Barbara's Travel Blog

Hangover Central

Does anyone ever grow up enough to stop getting hangovers? Who knows, but for now I'll have to chalk up today as another sacrifice to the alcohol gods.

After a late night putting out fires in the office on Friday, my boss, Mark, and I headed to Lan Kwai Fong for some dinner, drinks and people-watching. The Halloween merriment was already underway, with a non-stop parade of costumes and drunkenness - and luckily we had a great view from our street-side table.

Saturday night Steph threw a surprise birthday party for Peter at Art Jamming, where aspiring artists get a blank canvas, an endless supply of paint and brushes, and upbeat music to inspire creativity.

I had printed out a photo from Greece to recreate, but forgot to bring it with me, so I ended up improvising a big, textured heart design. Here's me painting, followed by the final product.

Everyone had a great time, especially since Steph had arranged for Mediterranean food and several bottles of wine. By the end of the evening we had some really great paintings (and some not so much), and most of us had paint on various parts of our clothes and bodies (some more intentional than others).

After finishing up our paintings, most of us headed to Lan Kwai Fong (yes, back again). If Friday was busy, Saturday was a madhouse, with everything from random conversations with British tourists, to a guy in a dancing bunny costume.

The topper though was when a severely drunk local guy literally fell at our feet. We spent the next half hour or so trying to help him stay upright until a friend arrived to take him home, at which point she began slapping him while the guys struggled to get him into a taxi. He broke free once and ran back to, apparently, attempt to proclaim something to me and attempt to get a kiss. No surprise, I was not remotely interested, but maybe a very tiny bit flattered.

We finished the night with some dancing at Jewel, after which I hauled my drunk ass home at 3am. It's a good thing I'm only spending three months here… even after that long, I'm going to need some serious detox time.

More photos at: http://babas.typepad.com/photos/hong_kong_2/.

The countdown begins

Amazingly enough, I'm barely halfway through this trip and I've already found myself counting down the remainder of it. It's hard not to, with everything I've got scheduled for the next six weeks: Trips to Beijing in early November and Singapore mid-month, my Mom visiting over Thanksgiving, and a whirlwind, four-country trip with Intel's Chairman in the first week of December. Then back to Hong Kong where I get two days to pack before flying home. I'm exhausted just thinking about it!

In the meantime, I'm trying to use the time I have left in HK to do some healthy things for myself (in addition to the usual drinking, cavorting about and foot massages, of course). Faith and I have become workout buddies two days a week, and I started seeing an acupuncturist about my back injury (from a car accident a few years ago).

I had my first acupuncture treatment yesterday, in fact. I'm going to reserve judgment for at least a couple more appointments, but I'm disappointed to say that I'm in more pain today than I was before I had the treatment. And to add insult to injury, I had to drink an herbal remedy (read: swamp-like sludge drink) for four days leading up to the appointment. I think it may very well be the most foul taste I've experienced in my entire life.

But enough complaining. The weekend's almost here, I got a care package of clothes and music from my Mom this week, and there's always vicodin to ease the pain. ;)

Just an ordinary weekend

This weekend was typical of my Hong Kong experience so far - drinking, dinner out with friends, salon visits, shopping, and of course the best part: laundry.

Friday night a big group of us went out to celebrate Faith's birthday, which of course involved excessive drinking, drunken-photo-taking (as evidenced by my lame arms-length shot of me and Peter), and lastly a loud (and surely, to the other patrons, offensive) discussion/ debate over a late-night dinner. Unfortunately not everyone found the evening quite as exciting - you have to be pretty tired to fall asleep sitting up in a bar like Ruby did!

Sadly, Faith did not make it to dinner, as her several martinis hit her hard and fast and she found herself pleading to Mike "gotta go home, take me home" midway through the evening. She said her hangover lasted all day Saturday, which must have been great since they spent the day sailing.

I, meanwhile, wiled away Saturday with a day of pampering. First up was a haircut and color, which I have been living in fear of since leaving my trusted hairdresser behind in Portland six weeks ago. The situation was getting desperate though, so I took Laura's recommendation and tried Vincent at NEXT salon - which turned out fabulously. I love the cut, love the color, and thoroughly enjoyed their hair washing stations, which instead of chairs are full-on beds with shampoo sinks at the end of them!

