Jill in Hong Kong

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2008-06-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

So... I'm home, and have been for 3 weeks now, but I felt like this blog needed some kind of ending to tidy it up. I like things to be tidy and organised. I'm hoping that'll be an asset in my new life as a teacher in training but worry that it might be more of a problem when the paperwork and lesson plans and essays get on top of me and end up in a big mess.

I got rid of my bed, approximately 10 minutes before the landlord was meant to come round and check the flat and take my keys. The lady who was meant to collect it last time I wrote cancelled on me. Another man came round and looked at the bed and wardrobe then decided they weren't what he was after. The lady who did eventually take away the bed cancelled because it was raining and then had issues rearranging another collection time, but when she arrived she brought a man with her who had the whole thing dismantled in about 5 minutes (with the help of his power tools!) and carried it all away so I didn't have to assist. Which was great!

The last week in school was quite surreal, like I kept noting the date and that in 'X days and X hours' I'd be back in the UK, but the rest of my brain wasn't registering it. On our last Wednesday we were told we had to come to the lunchtime meaningful task. The whole school was there to say goodbye to us - each form class had prepared a song, a poem, a drama or a speech to say thanks. It was really lovely, although Rich and I were sat right at the front of the hall in full view of EVERYONE so I was determined not to get too emotional! Lots of the classes gave us cards or little gifts - one gave me a bag of home made cookies! Perhaps the strangest thing was going back in to school after all that on Thursday and continuing to have lessons. It seemed like a bit of an anticlimax to quietly slip out the school gate at the end of of my last actual day.

Hong Kong was a great experience. When people ask me what it's like, I never know how to reply. It's a city of contrasts ; the skyscrapers against the rugged hillsides, the smooth designer stores against the bustle of Mong Kok street markets, the huge container ships against the idyllic sandy beaches. I like to think I've captured some of that here. It's a crazy place to live but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable. If you have the money you can experience the best of it all, but you'll have to work hard for it, and I don't think I'm cut out for such a work hard, spend hard lifestyle.

I'm going to finish this with a goodbye message from one of my students...

Ms Owens

Work hard, when you go back your county, if i see you again can you speak in cantonese?

Your student

Jay

Waiting

2008-05-24T22:34:00.001-07:00

I'm waiting on a Philipina lady called Julie to come and take away my bed. I've decided I should lie on it until the last possible minute because I'll really miss it when it's gone. Haven't entirely decided where I'm going to sleep next week. Tonight I'm testing out how comfortable my floor is when I pile all my spare bedding, blankets and sarongs on it, on Tuesday I'm staying at Nicole's flat in Tin Shui Wai, and there's always the option of booking into a hostel for a few nights. Thing is, despite moving half way across the world for 9 months, I'm quite a homely person really and the thought of packing up all my stuff and adjusting to living in a different building for a few nights (without my kettle!) doesn't really appeal.

Last Sunday, the company I work for organised an Olympic Fun Day on Cheung Sha Beach on Lantau, which is apparently the longest beach in Hong Kong. The weather was cloudy when we set out in the morning, but by the time we'd taken the ferry to Mui Wo and the bus to the middle of nowhere, things had heated up. Cheung Sha has an Upper Beach and a Lower Beach and as luck would have it, we got off the bus at the wrong one and had to walk almost the full length of the longest beach in Hong Kong in the glaring midday sun with our bare feet burning on the sand. Needless to say this didn't exactly put us in the mood for running relay races with chopsticks and peanuts or creating rivalry between the two teams.

Crazy Relay Races on the longest beach in HK

Emma, Amy and Sarah show off their Kowloon Gold Medals

However, people did get more enthusiastic as the day wore on. I took part in the Tug of War (!) and the boys officially acknowledge that the girls played a much better game of football than them, and at the end of the day, my team (those who live in Kowloon) won! We then had a BBQ as the dusk (and sadly also the mosquitoes) descended and got to see a whole heard of Lantau's famous wild cattle whilst waiting on a bus to take us home.

BBQ at dusk

This week at school I've been getting my S2 classes to make a yearbook. In each class, I assign 2 people to be 'photographers' and try to get a mugshot of everyone. My students are not very fond of being photographed, as you can see from these efforts!

Nicole and Joyce

Roy and Michael and Isaac

Yesterday I took another trip to Clearwater Bay beach for what may be my last swim in the South China Sea. It was lovely to be swimming at 5pm, but the beach was a lot busier than the last time I'd visited. In the evening I went to the Lan Kwai Fong Beer Festival. Lots of people, lots of sweating and yard glasses of beer. A typical Saturday night in Lan Kwai Fong really!

Guangzhou

2008-05-17T02:08:00.000-07:00

This time in a fortnight I'll be all packed up and ready to leave Hong Kong. Not entirely sure where everything is going to go. Today, after my last session of Saturday school, I had a sudden urge to go out and by myself Hong Kong things, so I purchased 2 cushion covers (very packable) and a tray with 3 dishes (not so packable) as souvenirs. I'm torn between the ridiculousness of adding MORE stuff to my luggage load at the last minute and the feeling that I may never be back so it's my once in a lifetime opporunity to buy everything I see. Perhaps the best plan is just to stay away from shops but in Hong Kong that is pretty much impossible.

Anyhow... last weekend I went to Guangzhou. I took the train from Hung Hom in Kowloon. It's very easy, costs HK$190 and takes just under 2 hours. You can even buy tickets online at http://www.it3.mtr.com.hk/b2c/frmIndex.asp?strLang=Eng, although you have to collect them at a Hong Kong station so not so good if you're starting in China!

I went with Nicole (who I work with at HLC) and her skills in Cantonese and Putonghua were invaluable in making my weekend chilled out and relaxing. It was great to not have to stress about which restaurant to go in or where we were in relation to a map because, if we needed to, Nicole could always ask someone! Nicole's skills in travelling are, however, not so good so I was still required to read the maps, navigate the underground train network (called the Metro in Guangzhou) and book the hostel. We stayed in the Riverside YHA (http://www.hostelbookers.com/booking/index.cfm?hostel=24428&fuseaction=hosteldetails) which is clean and cheap and is a bit out of the centre of town but right on a waterfront street (Chang Ti Lu) which has been recently redeveloped with a selection of bars, restaurants and neon lights. There's also a Chinese park with crazy exercise machines and a square where we found a guy hiring roller skates!

On our first night, Nicole and I took a 1 hour river cruise from the jetty just outside our hostel. It was nice to see the lights of Guangzhou but the best bit is the fact that all the trees lining the river are lit up with green spotlights, making them look like giant clumps of broccoli. We also had hotpot in the Red Calf restaurant near our hostel which came with delicious herbal tea.

Broccoli trees on the Pearl River Cruise

On Day 2, Rachel arrived on a morning train from Hong Kong and we set off on a ferry across the river to Shamian Island. Shamian Island is where all the foreign traders had to stay, and in the past the bridges were closed at 10pm! The island has the wide avenues of a European city and some pretty looking buildings. We stumbled upon a group of about 8 brides and bridegrooms that we THINK were taking part in a fashion photoshoot! They were much more photogenic than the French church next to them, with it's strangely unreligious neon signs.

