 imperial stages in China), dressed up in some imperial outfits for photographs and had a ride on a pedalo! The Summer Palace contains a MASSIVE lake - so big we could barely see across it in the haze - and lots of Chinese people take pedalos and battery-powered boats out on it, so it felt like a 'real Beijing' experience even although it was clearly a frivolous tourist activity.

Rachel through the painted glass in one of many courtyards

Pedalos on the lake

Empress Jill, Emperor Tom and Empress Rachel

After all that, it was time to catch our (delayed) flight back to Hong Kong. I was sad not to get the chance to see more temples, wander the 'hutongs' (alleyways) or take a bicycle ride, but I'm glad a went for the short time I had.

A brief interlude...

I haven't written in AGES, but I have an excuse... I took a quick trip to England in my Easter Holidays! I had to go home for a PGCE (teacher training) interview for next year, but as an added bonus I got to spend plenty of time with Chris and my family, and see a few people I haven't seen in months.

Family on my aunt's canal boat in Earith!

Also on Easter Sunday it snowed! Very un-hong-kong-like

So, not much to report from the last 1o days or so, but there should be lots of news soon as I'm off to visit Beijing this weekend! I've got that song about 9 million bicycles stuck in my head already!