Off again!

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

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

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

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.