High Plains Panhandler

Stanley Market

Today I finally met the Australians in Hong Kong.

I had run into some Europeans before, mainly at the Big Buddha, but I was surprised at the distinct lack of any other countries especially now since the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar, making both dollars pretty weak. And since the entirety of Hong Kong is dedicated to shopping, shopping, and slightly more shopping, I thought I'd see more people from other countries here getting in on the action. (Really, I've never seen such sparkling clean subway stations full of so many shops; Hong Kong's shops don't just extend upward in this vertical city, they tunnel downward as well.)

But now I understand it's Stanley Beach on the south side of Hong Kong island where the Euros fly, and it's the Australians who made up the majority of pint-swilling, sun-worshipping beachcombers. 

Stanley Market has a crowded market on one side, a line of taverns and pubs on the other, all bordered by a long beach that is, itself, inhabited by windsurfers, their sails painted in primary colors dotting the bay.

I picked up three  hand-carved stone stamps for the kids (an artisan carved their English names and then Chinese equivalents on the bottom so the kids can stamp their transliterated names with glee on whatever they'd like), and I showed a slight amount of interest in a painting of a scene from an old Chinese opera. The shop keeper, a friendly and tiny woman, responded to my tepid interest with an enormous amount of interest in selling it to me, going into its history as an original work of art and showing me the certificate and artist biography. I really wasn't that interested in buying it, no matter what the discount I'm sure the shop keeper was about to give me, but she kept after me. I told her I wasn't going to spend anything close to HK $15000, so she pulled out an exact duplicate of the painting, only half the size, from a stack and said I could have that one for half price. And then she went on about how it was an original work of art with a certificate and on and on. Maybe I should have held on for the two centimeter-sized version. That would have been really cheap. And it still would have been an original!

I did stumble upon a painting that appealed to me and so Eddie, who was helping me explore Stanley Beach, beat down the price with a flurry of punctuated Mandarin, and within seconds of me nodding yes, three people appeared from a mysterious back room hidden by a curtain. They yanked the painting from the wall, took it out of its frame, rolled it up tightly, and packed it in a custom cut tube. It was very, very quick. I guess they worked like three mini tornados so I wouldn't have time in indulge in buyer's remorse.

We took a double-decker bus back around the island to Hong Kong proper, Australians all around us. They were a very friendly lot, smiling and cheering on each other. I, on the other hand, kept a close eye on the sheer cliff drops inches away from our bus tires. I asked Eddie if any buses had run off the road and crashed down the mountain. He shook his head and then said, "But just think, even if this one did, they'd never find the bodies!" I believe that was supposed to be comforting.

Later that evening, I hunted for an interesting place for dinner but then decided on eating at the hotel dinner buffet since that would give me a good view of Victoria Park and everything going on for the Mid-Autumn Festival. This festival is similar to Thanksgiving, and families get together to celebrate it with mooncakes, pastries with a cooked egg yolk in the center. I had one of these after dinner, and it was pretty good, and that's saying something since I can't fathom enjoying anything with a hard egg yolk in the middle. I'll take a mooncake over a dried out, teeth-cracking fruit cake any day.

The dinner buffet at the Park Lane hotel was quite good, and there was an interesting variety of all sorts of tasty things.  Everyone loved the crab legs, and when a new batch was thrown out onto a large glass punch bowl full of ice, a mass of people instantly appeared around it. I don't mean they were milling around waiting for the crab legs. I mean they just appeared, out of nowhere, and then two seconds later when all the crab legs had disappeared, the crowd vanished, leaving me confused and crab legless. On my plate, merely watermelon. I had not moved quickly enough.

The rest of the buffet was a madhouse, people running this way and that, filling up their plates over and over again. I thought it incredible that no one collided with anyone else, but then again, I think that's how Hong Kong is. The traffic is crazy, hectic, and chaotic. Drivers float between lanes and rush up to the bumper in front of them, at the last second slamming on the brakes. It's like a giant game of bumper cars, except no one gets hit. I'm sure there are accidents, but I saw no banged up cars, no wrecks, no accidents. Just a lot of drivers practicing for it. I guess that also works at buffets and in subway stations.

