Do Hong Kongers Dream of Electric Sheep?

After how much fun I had writing that last post, I’ve actually been inspired to keep writing over the last few days, but haven’t really had the chance to upload because my new apartment didn’t come with internet. (Side note: I am no longer living in Causeway Bay, so you’ll be hearing more about my new neighborhood soon. The Causeway stories will also continue however, as work is still over there.) As I write, I’m actually typing in a Word doc that I’ll just upload when I find a Starbucks or something. Starbucks here only gives you free internet for 20 minutes, by the way. That seems pretty stingy to me, but on the other hand they are very possibly justified in their fear that if they have free unlimited wifi, their Hong Kong customers will never leave. Ever.

After all, Hong Kongers are probably more addicted to their smartphones than the people anywhere else I’ve visited so far. Japan is a close second, admittedly, and I’ve never been to South Korea, but Hong Kong is certainly the first place I’ve been where the subway station loudspeakers continually entreat day in and day out “Please hold onto the handrail; DON'T keep your eyes only on your mobile phone” as you get out of the trains and take the escalators up to ground level.

Several coworkers have told me that phones often seem to play a central role in the dating culture here—and I don’t mean because people meet on apps like Tindr or anything (though I think Tindr does exist here.) Rather, I’ve heard several stories about Chinese couples being spotted spending their time together in restaurants and cafes, with each person glued to their own mobile phone for the entire meal. Sometimes the date takes place half in the real world and half in the virtual one, with couples sitting together while they compete against each other in cell phone games. Meanwhile, on the streets, people mill around, eyes fixed on their phones, standing and blocking the walkways.

In fact, phones aside, it feels like the Chinese in the over-crowded Causeway Bay area have very little sense of when you should walk faster to keep traffic moving, or at least get out of the way of someone trying to go faster than a window-shopping pace. It drives the Manhattanite in me crazy. People are often so slow to move that I’ve started experiencing a form of pedestrian road rage where I have to actively restrain myself from just kind of punching people out of the way.

Still, technology here can be awesome too. Like Japan, the vending machines here are completely beyond those we see in the U.S.

For example, this one sells umbrellas, in case you amateurishly get caught out during a typhoon rain.

I was also a huge fan of this bathroom in the Hysan Place mall. The blue and red lights you see at the top of each stall are not just for classy décor; they also indicate which stalls are vacant or occupied.

When walking the streets of Hong Kong, you also perpetually run the risk of getting dripped on. Water droplets plop down on unsuspecting passerby at any moment, not because it rains all the time, but because of the condensation continually leaking down onto the streets from what seems like millions upon millions of air conditioner units installed in the windows of homes and restaurants overhead.

A late night view of Causeway Bay offers a quieter perspective on the usually bustling neighborhood.

A few funny moments from a couple of weeks ago:

This photo above shows the time Sara (who is Chinese American), Stephanie (Caucasian) and I went to dinner together. On the near side of the photo are the chopsticks the waiters automatically served Sara and I, while on the far side are the fork and spoon Stephanie received. The waiter also doubled back later and asked me if it was okay that I’d been given chopsticks, thus perfecting a symbolic summary of our ethnicities by giving chopsticks to the Asian, cutlery to the white girl, and an uncertain in-between for the halfie.

Other hilarious moment: Causeway Bay is not the best area for after-work drinks, so we found ourselves at one point at a very strange bar called Brecht’s, where the beer was served in little water glasses, the music alternated between random rock songs and every Eminem song ever recorded, and the décor featured these lovely caricatures:

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Mainland China anymore…

Some things just can’t be explained.

Around the end of July, my college friends Lucy and Sophie were nice enough to go a few days out of their way and visit me on their way out of China and back to the U.S. My next post will feature the packed couple of days we had when they were here. For now, I’ll leave you with some pictures of the first night that the three of us all had together. We set out to get a good view of Hong Kong at night, so we rode the tram back up to the Peak (you may remember the daytime photos from the Peak from an earlier post) and got a glimpse of the Hong Kong city lights.