Wedding Photoshoot

After a spot of lunch in a Shamian Island restaurant (thanks to Nicole's ordering), me, Rachel, Nicole and a New Zealand girl we'd picked up called Chloe set off to find the Chen Clan Temple. Helpfully, you can find it at the metro station called Chen Clan Academy! The Temple was apparently the home of the Chen Clan for many years, as well as a place to worship ancestors and take imperial examinations. It's a nice building with a lovely courtyard, impressive roofs and a refreshing garden out the back. The Temple/Academy is also now part of the Guangzhou Cultural Museum so has some paintings and fans on display.

Nicole and Rachel at the Chen Clan Temple

From there, we walked towards what someone translated into English as 'Walking Street,' but en route we got distracted by a MASSIVE jade market. The market starts out lining a big square but soon diverges into a multitude of alleyways, all filled with stalls selling hundreds of jade bracelets, pendants and beads. Surprisingly, we made it back out of the warren without buying very much! We headed on towards 'Walking Street' and eventually reached it - a massive pedestrianised strip full of flashing neon brand names. We observed the crowds and took some photos and then, ignoring the McDonalds signs in all directions, headed back out of the pedestrian zone and down a little alleyway full of food stalls to find some dinner. I had a chicken kebab type thing, some coconut milk and an intriguing spiral of crisps. The scorpions didn't really tickle my fancy.

The spacious part of the Jade Market

On our last day in Guangzhou we had to trek out to the East Railway station to book our train tickets back to Hong Kong. There was a rumour that we had to book them 3 hours in advance, so the sensible thing to do it just book them at the same time as your outward ticket! Chloe was heading on to Shenzhen and didn't need to book for that as the trains leave more than once an hour. Having sorted that out, we set off for Yuexiu Park and the Orchid Garden. The metro stop is called Yuexiu Park, and that's the most obvious thing when you come out the station, but the Orchid garden is JUST across the road and is (in my opinion) a much more pleasant place to visit. We, however, found the park first and paid our 10RMB entrance fee so felt we should have a little explore. There is a big, beautiful lake at one corner of which you can feed the fish. The fish are clearly used to this as they gather there in giant swarms as almost leap out the water when they sense someone holding their hand out to drop in some food. Watching this feeding frenzy made us a bit peckish, so we headed out the park and into a restaurant which overlooks it for some tasty dimsum.

Feeding fish

We only just had time to pop in and out of the Orchid garden before heading back to the hostel for our bags. It was much greener than the park, full of lush bamboo forests that block your view and give you the illusion of being in a massive forest when you're only really in a small park. We found a greenhouse full of colourful orchids and a teahouse where you could sit and chill out (if you had the time). I could have stayed there all day.

Nicole and I in the Orchid Garden

However, it was time to return to the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong. Guangzhou seemed to have a much slower pace of life, although we certainly saw plenty of places where skyscrapers are shooting up as well as traffic zooming along highways. I think perhaps it's just that there's more space in Guangzhou, so the hectic parts and skyscrapers are more spread out. Whilst there aren't any major tourist attractions (or at least, not comparable to those in Beijing), there's plenty to look at for a long weekend.

Olympic Torch

2008-05-14T03:43:00.000-07:00

Beijing Torch Monument

Last week, the Olympic Torch came to Hong Kong. My school cancelled lessons and held a Torch Relay in the gym hall (it was meant to be outside but the weather was too damp). Some students in each form class had built their own interpretation of the Olympic Torch, and then 8 more students were the relay team that took part in the race. Everyone was issued with a China or Hong Kong flag to wave during the event, but the message from the teachers was (according to our headmaster's translation!) that you can be proud to be Chinese without being proud of everything the Chinese goverment does.

National flag waving

To celebrate this momentous occasion... here are some photographs of Olympic Madness in Hong Kong!

Me and Zoe with our flags

Torches made by the students

Fuwa on the waterfront - The Olympic Mascots

I've also been on a little trip to Guangzhou but you'll have to wait till later for that update as I've got people coming over to my flat in about 10 mins. We're going to order in pizza and have a girly evening, almost like I used to do with my uni flatmates, but without the Charmed and Sex in the City DVDs!!

Nearing the end

2008-04-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-19T03:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T05:07:00.001-07:00

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...

2008-04-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

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!

Tiring Times

2008-03-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

Well the show is finally over. It was great fun but truly exhausting and although I miss the people already I'll need to recover before I start missing the rehearsals! On the Tuesday night after the show we had an after party in Grappa's bar, which is in the bottom of Jardine House in Central and I had so much fun chatting to people that I didn't want to leave. Hopefully I'll meet up with some of them again in the next few months.

Some of the girls from Anything Goes... and a sailor!

I've been busy at school as usual as Rich is still off with his broken jaw. I got my English Ambassador team to make egg shaped clues to post around the school for an Egg Hunt on Wednesday and watched Freaky Friday (a Disney film) at lunchtimes with some of the 2nd year girls.

Hong Kong has had 3 school children die from flu related illnesses recently, so they've stepped up precautions and lots of schools are going on holiday early. My school hasn't closed yet (we're due to finish on Thursday anyway) but the morning reading period is now dedicated to taking every students' temperature and around half of my students are sporting delightful blue face masks to protect them from everyone else's germs. It may seem a bit crazy and over the top but Hong Kong suffered hugely with SARS and in a city where everyone lives so densely packed together it's better to be safe than sorry.

On Saturday night Scott decided to have an early birthday dinner, as everyone is jetting off on their Easter holidays before his actual birthday next weekend. We went to a Chinese restaurant on the top floor of the North Point Wet Market on Java Road. The food was standard Chinese restaurant stuff but I haven't been for a big group meal in ages and it was fun to share lots of dishes and drink Tsing Tao out of bowls! It was really nice to see some Chatteris people that I hadn't caught up with in a while (due mainly to show rehearsals) and I've even got some of them on video thanks to Ken's imagination and the spinny lazy susan on our table!

Bowls of beer

Hopefully, this shows people at Scott's birthday meal!

Only a few days of school left before the Easter break, when I'm taking a whirlwind trip back to Britain to go to a PGCE interview. Feeling a bit guilty about my giant carbon footprint but looking forward to real milk and bread and cheese.

On the other hand, I've recently become really pleased with the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables you get in Hong Kong. The other week I bought 4 passionfruits, 3 mangos and a green coconut (with a straw in it to drink the milk!) for less than a fiver. It's fabulous! And this evening I went out to the market and bought 5 tomatoes, still on their vine, for less than a pound. Shopping in Tesco's just wont be the same.

In the news...

2008-03-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

The musical that I'm in was reviewed in the South China Morning Post. If you look closely at the picture you can see me in the middle of the stage, although not in the front row!

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CitySeen: Nine years on and just as strong, HK Singers are back in fine voice

Andrew Sun

Updated on Mar 07, 2008

They first did it nine years ago. Now, top community theatrical group the Hong Kong Singers are producing Cole Porter's depression-era romp Anything Goes once again. The musical opened last night at the City Hall theatre (and continues until Tuesday) with several cast members returning to roles they first performed in 1999, including one of the lead actresses, Shareen Hellen.

New director Tony Penny was a fan of the first production. "I wasn't involved, but I remember seeing it," Penny said. "It was excellent and I hope this one is even better. [Shareen] is a wonderful singer and she's recreating the same role. Now, she's even stronger and better than before."

