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...