Next I headed to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where I took the advice of my colleague Josie and got a Shanghai pedicure. It is indeed as frightening as the name sounds - a guy uses a slew of sharp blades to slice away every bit of dead skin on your feet, so you end up with soft, pink, not-at-all-leather-shoe-like feet. He even trimmed my toenails with a blade, which I have to admit was a little scary. But it didn't hurt a bit, and the end result was lovely. The only down side was that later that night when I put on my favorite black heels, I found that all the calluses I had developed were gone, which mean my shoes hurt just like the first time I wore them.

Saturday night I met up with my colleagues Lulu (from Taipei) and Diana (from the US, who I ran into by chance in the mall on Friday) for dinner at a great Nepalese restaurant in SoHo. Afterward, Diana and I headed to a bar at the IFC mall for a lovely sit on the balcony overlooking Victoria Harbour (sorry for the blurry shot), which lasted about 20 minutes until it suddenly started raining. I'd all but forgotten that rain existed, with the last couple weeks of sunshine.

And last (and definitely least) I spent Sunday catching up on a massive backlog of laundry and watching mindless TV. Because sometimes a girl just has to slack.

Haze Craze

A recent Bloomberg article ("Hong Kong, the invisible harbor") addressed the growing problem of air pollution in Hong Kong. According to the article, the EPA's air pollution indexes for the city fall within the high category "virtually every day."

This is naturally of interest to me as a current resident. But it also caught my eye because I had been trying for a few weeks to get some photos of the view from my office building, and I'd finally gotten some decent shots the day prior to this article running.

It didn't last though - here's what it looks like on a typical non-rainy day. Blech.

Oh, and at my mother's request, here's a photo of my cubicle in Hong Kong. Sorry I'm not in it, but I couldn't quite bring myself to ask one of my coworkers to take a photo of me at work.

On the Road Again

After four weeks of staying put in Hong Kong, I'd almost forgotten how to travel (or at least how to pack). But I expect to be traveling more in November and December, and hopefully to some more exciting places than this week's destination - Taipei, Taiwan.

I was there to attend the Intel Developer Forum, and thankfully I've been to Taipei before, so at least I knew my way around. There's not a lot of exciting stuff to do in Taipei, but one of the nights I went out with a small group of international journalists to one of the night markets. The markets are always entertaining and a bit of a culture shock, and this one was no exception. Here's a photo of Australian journalist Dan admiring some big buckets of snail snacks. Mmm!

Since the last time I was here, they also finished constructing Taipei 101, which is now the world's tallest building. It's so tall, in fact, that I had to turn my camera diagonal to be able to fit the whole building into the photo I took from my hotel room.

Today I took a quick jaunt up the tower to see the view (and I do mean quick - the elevators received a Guinness world record for being the fastest in the world). Most of the views reinforced my opinion of Taipei as a sprawling, industrial city, but one angle surprised me (the photo on the right). Maybe there's more to Taipei than I thought.

I'm sitting in the airport now, killing some time before my flight, and looking forward to being back in Hong Kong in my own space again. Look at that - I guess I'm starting to feel more at home in Hong Kong than I'd realized.

More photos at http://babas.typepad.com/photos/hong_kong_2/.

When the moon hits your eye…

Saturday was such a busy day, I actually had to break it into two blog entries. That night I met up with Mel (who used to live in Hong Kong), Steph & Peter, and Mel's friends Jason and Claire.

The evening started out simply enough… drinks at a Thai restaurant in Hong Kong Park (where I went my first weekend to see the aviary). We had a nice time chatting, and discovered that Peter and Jason had plans later in the evening to go help out at a fundraiser sailing event. They swore up and down that it would be a great scene with lots of single men, so we ladies ended up agreeing to meet up with them after dinner.