For any theatrical director, working on a show that has been remounted and produced many times over can be daunting. However, Penny - a Hong Kong Singers veteran who has directed everything from Agatha Christie murder mysteries to My Fair Lady - suggests it's not all about the director. "I was asked before how, as a director, I put my stamp on things that have been done before, and I say it's essentially the cast that puts its stamp on it. Even if people have done the show before, they are still coming into a new production. Everyone works differently with different people. For this show, we're trying to make it more light, more fun."

For tickets to the show, contact Urbtix on 2734 9009.

Additional reporting by Clara Mak

Send tips, tickets and invitations to andrew.sun@scmp.com

Made it to March!

2008-03-03T03:34:00.000-08:00

I haven't much time for blogging at the minute. I've been rehearsing with the Hong Kong singers 3 or 4 times a week, and as of tomorrow I'll be at City Hall every evening for 8 days straight. It's going to be exhausting but hopefully a lot of fun!

Since last time I wrote, the weather has warmed up a lot. Today it was warm enough for me to go out with a skirt and no tights on! I've not been doing much exploring though.

Me, Rachel and Scott found a new bar (well, new to me!) called Ned Kelly's last stand. It's in Tsim Sha Tsui and has a live jazz band that play every night. The bar is pretty crowded (we were there on a Friday) but the atmosphere is really fun and relaxed, which makes a change from the somewhat pretentious bars in Central where everyone seems to be trying to work out how much you spent on your outfit. The jazz band were really good too. We were dancing in our seats!

Inside Ned Kelly's... it's a bit dark but you can make out the band

At school we were getting musical too last week. We made AMAZING horns from plastic drinking straws with little funnels of paper stuck on the end. It takes a little while to get the knack of making the noise with them but once they work they're pretty loud! This week we're beginning our Easter celebrations by making little yellow pompom chicks.

Some of the girls from 1E with their horns

Celia and Jace with their pompom chicks

That's all for now folks!

Back to school... again

2008-02-18T05:22:00.000-08:00

The holidays are over, Chris has returned to Britain and I bought a hot water bottle. It's been similar temperatures in Hong Kong to London for the past week or so!

The cold weather didn't stop my school having it's first ever sports day though. I was amazed by how the kids managed to spend all day hanging out in an open sports stadium without rebelling. I spent most of the day at the announcements desk where we got regular supplies of hot tea to warm our hands with. I ran 100m as part of a 10 person parent-teacher-student relay team in the afternoon, but sadly my team (1C!) didn't win.

The school flag on parade at the opening of Sports Day

Flags waving in the spectator stand

At the weekend I went for dim sum in Maritime Plaza mall in Tsing Yi with Olisa, Jennifer and Sat. Olisa got there half an hour before us and cunningly got a number for the restaurant queue which meant that we managed to get a table... an hour later! Whilst we were waiting we were entertained by a dragon dance that was going around the shopping mall eating clumps of celery-like vegetables from the restaurant doorways. I asked Olisa (who has Cantonese parents) what it was all about and she said it was traditional but she didn't know what it meant! It was a pretty good distraction from the long wait though.

Dragon Dance

Chicken feet... mmm...

After the food, we discovered a Disney Chinese New Year display in another part of the mall and payed a small donation, which was apparently going to local community charity, to go in and take photographs. I'm pretty sure that only in Hong Kong to you get giant pagodas inside shopping malls built with mickey-mouse shaped lotus blossom designs on their windows! It was great fun taking silly photos with all the characters, although I did feel slightly guilty when there were queues of 5 year old children waiting to take their turns!

The Disney pagoda

Me and Jennifer among the flowers

On Sunday the weather warmed up a bit and I went back to Hong Kong park to bask in the sun like the terrapins whilst I ate my lunch. Then I had rehearsals. The musical starts on March 6th so if I don't write for a few weeks... I'm too busy tapdancing!

Macau Madness

2008-02-10T02:56:00.000-08:00

It's Chinese New Year so I'm on holiday, Chris is visiting and we went off to Macau for a few nights. We stayed in the Pousada De Mong Ha which is a wee bit out of town but is run by tourism students so they are all really keen to serve their guests and the hotel is not too expensive. (http://www.ift.edu.mo/pousada/eng/intro.htm)

Chinese New Year decor in the main tourist street

The main things for tourists to do in Macau are: admiring the Portuguese style architecture, visiting the beaches and gambling in the casinos. We spent our first day wandering around the town centre admiring the ruins of St Paul's and the Monte Fort. It does make a nice change to see winding streets and European style architecture instead of the blocks of towers that cover the majority of Hong Kong, but some of the buildings have been painted so brightly that they look uncannily like scenery for a Wild West film! We also came across the Camoes Garden which is a fascinating little park containing mosaics, a foot massager, picnic tables, exercise machines, a children's playground and some badminton courts. It was nice to see lots of locals using all the facilities the park has to offer and we felt like we'd got properly off the tourist trail... especially when we left the park and found ourselves on Avenue Marginale with no sign of any taxis! But when we looked on the free tourist map we discovered we were actually pretty close to the Pousada, so all was well.

The ruins of St Paul's - No 1 on the Macau Tourist Itinerary

Is it a church or a saloon?

As I mentioned already, the staff at the Pousada are falling over themselves with eagerness to help their customers, so we told the receptionist we wanted to go somewhere for dinner and asked her to order a taxi. She (and the taxi driver) sent us to a block full of bars and restaurants, most of which looked empty, and we chose a Portuguese restaurant where we had delicious beef and decent red wine and got given a free glass of port by the owner. I only wish I'd remembered the name of the restaurant, or the area, so we could recommend it or go back! We tried the same trick the next night with a different receptionist and ended up in the tourist centre, where we had a meal that was tasty but not nearly so atmospheric.

The Macau Lighthouse

Day 2 in Macau was going to involve visits to the Wine Museum and Grand Prix Museum, but unfortunately they're both closed on Tuesdays! Instead we went to visit another park and a lighthouse on a hill, took a ride on a cable car, toured the Macau Fire Service Museum and returned to the Pousada to watch a film in the warm! It's really quite chilly over here just now! In the evening we braved a visit to the Grand Lisboa casino. The doormen in capes and metal detectors are a little intimidating, I guess to put off people that aren't going to spend any money, but it didn't work on us! We had a drink in a lounge bar overlooking the tables and watched everyone else spending their money.

Me in the Fire Services Museum

We did make it to the museums on our last day in Macau, but I wasn't too impressed. They are part of a big new purpose building tourist activity centre, close to the ferry terminal, so I was expecting them to be really interesting. The Grand Prix Museum had some cool looking cars and a lot of information, but the display boards had too much writing on them and the only interactive part of the whole museum (some car racing games!) was roped off! The Wine Museum was a little better but mainly because of the taste of wine at the end. They're not bad for a rainy day activity, but you could make so much more out of them. We also went to the Macau Tower, which was a lot more impressive. Luckily Chris wasn't feeling too great so he didn't attempt to make me bungee jump off it!

Chris contemplates bungee jumping

Back in Hong Kong now and just a few days of holiday left. Chinese New Year has been a bit odd as all the shops have been shut (although that doesn't make the streets of Mong Kok any less crowded!).

More cultural experiences!

2008-01-26T20:12:00.000-08:00

I have a new camera so my blog updates will once more be in full colour!