I thought about going into Victoria Park and joining the festival ceremony, but when I walked outside and strolled down Great George Street, the foot traffic was so intense and crowded and mooncake happy, I think I was struck with people claustrophobia, and I couldn't really look around or explore because I had to move with the tide.

So, instead, I spent my last night in Hong Kong looking through my window at the sunset. Twenty-five stories below, sprinkled across Victoria Park, people were on their blankets, eating mooncakes, and enjoying the Mid-Autumn festival. This was a celebration, time for family.

But mine wasn't there with me.

That's when I knew it was time for me to go home.

Big Buddha

The hike from Hong Kong to the Big Buddha is long and steep, so it's a good thing I rode the tram instead.
Once at the top of Lantau Peak, the Buddha is just a short walk down a very populated path, the Buddha looming over everyone. (Of course, you stop in the Lantau Peak gift shop first - Suzanne and I have a theory that everything ends in a gift shop; now I know it's cross-cultural.)

First things first: lunch. Today it was in the Po Lin Monastery, a vegetarian lunch shared with a few visiting monks (well, not really with them - I was a table away, but I got to stare at them obliquely and think how interesting. They had some very nice high definition video cameras and expensive-looking digital still cameras, complete with large and intimidating lenses).

After lunch and a quick tour of the monastery, I headed up the 268 steps to the statue of the Buddha itself. This might not sound like too many steps to take, and that's what I thought too. But halfway up I realized, as the sweat was gushing down into my eyes, that I wasn't just climbing stairs. I was slogging through the molasses of humidity all around me. It was thick and weighty and steamy.

I made it to the top, next to a group of German tourists who were giving each other high-fives on their climbing victory. The all looked shiny and happy. I must have looked like an escaped convict, hunting freedom that only the cool breeze of the air conditioned gift shop could give.

After a quick tour of the Buddha, I walked back down to Lantau Peak and caught a bus to a small fishing village on the other side of the island. This was one of the best roller coaster rides I've ever been on. The bus driver knew absolutely no fear, and he careened around these mounting curves, flinging the bus this way and that, the sheer drops on the side of the road taunting some regurgitation. I had to really concentrate on holding down my monastery lunch.

It didn't help things that the bus driver was obsessed with killing a fly on his dashboard. He'd throw the steering wheel to the left and then, while the bus righted itself after balancing on what felt like two wheels, he'd whack a rolled newspaper frantically at that fly, each time missing it and then getting angrier and angrier. And that's how the trip down the mountain went, whack - twist - turn - lunge - break - whack, until we finally stopped in the middle of a surly gang of cows to let some passengers off at a bus stop. And then, without a second to lose, we were back at it, flying down the mountain for dear life.

At the bottom, the fishing village of Tai O was such a change from everything I'd seen so far. It was laid back, slow, and, most incredibly, had people who were actually fishing (this is compared to places I've been in the past that promise authenticity but deliver only gift shops). Tai O is known for its dried seafood, and there were buckets of it everywhere, along with odd assortments of shark skins hanging from roofs, noodles, and live crabs in plastic containers. 

Eddie, who was taking me around exploring, and I took a break in a small cafe (for lack of a better word, that's what I'll call it) for some handmade cake pastry (it's only made once a day, and when they run out, that's it until the next day), and I had some old style British tea mixed with milk. It wasn't simply tea with milk; it was a different concoction, but now I'm addicted. 

The people in the cafe were all local, all hanging out, and one, in particular, was really giving me the hairy eyeball. He burped a few times, scratched a few wandering itches, all the while keeping his eye on me. I knew I didn't fit in, but now I felt it.

We then took a nice boat tour of the village (we got a good deal since the driver wanted to fill all eight seats on the small craft), and I caught a great view of a white dolphin, a type of dolphin found only in the South China Sea. That's when I discovered all of us on the small fishing boat knew at least one common word: "Oooooh!" Well, actually I think I said, "Whaaa!" But it was close enough. We all knew what each other meant.

