Ni Hao!

China:   The first day in China I went out with Allie, Michelle, Laura, and a couple of their friends I didn’t know all that well. The port in Hong Kong was in an amazing location, right beside the city and easily accessible. When we docked on port side Allie and I had an awesome view of the other side of the city with all of Hong Kong lit up in the background, while everyone else on the other side of the ship were stuck looking into the other end of a mall. Weirdly, we docked right up against a huge mall. Like a shopping mall. China really loves malls. There are malls attached to every metro station, malls connected to banks and office buildings, outside promenade style walking malls, and huge ant farm looking malls with what seems like millions of Asians all milling around them. Oh! And as soon as we got off the boat we walked about five feet from some incredibly cute very buff New Zealand rugby team members since Hong Kong was hosting some big Rugby 7 tournament thing while we were there. I’m not really sure of the details but I know it was a big deal and that tickets had been sold out for forever…

 

Anyways, we get off the ship and I’m one of the only ones who has Hong Kong money (thanks Mom and Bank of America!) since a bunch of people assumed People’s Republic of China (PRC) money would work there. Which is another weird thing – Hong Kong is absolutely nothing like PRC. It has a distinct government, money, and language. Therefore, after much discussion, Mom and I’ve decided to count it separately as a country apart from the rest of PRC (for those who are keeping count that means I’m at 27 countries. Hollerrrrr.) It really is nothing like the rest of China. It’s very cosmopolitan and English accessible and built up; unlike what I saw of PRC.

 

The interport lecturer for Hong Kong was a university student whose name I’ve completely forgotten but was very small and adorable. He told us some of the must-see stuff to check out during cultural preport, and one of the things I’d written down and circled multiple times was Stanley Market. He made it sound as though it was a market like we’d been used to – a huge chaotic sea of vendors selling all kinds of goods at reasonable prices. A must see. However, when we arrived there (after a $15 cab fare with 5 people squeezed into the tiny taxi for a 30-40 minute ride! It was on the other side of Hong Kong!) it was nothing like I’d expected. It was super touristy and full of insanely expensive stuff all geared at tourists. We’d also been lead to believe that we couldn’t really bargain so everything seemed frustratingly expensive and insane. – Though I should mention that in retrospect each of the countries builds on the last and much like how I felt about prices in Viet Nam after Thailand and then China after Vietnam, I was crazy to think China was so expensive after Japan bitch slapped my wallet. I guess that’s how it always is though, it’s all comparative to what you know.

 

So I bought just a couple little things – a shirt and some hanging decorations for the house next year and a year of the ox thing of Aiden. We walked up and down the alleyways with legitimate stores lining each side and then hugged the edge of the water and people watched. We decided to grab some lunch from a cheap local looking place hidden inside Stanley Market but there wasn’t really room for all of us, so they corral us into a creepy attic looking upper lever place where we all order some much missed greasy Chinese food. I had beef and udon noodles and split some dumplings with Allie. Tasty. We watched the rugby games on the t.v. and soon the attic became PACKED with locals searching for the scoreboard and some Chinese snacks. After lunch we all wandered some more and then took a cab back to the port area since I wanted to stay relatively near to the area since my mom was meeting me around 7/7:30ish in the hotel. (Also, another side note about the taxis here… It wasn’t until here that I was able to use a seatbelt again for the first time the entire voyage since I didn’t take any taxis in Spain. Usually this is how it works out: we pile about a million people inside one small taxi and ignore our cab driver’s complaints. I pull out my seatbelt to buckle as many of us in as possible, but realize that though there is a belt, there is no buckle. Of course not. So our driver usually makes some of us lay across the rest in case the police see us, and we speed off into the unsafe distance. It’s kind of charming, and now that we won’t be experiencing anymore of that I know I’ll miss it…)

 

We wandered back along the Kowloon side of Hong Kong (we had to take the star ferry from the Hong Kong island side to the Kowloon side to get to Stanley Market) – we saw the IFC office building where someone told us part of the Dark Knight was filmed, and went to the mall attached (of course.) to get some iced coffee and a usb for Michelle. We asked the information lady at the mall where we should go for some good foot reflexology – which we promptly ignored when we got distracted by a costume store where we tried on wigs, masks, boas, and tiaras. We finally found a foot reflexology place that was $25 USD for 15 minutes of shoulder massage, foot soak, and an hour of foot massage. It was really nice and even though it was about 5x what we would have paid in Thailand, it was perfect. It was also interesting because in China foot reflexology is a serious medical thing. For certain parts of the foot there are corresponding parts of the body that go along with it – for instance, a pregnant lady came in after us and they needed to know how far along she was because since she was already 8 months along they wouldn’t go near her ankles because that’s where sex organs corresponded to and they didn’t want to send her into early labor.