This week I finally went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art (on Wednesday when it's free!). The building is on the waterfront at TST, which is one of my favourite areas in Hong Kong, but it's not exactly an architecturally pleasing building. Luckily the exhibitions inside are a bit better. I saw 2 galleries of old style Chinese art (bamboo scrolls with birds and flowers or misty looking mountains and a bit of Chinese poetry down the side), a room full of Chinese ceramics (the exhibition contains examples of pots from all the different dynasties and wasn't terribly exciting) and a contemporary exhibitions called Made in Hong Kong (the work of 7 different artists currently working in Hong Kong). I liked a few of the old scroll type works, but after a few rooms of it they started to seem very similar. The contemporary exhibition was nice because most of the works made reference to things that I've actually experienced or seen in Hong Kong. I also found some maps on display as part of the Charter collection which was a huge collection of works in colonial times but can now all fit into one small room. It was interesting to see how Hong Kong looked back in the day but there was a guided tour going on in the room so I didn't stay for long.

Yesterday I went back to the Museum of Teaware in Hong Kong park to take part in a Wuwo Tea Ceremony with some other Chatteris people. The ceremony comes from Taiwan and 'celebrates the pursuit of ideals of peace, sharing, simplicity and naturalness' (or so says the leaflet they gave us!). The idea is that each person brings their own teaware and their own tea and shares it with the others, and no one is accorded any special rank because the order of sitting in the circle is decided by drawing numbers out of a hat and each person has to serve tea to the 3 people on their left and receive tea from the 3 people on their right. It's a really nice idea but our group had slight difficulties because we didn't really know how to go about preparing the Chinese tea! We had traditional style teapots which can easily sit in the palm of your hand, tiny little teacups that hold about 3 sips of tea, a big bowl that you use for pouring out waste water or used tea leaves and a delicate tray and 'delivery' jug that you use to serve your tea to the other people. It was quite fun, despite our cluelessness, and it's the sort of thing that you'd be very tempted to try at home if you had all the necessary bits of miniature crockery.

After all that Chinese culture, it was time to reinstate some British traditions, so last night I went to a Burns supper! Scott had invited some people round to his flat and prepared haggis, neeps and tatties for us all. There wasn't a piper to pipe in the haggis but Scott did a very good job at reciting the first verse of 'To a Haggis' from memory and afterwards a really tasty meal we gathered round the TV to watch a DVD of Scotch and Wry! It all felt so comfortable and homely that it was a bit of shock to go back out on the street and be greeted by a blast of Cantonese conversation.

Haggis, Neeps and Tatties.

School has been very quiet this week due to students being on exams and me hiding in the heated staffroom. Back to normal for next week though.

Life as usual

2008-01-17T05:06:00.000-08:00

It's cold in Hong Kong. I've been layering up my clothes as much as possible but I'm tempted to buy one of the big padded coats that all the locals wear, there's something psychologically warming about a big padded jacket! It's not really any colder than autumn in Britain, but there's no heating here so you need to keep your layers on inside as well as out. Luckily I have my woolly hat, scarf and gloves from my mountain climbing.

Not much has been going on so far this month. Rehearsals for Anything Goes are trudging onwards. We've finally finished learning the 8-pages of tap-dance break, but that just means we have to practise it! School is a bit quiet because the kids have their end of term 1 exams next week and the teachers are all busy cramming in extra revision sessions and proofreading papers.

I've not even been out exploring recently. Perhaps after the new and exciting-ness of Borneo, Hong Kong feels a bit like home now. I've been spending my free time going to cinemas, having dinner with people I've not seen all holidays and doing a bit of shopping (more clothes to layer up in the cold!). I've got half days next week though as the kids have exams, so maybe I'll try to be more adventurous.

Over and out!

Borneo travels

2008-01-05T00:47:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

It's been a while since I blogged, but I've been busy in Borneo!

We arrived on December 23rd (at 1am!) and (later that day) got picked up by the lovely people at Borneo Native Homestay and Tours (http://www.borneonativehomestay.com/) who we'd booked our 3 day, 2 night trek up Mount Kinabalu with. Mount Kinabalu is the highest peak in South East Asia (4092.5m above sea level) and is apparently one of the easiest mountains to climb. However, if you're not very fit and haven't done any training other than taking the stairs rather than the lift every day, it's definitely not easy! Luckily our first day involved nothing more strenous than visiting the visitor centre and watching a video about Mt Kinabalu.

We set off on our hike at about 9am on Christmas Eve. We did the Timphon Trail which is the easiest, shortest route, but involves an awful lot of very large steps. There are 7 shelters to pass between Timpohon Gate and the Laban Rata Guesthouse where we would spend the night and Rachel and I stopped at every single one of them, and plenty of other places along the way! It began to rain quite heavily around Shelter Number 4, so we donned our waterproofs (thankyou Jude!) and continue to trudge uphill. We didn't see any views due to the cloud and mists, but we did get to see the cool vegetation. There are impressive tree ferns (ferns the size of trees!) that are some of the oldest plant types on earth and crazy pitcher plants that slowly digest any insects that get trapped inside them. We stumbled in to Laban Rata at about 4pm and peeled off our wet layers before grabbing a hot cup of tea. The Guesthouse has a really nice atmosphere, everyone is going through the same challenge, and when the rain cleared up a bit later we were able to go out onto the balcony and admire the stunning view of blanket cloud below us and the dark granite peaks above. After digging in to the buffet dinner and chatting with a few fellow climbers, it was time to have a nap...

... then at 1:30am on Christmas Day, we were woken up! I'd set the alarm for 2:15 but other people in our dorm started rustling about much earlier and there didn't seem much point in lying in bed. We had a little breakfast (Remy our guide had said don't eat too much in case of altitude sickness!) and put on our Santa hats (Rachel had brought 7 along and distributed them amongst our fellow climbers) and headed out in the dark at about 3am. The full moon made the peak look even more impressive as it glistened slightly against the black sky. It's surprisingly cold at 3am at 3600m, so we were wrapped in layers of clothing and woolly gloves, scarfs and hats. The effort of climbing, however, rapidly warmed us up! It was extremely tough going that morning. I would stumble forward for about 20 steps and then need to sit down and catch my breath, then pull myself back into standing position before the cold set in! The path over the granite dome is pretty steep in places and there are sections where you pretty much haul yourself up using a rope, although things flatten out a little when you get closer to Low's Peak, which is the highest point. With our extremely slow progress, the sun began to rise long before we'd reached Low's Peak and it was extremely tempting just to sit down where we were and watch the colours glow, but our guide was very good and kept pushing us on, so we reached the top before the sun was fully up and were able (after another rest to get our breaths back!) to admire the beautiful views and take some photographs. After that, the world seemed to be a much brighter place, for a while, and I felt pretty cheerful on our descent to Laban Rata for breakfast. We had a short break there to repack our bags and have some more coffee, and then we began the long walk back to the Timpohon Gate. It rained again on the way down, so things got quite low for a bit, but as we got closer and closer we started singing some Christmas songs. We finally made it back to the gate at about half 3 in the afternoon. We were given our colour certificates and fell into the back of our waiting van... one of the best things about booking your climb through a tour group!

The other worldly landscape near the peak.

Sun coming up

Me and Rachel at the top!