And a view from the waterfront that I actually took before Lucy and Sophie visited:

Pretty sure the HK Tourist Board should be paying me advertising money right now…and there’s a lot more great stuff to come next time!

TBC

What Teachers Make

Written on 7/28/14

Yeah, so, first of all, the previous format for date labeling is probably going to have to stop. Like I said in my first post, as a kid I never found the motivation to regularly keep a diary, and clearly a decade and some later that hasn't changed much.

On a different note, yayy! Work has started! And it is insane. I'm teaching 8 unique classes right now, but some of those occur twice instead of once a week. During the first week I lost my voice almost completely because of not being used to talking non-stop for almost four hours (two classes) straight. (Who'd have guessed that I'd be bad at talking continuously, eh? That's probably the biggest shocker of the post.)

Here's what I've learned: kids are adorable; kids are monsters; kids are 100% crazy; and if I ever wanted to write a best-selling children's novel, I should probably just steal one of my kids' ideas and then write it way better. (I only realized as I was writing that that I just summarized the entire plot of Big Fat Liar, except instead of sympathizing with cute little Frankie Munez, apparently I'm Paul Giamatti. Oh god.)

But anyways, I teach a range of kids going from 5th through 9th grade, and it's hilarious and terrifying to see again in person what puberty does to a person. The 5th and 6th graders tend to be energetic to the point where I've had some behavior problems in class. Yesterday, some of my kids started throwing stuff to each other around the classroom, and they regularly scream over each other, or sing, or swear and make really, really bad yo mama jokes I haven't heard since the '90s. Not all of my 5th/6th kids are like this of course. One of my other classes is full of extremely bright kids and I spend a lot of my time wishing they would just sign up for all of my classes. 

The 7th-9th grade kids, on the other hand, tend to be much quieter. A combination of slightly improved impulse control, a puberty-induced extreme fear of embarrassment, a teenage sense of apathy...who knows. They're much easier to manage, but also not as fun when you get the occasional class who seriously don't want to say anything.

The public mini-buses in the Causeway Bay area are covered with ads for various "education centers" promising to foster academic success, but ours are by far the most frequent.

We've also learned that the company has in the past paid much more expensive fees to put ads on the ding-dings, and those ads have included teachers' faces. Having one's face on a ding-ding has now become a life ambition for some of the new teachers.

A mock-up leftover from the time we did have a ding-ding ad.

To a certain extent, I think I identify with these kids' upbringing a lot more than some of the other teachers. The kids all come from incredibly privileged backgrounds and, to be honest, even though I already knew how privileged my own childhood was, the knowledge is brought home even more every time a kid says something about his/her elite life and I catch myself thinking "oh yeah, my family does that too." They talk about traveling to Europe, or vacationing in Thailand. When the teachers were discussing how insanely expensive the international schools these kids attend are, I agreed with them, but was forced to admit that my own international school back home had cost about the same.

Recently, I was teaching a 5th/6th grade class about the issues that face the elderly here in Hong Kong, and, knowing that these kids have NO awareness of poverty, I started off by asking them about their own grandparents. Were they retired? Did they have their own home? So they had saved money, huh? Do they have health problems? 

One kid started saying that of course his grandparents have money--they always gave him money too. This led to a round of discussion, with one girl saying she got HK$900 for her 9th birthday, HK$1000 for her tenth. I noted that this was a pretty good incentive for living. Another boy chimed in, "My grandparents gave me HK$3000 for Chinese New Year!"(About USD$390.) In a different class, a boy informed me that he would be missing class later that month because his condo in Beijing would be finished and he was off to vacation there.

It was gratifying, though, to see their shock and dismay when we read about the living conditions that some of Hong Kong's elderly must endure. The dark side of HK that these kids are sheltered from is the terrible poverty that about 1/7th of HK's population faces. (Well, and the human rights abuses and exploitation of Filippina and Indonesian domestic helpers, but that's another story. Oh, and also the treatment of minorities in general...okay, it can be kind of a dark place underneath the glitz.) I hope that they learned something about the less privileged, at least. Maybe their curiosity will be sparked.

And now, for something (not) completely different.

