Hong Kong – Tourist edition!

Whoa, Hong Kong! I don’t think I’ve ever been that intensively touristy and I still feel there was a lot to see and do there. Even though I still totally dig China and all it’s random not-giving-a-crap, this was actually a place I could imagine myself living on a long term basis.

First of all I actually really like that the space is so tight. It’s got a lot more atmosphere than the broad, anonymous boulevards of Beijing. And there are all kinds of lively markets everywhere; bird market, flower market, jade market, “Ladies’ Market”, goldfish market! And so on. And even though it’s a bit expensive to get around by public transportation (compared to Beijing), they do have the world’s longest escalator. I mean, how about that.

Random foodmarket. Mikkel may possibly be about to sneeze.

If the city’s getting too much, the beautiful, relaxed outlying islands aren’t far away by ferry.  We went to Lamma Island where we relaxed and went swimming at the beach all day. Perfect idea since the weather is hot and very humid, turning me into a very sweaty Scandinavian. Lamma is a real “hippie” island, organic stores everywhere and a lot of multi coloured cotton clothes.

Chillout at Lamma. Denmark (Carlsberg) meets Hong Kong (convenient can-can under the table) meets China (eating nuts in a messy way while rubbing our satisfied bellies).

We also visited Lantau Island for a more specific reason: to see the big bronze Buddha. We went up there with the lift, a bit expensive but the view was worth it. There was a disgusting tourist-village around it, but even though it was very impressive. We chose the “Path of Wisdom” (who wouldn’t?) to get away from the masses and look at the nature. Waaauw. The views were spectacular and I just had to do Qigong on the Heart Sutra hill (the Heart Sutra is carved in big wooden logs up a hill) with a view down to the Buddha. Not sure if it made it more effective, but I’d like to think so.

The “fence” around him is not (only) for keeping him in, but to prevent people from falling down while admirering/worshipping. So he’s big alright.

Foodwise it was expensive, but we did have some luck! We tagged along an American guy and a Scottish gal who’d found a small, hidden pearl of a local restaurant. We had the famous Hong Kong “French toast” and noodles + stuff. Very delicious, relatively cheap and even though the place didn’t look that great and despite the fact that you couldn’t spot it without knowing it, there was a queue down the street to get in.

French toast in the middle, satisfied tourists in the background.

… And this is the queue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also went to the world’s cheapest Michelin restaurant. Also a small place serving dim sum from plastic service, but ouuh! You’d get a queue number outside the restaurant and a menu paper to cross out the things you wanted. When it finally was our turn (sooner than expected!) we were squeezed into the tiny place and served some of the most delicious stuff I’d ever had served with Pu Erh tea. 149 HK$ all in all. That’s probably the cheapest non-7/11 meal we’ve had in Hong Kong!

Need I say more?

Oh, and they also have awesome seafood BBQ-sticks everywhere. The museums were nice as well even though they wouldn’t let us into the Picasso exhibition. Pff.

The mindset and atmosphere are very different from Beijing. A big part of it is of course the British/western influence. Everybody speaks English, everything is prohibited (with threats of persecution), there’s neat and tidy everywhere you go, but no migrant cleaners to see.People apologize, queue, even keep a distance to you, don’t rush to the available subway seats, don’t want to haggle, don’t yell at you and pull your arm to get you to buy something. The cars drive in the opposite site of the road (but don’t worry, I didn’t REALLY got run over) and people actually wait for the lights to turn green. And they supposedly have the best Wing Chun instructors! You know Bruce Lee’s fighting style. A random guy who helped us finding our way, happened to be a martial arts coach and gave me a crash course in, yes, Wing Chun..! Definitely not the last time I try it.

Uhhh, tacky Symphony of Lights AND Bruce. That was my favourite day.

Well, and now we’re back, registered at the police station and ready to start working tomorrow!

Wonderful Hong Kong, not so wonderful visa.

Hong Kong is grrrreat! Will give more specific information on that later + pics. I can tell you that the weather is perfect, the atmosphere so comfortable, people are nice, nature is beautiful, city is impressive, everything is prohibited, markets are so full of life, seafood BBQ is yummy, but everything is very expensive. Still, if I had the matching salary I could really imagine living here. There’s everything you need within a very short, cheap distance.

Now to the serious stuff: Our visas. As it turns out, we can only get a one month single entry visa here in HK instead of the two-three months we were hoping for. That sucks, to be honest. We have three options:

A. Open a Chinese bank account with min. 3.000 euroes and cross our fingers that it they will give us a month’s extension at the police office and let us get the money back when we go home.

B. Pay an agent to extend our visa by a month. Will probably cost between 1.600-5.000 RMB (1Euro=8RMB)

C. Rebook our plane tickets, stop at the project earlier, try and convince our landlord that we shouldn’t pay the last month’s rent and give us the deposit back.