From the mountain we were driven for about 5 hours to Tempurung Seaside Resort (http://www.borneo-authentic.com/tempurung2.php) which was a bit of a long trip when our day had started at 2am! But the drive was worth it, we were greeted by extremely helpful staff who took us straight to our room to dump our baggage and then whisked us back to the restaurant to help ourselves from the impressive Christmas buffet. The restaurant is open sided and thatch roofed. It was amazing to suddenly find ourselves in such a serene place, sitting at a carefully laid table, being brought glasses of ice cold water and listening to the sounds of waves on the beach. The only hiccup was the lack of phone or internet connections, which combined with an extremely useless mobile phone signal to make it pretty impossible for me and Rachel to send Christmas wishes to anyone.

We stayed at Tempurung for 3 nights to recover from our climb. Our muscles were aching the next day and we hobbled about like old women and moaned every time we had to stand up. Swimming in the sea helped, as did the massage that Amy (one of the lovely staff) arranged for us on the third day. I think we had just enough time to appreciate the peace and beauty of the lodge, if we'd stayed a bit longer it would've got a bit boring as there's nothing much to do, although we could've arranged trips to go white water rafting if we'd had the energy!

We were picked up at Tempurung by the lovely Borneo Native Homestay people (our driver, Conran, was incredibly helpful and full of fascinating facts about the things we passed - for example he told us that in a few years time all the fuel in Sabah will be 30% palm oil) and driven back into Kota Kinabalu to catch our bus to Uncle Tan's Operations Base near Sepilok. Sadly, we couldn't get a seat on any of the earlier buses so had to leave at 8pm, which meant travelling in the dark and not getting to Uncle Tan's Ops Base until 3am! The bus was clean and comfortable enough to nap on and the driver helpfully dropped us off at the right place and pointed at the building we wanted, so we were able to get ourselves inside and fall into bed pretty quick.

Uncle Tan's (http://www.uncletan.com/wildlifetour.html) is a camp in secondary rainforest along the Kinabatangan river. It started off as a really small basic camp run by Uncle Tan (who is sadly dead now) and has grown over the years. Most of the guides live on camp year round and in the peak season they employ part-time workers from local villages. They're also involved in conservation projects - at the minute they're growing tree seedlings to try and create an elephant corridor with the WWF to connect some of the patches of fragmented rainforest.

The camp is pretty basic but has everything you need for a few nights stay. The rooms are basically raised wooden boxes with 3 sides of wood and the front side covered in wire mesh to keep the monkeys out. There is a troop of long-tailed macaques that like to visit the camp in the afternoon and you can hear them dropping on to the tin roofs. During our stay, one of the other guests was napping in a hammock and a monkey came and stole his packet of cigarettes! We saw an awful lot of monkeys, most of them hanging out in trees by the river when we did our river trips, including the strange nosed proboscis monkeys that only live in Borneo. There were also a few crocodile spottings, which is a bit disconcerting when you're only in a wee boat, and a river otter, which was a bit nicer to look at! The boat trips were my favourite part. The camp is set in a flooded woodland so you spend a lot of time winding your way out to the main river through the tree trunks, with large branches covered in ferns and bryophytes flying over your head. At first you wonder how on earth the guides know where to go, but by the end of your stay you start to recognise the way yourself and it feels like you've learned a way into a secret garden.

Inside our cage/room!

As well as the river trips, we did a day walk and a night walk in the swampy forests around the camp. We were all told to wear rubber boots (wellies!) for our walk, but the water levels were so high that the murky puddles came right over the top! The wet feet were very much worth it when we found ourselves standing directly underneath a young male orangutan. He just hung out in the shade, gazing at us nonchalantly as we snapped hundreds of photographs (I'd lost my camera but Rachel gave me hers whilst she took video clips) and didn't even complain when we followed him for a bit as he wandered off. The night walks were more focussed on little creatures - we saw lots of frogs and spiders and the Borneo Blue Tarantula and a black scorpion which the guide let us each have turn in holding. It was surprisingly light for such a scary, spikey looking creature.

The beautiful Orangutan

On our last morning in camp there were no spaces to go out on the boat trip (the new arrivals get priority) so me, Rachel and a Glaswegian girl called Louise had to stay in camp. Louise's boyfriend John went out on the trip and reported that we didn't miss much, just a few more monkeys, and we were much cheered up when a few monitor lizards decided to come and visit the campsite! After that, there was only time to lie in the hammock for a bit and look at the pygmy squirrels (SOOOO small and cute) chasing each other around the tree before we had to pile back into the boats with all our stuff and say goodbye to Never Never Land.

The long bus trip back to Kota Kinabalu was air conditioned, which was fantastic after the oppressive heat of afternoons in the jungle, and as we passed Kinabalu National Park I was able to look up at the spikey peaks poking through the cloud and remind myself that I'd been up there! We had the same experience when we saw the mountain from the window of our plane, but somehow it all seemed a bit surreal.

We made it back to Hong Kong by 1am on Thursday morning, by sneakily using our 1am ferry tickets for the 11:15 ferry from Macau! Then it was back to work.... only for a month and then it's Chinese New Year!

Off again!

2007-12-21T18:25:00.000-08:00

I'm off to Borneo today. Quite scared as me and Rachel have booked everything online, a little haphazardly, so it'll be interesting to see if all our plans actually work out. It seems very strange to be leaving Hong Kong for a holiday when I still quite often feel completely confused and foreign in Hong Kong!

The last week of school was quite fun. We had a Speech Competition where the kids were given a topic and then had to stand up and try to talk about it for a minute without any preparation time. The students who took part did really well so I feel like maybe me and Rich have made a small difference to their confidence, if nothing else. We also had to do our own performance in front of the school yesterday. It was Christmas Activity Day and we were asked to do half an hour on 'Introducing the Western Ways of Celebrating Christmas.' We did a little powerpoint presentation with lots of pictures of Christmas decorations and lots of talk about Christmas lunch, and then we taught them to sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer! I'm sure the school took photos of me singing and Rich strumming his guitar like a little folk band, so I'll try and upload one after the holidays.

I don't know if I'll get a chance to get online whilst I'm travelling so for now...

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Santa-hatted Shenanigans

2007-12-15T16:32:00.000-08:00

My parents have returned home to the frosts of Scotland. Monday was a school holiday so I had one last long day with them where we hiked along the Dragon's Back on Hong Kong island and then hopped on a bus to Shek O for a chilled out lunch and a spot of relaxing on the beach. The hike went along a ridge with some pretty impressive views of the coastline and, with a sneaky bus journey at the start and the finish, wasn't very strenous at all.

Mum and Dad go paddling in the South China Sea

The week at school has been pretty hectic -Rich and I have been running lots of Christmas activities and on Wednesday there was an Open Day for prospective students and their parents so the whole school was on red alert. Understandably they wanted to show off their native English speaking teachers, but my timetable on Wednesdays didn't fit in with the open day schedule, so I had to teach a class that I don't normally teach in front of about 20 primary school students and a collection of parents, which was just a little scary!

Busy at the Christmas Cafe

The weekend has brought lots of Christmas celebrations as most people are jetting off home or to exciting holiday destinations next weekend. On Friday I watched Love Actually with a bunch of girls and a lots of chocolates before we headed on to a flat Christmas party to dance to some cheesey Christmas classics. Last night was the official Chatteris Christmas event, which involved take away pizza and santa hats on Repulse Bay beach. The boys who organised it did a great job, they'd decorated the trees with tinsel and fairy lights and brought along some Christmas music and made party bags for everyone so that we all wore our free Santa hats and even provided a Christmas carol book so we had no excuse not to sing along. It did feel kind of festive singing 'Jingle Bell Rock' at the tops of our voices, but Santa hats and sand between your toes is a strange combination!