Kids are crazy story time:

1) We give all prospective students who want to take a critical thinking discussion/debate course with us an assessment test where we ask them various logic questions. Recently, we got one back from a 17 year-old girl whose response to the question "Should companies offer gym memberships or fitness programs to their employees (to boost their productivity etc.)?" was:
  "Yes, because if the female employees use the gym and become    more physically appealing to male workers, the male hormones  will push them to work harder to impress the beautiful ladies in  the office. The workers would also try their best to finish their  work on time so they can date after work. Higher efficiency can  be achieved this way--what a  bargain!"

Unsurprisingly, "What a bargain!" is the new catchphrase around work.

2) In fact, it came up recently in another situation. During the summer, class sizes fluctuate a lot as students come and go because of family vacations. One of my 5th/6th writing classes temporarily dropped last week from four giggling girls to one. It turns out that when girl number 4 is on her own, she is much, much stranger than she seemed in a classroom of her peers. We spent some time at the beginning chatting; I was trying to put her at her ease since it's obviously hard to be the only student in an interactive two hour class. 

Eventually, she looks at me intensely for a moment and asks, "If I ask you a question, will you promise not to get mad?"

Well, no curious person can refuse that, so I told her I wouldn't get mad but that I might refuse to answer.

Hmm. She considered this. "When you were wearing that other thing that other time, how come you didn't close all your buttons?"

*Blush.* Did I forget? I wondered. Did I just leave more buttons undone than was work appropriate? I pointed to my current shirt and noted that unfortunately, there were no more buttons to button--they ended at what I considered a reasonable height but not all the way up to my neck.

"No, not that shirt. You know the one. YOU KNOW what it was. Don't you know you looked so silly?? All the girls were talking about it."

I had nothing to say to this. I tried to describe a couple of my work outfits that she might be referring to, but every time received only, "No, no! You KNOW the one."

"Jane (not real name), I honestly have no idea."

Her eyes widened dramatically. "Is it because you wanted to attract that male teacher who was with you when you sat in on this class?"

Whaaaaaat??? It's true I had sat in on her class back when another instructor was teaching it, but I saw so many classes the first few weeks; I couldn't recall sitting in with someone else. I figured though--and dialogue with her confirmed--that she was referring to the only male new teacher, who must have also been observing at the time.

"Do you want to kisssssss him??"

"Uh, NO. D and I are friends and he is awesome but no."

"Don't lie! YOU KNOW! You KNOW!! There was lightning in your eyes!!"

This was when I decided it was time for Jane to try some grammar exercises by herself so I could snickeringly write an email to the other teachers telling them about the insanity taking place. One teacher's response: "Good thing that lightning will drive up D's hormones and make him work harder." My response: "What a bargain!"

3) A later gem in the same class:
"You must be so rich."
"Not really, why would you think that?"
"Because this place is very expensive and it pays you so you must be so rich."
Admittedly, I could see how this might occur to someone. But I gently corrected her and said I was doing okay, but not rich rich.

At some point, she also asked:
"Why do you always fake laugh?"
Ah, the moment of non-insane insight. A question that has plagued me from various sources for many a year. Having no good reply at the ready, I resort to my go-to response--fake laugh.

Skip to when Jane starts planning out the story she'll write for homework:
"I'm going to make this President like you. She'll be 30 years old and really tall and have a large nose...but I'll make the eyes small because you have really big eyes. Oh, and she'll have a fake laugh."

"Jane...how old do you actually think I am?" Snicker.

She guesses down each year to 21 before I respond affirmatively. Her eyes widen. "21!! If you are only 21 now, you are going to be so rich!"

I tell her I appreciate this financial advice, and she instantly begins haggling how much of a cut she should get from my millions as a "fortuneteller" fee. She is swiftly denied anything above 1%. The clock ticks. Two hours are up.

Up Next: we switch back to stories of Hong Kong life...

The Experience Peaks

Well, hopefully not emotionally. But we did visit the Peak. Haha, I can just hear you all groaning at that one.

