Hong Kong Phooey!

"This city is a melee of the senses!" Lisa said that to me on our first night out after saying goodbye to the ODFL kids. I realize that I am making a habit of begining my postings with a quote, but this statement has stuck with me. It sums up my experience in Hong Kong so well that I had to repeat it in the introductory paragraph. Please allow me to paint a picture of this city after dark.

Its sometime after midnight and you are sitting on a stool in a purple bar filled with hipster Chinese people. You are the only white person in the place, yet no one, including the bartenders, will acknowledge that you are not invisible. This could plausibly be because they do not speak English, but you know that the real reason is because your first beer, cheapest on the menu, cost all the money you had. Normally, you would have already left for home feeling a little disgruntled, but the entertainment is so over the top that its enough to keep you in your chair for a while. There is a band play all the "hits" of the 70s and 80s... Here are some of the songs from their set list, hopefully you will be able to understand why I used the quotation marks. "Smoke on the Water" by God knows who, Air Supply's classic "I'm All Out of Love," "Careless Whisper" by WHAM and of course, my dad's personal favorite, "Hotel California" by The Eagles. Why does everyone love The Eagles so much? I don't get it. Please do not forget that this is in Hong Kong and all those stereotypical accents that you've heard all your life are making it exceedingly difficult to keep a straight face as you observe this strange scene. The 40+ year old business men dancing and jumping up and down to the encore choice of "Mone Mone" does not make it easy either.

But this is Hong Kong, a place where everything I saw and did over the six days that I was there was... unique. Maybe I am not inspired, maybe my time there was too short, or maybe I am still not far enough removed from it all, but I don't know how to describe these days "classic" format for a story. By that, I mean that I am choosing out of laziness to skip the beginning middle and end in favor of relaying a few of my favorite points.

I'll start by describing our hotel, the Chung King Mansion. Please do not be fooled by the name, I do not understand why this building has not either been condemned or fallen down on its own recognisance. Its a dingy skyscraper in the middle of downtown with budget accomodation on every floor. Have you ever shown up to the hotel where you reserved a room, one that charged you a booking fee, only to find that it is a pile of rubble? I'm guessing not, but now I can say that I have. We were forced to improvise and find a new place right off the bat. The ground floor was a dirty maze of shops that all sell the same crap. Each store looks identical to the next and you can't help but wonder constantly where you are. The population in this building is almost entirely African people wearing brightly colored Dashikis (Sp?), which I found odd. There are only two elevators that service all 16 floors and there is always a line to get in. I don't mean to be morbid, but they feel like a steel coffin. You stuff yourself in there with WAY too many stinky people,take a deep breath as the doors close, make peace with God, and pray that the cords don't snap before your floor. What can you do, though? These are the only cheap places in town.

Our room was actually okay. By okay, I mean it didn't smell THAT bad, and it was semi clean, in that I never saw any cockroaches. So it exceeded our extremely low expectations. We even had an alarm clock. It went off every morning at 9:05am and sounded just like a jackhammer outside our window... actually, it was a jackhammer outside our window. They were building the hotel that stole my booking fee on the floor below us. There was at even a sense of security (our door locked), or so we thought. The lobby is the classic hotel style where you drop off your key each time you leave and pick it up when you return. For this to work, though, you need someone at the reception at all times. I ran up to the room after dinner one night, only to find that I was the sole person in the lobby. Hmmmm.... who is guarding our key? So I started shuffling my feet, clearing my throat, and anything else that might alert someone of my presence... nothing.... "Hello? ... still nothing... "HEELLLOOOO!!!!!" ... If anyone was there, they would have heard me. So I climbed over the desk, searched through all the drawers, found my room key, opened my door, grabbed all my valuables, and returned the key where I found it without anyone knowing what had happened. This became the routine for the remainder of the trip... Don't ask why I didn't just hold onto the key.

My friend Trevor lives in Hong Kong and was our host each evening. For those that don't know Trevor, he is my first friend. We grew up across the street from each other and used to be inseparable. My passing through was a long overdue chance to catch up. It was also an opportunity for me to tease him about how he always cheated at Monopoly and never let me play with his coolest toys. So I got some closure. I can't think of a better way to discover a city than to do it with someone that already has. Trevor took us all over. We bartered in street markets and ate 5 or more meals a day, during which time I tried jellyfish, 1000 year old egg, frog ovaries, and God knows what else. I also redefined the word "spicy." I spent 6 straight days with sweat rolling down my face, rarely because of the humidity.

Did I mention that you can drink beer in the streets? Convenience stores sell it on every corner. Also, I'd like to reiterate that it was the middle of the monsoon. After 3 weeks of the "monsoon" in Nepal, I thought I knew what to expect... I was wrong. It rained CONSTANTLY, and I use that word in its literal definition. But it added to the surreality of everything we did. We spent more than one night wandering aimlessly under neon lights in the rain. We would stare up at it all with an umbrella in one hand and a beer in the other... I can think of worse things.

It was a great time and I was sad to leave. Not that sad, though, because our next destination was Indonesia. Of course, we stayed out all night before our flight taking shots in a -20 degree freezer while wearing fur coats and dancing to a Filipino band as they played "Come on Eileen." I'm entirely too old to rally after that sort evening, I don't know if anyone is that young. But who could pass up an experience like that? As if that wasn't enough to make us miss our flight, we only gave ourselves an hour to go through customs in Malaysia before catching our connection. We got a lot of angry looks as we held our American passports up like badges cut 400 people in line. We may have had to make a scene, and we kept the plane waiting on the runway for a half hour just for us, but we made it. They even reopened the luggage rack for our bags. I'd love to write more about my time here in Indonesia. It has been wild, but I sense that this chapter is not yet complete. Stay tuned.