 

After that I had to leave asap since it was already past 5. So I took the star ferry back to the Tsing Tsang Tsui station to get my bags and passport from the boat and then take the ferry back to the main station on the kowloon side and took a taxi to the Conrad to meet my mom. I checked in only a few minutes before her and quickly passed out on the bed until she knocked. It was so good to see her, but also really, really, weird. It’s been such a journey for us to get to each place, and even though it’s been a lot more sped up with only two days between ports for Asia – the idea that my mom could leave NOVA the same time I left Vietnam and get to the same place as me in about the same time, from the other end of the world, is a weird thought. As I type this we are on day 2/9 en route from Yokohama to Hawaii and while it sucks we have a full 9 days on the ship (and 8 straight days of classes) I can’t imagine it taking any less time. More about this leg of the trip later though.

 

So after Mom came we talked lots and had a swanky dinner at the hotel that I wasn’t very happy with initially but I must admit was very delicious. It’s hard to explain it but after seeing – no, not even seeing, living – in such culture shock, poverty, and independence, it makes me supremely uncomfortable to be around rich white people all the time. To drop even 15 or 20 dollars on a meal, much less 30 or 40, seems so foreign to me now. I’m sure things will change quickly once I’m home – already it’s different after Japan, but it’s still weird. Even the ship, which I’ve come to think of as my real home oddly enough, with its teeny tiny cabins and beds that are essentially cots, seem a luxurious pleasure after traveling through tuk tusk and hostels. I don’t want it to sound like I’m complaining because I’m not at all – what I’m trying to say though is that this ghetto, hectic, dirty, chaotic, and weird way of living has been my life for the past 3 months. And I really like it. It’s really solidified how I want to move on after college and the kind of careers and life I want to pursue if I can.

 

In the meantime though it just made me feel really weird and nervous to have my mom remind me of the familiar America and way of life waiting for me back home in just three weeks. But back to time with the momma; we went to bed early and woke up the next morning to check out the antiques market. We saw lots of weird stuff like a monkey skull with embossed metal all over it and skull earrings and all kinds of weirdness. There were also lots of little carved wooden men and women that looked like ancestor carvings that were in Thai spirit houses – I’ll have to ask my religion professor about the ones we saw in China, but they looked almost like the ones Roman temples had where people would order carvings of themselves to place in front of statues of gods and goddesses to worship them all the time. Kind of an interesting idea, but I have no clue what the ones in China were about. There were lots of Mao iconography too – even a statue of Mao sitting in a big overstuffed purple chair smoking a cigarette. Both Mom and I really liked that one but it was insanely expensive and there was no way we’d have been able to lug it back to the hotel. I tried on an enormous metal necklace with different Chinese horoscopes. I also  found a really cool demon brass door knocker that looks like something out of the Labyrinth (I’m putting my foot down on this one too, no matter how creepy you all might find it back home, I’m definitely putting it in the house.) We stopped in at a local dim sum restaurant and ordered way too much food after like 30 minutes of trying to figure out how to order. We had sweet honeyed pork belly, steamed buns, shrimp dumplings, barbequed pork on white rice, and lots of Chinese tea.

 

We went to Temple St. market where I went crazy with the shopping. I got a big gold painting of monks walking, a purple jade Buddha for Nicole, and lots of other little things for people back home. I also ordered a beer and got a huge 40 oz. looking thing with a straw (so classy.) It was a really fun night and full of all kinds of crazy stuff – even an electronic dancing Amish man.

