A thoughtful
friend of mine asked me a few questions about my trip so far:
How’s HK?
What’s your
biggest surprise so far?
What’s your
biggest embarrassment?
Where’s your
favorite non-Garrett place to eat?
How’s your
apartment?
At the time,
these questions overwhelmed me due to the Great Internet Meltdown of 2013. I speak for us all when I say we are grateful
it’s January, and the worst of the year has already passed.
I will sum
up my answers to all of these questions with this diagram of my week in review.
Starting
neither left to right nor top to bottom, this is how it happened.
No-internet
apartment
I thought it
would be fairly simple to set up internet for the apartment. Wrong, I was so wrong. Despite their response of “yes” to everything
you ask, internet companies are not willing to set up connections for temporary
and foreign residents of Hong Kong. Thanks
to our realtor, we found one willing to compromise. But when the technician came last week, we
discovered the signal wasn’t strong enough for a cursory hook up. They could come back in a week, and no they
were not open to the idea of accepting bribes.
As I type,
there are two Cantonese men sitting on my living room floor chatting away,
probably about how this apartment is actually lined with lead so that
information can neither enter nor leave the unit. They also just told me, “No, this will not be
wireless! Haha!”
Café that
doesn’t mind squatters
Since I do not have internet, I have taken
residence in the neighboring Café O. It is
a friendly place with nice hot beverages and a wait staff that doesn’t bother
you if you stand outside the door before they open to use their wireless.
To add to
its charm, in the last week I have made a friend named Josephine who is
studying law, thrilled my café neighbors with 2 hours of conference calls, and
been hit on by a random dude in sweats (I swooned).
Coldest
closet and home of GP in Hong Kong
When I’m not
at Café O, I use the internet from the cold and dark closet/office of our
Shop. I can’t work there very long
though if I want to maintain feeling in my fingers. Regardless, I’ve enjoyed getting to know
everyone there and they are very nice to me.
My best phrase in Cantonese right now is probably, “You can try!”
Nicest
pastry chef I’ll ever meet
I met
Gregoire Michaud, pastry chef of the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong. He kindly let me into his kitchen and offered
me a mini sourdough baguette fresh from the oven. It was delightfully crisp, warm, and
tender. If you can eat one of these without
smiling, you are probably a robot.
Good-looking
white people like this area
The
mid-level escalator connects my no-internet apartment to the very cold closet. My observations tell me that you can only
hang out at establishments along the escalator if you are a good-looking white
person. Or if you are selling
internet. As I am neither white nor an
internet peddler, I just ride the escalator and watch the people talk about how
good looking they are.
The Soup Man
Sometimes I
wander away from the escalator on my way down the hill to see what I’ll
find. What I found is The Soup Man. I walk up to him, smile, point to a bowl of soup
that someone is eating, he barks at the soup chef, and then a few minutes later
I have a bowl of hot and delicious soup.
Pig stomach? Mystery fish paste
balls? Unidentified offal? Yes, please.
The Soup Man is my favorite, but Hong Kong is generally a wonderful land of soup. I have soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They are all different and delicious.
My
understanding of HK’s street system
A week
later, I’ve finally got Hong Kong’s system down: MTR -> mall -> walkway
-> mall -> MTR -> walkway -> lost -> lost -> lost -> eat
soup and feel better that I’ve been lost for so long.
Construction
wasteland + the worst mall ever
On a quest
for adventure, I got stuck in The Elements, probably the worst mall in the world. There is only a way in. There is no way out. And if you do manage to find your way out,
you will get stuck in a construction wasteland for hours.
A really big
teddy bear lives here
I finally
found a way out of the construction wasteland and surfaced in a place with
civilization. Civilization was really
excited about this giant bear. So I took a picture too.
A lot of
lights
I also found
a lot of lights close to the really big teddy bear.
A lot of
lights
I walked
through Lan Kwai Fong. It was bright and
loud.
Bus drivers
who drive here will not tell you when to alight
Mini buses
do not have actual stops – they only stop before the final destination if you
tell them where to let you off. I showed
the bus driver the name of the place I needed her to stop, and I thought she
agreed to tell me when we were there.
She did not tell me. Luckily, I
used a couple landmarks and context clues to hop off the bus in the nick of
time. I will most likely never ride a
mini bus again.
Angry taxi
and shady printers
I rode to
the end of the Island MTR Line to talk to a printer at his “paper factory.” That was my first clue that this place would
be difficult to find. I started
following Google’s blue dot towards the address, but when I saw that it told me
I’d have to walk up a very steep gradient for 2 miles, I decided to get in a
taxi in case the blue dot was wrong.
The taxi was
cheesed that I didn’t speak Cantonese and that my Google maps was not the local
version. He kept repeating, “Where is
it?” and I kept repeating, “I don’t know!”
Finally he figured out what I was talking about and lectured me about
not having the Chinese version of Google maps on my phone.
There was no
door to the building, only a crowded loading dock. I saw a sign in Chinese that said something
about customers, maybe, so I followed it.
I found an elevator and some lady asked me what floor I was going to, I responded
in Cantonese, and she guided me to a creaky old elevator.
It doesn’t
matter what happened after that because I consider this two-line exchange in
Cantonese an utter success.
Post-Great Internet Meltdown of 2013 Thoughts
Now that I've accepted that lost is found and all problems can be solved with a bowl of good soup, my friends and I are glad to call Hong Kong home for the month.