Singing Christmas Carols on the beach!

Song sheets and santa hats!

5 more days of school and then it'll be time for my Christmas holidays! I'm off to collect my washing and try to decide what to pack!

A busy start to the month

2007-12-08T16:52:00.000-08:00

It's finally December, but the weather is now similar to Scottish summer. Yesterday I was out in a short dress and a wrap for the whole day and I was only really chilly in the evening. I haven't written for a while because my life out here has suddenly got hectic - I've started 8 weeks of volunteering on a Social Welfare programme on Wednesday evenings, I've joined a musical society and now have rehearsals on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays AND my parents have been in town so I've been tour guiding them around!

Last weekend I took them to Stanley for a leisurely lunch on the promenade and a wander round the market, and we went to visit the Chi Lin Nunnery and Wong Tai Sin temple. The nunnery buildings are really impressive, made out of dark wood and held together without a single nail, but the atmosphere there is very quiet and austere and, aside from the visitors kneeling to say a quick whispered prayer, you don't really see anyone actually worshipping the big buddha statues that they have there. I think the contemplative atmosphere was good for my jet lagged parents, but I much prefer the hustle and bustle of the temples I've visited here, so we popped in to Wong Tai Sin temple at the next MTR stop so they could experience that too. Wong Tai Sin is one of the busiest temples in Hong Kong and the day we visited the courtyard in front of the temple was packed with people laying out offerings (including a whole chicken and a huge chunk of ham) and burning incense and shaking tins of fortune telling sticks. After 10 minutes or so taking in the atmosphere we retreated to the left side of the main temple, where we discovered a lovely garden with pagodas and covered walkways and a HUGE waterfall feature and a pond full of technicoloured carp.

All that wood and not a single nail at Chi Lin nunnery

The hustle and bustle at Wong Tai Sin

Dad and Mum in the Wong Tai Sin gardens

I've also been taking advantage of the visiting parents to do some slightly classier activities. Rather than watch the nightly Symphony of Lights show from the Avenue of Stars with the masses (I've already done this about 3 times!) we hopped aboard the Aqualuna, a big wooden junk with red sails (although it relies on motor power) and colonial style furnishings, to take a tour of the harbour and enjoy the light show from the water. The rattan seats are surprisingly comfortable and it's all very elegant lying back with your 'complementary' drink, although the best bit of the experience might just be the jealous looks on other peoples' faces at the pontoon!

Me and Mum on board the Aqualuna

For our luxury highlight this weekend we decided to take in the Peninsula, a historic hotel where the Brits officially surrendered to the Japanese during WW2. It's so posh that the bathroom attendant actually hands you a cloth to dry your hands on and then produces a wicker basket for you to discard it in. Sadly, the Felix bar on the 28th floor doesn't open till 6pm so we couldn't take in the views, but we had drinks in an elegant lounge bar and admired the subtley shimmering Christmas decorations in the foyer.

The Peninsula foyer, decorated for Christmas

We spend the rest of Saturday wandering around Hong Kong Park, where I finally got to see inside the conservatory. The plants are pretty and the displays are nicely set out, but only in Hong Kong would you find fake plastic reindeer and Christmas decorations in a hothouse! Christmas make take longer than usual to arrive here, but once it's December people really seem to get into it. It'll be interesting to compare Hong Kong's efforts with whatever I find in Borneo over the holidays.

Christmas in the Conservatory at Hong Kong Park

A week in the wilderness

2007-11-25T04:08:00.000-08:00

November weather is nice and cool, making it a very good time of year to go exploring the 80% of Hong Kong that is still an undeveloped, mountainous wilderness. However, having noticed that my blog so far is full of pictures of beaches and parks, I'll endeavour to include some pictures of buildings in this entry!

Last weekend I went on a very leisurely hike from the Wan Chai Gap to... Aberdeen! The (mainly downhill) walk went past the Aberdeen reservoirs which look very odd. You get wild, jungley greenery growing down to the sides of the reservoir, but then the water levels were quite low and the baked orange coloured rocks that line the sides of the reservoir look like they've been carefully sculpted by people. Aberdeen itself has a nice waterfront promenade to stroll along, although it's not the most peaceful stroll due to the old women offering rides on their sampans.

The waterfront at Aberdeen

Me and a reservoir

On Monday at 1pm I set off in a bus full of orange and black tracksuited teenagers to school camp. We went to Sai Kung country park, in the Eastern New Territories, where we stayed in the Lady Maclehose Holiday Village (me for 1 night and the students for 2 nights - the teachers were on a rota!). The holiday village was quite similar to the 'camp' that we stayed at when we first arrived in Hong Kong, but this time there were individual bungalows instead of blocks of dorm rooms, so we had our own teachers bungalow where we could hide from the kids. On Day 1, we went on a boat trip to see some corals. Instead of having an expensive glass bottomed boat, the students were equipped with plastic buckets that had glass plates stuck in the bottom. They pushed these against the surface of the water (leaning over the side of the boat) so they could see the seabed quite clearly. It's a great idea, but sadly the corals we were looking at were disappointingly grey and lifeless. We then returned to camp for dinner in the canteen and the poor students had to sit for 2 and a half hours watching an episode of Blue Planet (they dubbed over David Attenborough with Cantonese!), a presentation on coral environments, a video about mangroves and a presentation about creatures that live in the mangroves. I don't think the environmental instructors who were running the programme had done much work with school groups before!

The boats speed back to land

Day 2 at school camp was sunnier than Day 1. In the morning we went a wee walk beside a mangrove. The instructor kept stopping and explaining interesting things about the plants we were seeing, but the student didn't seem that interested and the explanation was in Cantonese. At the end of our walk we got to scramble on a beach that the mangrove was slowly reclaiming and look for crabs under the rocks. Then it was back to camp for lunch, which we needed as fuel for our afternoon hike. We walked up a hill and down the other side to a BEAUTIFUL, rugged, isolated beach. There were warning signs about dangerous undercurrents, but that didn't stop me and a few of the boys having a paddle!

Girls on the beach

Boys on the beach

The rest of the school week was comparably uneventful. The students were still at camp on Wednesday but I had to go in and lesson plan for 3 hours, and on Thursday we all had a day off to recover, but I didn't do anything unusual.

On Friday Cat arrived in town for the weekend. We had a nice dinner in Knutsford Terrace and then took a quick stoll along the waterfront en route back to her hotel. She's been busy with her dad's business aquaintance's family for the rest of the weekend but we'll hopefully have dinner again tomorrow before she jets off home.

Since I wasn't required to tour guide Cat around, I went off on another hike today. This one came from 'The Serious Hiker's Guide to Hong Kong' so it was a bit more strenous. We climbed up from Tai Wai MTR to Amah Rock and then on to Lion Rock, which is about 500m high and is part of the ridge that forms a natural boundary between Kowloon and the New Territories. The views on the ridge are pretty impressive - you can see the whole length of Hong Kong Island - but the haze means that cameras don't really capture it too well. We could tell it was a 'Serious' hike when the concrete path disappeared. Up near the top we had to scramble amongst the rocks. I'm hoping my legs won't ache too much tomorrow!