DAY 3 - 7/3/14

Today, Sarah joined the rest of us and we got a little taste of Hong Kong's cultural heritage and flourishing modern art scene. (Apparently said scene is becoming quite a big deal - http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/hong-kong-culture-now - can't wait!) We originally hopped on the ding dings in search of the Mid-Levels escalators (I'll save explaining those for some time when I've actually seen them) but wound up somewhere closer to Victoria Peak instead. The Peak, as its name suggests, is the tallest mountain on Hong Kong island, and offers a famously beautiful view of the city and the harbor. 

Getting ahead of myself. Before we went up to the Peak, we stopped by the Hong Kong Teaware museum, which is totally free (I think I recall reading that most museums in HK are free, but no one quote me on that) and features 8 rooms of tea sets, some from ancient traditions and some with a little more modern flare. I'm putting a few pictures here to illustrate how cool these were, but the full album will go on facebook, so check back there.

Examples of older ones:

And some recent innovations:

In conclusion - a great use of zero money! Side Note: the facebook album will also have pics of me and the other new teachers, but I won't be posting anyone else's face here for privacy purposes. Here's a picture of the park outside the museum instead. 

After the museum, we made our way to the tram that takes you up to the Peak. In this heat, we didn't even think about attempting to climb up the stairs instead, but we did think about going down on foot. 

Luckily, Sarah's cold prevented us from the attempt, because we realized on the tram back down that the route is very long and very steep. At one point on the tram going down, the train had to make a stop at a second station and pick up some straggling visitors, leading Sara to joke that this was the "Oh, let's climb down on foot...wait no this is way too hard helppp" station. Even on the trains, the going is steep enough to feel like a roller coaster, and, on the way down, the seats are all facing up towards the peak, so you ride down facing backwards at pretty high speeds. It was awesome. (Sara and Stephanie did not agree.)

The Peak itself was as stunning as the tour books and pictures show. I can't wait to go back at night. It's amazing how the apartment complexes that show their age quite a bit from the ground look so charming and colorful from a distance. From up on the mountain, they blend together charmingly with the modern financial skyscrapers that pepper the view. The Manhattan skyline has nothing on Hong Kong when it comes to tall buildings. While Manhattan has plenty of skyscrapers, the residential neighborhoods are still so much shorter than those in Hong Kong. The Columbia area is a good example--the dorm buildings go up for fifteen floors at most. That's probably the average here. 

The entire city feels so vertical that it's as if everything is stretched, or as if the city lives on a whole different altitude level than other cities. In San Francisco, where we have the housing crisis, locals decry the "Manhattanization" of SF, fearing that higher housing units will blot out our view of the bay as well as what little sun we have. When you gaze down at Hong Kong from the Peak, there are so many tall buildings that it feels like we've gone straight from having our views blocked by tall buildings to having great views because we ALL live in those tall buildings. (I know this to be untrue, since the apartment I'm currently staying in is shafted, but that's how it feels when you look out at the city.)

Side note: I didn't get any pictures of them, but there are a few buildings sitting on the rolling hills surrounding the peak, just casually perched amidst the otherwise undeveloped jungle-like forests. Would love to know who gets to live there, or why those buildings are there. They're a little puzzling. On the one hand, they have what must be at least a USD $20 million dollar view of Hong Kong; on the other hand, they look large but not well maintained. Are they abandoned? Ex-colonial palaces? Hard to say, but man, it must be amazing to stay in one.

Now for the Hong Kong culture tidbits of the day. Up until now, we had restricted ourselves to riding ding dings, but we weren't too eager to clamber aboard one at rush hour after coming down from the Peak. Ding dings have lots of open windows but no air conditioning, making them not so ideal when packed in the summer. We decided to take the subway back instead. Surprisingly uncrowded and the air conditioning was lovely. Pro tip though: do not attempt to hold the doors when they're closing. If your friends are trailing behind, either don't get in, or leave them behind and hope they catch the next one. Those doors do NOT want to open back up, and for a second I thought I would be starting my first day of work as an emergency amputee.

Here's what the doors will do to you:

We were all shrieking and (in my case of course) madly laughing when this happened. You should have seen the looks on the local people's faces. 

