Hong Kong

Short but communicative was the message I got from Cary Wicker, a fraternity brother from TU: “making a trip to SE Asia, call me.” Call him I did, and we talked flights and visas. The visa for American tourist to China is ~$130, because that’s what we charge Chinese people to come to America, and China’s all about things being equal. Of course the number of people applying for those two visas (and the labor cost to process them) isn’t exactly equal, but the Chinese government isn’t too concerned about that. So Cary and I decided we’d meet up in Hong Kong. I hadn’t been there, and because Hong Kong knows where it’s bread is buttered, Americans can visit for 90 days visa free. Cary had quit his job to go back to grad school, but had racked up a fair amount of miles from his last job, so was taking advantage of them while he was young and free.

I took the super convenient and comfortable sleeper train from Shanghai to Hong Kong, got metro passes, and found a cramped but relatively clean room for three at a cheap hotel of off the Mong Kok metro station. I had great information about Hong Kong because to supplement the guidebook was 真真 a senior at my university that I recently started dating. 真真 isn’t exactly a traditional student of our school. Her college entrance exam score, and her dad’s relationships were good enough to get her into a large interview pool of Chinese students to study in Hong Kong. She passed, and studied there for two and half years. But, because she was in the interview group, she was assigned to study land surveying and geomatics, not English like she wanted. So, she transferred back home to Changzhou, but not before getting a great grasp for Hong Kong. So, before I left, we looked through the guidebook and she sifted through that information to help me out. I met Cary and Lee, his friend who was traveling with him at the airport and then we hit the ground running. Lee, as he explained it, worked really hard his first two years at University of Texas Law School so that he could study abroad at a law school on the beach in Australia-and that’s what he was doing. After Hong Kong, they would hit up the Southeast Asian peninsula and then go down to Australia.

We had a great time going around Hong Kong. For me, Hong Kong was a nice respite from the busyness and dirtiness of China. Now, Hong Kong is plenty busy, but it seems much more relaxed when everything is pretty clean, efficient, and in English. I can’t say enough about the Hong Kong metro, which was the best I’ve ever been on. For Cary and Lee, it was probably more of the traditional Hong Kong experience-a great mixture of modern technology with ancient Chinese culture. We went up Victoria Peak, had a trendy lunch in Soho, had drinks in Lan Kwai Fong, took the Victoria Harbour Cruise, saw the giant statue of Buddha on Lantau Island (which was humorously commercial), got lost making our way through the cities many gorgeous parks, window shopped some watches that easily eclipsed my annual salary, saw the Chinese export machine working hard on the docks of Victoria Harbour (as well as the pollution), and were wide-eyed as we wandered the streets all around Central and Tsim Tsa Hui. Hong Kong was one of the more impressive cities I have visited. It was hustling and bustling, yet the convenient parks offered a place to relax. You pass old women selling random gourds and live fish from rickshaw drawn carts in the shadows of modern, giant skyscrapers. While in some cities you have to work to get dinner after nine or ten, it seemed like some of the street vendors were just warming up their skillets at that time. Being on an island, it’s super compressed, but this was much of its attraction, that as you left one famous district you’d be entering another one. It’s a tough city on the wallet, especially for me, coming from a Chinese salary, but there were places to get discount meals-generally one of the many fast food joints, which actually were on every corner. I had a blast taking in the city, and being able to do so while catching up and joking with a buddy from school.

In order to amortize the cost of the train tickets over a greater time period, I stuck around for two more days after Cary and Lee headed to Saigon. I was able to spend lots more time walking around Central and Tsim Tsa Hui, as well as visit the south part of the island, which had some sweet beaches, piers, and ocean side cliffs. Unfortunately, due to the beaches, most of this part of the island was covered in gated communities. After getting on and off a few buses that didn’t quite get where I thought I wanted to go, I just headed down a few private drives and seemed to take some sort of electrical workers’ access road down to the beach. It was nice, but the water was cold, so I walked around a bit, amazed that such a calm beach and neighborhood was merely a half hour bus ride from the middle of the city. I also checked out a pretty neat bird garden and the Hong Kong history museum. It was most interesting to see its take on recent Chinese history, which was quite different from what I hear or read in Chinese media. Of course, Hong Kong is part of China-but its (quasi)independent government allowed the museum to be more like a museum, less like a propaganda center. I was also able to use the extra time to meet up with 真真’s old roommate and her boyfriend. They took showed me around some of their campus and then took me for a nice stroll along the harbor and Hong Kong’s own avenue of the stars. We had a great dinner together; she and her boyfriend are both very accomplished students and it was cool to talk to them about the drastic differences between their college life in Hong Kong (much more like that in the U.S.) and that of their friends back in China. In addition to all the great sites, good food, and convenient transport-the sunny weather in the mid-70s made for a fantastic trip.