Elise, Scott and Sarah hold up Amah Rock

View of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island

The scary ridge.

Buddha, Baking and Birds

2007-11-17T18:19:00.001-08:00

In the Christmas break I'm going to Borneo, where I might (if the tour company confirm our booking)be climbing Mount Kinabalu! So when Scott suggested a little hike last Sunday I decided I ought to go along. We took an MTR to the end of the orange line on Lantau and then a minibus to a little village called Shek Mun Kip (I think) where the trail began. The start of the trail isn't very well signposted, but it gets better as you get higher up. The path is all concreted so it's strangely like walking on a pavement through the jungle, but the noises and the butterflies whirring past your nose help you to feel like your really out in the wild.

The expedition crew

Temple roof hiding in the jungle

The hike up the hill isn't too steep and there are lots of little distracting monasteries and temples to stop at on the way, as well as 'an audible stream' (that's how it's described in Scott's hiking guide) where we stopped to sit in the shade and I dipped my feet in the pool. After two hours moving uphill in the Hong Kong sunshine it was rather nice get to the top and walk along the flat plateau towards the Buddha. This time I paid bit extra and went for a meal in the vegetarian restaurant. The food no doubt tasted extra good because we'd put in such an effort to get to it!

The 'Audible Stream'

Reflected Buddha

The rest of my week has been quite un-touristy. On Wednesday I went for a few quiet drinks in my local (literally right next to my block of flats) bar. It's called Co Co Duck and is part of a chain. It feels a bit like an old men's pub in Britain (only with that traditional smoky atmosphere) and has tartan fabric on the seats. After our drinks we went for some food in Langham Place, which is the big shopping mall in Mong Kok and discovered that Christmas has officially hit Hong Kong.

Christmas in Langham Place

Yesterday I went back to Hong Kong Park, on the island, for a proper explore. The park is right in the busy part of Hong Kong Island so you have the surreal feeling that your in a giant tv set and either the lush vegetation or the shining sky scrapers has been superimposed on a blue screen. To add to the surreality, the park also contains a marriage registry so the main paths are full of just-married couples queing up to get their photos taken in the most picturesque spots! If you can wind your way along the paths without tripping over the trails and tripods, you can also visit the Museum of Tea Ware (exhibiting a variety of tea pots) and a huge aviary containing around 600 birds before taking in the conservatory (which I didn't have time for) and the waterfall!

Where did the skyscrapers go?

The Aviary

The Bank of China tower from behind the waterfall.

This morning I woke up to the sounds of bagpipes! It's not the Fair day... but there is some kind of celebration going on in the sports ground that my windows look over. I always thought that when I live abroad I would start to get nostalgic over the sound of bagpipes but sadly that effect hasn't kicked in yet. I don't think the pipers were particularly experience - they seemed a bit out of tune to me!

Bagpipers out my window!

I'm going on another hike this afternoon so need to go and get my suncream on, then it's off to school camp tomorrow which should be interesting.

Intrepid adventures in the New Territories.

2007-11-10T05:20:00.000-08:00

My students had tests this week, so the whole school officially finished at 1pm on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. On the Wednesday, 3 of my first year girls invited me to go and have lunch with them. I asked if Mr Macauley (Rich) could come too, and so we all went to McDonalds! The girls are really good at English, but also REALLY hyperactive so it was quite hard work keeping track of their conversation for more than an hour, but then they took us on a wander through Tin Shui Wai Park which is really quite pleasant and not particularly far from our school. It was nice to see a bit more of the area we teach in.

Me, Kelly, Clarissa and Summayah in Tin Shui Wai park

On Thursday I decided to go on another Tin Shui Wai adventure, to the Hong Kong Wetland Park, which a pink signpost (they have LOTS of them in Hong Kong directing you towards tourist places) indicated was only 12 minutes walk from our school. The Wetland Park is man-made, but borders on a natural marsh reserve. It was partly built to compensate for all the wetlands that were drained to build new housing in the area, and to educate the local people about the value of the little protected parts that remain. My kids at school had told me the Park was boring and full of mosquitoes, but I was quite pleasantly surprised. The walkways around the park are carefully constructed so you don't really see all the other visitors (although you HEAR the visiting school groups!) and the different areas of the reserve look natural rather than man made. There was a mangrove section which you cross using a floating boardwalk and I got quite excited by being amongst a geography-textbook habitat! I also saw some of wildlife... although not necessarily the most exciting of species.

Little Egret

Crabs in the mangrove mud

Butterfly

Today was my third adventure in the New Territories. I went to the East side this time, to Clearwater Bay Second Beach. I've been meaning to go to a beach for a few weekends, but the weather wasn't too great, or I couldn't find anyone to go with, or I got distracted by going to Disneyland, so today when I woke up and realised it was going to be a bit of a scorcher, I decided to head out alone. I'd never been to a beach alone before, but it was a really relaxing experience. The only downside was that I had to leave all my stuff unattended on the beach while I went for my swim in the sea, but the worry was well worth it when I got to think 'It's NOVEMBER and I'm swimming in the sea!!!!' The beach was a really good place to chill out as it's not got any towns around it and the road is up the hill from the beach and hidden amongst the greenery. It was so lovely to just listen to the sounds of the waves crashing on the floor rather than the traffic and the car horns and the pedestrian crossing beeps that you get in Mong Kok. I must try to go back again before it gets too cold.

Clearwater Bay Second Beach

The soothing sound of waves on the shore

The intrepid explorer chills out on a rock

Disney!

2007-11-05T05:10:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I went to Hong Kong Disneyland! It was a beautiful sunny day (you'd think that's normal here but actually it had been rainy for much of the week) which lifted our spirits right up, even before we'd reached Sunny Bay MTR station and got onboard the magical Disney MTR train with the Mickey Mouse shaped windows!

The Disney MTR

The park is smaller than the one in Paris (and much, smaller, apparently, than the one's in America) so it's not exactly a thrill a minute, but if you're excited by the thought of meeting Hong Kong-ers dressed up in Disney suits and trying on silly looking Disney hats, then there's more than enough to keep you going all day.

Fiona and a silly hat

Almost as soon as we arrived (after our first silly-hat trying on detour) we found ourselves outside The Festival of the Lion King show, so we popped inside and were just in time for it to start. I've never seen the Lion King musical, but I imagine the costumes and props were pretty similar, and I was rather impressed by them. The story seemed a little rushed, as they were trying to fit the whole of the Lion King into a half-hour long performance, but it was fun all the same. The opening number was Circle of Life, just like we sang it in the Rev concerts last year.

Hanna, Jenny, Alice, Me and Fiona

We managed to get our photos taken with Alice in Wonderland, Mickey and Minnie, and Woody and Jessy from Toy Story, which was slightly embarrassing but really good fun. Minnie even gave me a kiss on the cheek! My favourite ride would be a toss-up between the Winnie the Pooh ride (where you travel through scenes from various Winnie the Pooh stories and they do some very clever pretend rain for the one where 100 acre wood floods) and the Buzz Lightyear ride where you get laser guns to shoot at the evil Zurg and I scored more than anyone else and managed to reach Level 5, which makes me a 'Space Ace'! Sadly, when we went on it later in the day, my gun was malfunctioning and I got zero points.

Fiona and Hanna get the evil Zurg

After the fireworks behind Sleeping Beauty's castle, we had to hop back on the MTR and return to the real world...