We took a fast commute ferry back to Hong Kong island, and it made for a spectacular view, crossing the harbor, bathed by the lights of the city, the lights of the ships, and the swaying glow of a couple of Chinese junks.

The harbor is beautiful at night, high rises in the background, the reflection of lights in front. As the ferry sped over the water, It struck me that this was modern Hong Kong.  Urbane, cosmopolitan, and, full of flat screen TVs. But on the edges, a bit of old China is still there,  in the clicking of Mahjong tiles in a back room off a dirt street or the murmur of bowing monks in orange robes at the top of a few hundred stairs.

It's there, still floating, still illuminated by red lanterns in the middle of the sea.

The Night Market

I joined the Taipei night market tonight, and wandered around in the cacophony, exploring the crowded walkways and crammed stalls where people were selling both oddities and t-shirts, fried tentacles and boiled something or other. And this was the first time I've ever run across the delicacy called Stinky Bean Curd. 

It's well named, because this stuff was stinky. I mean, as in rotting corpse, putrid sewer, instantly curls your hair stinky. After a few extended minutes of exposure to this rank and nasty food, I was able to sniff it out from even the most obscure location.

So I pressed on, twisting and turning myself to evade the thick crowd in the night market. As I walked, I realized something. While people might argue that we in the U.S. have lost our moral authority to lead in the world, or  that the we've lost the currency basis war to the Euro, I now know one battle we haven't lost. That is the battle for inane slogans on cheaply made t-shirts.

Everywhere I looked there were t-shirts with English phrases or American celebrities on them, and a lot of the phrases were a little off such as, "I'm the Big Mac of Daddy," or "The Warming of Global Environs Harbors True."

Down some of the lesser traveled alleys of the Night Market were the more aggressive sales pitches. Wizened old woman and ancient men in stained undershirts, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, would lean out over their mysteriously boiling pots of oil and shout incomprehensible things to me. But seeing as though I have now mastered the handy phrase 不要, I was able to make it through this gauntlet unscathed, regardless of how interesting the dried duck tongue looked. 

The night market goes late into early morning, but I was far too tired for that. I had a cold vegetable drink ("Good for the health!" - it seems as if someone will always tell you the things you eat here will fall into that category), and then it was a quick cab ride back to the hotel, far away from the lingering odor of stinky bean curd and the magnified voices of street vendors trying to sell tennis shoes wrapped tightly in plastic.

I Left My Shoes in Taipei

Today: Taipei.

I left Hong Kong early this morning for Taiwan and, at my first meeting, had to take off my shoes. At first I hesitated, not being one whose morning mission was to poison the atmosphere with stinky feet, but it quickly became apparent that the best diplomacy is to go along to get along. So I slipped my feet into a pair of slippers and slid quietly into a conference room. After the meeting ended and I was putting on my regular shoes, I concluded that we should take our American ingenuity and improve upon the slippers-at-work requirement: sweat pants and jammies at the office. With pillows. Always with pillows.

Work consumed all of the day today, so there was no time for exploration, but I did have eel for lunch and had dinner at the Dafang Regimen Cate Teppanyaki restaurant. I wasn't sure what I was in for at this restaurant because when I walked in, I noticed two long tables with chairs around three sides and a cooking top in the middle. Now we have two of these types of restaurants in Amarillo, which everyone calls Kabuki-style, and I was very familiar with how they worked. The chef would do his show, cooking rice and steak and chicken in front of everyone, maybe building a tower out of onions and lighting oil on the top so it'd steam like a volcano, then fling his knives around, Bruce Lee-style, and amaze the customers so, in the end, we'd all feel obligated to clap awkwardly while he shoved piles of fried rice onto our plates.

When I saw those tables tonight I dreaded it.

But I was wrong, so very, very wrong. This was one of the most amazing meals I've ever had, and that includes the Wednesday night of '87 in College Station with Double Dave's pizza rolls and a backpack lined with aluminum foil.