No matter what, it will cost us a lot of money and we’d have to reebook the tickets. So glad we chose flex-tickets. We’ll discuss what to do when we get back to Beijing, but my God, it’s a really difficult dilemma. Don’t know how our economical situation looks like, but wauw going home in one month doesn’t seem that far away. I’m wishing for a miracle, that’s what I’ll do.

Uh, and last thing, we’re hoping to have a delayed Eurovision Song Contest party Sunday. Hopefully we’ll get both Europeans and Chinese to participate!

Arrived in Hong Kong!

After getting up at 4:50, getting a taxi to the airport, checking in, taking the bus from the airport to the plane in what seemed like an eternity, getting on the plane – which was delayed more than an hour – getting off and entering a wall of sauna, running around at Shenzhen Airport asking for the subway to Hong Kong, “Mei you, mei you, doesn’t exist”, finding it after 2 hours, going to the border, proving ourselves true idiots failing to notice the giant “HONG KONG –>” signs, getting help from a SHOCKING amount of English speaking Chinese, doing symbolic visa registration for entering Hong Kong, going by sub again and being amazed by a very, very tight spaced city, we arrived in our hostel, 18:00, 8th floor, 24 bed dorm, 2 bathrooms, aircondition –> important.

Tomorrow we’ll go to the visa office as the first thing, and afterwards hopefully Historical Museum, Victoria Bay, Lamma Island, Disneyland, Waterpark, Picasso Museum, hiking, strolling, dining at cheap Michelin restaurants, watching grafitti and skating youngsters, going pubcrawling, shopping western goods, swimming, world’s longest escalatoring, speaking English and English and English, laughing at the Cantonese language (we cried from laughing at the dictionary in Lonely Planet: pork = jew yuk), admiring architecture, sweating, visiting markets etc. More or less. Welcome out of China!

“Kinder Reminder”

… As it says on the Chinese toiletwalls about not throwing papir in the toilet, but in the convenient bin. A “kinder reminder” did we get today of the real China, the China you don’t think about when you are haggling, eating rice or getting squished in the subway. This was the first, the most disturbing, but not involving us:

“China activist Chen’s relatives describe beatings”

and the second is this potentially very involving us:

“Are You Legal? 100 Days of Checks on Foreigners Begins Today”

We’re apparently talking knocking doors, stopping people on the street and encouraging to turning people in. And fines 5.000-20.000RMB and jail sentences from 5-15 days. We do have a visa, and we are gonna get a new one before it expire, but it’s tourist visas so we don’t have a residence or working permit. Hope volunteering doesn’t count and that they won’t find our flat! Welcome to a 100 days of hide and seek!

More work + Hong Kong soon

Hello dear reader,

just came back from pub quiz at the Bookworm – a western kind of expensive café with loads of books to read – where we/I usually go on Mondays. Not because I enjoy sitting there feeling unintelligent (they did make the questions easier and less British now, though), but it’s great socializing. Atm. drinking porridge from a cup (mostly because it’s the only “food” I’ve got to munch) and eating sunflower seeds like a proper Chinese (never a bad time for bird seeds). Phew, there’s an infinite amount of stuff I want to tell about, but haven’t had time to write about… Now, I’ll start by telling the current situation:

We’ve started teaching/playing with the 2-3 and 3-4 year-olds for the Parent & Child class after morning reading with LVS (the young guys) every day. That is really something I have to get used to, it’s been a long time since I had these sizes romping about.  But they are really cute these Chinese children although it’s a bit random hanging around with them THAT non-verbal and with them still being a bit afraid of us. Teaching the LVS is moved to Saturday afternoons after teaching the OHW in the mornings (loooong days, goodbye Friday parties). This Friday I was told that my whole OHW team was going to be absent the following day – and that it would be very nice if I’d do the teaching. Usually I’m just a TA with two other TA’s and a teacher and hadn’t prepared for LVS’s class yet, but we all got through it safe and sound! Although the LVS really pissed me off in the afternoon, only speaking Chinese and ignoring me. Well, it was during the LEGO exercise and they’ve never seen it before, so it’s understandable. I mean, it is pretty amazing that toy. It was so funny to see them building a house. Normally, it’s not very difficult predicting how a Dane for example would build a house: Square box with a window and door, triangular roof, possibly with a chimney. But these guys all made VERY Chinese skyscrapers with complex Chinese-style roofs. It’s not that the buildings here look THAT significantly different from other places (except that even some neat, expensive places here are built of plywood and foil), but the idea is still based on Chinese logic and aesthetics.