Another culture note. Hong Kong is of course famous for its concentration of astonishing wealth, and also for the rich mainland Chinese it attracts for shopping tourism. I think someone told me the other day that there are nine Prada flagship stores in Hong Kong. So it makes sense that there would be tons of luxury jewelry stores as well. What I can't understand is why so many of the jewelry stores are the exact same brand, Chow Tai Fook. I've seen two on the same block in some cases--they seem to be as common here as Starbucks' are in the U.S. I keep imagining some suspicious triad family or something using them as a front. That is totally speculation, please don't sue or kill me.  Anyways, their ubiquitous storefront signs look like this:

And they sell crazy huge golden necklaces and statues and stuff. I should have gotten more close ups, but I got nervous taking the pics even though I asked for permission beforehand. Didn't want to look like I was scouting for a heist lolol. But seriously, look at that pig necklace on the right!!! And are those just flat out gold bars on the bottom??

Last note for now. I know I already talked about milk in my last post, but it's just such a different experience here, I can't let it drop quite yet. We ate at a pretty tasty Japanese restaurant at the mall that (surprise surprise) dominates most of the developed space at the top of Victoria Peak. Stephanie ordered an iced coffee, and it came with two little pitchers. The first looked strangely like they had handed her water, until she stuck a finger in it and realized it was sugar water--perfect for adding sweetener to your ice coffee pre-dissolved, since granular sugar won't dissolve in cold coffee. I thought that was pretty genius and classy. The other pitcher had a thick, somewhat yellow creamer in it, and we couldn't figure out why it was both thicker than normal milk and too yellow to be normal cream. At the time, I thought maybe it was condensed milk, but Stephanie pointed out that this made no sense if there was already sugar water provided and condensed milk is sweet. 

It was only later, as I was walking home from the metro station and passed a supermarket, that I realized what it probably was. 

The supermarket was selling these bottles, and it dawned on me that of course, Asians are almost always lactose intolerant, and Hong Kong also apparently is famous for amazing soymilk, so why wouldn't they automatically just serve you soymilk with your coffee?

Just thought that was a fun thing to realize...as an avid milk drinker, lactose intolerant lifestyles aren't something I think about too often...

Anyways, I'll end there for now. Next up: Lauren goes to work for the first time!

First Meetings

First Meetings

DAY 2 - 7/2/14

So I know you all know how much of a weather wimp I am, being a San Franciscan and all, but I honestly don't know how people live in this kind of heat and humidity. Whenever I go home to Singapore/Malaysia, I stick to air-conditioned malls as much as possible. Here, the sweat and the stickiness just hit you like a punch to the face every time you step out your door. It actually knocks me back for a second each time, and whenever I get a whiff of air-conditioning through the automated doors of whatever shop I'm passing by, I have to resist (not always successfully) the urge to go in and pretend to care about what they're selling so I can just stand in the air conditioning. Half the reason I'm looking forward to starting work is that then I'll have an excuse to stay inside during the hottest parts of the day without feeling like I'm wasting it. 

Still, I am proud to say I did NOT waste this day. As I said in my last post, I got up in time to catch the tail end of the U.S. - Belgium game, and I couldn't go back to sleep after that. Instead, I walked around taking in an empty Causeway Bay at 9 a.m. CB is usually one of the busiest areas in Hong Kong, but most of the shops open from 10 or 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. If I weren't jet-lagged, it'd be my kind of schedule. 

Then tragedy occurred. Feeling peckish after falling asleep without eating dinner the day before, I stopped at a tiny bakery somewhere down some street in Causeway Bay. It was small enough to practically be a food stall, not one of these chain bakeries where you know everything you buy will taste good but nothing will taste great. I bought my first ever Hong Kong egg tart there, and then merrily went off to buy a carton of milk at a 7/11 further along (more on that later). Big mistake. A few minutes later, I ate said egg tart while walking. Side note: ever since Japan, I always feel half thrilled half guilty when I eat and walk at the same time, since it's so taboo there. But anyways, the important point here is that this was THE most delicious egg tart I have ever tasted. The pastry was warm, flaky, crumbly, not too thick or too thin. The yolk was sweet and silky. And I have no idea where that bakery is. I may never have that egg tart again. 'Tis a tastebud travesty.