After a long taxi ride over to Kowloon and well beyond, followed by dinner, we headed down to the yacht club to track down the boys. Once we were down on the dock, Steph spotted Peter from a distance, recognizing his signature "I'm dancing drunk on a boat" hip swizzle. They puttered on over to pick us up, and into the boat we went.

It turns out the fundraiser was a 24-hour event in which small sailing dinghies had to circle a course around the bay, unfortunately with little to no wind to propel them. Peter and Jason were part of the rescue crew that had to circle the route and make sure no one was in distress.

As we circled the route, it became clear that the conditions were not exactly high-risk - the only "situation" we came across was one boat that yelled to us that they had found a shoe. Once we had confirmed that it was not attached to a foot (or any other body part), we puttered along on our merry way.

With little actual rescuing to do, we decided to take a detour to visit the site of our colleague Josie's sunken junk boat. At first I thought they were kidding, but no - it turns out she used to live on a junk, and later rented it out to a couple for a low price in exchange for taking care of the maintenance of the boat. As you've likely deduced by now, they weren't quite holding up their end of the bargain. So one night they head to dinner around 8pm, and by the time they get back at 10:30 the junk had sunk - with all their possessions in it.

As you can see from the photos, there's been no recovery of the junk (though apparently the renters did make some dives to retrieve some of their stuff). But don't feel bad - the junk still serves an important function: It makes a great platform from which to moon your friends and colleagues. ;-)

More photos at http://babas.typepad.com/photos/hong_kong/.

Mr. Squid's Wild Ride

On Saturday I had made plans to visit Ocean Park with Julie, another Intel expat from Oregon. Unfortunately, the day turned out to be particularly hot and humid, which was not appreciated on top of the hangover I was nursing from a night of drinking with Faith and Mike.

I sucked it up and went though, and in the end I was glad I did, because the park was the best aquarium I've ever been to. They had cool seal/sea lion and shark areas, but the highlight was the giant reef, which has thousands of fish, shark, and various other sea creatures, which you view from above first, then lower and lower via a downward-spiraling path around the reef. Words can't really capture it, and unfortunately my camera battery was starting to die, so I only got a couple photos of the reef.

Also amazing at the park was the sky tram that takes you from the lower part of the park to the upper part, via about a 10-minute ride featuring stunning views of the south side of Hong Kong island. They also had a lot of cool-looking rides, although the only one we went on was the ride that drops you from a great height so that you feel like you've left your stomach a few hundred feet up.

I will say though, as much as I enjoyed the park, there were a couple things that struck me as odd. First, in the shark area there was a display extolling the many virtues of sharks, such as what they contribute to the environment, the different vitamins & minerals that come from sharks, as well as the fact that they're a food source - and they're great for wallets and purses! Seriously, they had actual wallets and purses as examples.

The other odd thing were the Halloween-themed items throughout the park. I get how that could be fun for the kids, except instead of kid-friendly Halloween décor and activities, they had special themed areas like "Psychotic Island." Somehow that doesn't seem quite kid-appropriate.

Last but not least, I was amused by some of the food options in the park. There was "Mr. Squid" (because really, who doesn't like a big batch of squid followed by a roller coaster ride?) and the fish cake, which was made even less appealing to me by the fact that it was molded in the shape of a fish, fins and all. Asian food - you've gotta love it.

As always, additional photos are posted at http://babas.typepad.com/photos/hong_kong/.

My day in "communist" China

Capitalism is alive and well, and thriving in communist China. That's right - today Stephanie and I headed out for a day of shopping in Shenzen, China's Special Economic Zone.

Shenzen is located about 20 miles inland from Hong Kong, accessible via a 45-minute ride on the KCR train. Before setting out, we fortified ourselves for the day ahead with breakfast at the Flying Pan, a 24-hour greasy spoon café in my neighborhood. BTW, that's Steph's boyfriend, Peter, with her in the photo; for some reason he declined to join us for our daylong shopping expedition.

Arriving in Shenzen, we had to go through Hong Kong customs to exit Hong Kong, then immediate go through Chinese customs to enter Shenzen - which took about another half hour, and of course was done without air conditioning.