... where not much is happening this week! The students are starting their Term 1 tests on Wednesday, so it's all a bit studious at school. Think I'll go back to the magical land of Disney!

Kite flying and Halloween

2007-10-27T23:01:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-09T06:10:00.000-07:00

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...

Mid Autumn Festival

2007-09-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was my birthday, and also the day of Mid Autumn Festival which is apparently the 2nd largest event in the Chinese calendar. People get together with their families and have nice meals and then stay up all night playing with lanterns and watching the full moon. It's all something to do with a man who was given potion that would make him fly by a god, but then his wife stole it whilst he was out one day and then she flew to the moon and couldn't come back. Apparently she has a jade rabbit to keep her company up there.

Rabbit lantern display

I got quite a few cards in the post, in fact some women sharing the lift with me commented that I had a lot of post, which lead to a few minutes of English conversation with my neighbours, although they live in Block B not Block A so we went our different directions after the first lift.

I went down to Victoria Park, which is on Hong Kong island, to check out the lanterns displays. The park was full of people milling around. There were lots of children and adults with lanterns, some of which were traditional and papery looking and made in the shape of fish, whilst others were more like inflatable toys with tiny torches in the middle. I even saw one little boy with a Buzz Lightyear lantern. There were lots of signs saying that lanterns with candles inside were forbidden.

A lantern tower in Victoria Park

Lantern bamboo screen

Hanging lanterns

The most exciting thing about Mid Autumn Festival, other than the pretty lighting, is that everyone gets the day after off work to recover from staying up staring at the moon all night. I wasn't exactly staring at the moon, but we did hit Central for some birthday celebrations! The Wednesday holiday was thus spent doing not very much at all.

It was back to school on Thursday, where this week I've been doing a lesson on Acceptance Speeches for Awards Ceremonies. We acted a scene from Harry Potter in last week's classes and the kids voted on which student was the Best Harry, Best Ron etc, so this week they prepared speeches and made paper plate awards and then we held an awards ceremony and I announced the results. It was great fun, even the fifth time round!

Houston collecting his Best Harry award

Carmen gives her Best Hermione acceptance speech

Tonight was parents night, so I had to stay in school until 9pm (that's a 13 hour day at work!). Rich and I appeared to be there just so the parents could smile and stare at us, as the actual presentation to the parents was all in Cantonese. The teachers sat next to me kept translating bits though, and seeing all the parents of the children I teach reminded me that I've actually got the potential to have a big impact on all of their lives. Not in a scary way, more in a motivational way that makes me want to get all our lunchtime and after school activities up and running, and spend less time doing lesson plans in the staffroom and more time out in the playground chatting with the students.

Jude and Fiona (friends from my uni course) have arrived for a few days stopover en route to New Zealand. They're too jet lagged for socialising tonight but we're hopefully going to do touristy things all weekend.

Home comforts

2007-09-21T03:33:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this from the comfort of my own flat - I spent much of last Saturday out laptop shopping and then on Wednesday we got internet installed in out flat. Hong Kong is pretty good at technology - my laptop (after a great amount of trailing round Hong Kong) came from a 3 storey computer centre just 5 minutes walk away from our flat, and we arranged out internet at a stall on a street running paralled to ours. We spoke to a man at about 5pm, and by 9 o'clock they'd come round and we were online!

It's a good thing really because things at school have been getting more hectic and I haven't had time to spare for faffing around on the internet. Lessons are going alright, although it's amazing the different reactions you get when you teach the same class to 5 different sets of students. Rich and I had to do a lunchtime Meaningful Task on Thursday, which was a little like an assembly. We had the whole school (only actually about 200 kids) in the hall and played Who Wants to be a Millionaire with them using the powerpoint and the giant screen they have. It was a little bit like being back at PGL as we tried to keep them all involved by getting them to cheer for their teams and shout out the answers. I got to have a microphone!

I haven't been doing too much exploring this recently. Last Saturday was spent laptop shopping, and then on Sunday a group of us went for dim sum and I went a wander round the Flower Market which is quite near my flat. The Flower Market is a bit like an extended version of a garden centre. It's a long road of individual flower and houseplant shops, with stalls out in front so that you walk along a narrow path of pavement between the plants. They have not so exotic flowers like roses all carefully wrapped up and then amazing looking lillies and things which are just left out in the open air. I plan to go back and invest in a wee plant for the flat at some point.

I got a bit more adventurous with my market shopping this week and bought one of the amazing pink dragonfruits. They look a LOT more exciting than they taste.

Pink dragonfruit

Inside the dragonfruit

School starts

2007-09-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

I taught my first lessons today! They went reasonably well, although I had a minor panic when I realised (5 minutes before my lesson started ) that one of the classrooms had no computer in it to show my prepared images on. As the whole lesson was based on using the images to encourage the students to speak, the pictures were pretty essential. Luckily I have a few scenic prints of my Botswana trip last summer that I used for the group work, but in order to have a large enough picture to do a class example I had to get artistic with my whiteboard markers! The students were asked to come up with words to describe the pictures. One of them described my whiteboard doodle as 'beautiful' whilst others came up with 'funny' and 'ugly'. At least I provoked a response!

Last week was a bit slow and aimless as we were expected to do our 8 hours in school each day but not entirely sure what to do to fill the time. In a normal week we have plenty of lessons and after school activities to get planning for but last week we didn't exactly know when our lessons would be or if there were specific topics to plan lessons on. It all got sorted out by the end of the week and Friday afternoon was very productive as me and Rich rapidly tried to sort out everything for our 9 o'clock monday lessons. We also went out with the other English teachers for dim sum on Friday (the traditional Hong Kong experience). It was really nice to chat to them in a more relaxed atmosphere than the office like staffroom, though they did giggle a bit at my chopstick skills.

Dim sum with the English teachers:

Priscilla, Peggy, Nicole, Carrie, Carrie, Me and Rich

The flat is looking a bit more like a home now. A sofa, comfy chair, coffee table and fridge arrived over the course of last week, although still no sign of my bed because Ikea have found a fault with their cheapest line of single beds (though not the double sized version that my flatmate Tom ordered!) and are getting rid of all their current stock and then (hopefully) getting new ones in at the end of the month. I've got my mattress to sleep on till then and the next bed up in about twice the price so I'm off to Ikea tonight to try and get a definite date for delivery. The fridge was the definite highlight of the week because now I can have tea with milk and no sugar (although the milk is UHT).

Went to visit the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens over the weekend with Blair and Rehana (2 Americans from my group). The gardens are right in the heart of Central which is pretty much the financial district, so you get strange angular views of skyscrapers above the palm trees and animal cages. There's a few aviaries full of brightly coloured birds, monkeys and lemurs (though most of them were sleeping at 3 in the afternoon), tortoises, 2 chinese alligators, a greenhouse full of orchids and lots of mosquitoes (not in any cages but I seemed to collect a lot of bites yesterday!). It was nice to see some natural sights as a break from the neon lights of Mong Kok. The zoo also has a Burmese Python in it's reptile house which is about as fat as my thigh and looks extremely long. It was an odd sensation to see a scary looking snake and then read on the information board that it's "common in Hong Kong"!

Animals at the zoo (Blair and Rehana!)

Touristic reports from a cybercafe

2007-08-31T00:49:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-23T02:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-21T03:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-17T02:06:00.000-07:00

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!