Backtracking for a second to the experience of buying milk. You might think to yourself, how hard can it be to buy milk? Or, if you can tell that I'm going somewhere with this, maybe you're thinking, oh, maybe it's harder to find in Asia. Both of those thoughts are a little bit right and a little bit wrong. You can get milk in any 7/11 and any supermarket, it's not that they don't sell it anywhere. The real issue is identifying which of the drinks are actually milk. 

It seems to be very common in Hong Kong to sell not only full fat milk and non-fat milk (partially skimmed is harder to find), but also something called a "milk drink" that is always stocked right next to the milk in very similar looking cartons. "Milk drinks" have very suspicious ingredient lists: the first ingredient listed is water, followed by milk solids, and a bunch of chemicals. Making them...what? Water with "milk" dumped back into it? Grosssssss. So suspicious....not sure what the point of them is, but I can't even imagine what they must taste like. I found an interesting blog post about the weird milk options in HK here: http://simplycooked.blogspot.hk/2010/07/buying-milk-quest-for-brave-and-upright.html

Moving on...I met up with a bunch of the other new teachers, one of whom had also arrived the day before and seemed as relieved as I was to metaphorically not have to eat alone in booths across from strangers anymore. Quick cast of characters:

David: graduated with econ degree from UChicago in 2013, worked for strategy consulting firm in Chicago, decided to quit working 80 hours a week and have a life. Will be working in the Beijing office after training.
Sara: grew up in Guam, fellow PoliSci/IR major from Swarthmore, taking a break before law school apps.
Stephanie: from New Hampshire, philosophy major from Bates (which apparently has great food btw! Lucky them...), also thinking about going back to school.
Sarah (hadn't arrived yet at the time but have met her since): our only native Mandarin speaker, studied philosophy at Stanford, thinking about a PhD, will be working in Beijing office after training.

Whenever I'm traveling with my mom, her strategy for getting a feel for a city is to hop on a bus and just ride it wherever it takes you, soaking in the sights. Hong Kong is perfectly designed for this: all of its buses are double-deckers (not sure if for efficiency or as part of the British heritage), and it also has a system of adorable aboveground double-decker trams affectionately known as "ding dings." 

That was too cute to pass up, so Sara, Stephanie, David and I bought metro cards (called Octopus cards) and rode around on the top of ding dings for several hours, hopping on and off whenever we felt like it. 

This is an incredibly cheap way to see Hong Kong. A subway, ding ding or bus ride costs HKD $2.50, or about USD $0.30. As a train-loving friend of mine in the U.S. recently explained, Hong Kong, which has arguably the best public transportation in the world, is able to offer these clean, efficient, and cheap rides because it has an ingenious financing system. The transport authorities charge fees and sometimes percentages from shops located near metro stations, on the theory that those shops should pay for the benefits they derive from the customer traffic the transport system is bringing them. The transport authority also flat out owns a lot of the malls located near metro stops, and so charges rent on them. The system doesn't just pay for the upkeep and costs of transport; it generates billions of dollars in profits. (If anyone is interested in more details, this was a great article: http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/09/the-unique-genius-of-hong-kongs-public-transportation-system/279528/ )

One of our ding ding rides took us out to Happy Valley, where the famous Hong Kong race track will be holding the final horse race of the season on Sunday. We swung by the outside of the Jockey club, where we got to see gems like this:

(Take me to Area C, please.)

We also made it out to the waterfront, but pretty much paused only long enough to snap some pics because oh man, it was so, so hot. You guys get to enjoy the postcard version minus the sweat.

With so many glass skyscrapers to be found, we all seem to have picked favorites. This one, the International Commerce Centre in Kowloon, is my favorite so far. Something about the slight twist to the glass reminds me of the Freedom Tower in New York.

The rest of the day/night was fairly uneventful, other than introducing Stephanie to rice cakes (which, for those of you who don't know and as she discovered, are not really rice-like at all, but are more like chewy, flat, disc-shaped noodles) and eating at the only Chinese restaurant I've ever been to that did not serve tea and did not even HAVE tea upon request. 

