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