 

We then got on the 20 hour sleeper train from Hong Kong to the PRC’s Shanghai, which was very strange. Both mom and I had top bunks in the compartment – without ladders. These things were like 10 ft. off the ground and we had to leap up onto a metal step the size of an ipod and then launch ourselves onto the beds. Once there we didn’t do all that much since the couple under us were a pair of Chinese people in their 60s or 70s. We didn’t want to really bug them and there wasn’t anything to do on the ship so we just talked and I watched bedknobs and broomsticks and the secret life of bees (so, so, so, good.)  

 

Once in Shanghai we realized nobody spoke English. We managed to somehow get a taxi after lots of confusion, and checked into our new super swanky hotel. We ate a lunch of fantastic stuff like sushi and chocolate ice cream and other tasty treats. There was lots of napping and watching of awful Asian MTV where skinny Asian men dressed kind of like women – including eyeliner and blush – fought over a girl and cried because their relationship was over. I think. Honestly I have no idea what was happening there.

 

We saw lots of bird’s nest restaurants all over (I guess the birds secrete some weird saliva that hardens into a nest that the Chinese then snatch and like to make soups out of.) I wasn’t about to try any of it, but it did look kind of cool. I never saw any scorpion either despite both Allie and I having made it our mission to try since Thailand. We went to a huge “pedestrian mall” which was actually just a cute walkway with all kinds of strange shops and malls on either side.

 

I went into the Nike Shanghai shop and checked out some of their awesome selection. They had some cute stuff but everything was outrageously expensive – I mean more than in the US for the same things sometimes. They did have a lot of really cool and helpful NikeID center where you could do everything on line in person and see about a billion different varieties of each style nike. We also went to a bunch of huge grocery store like places where I bought random things like peanut and coconut jellies and glutinous rice cakes (surprisingly delicious.) I also got some things called “Tuckahoe” cakes, which I initially was very excited about because Tuckahoe park in Arlington was my childhood haunt and it was the only other time I’d ever heard of it. Since then I’d eaten probably 5 or 6 of them not knowing what they were. I just wikipedia’d it and am horrified with myself.

 

“What it is: Wolfiporia extensa (Peck) Ginns (formerly known as Poria cocos F.A. Wolf) is a fungus in the Polyporaceae family. It is a wood-decay fungus but has a terrestrial growth habit. It is notable in the development of a large, long-lasting underground sclerotium that resembles a small coconut. This sclerotium (called "Tuckahoe", or Indian Bread) was used by native Americans as a source of food in times of scarcity. It is also used in Chinese medicine.”

 

My heart, spleen, and kidney channels will never be the same…

 

We ate at a Japanese restaurant where mom had udon and I had a green tea and black honey milkshake that was quite possibly the most delicious milkshake of my life, and croquettes and grilled unagi (eel.) We drank some tea and then kept walking. We found about a billion jewelry stores and inside one discovered some really awesome orange-y gold drop earrings with hollow stars at the end with bright orange stones in the center. There was also a lot of really gorgeous intricately carved jade pieces but they were so, so, expensive.

 

Anyways. Then we went back to the hotel for a good night’s rest before heading out the next morning to the 580 Market. It was less like a market and more like a warehouse full of random stalls with all pirated stuff. Tons of pirated stuff. They had some signs up that listed things you couldn’t have fakes of, like North Faces, but besides those it was a free for all. Pirated movies, fake hermes and tiffany’s, fake armani underwear, fake gucci sunglasses. It was nuts. I bought an insane black bape hoodie with gold all over it, lots of little gifts for fam. back home, and mom got fake uggs. There were all kinds of weird things there.

 

We had another lunch of udon (even though we were in China and I’d be in Japan in just two days, haha.) where I had some cold udon and dumplings and another green tea shake that looked a little shady but thankfully didn’t make me sick, and mom had hot udon. After that though we had to go since we had an on-ship time of 6 and I wanted Mom to tour the ship before we departed. I’d like to think she was thoroughly impressed, though she did note that my side of the room was in all kinds of disarray (sorry Allie!)

 

Overall China was exactly what I needed. Really low-key and a chance to see my mom again. It wasn’t full of crazy adventures, but I’ve had lots of those in the past three months…

 

Next up: JAPAN: Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Yokohama!