Here are a couple more pics from the journey along the way. Warning: I am giving you all a very skewed view of what Hong Kong looks like. When you walk around, the interplay between rippling, soaring glass skyscrapers, and janky, run-down looking apartment housing complexes with ugly, dripping air conditioning fan units sitting outside every window is apparent no matter where you go. I just haven't taken many pictures of the latter type of building.

On second thought, I really like that building on the left in this last photo too...

First Impressions

Welcome one and all to Lauren's Hong Kong shenanigans blog! I am starting this blog as a way to keep everyone at least semi-updated on my experiences in Hong Kong. I feel like I can give you all a more detailed run-down if I give the same summary to you all at once, instead of repeating myself brusquely again and again. 

First off, be forewarned. This blog will not be updated on any regular schedule. As a kid, people always assumed that I would be a great journal writer or diary filler because I liked to read and had a smart mouth. Not so. I have never successfully kept a record of my own humdrum existence for longer than a couple months because, even when the only audience I had to please was myself, it was still boring. So let's take the pressure off right now. If I update this blog, I will let friends and fam know on facebook. No need to constantly check back otherwise.

DAY 1 - 7/1/14

Arriving in Hong Kong could have gone a little more smoothly--there was a confusing mix-up over whether anyone was coming to fetch me from the airport, so I ended up getting a cab into the city only to find out that the poor HR lady from the company had only been running late and had driven all the way to the airport after all. On a side note, I filled out so few forms coming off the plane that I keep worrying that I somehow missed filling out some vital immigration/customs info and will be arrested by the Hong Kong police at any moment. Hong Kong appears to require the least customs documentation of any country I've ever visited...there can't have been more than fifteen minutes between getting off the plane and getting through both customs and baggage claim.

Anyways, the first thing you realize when you spend a few minutes in Hong Kong is that the tourist guidebooks are misleading. They are technically accurate: you can "get by" in Hong Kong with only English, and they do list the exceptions and warn you that taxi drivers on the whole do not speak English. But they don't prepare you for how little English is really used in Hong Kong.

Luckily, all the street signs have English printed on them, and you'll see a ton of English on shop signs, ads, and, in the touristy areas, on restaurant menus. But people in the less fancy shops and restaurants speak English very poorly, and what the guidebooks don't capture is how intimidating and overwhelming it is to realize that if you meet someone whose English isn't good enough for the two of you to understand each other, there is no alternative solution. You simply have no common form of communication--and Hong Kong is so fast-paced and frenzied that no restaurant worker is going to patiently wait while you google how to say something in broken Cantonese. It's honestly scarier than the time I spent living in Japan, since there I actually had much, much better command of the local language and really didn't need English at all.

After the HR lady fed me some kaya toast from my favorite Singapore breakfast chain and dropped me off at my temporary apartment (I get housing from the company for the first month while I look for a more permanent place), I immediately turned back around and went out in search of shampoo, conditioner, toilet paper, etc. That too was overwhelming. Finding clothing stores or restaurants is no sweat in any city you go to. That kind of stuff caters to tourists anyways, and is easily and instantly recognizable. But stop and think about where you would go to pick up everyday necessities. Walgreens, Safeway, Trader Joe's, Costco, Bed & Bath. Your go-to places in the U.S. are all brand name chain stores that specifically sell the miscellaneous everyday items no other store is going to sell. And none of those brands exist here.* So how are you supposed to know where to get stuff?

Mostly, I just wandered around poking my head into stores that sold tissue paper out front and looked like they had lots of bottles on their shelves. This seems to have been a fairly successful strategy (although now that I've learned where the actual supermarket is, I suspect I overpaid at the mom & pop places), except for one problem. English. 

You don't even need English to buy shampoo. All you have to do is put the bottle on the counter, hand them cash, take the bottle and go. But, after already having some difficulties earlier that morning with the taxi driver who spoke no English at all, I was somewhat irrationally terrified of a potential "Sorry, I don't speak Cantonese can I please just have this shampoo" conversation. It doesn't help that Cantonese to me has always felt a little like being shouted at all the time. But maybe that's the fear of the unknown talking. 