Then on Sunday we’re going to Hong Kong for a week to get new visas. It’s gonna be an expeeeensive trip, but hopefully everything will go smooth and easy *knock on wood*. I’m really dreading the weather, heard it should be about as hot and wet as Mongolian Hop Pot. I bet there’s a better saying in Chinese. But oooh, am I bitter: Intro Festival, the biggest electronic festival in China AND the Eurovision Song Contest is the Saturday when we’re in Hong Kong. Bugger!

Uh, and then I’ve tried chicken feet finally. There wasn’t a lot of meat or taste on them, but maybe the place didn’t prepare them correctly or something. Anyway, I was disappointed.

Qigong & Bagua

In lack of any kind of exercise and with a lot of spare time I opened project “qigong”. I met a Bosnian girl “whose life was saved by qigong”. It sounds a bit like a cult, you might think (and it kind of is), but she insisted that she wants to teach me in private, so that was an amazing opportunity (to be enrolled in a cult). She actually (almost) stopped drinking and smoking because she gets the same effect – but stronger and healthier – from qigong.

So a couple of days ago I woke up a bit hung-over after having been to blues the night before. I got a cab and met up with her a little later than planned (…) and we went to Ritan Park, probably the nicest park I’ve seen here in Beijing. Truly beautiful, peaceful and very Chinese. Her version of qigong is a mix with bagua (which is basically doing exercise with trees – AND THAT’S WHY THE OLD PEOPLE ARE HANGING IN THE TREES!! It all makes sense now. What a pity) so we did some stretching with a tree to begin with. Fair enough, I love trees and they’re easy to hold on to. And then the qigong started.

It was some of the most awkward positions my body has ever been in. E.g. the one where legs are spread, but knees touching, elbows touching (in front of the body…) and hands as far from each other as possible with claw fingers. Look up, breathe, tongue against palate. Stand for as long as possible without dying. I was trembling the whole qigong part through! It was so hard even though we almost weren’t moving. Slightly bended knees and lifted arms will apparently do the job for you. At a point it actually felt like somebody was holding my body for me – very strange! But I guess I have a long way to go, for the girl was laughing spontaneously from the goodness of the qigong. It is supposed to get your mind connected with your body, get your qi (energy/blood circulation) to flow better and to become more aware of both your surroundings and your own body and mind.

I going tonight as well (it’s very hot in BJ atm and temperature is still rising) – I’m looking forward to lucid dreams and laugh attacks.

Tianjin fairy tale!

Okay, so these last weeks I’ve been very bad at updating the blog even though there’s been tons of stuff to write about – so I’m really behind! That’s been partly because there’s been too much to write about, too much to write about that took time from blog writing and because I’m panicking a bit about applying for university. Still don’t really have a clue about what to study (and probably never will), so I might just end up choosing something and then end up working as something completely different. I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be teaching children (I had that assumption before I got here). Maybe astronaut. Why not.

Ahem: Once upon a time (rather specificly last Sunday-Tuesday – the Golden Holidays, or Labour Day as we call it back home) we went to Tianjin after being invited by a Chinese girl I randomly met while picking up some take-away. She is one of the nicest people I’ve met. We took the high-speed train and half an hour later we arrived. That was like a second culture shock! There were a lot of anonymous skyscrapers like in the rest of China, but most of the architecture there was surprisingly European! It was so surreal walking around on the clean, broad pavements, fancy bridges, churches… Well, there were more Chinese tourists and birdseed left-overs than in Europe, but still! A bit like being in Disneyland, a little fairy tale spot within the real world. The churches was made into museums though and the architecture wasn’t EXACTLY European. When the girl showed us around and asked us “Isn’t that just SO French?” we nodded, but kept thinking that most of it was a strange mix of everything. Both because French, Italian, Spanish, British etc. styles were side by side in a weird clash, but none of the buildings were REALLY any of those styles. E.g. “the French bridge”: Okay, it had statues and ornaments, but the French would never cast ornamentation in concrete and paint it bronze-coloured.

Well, Chinese sweetheart showed us around, and the next day we went to a TOTAL Chinese market street (POW culture shock backwards) were we had cha tang (porridge thingy), ma hua (some twisted bread/cake/fried dough/klejner’ish thing) and a weird rice lollipop. Yep, they’ve got rice EVERYTHING. And there were so many people sending lanterns up (you know, the ones that are like hot-air balloons) over the river in the evening… People hanging out on the broad pavement next to the lit up Tianjin Eye ferris wheel… Mm, and then we went to a club with some of our Italian friends (of course there are many Italians in a city that has an “Italian Style Town”). And then we went home to BJ (yesss, that is the official initials of Beijing, you should really see the people wearing “I ❤ BJ” T-shirts) and slept a lot. And they lived happily ever after.