Thankfully, they made up for the time-consuming border crossing by placing the shopping center literally within steps of the border. I'm assuming there are more shopping centers beyond the one we visited, but I can't imagine why you'd need them - this one had six seemingly endless floors of shops filled with purses, shoes, clothes, fabric, tea, household items, and more.

We started out in the fabric section, and amazingly I didn't buy anything - there was just so much to choose from, I felt like I wouldn't even know where to begin. We then made our way through four floors of purse shops (okay, there was some other stuff on those floors, but we were on a mission). We made a refueling stop midday for Dim Sum. And finally, we finished up with a visit to a private DVD shop ("private" in that they close the metal storefront while you're in there so no one can look and in and see what's going on).

All in all, I'd say I had a very successful day. My feet are killing me after about 7 hours of shopping, but I walked away with some gifts; two gorgeous purses for about US$50 and $35 (one of which I'm pretty sure is a real Chloe, which my Web searches indicate is worth about US$1,200); and four movies (one not yet released), four seasons of 24, two seasons of the OC and one season of CSI: NY, all for less than US$90. Now that's some shopping!

Listen to the muzak

All right, somebody had better confess... because I know you blabbed. That's right, apparently word about my elevator muzak complaints got back to management, and they've decided to punish me by turning it off altogether, and replacing it with Chinese talk radio. Not amusing.

Thankfully, for once I actually had my iPod in hand in the elevator. That's because I finally got on board with the world's best way to make a workout pass faster: Audio books. Combine that with the fact that my gym here is just blocks from my apartment, and I could actually see myself getting back into regular workouts.

Here's hoping. :)

Lady-Shopping

Yesterday I set out to explore the "ladies' market." This name cracks me up, as it makes me picture something a little more like Amsterdam's red-light district, with ladies of every size and shape available for purchase. In reality, Hong Kong's ladies' market is a night market geared toward women.

I did see plenty of men there too though - probably because just a block over is Nathan Street, the big electronics shopping area.

The market extends several blocks down a street in Kowloon and is comprised of large, closely packed stalls on either side of a narrow walkway. You shuffle along the walkway in stream of people, peering from side to side at the different booths until you find one that looks interesting, then quickly veer into the booth before the crowd pushes you beyond it.

The shops offer an endless array of girly shopping options: purses, jeans, pashmina scarves, shoes, cell phone covers, jewelry boxes, stuffed animals, and more.

Unfortunately, my plan of photographing purse options to allow my friends back home to pick and choose what they wanted quickly fell flat - most vendors in Asia won't allow you to photograph their wares, because they know you can turn right around and have most things copied here. (Sorry girls!)

The market was fun, but what I quickly tired of was hearing "Hello Missy," which is apparently the universal method used at the ladies market to lure white female customers into vendors' booths. Needless to say, this tactic was not successful with yours truly.

Another aspect of the market that I was not inclined to partake in was the open-air food stands. The smell alone was enough to knock me down - all kinds of unidentifiable (to me, at least) hot food items, along with a few I recognized, such as big piles of octopus tentacles - all hot and steaming and sitting right there in the open. Which made for very convenient access for the flies that I saw crawling all over the food. Mmmm, flies.

Apparently I wasn't the only one not going for the fly-food; at one point I had to fight my way through a horde of people waiting in line to get a table at a classy joint they call Pizza Hut. Add that one to my list of bewildered head-shaking moments.

And while I'm on the subject, here's one more thing I'll never fully understand about Asian culture - the fascination with Hello Kitty. You see it a lot here, but nowhere more than at the ladies market. Case in point - the Visa application stand where you could choose your Hello Kitty Visa card design: Cool Kitty or Fun Kitty. I kid you not.

Take me to Ba fa guy & Hollywood doe - por favor

Earlier this week, I finally got the chance to meet some of the reporters I'll be working with here in Hong Kong, when my colleague Josie came to town and took me along on some meet & greets. I won't bore you with work stuff, except to note that we had lunch at a great restaurant at the IFC mall on the waterfront, and the weather cooperated to provide a pleasant outdoor lunch with a stunning view. The photo doesn't even begin to do it justice - I really wish I had a panoramic camera to capture it.