The result, anyhow, was that after finding the place that sold the stuff I wanted, I walked past it and paused to stare at it four times before my longing for a shower (it is SO HOT and humid right now ughhhh my sympathy for the poor FIFA players has increased 1000 times over) woke my courage and got me in the store. Predictably, once I was in, everything was fine. Put item on counter. Hand over cash. Go. Phew. 

The rest of that day was pretty boring, actually. There are plenty of things I need to get done, like get a real phone plan or set up a bank account, but none of that can happen until I start work on Friday (7/4/14). I wasn't up to much touristing either: Causeway Bay, one quickly realizes, mostly reads like a directory of shops filled with things I can't afford. And with my notoriously bad sense of direction, I was a little afraid to stray too far from the area with no GPS, no friends, and no Cantonese. I mostly wandered around trying to break my jet lag. Decided at 4 p.m. that I should make an exception to quitting coffee so that I could use caffeine to stay awake. This called of course for a Starbucks run, since, as many of you already know, Starbucks is the only place in Asia where I'll drink coffee because it is guaranteed to have Splenda no matter where you go. There have actually been very few Starbucks' around so far, although when I did finally find one, there were two sitting right across from each other. Typical.

Caffeine turned out to be only semi-effective. Stumbled back into apartment, which is really not an apartment but a room plus bathroom. Luckily, that's about what I was expecting, having been staring at scary pictures of what X dollars will get you in the Hong Kong rental market for the last few months. I was just happy/impressed that there's enough floor space to lay both my suitcases down on the floor and still walk between them to the bathroom. Forced myself to wait till 8 pm to sleep. Conked out and got up at 5 something a.m. in time to see the overtime of the U.S. losing heartbreakingly to Belgium. So for those of you wondering why my Facebook status "tweets" only exclaim over the last half hour--I was unconscious. Sorry, Tim Howard. Others will have to do the memory of your greatness better justice.

Random observations that don't fit into a cohesive narrative:

1. Not sure what's going on with recycling here in HK. Thought I saw some drop off locations while walking around, but there doesn't seem to be an easily understood system.

2. On the other hand, yayyy there are actually public trash cans in the street. Not having public trash cans is definitely one custom I do NOT miss from Japan.

3. Speaking of Japan, its influence here seems much bigger than I expected. Lots of ads/shop posters have Japanese as well as English; tons and tons of Japanese restaurants including some chains like Yoshinoya that I recognize from Japan; the 7/11s here even carry my favorite matcha chocolate chip cookies from Japan, which I'm pretty stoked about. There are also these enormous statues of characters from a soccer anime peppered around Causeway Bay (major shopping neighborhood where I'm currently located) right now to promote Adidas and the World Cup.

 

4. Street restaurants are so low on space that if you're eating alone, they will just seat you with another lone person. I've seen people share cafe tables before in the States when there are no seats, but I feel like it's almost unheard of to share a restaurant table unless one person invites the other solo person to sit. Shared a weird meal with a guy in a booth table. Awkwardly checked phone many times. He didn't care.

5. Didn't see much of the protest in Causeway, which is two metro stops over from where the big time stuff was happening in Central, but there were a few people shouting what seemed like political messages into megaphones with posters, and a LOT of policemen walking around in large gaggles.

Some additional pics:

A Batman exhibit at the Times Square building--there are also life size models of all of the Batmobiles (including motorcycle) from the three Christopher Nolan Batman movies.

These guys below are climbing up the wall of the Times Square mall interior.

How you know you're in China: when Starbucks posters look like this.

Concluding note: if you're worried that this sounds like a depressing start, don't worry. It gets better. In fact, so much more was accomplished today that I'm too tired to tell it. You can probably guess how well this journalling is going to go based entirely on that comment...ah well. 

Cheerio and Ta Ta for now! (Sorry, I watched Saving Mr. Banks on the plane over.)


*Well, actually, there IS an IKEA right nearby. Ahhh, IKEA. Bless its heart.