Hong Kong Express

Hello from Seymour Road in Midlevels, Hong Kong!

With law school looming in the steadily less-distant future, I decided to skip town for a few days. This Wednesday I hopped the adventure train, taking a flight over the polar ice cap to the other side of the planet for a week on the island of Hong Kong. My friend M offered me a spare bedroom in the Midlevels district of the city, and in a bizarre turn of events, I accepted.

After two flights, two trips through security, and a stop at the Garden City Diner for calamari and a burger, I boarded Continental's direct from Newark to HK.

The fifteen hour flight (well, sixteen if you count the hour spent on the runway after a storm delay) featured a group of EF students, a few blessedly quiet babies (well, mostly quiet), and some delightful vegetarian cuisine. There were even vegan cookies! The tv in front of my seat had games, movies, tv shows, and a map showing our progress, and we also had a laptop for movies. There were electrical plugs under our seats! The skymall magazine also offered a solid half an hour of entertainment, especially the garden statue of a zombie climbing out of the ground, and a brownie pan that makes all corner brownies. I'm so buying those!

After dinner (Indian vegetarian including a cup of quinoa with beans), the flight attendant came by with fortune cookies containing some rather mixed-message fortunes, which led to a discussion of how those red and white folded boxes became ubiquitous to Chinese take-out. Apparently, an industrial company in San Francisco was using the box for a different purpose and sold the excess stock to the Chinese immigrant community in the bay area. Or so i'm told by the flight attendant who saw it on tv. All in all, I did some reading, watched some movies, played some FreeCell, and waited out the longest flight of my life without too much trouble. As prescribed, I yogaed every five hours and drank as much water as I could, and tried not to sleep but snoozing ended up being the fastest way to get through the last five hours. We landed at about 8:10pm local time.

As long as the flight took, it was a very quick and easy deplaning process. I hopped off the plane, called my dad to check in with him, got my passport stamped, and headed onto the train into the city to the IFC mall. On the way I bought an Octopus Card, which is used on city buses, the MTR, any 7-11 or Circle K, movie theaters, Watsons (HK's answer to CVS), etc. By this point it was about 8:30pm in HK.

We had dinner at Crystal Jade, a crowded restaurant full of young people where place settings included personal packs of wetnaps for each plate, in case things got messy. We were served free hot tea in a glass as we sampled meat/veggie buns, bok choy, sweet & sour chicken, Shanghai fried noodles, and this amazing rice cake stuff - Jasmine rice dried and fried. I'm told this is how to make it: cook a batch of Jasmine rice, then spread it on a cookie sheet and bake it for 12 hours at 100 degrees and cut it into squares. Then you deep fry the squares to produce tasty goodness that can be sauced or left alone.

The walk from the IFC mall to Seymour Road in Midlevels is up a mountain, so we took "The World's Longest Escalator" with a vertical climb of 135 meters and a total of 800 meters in length (don't worry it's not continuous). Apparently 55,000 people ride it each day, and it goes down in the morning from 6am-10am, then up from 10am onward. It's a series of escalators, some in moving stair form and some in flat airport-style form (the flat ones still go uphill and they're quite steep). Along the way, riders are reminded by a series of signs not to spit, litter, allow for standing stagnant water, or smoke.

M's apartment building on Seymour Road looks deceivingly small (read: lousy) from the outside, but the inside of the 2br 1ba 900 sq ft apartment is lovely. My borrowed bedroom has a strange couch-like bed (I'm told as I wite this that it actually is the other half of the couch in the living room) and a built-in chest of drawers and cabinets. The view of HK from my bedroom window is pretty much what it's looked like since the plane touched down - tall (TALL!) buildings, with every inch of streetscape crawling with shops, restaurants, tented stores and people. Despite this view, I'm told that 80% of HK is actually "country park" (government owned parkland).

Tomorrow will include some or all of the following:

• a late brunch at either The Flying Pan or The Brunch Club in the Midlevels neighborhood called Soho
• a gondola trip up to "The World's Largest Sitting Buddha"
  
• a trip on "The World's Oldest Tram System" up to the Peak to the observation deck to look at the entire island of Hong Kong
• Stanley Market for lunch by the ocean and shopping
  
• a nearby Buddhist temple with cheap antique shopping
• wander in the wet markets (vegetable and meat markets) in Central (a district bordering Midlevels)
• Hong Kong natural history museum

"Only fools and dead mean don't change their minds fools won't and dead men cant."
"Pay attention to your nonverbal cues, and try turning it down."