The meal tonight was subtle and both fascinating and fantastic. Our meal came in bits and pieces: a slice of bread (to be eaten first before the salad), a prawn, a bowl of soup, beef rolls - it's almost a disservice to try to describe it. The chef told us to eat in a certain order with certain tools. We had to eat the salad clockwise around the salad bowl, lettuce first and ending with a bitter Chinese root that was supposedly good for the health.

Each swallow of food had a particular meaning, each way the chef carefully cooked, folded, and moved ingredients around on the stove had a particular story. Everything fit, and after a few minutes I began to understand the harmony of the food was both in how it was made and how I ate it and what relationship it had with other things on my plate.

I'll have to learn more about this. Perhaps a paper plate of Cheetos and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn't the most harmonious lunch.

Adding a pizza role obviously would push things back into balance.

tlhIngan maH!

My hotel here in Hong Kong is beside Victoria Park, home to an early morning Tai Chi group that practices right in view of my window. After a long day of meetings today I took a little stroll in the park to stretch my legs and ran across a few people working on their Kung Fu. A handful of old men, lounging about in their droopy undershirts, were watching them.

One of the Kung Fu-ers brought out hook swords (I had to look up the name). When I saw them I thought they looked like some Klingon sword of terror Worf from Star Trek would use. 

They guy danced around, flinging the sword this way and that and, in general, looking quite impressive and frightening. When he finished, a couple of the old men applauded half-heartedly. One man, who had been rattling off Mandarin so quickly as if he were trying to cram in two thousand years of Chinese history into one breath of conversation, suddenly stopped and pointed at the swords.

"Star Trek!" he said, smiling.

The culture of Spock consumes the world, and I am happy for it.

The Maddening Crowd

There's an old Star Trek episode about a planet so crowded people are constantly crammed together with nowhere to move. Someone moved the entire population of that planet to the street I was walking on today. 

I didn't know there were this many people in Hong Kong. There are people everywhere, and moving down the sidewalk was more like shuffling ahead an inch at a time. (Once a woman in front of me barely crept forward at all, seemingly frozen in mid-step; it took me a few seconds to realize my big foot was keeping the back of her flip-flop nailed firmly to the ground. When I finally lifted my foot, she lunged forward into the crowd, devoured quickly by the mass of slow moving people going nowhere.)

People weren't just walking. They were hanging out, sitting in the shade, lying down on newspapers or mats or whatever they had to provide a millimeter of separation between them and the ground. It was so strange - I'd turn a corner, and there'd be fifty or sixty people just sitting around, the pedestrian path between them squeezed into a narrow walkway. No one seemed to mind, and the crowd kept surging like a beast rerouted here and there between other people, curbs, trucks, and cars. I learned quickly that you didn't fight it. You just surfed along.

That was okay. My plan today was to keep walking, stay far from the hotel and comfy bed, and force myself to acclimate to the 13 hour time change. I figured if I walked enough, I'd be exhausted at the end of the day, collapse at bedtime, and be ready for actual work with actual meetings tomorrow morning. So walk I did.

The crowd, with a mind of its own, pushed me into a subway station, so I went with it and took the escalator down to the Causeway Bay station and then, blind and lucky, caught the train to the Central station, followed the crowd, found the exit, weaved my way up various flights of stairs populated by various groups of lounging people, until I found myself here at the Star Ferry Pier. For about 50 cents I took the ferry across Victoria Harbor to Kowloon and started wandering around there.

Apparently this is a big tourist area. I know this because I was accosted with many, many offers to buy cheap watches ("Rolex. Looks good on you!"), tailoring, and one whispered "massage sexy."

A quick lunch of Dim Sum and I was back on the sidewalk, going up Nathan Road, a wide expanse of fancy shops and more busy people. I took some stairs past the Kowloon Mosque and entered Kowloon Park, where I immediately stumbled upon the weekly Sunday afternoon Kung Fu demonstration. So now soaked with sweat,  I took a shaded seat under a canopy and watched enviously at all the other people who had had the foresight to bring fans with them. I tried to fan myself with my iPhone, but that didn't work. I guess it can't do everything after all.