While we were out, I also captured a shot of the "trolley" (I believe it's some sort of cable car) that some people use to get around town. It's been described to me as slow and somewhat inconvenient (due to its limited area of coverage), and I've noticed it also has no windows - which means no air conditioning. I'm sure there must be some up side to it, but somehow I haven't been tempted to hop on quite yet.

I have mastered the MTR (the subway), but mostly I take cabs, since they're so cheap here. I've even learned how to tell the cab drivers how to take me home in Chinese ("ba fa guy & Hollywood doe"), and was pleased when a co-worker told me my tones were perfect.

Last but not least, last night I played around with my camera a bit to get some shots of the view from my apartment at night. It's no harbor view, but at least at night you can't see the dirt on the outsides of the buildings!

Wiki-madness

In the latest chapter of the "Will wonders never cease" book, I discovered today that my street is listed in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Street. Clearly I will have to track down the umbrella guy at some point.

And while I'm on the subject of surprising Hong Kong factoids, check out the photo on the right. This is the building directly across from my office, which is located on the 32nd floor. There's been construction going on ever since I got here, but last week I noticed that the scaffolding on the building is made of bamboo. It's seriously bizarre to see men in hardhats out there scaling the bamboo scaffolding 32 floors up. In fact, if you look closely, you'll see there's a guy hanging out in the photo.

I don't know how you do it, making love out of nothing at all

I'm feeling a little better today, so I ventured out for some shopping and exploration. First up was the flower market in Kowloon (across the bay on the mainland). Talk about a flower lover’s paradise… street after street of shops, their sidewalks overflowing with gorgeous flowers and plants. I picked up some bamboo shoots and a beautiful vase for about $14, and a bunch of lotus flowers for a little over a dollar. The flowers are still closed up tight, but here’s a link to what they look like when open.

Later I headed to Causeway Bay, home of Hong Kong’s Times Square, along with boundless shopping and endless crowds. I was on a hunt for some basic household items, and once I learned there’s an IKEA in Causeway Bay, I knew that would be my one-stop solution. As with every IKEA experience, by the time I finished, I was ready to kill just about anyone who crossed my path. Thankfully, it had started raining just before I left the store, so everyone was huddled under awnings – while I beelined it through the rain to a taxi line and got the hell out of dodge.

While out and about, I noticed something rather disturbing. During the last couple weeks, over and over again, I keep hearing the song “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All” by Air Supply. I even woke up with the damn song in my head earlier this week. Anyway, today was probably about the 10^th time I’ve heard it, and it finally registered – the universe must be sending me a message. But damned if I can’t figure out what the message is or why the universe would choose such a cruel mechanism to deliver it.

And while I’m on the subject of bad, repetitive music, I must note that the music in my apartment building’s elevator is a cruel joke as well. The elevator has a repertoire of four songs, one of which I like, three of which I am growing to hate. Sadly, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the elevator drives me to hate the fourth song as well.

On the up side, the weather is starting to improve. As mentioned above, there are still sudden (and intense) rain showers now and then, but we've actually had a streak of decent weather this week. Here's hoping the trend continues.

As always, additional photos are posted at http://babas.typepad.com/photos/hong_kong/.

Laying low

For those of you checking on a regular basis, sorry I've been so quiet this week, but I've been feeling a bit under the weather. I've been fighting off the combo of a head cold and a poorly timed flare-up of my back injury (from a car accident a few years ago).

As such, I haven't had very interesting stories to share. My life this week includes things like having food delivered and sitting around on the couch watching a marathon of "Lost" on DVD. Actually, if you haven't seen it, that is one hell of an addictive show.

I did visit a doctor here in Hong Kong, one who I guess in the US would be considered a naturopath, and who practices something called Bowen therapy. I just went yesterday and she said it typically takes five days to see the full results, so I guess I'll have to wait to see how much it really helps.

Anyway, I'll try to get out and do something worth writing about (and photographing) tomorrow. Hope everyone back home is healthy and happy.

~Barbara