The Kung Fu demonstration was great. It began with the Dragon Dance (the dragon's the deity that controls the rain). About twelve kids ran around, each holding up a stick to support part of the long dragon puppet over their heads. They twisted and turned, dipped and dived, but a few times one of the kids stopped paying attention and ran into the kid in front of him. I guess there's a universal truth in there. It doesn't matter what god or gods you believe in or don't believe in. If you're not careful you'll always run into the guy in front of you.

After Kung Fu, I kept marching. By now I'm sure I had lost about twenty gallons of sweat, so I found a vending machine that sold beverages. The water, unfortunately, was called "Pocari Sweat Water," and this had all the attraction of a mouthful of sand, so I opted for a Coke, a Coke with real sugar and no skull and crossbones high fructose corn syrup. Ten minutes later that crummy sugar and caffeine-laced Coke knocked me out hard, and suddenly all I wanted was air conditioning, a pillow, and silence.

But I kept at it, taking the subway back to Hong Kong island proper and then walking through city'super, a large grocery store, because I wanted to get an idea what regular people have to pay to live here. Conclusion: it's expensive to live in Hong Kong.

By now I was dead tired and figured that was enough to shut me down for the night, so I headed back, turning all sorts of wrong ways and ending up on 渣甸街 or, more precisely, some strange and mysterious shoulder-width alley off the street that was filled with stall after stall of clothes, shoes, hats, and baby gremlins.

After trial and error (more like a trial of errors) I found my hotel, and here I end the day. I am very excited though. I recognized the word 牛奶 during a commercial. Those Mandarin lessons are paying off!

Off to Hong Kong

Boy, I'm tired.

I'm waiting for my connecting flight to Hong Kong in the Tokyo Narita airport, and even though it's two in the afternoon here, I know it's midnight back home. This knowledge abuses me because I know I'm not supposed to be sitting here, hot and sweaty in this humid airport. I should be sleeping. Or at least watching something awful on the Sci-Fi channel.

The morning started early, bouncing from Amarillo to Dallas and then catching a 777 (something I've never been on before) from Dallas to Tokyo. On the flight I finally finished the new Indiana Jones movie, something that we thought we could watch at the drive-in one night, but we left early because, one, it was too scary for the kids and, two, it was utterly inane and awful. Now I have this to report: the rest of the movie doesn't get any better. It says something when I actually looked forward to the plane captain interrupting the movie with information about turbulence and seat belt use. 

The flight took about 12 or 14 or 18 or however many hours. It was some leg cramming amount of time during which I watched four episodes of The Tudors, read an analysis of Leibniz's cosmological argument (I was hoping this would inspire a nap), watched 22 minutes of the (relatively) new Speed Racer movie, spent three minutes being angry at never being able to reclaim those previous 22 minutes, and tried to do some writing but then gave up.

The woman pushing the zamboni-sized vacuum just gave me the stink eye. I think I'm the only one in this section of the terminal. The gray sky outside notwithstanding, it sure feels like midnight here even though it's mid-afternoon. No one's around.

Well, that's not entirely true. There are four people at the gate where I'm waiting in the empty waiting area. They've asked me several times if I wanted to go to Shanghai. (That was the flight that left about an hour ago; they must think I should have been on that one.)

So I wait. And I try not to be sleepy. And I still have to stick it out another four and a half hours on the flight from here to Hong Kong. 

I'm pretty wimpy!

South China Sea update: The guy next to me is very friendly. He's Australian. He also smells like socks. I'm afraid he must think the same of me.

Cookie Chess

When we discovered that chessmen cookies from Pepperidge Farm now came in chocolate, the first thing we thought was that they'd make great playing pieces for a game of chess. So we made a board out of construction paper, set up the cookies, and started our fierce game of kids versus parents. (Suzanne and I already had a good winning strategy because the kids had made a deal among themselves: when you capture a piece, you get to eat it, so we knew they were ready for some quick and early exchanges.)

The game didn't last too long, mainly because everyone wanted to eat, and I stumbled upon a nice checkmate without even noticing, which made the kids happy so they could then eat as many cookies as they wanted.

Now that's the way to play chess!