Hong Kong

Oh man, I tell ya it felt good to leave work the Friday before Halloween and hope in a cab headed to the airport instead of braving Shanghai’s Metro.  Halloween weekend was my first time leaving Shanghai since I arrived here in August.  As it turned out, a commute from Shanghai to Changsha isn’t all that bad, except for the bad quality and exorbitant prices of airport food in China.

When I exited the airport at Changsha around 10:30 Friday night I inhaled deeply.  After living in Shanghai so long the air… well, it smelled kind of provincial.  Not that Changsha or its airport (many miles outside town) has clean air, but Shanghai’s air feels so adulterated most of the time.  Not only is the city covered in smog but just walking the streets and subway stations you inhale a multitude of fragrances that have nothing to do with the natural world.  Whether it’s the obnoxious construction smells I find in the People’s Square metro station, the sharp cologne burning my nose in the elevator, the smell of refuse on the street or the intoxicating scents of a decadent restaurant – no breath in Shanghai is free of man-made smells.  Of course it wasn’t just the smells that made it clear I wasn’t in Shanghai anymore, there was something pleasantly inland and second-tier about Changsha that set it apart from the sterilized coastal city I share with 20 million other people.

My cab driver from the airport drove at tremendous speeds (what is it with Chinese cabbies driving obscenely fast to and from airports?) and I arrived in downtown Changsha in record time.  First stop was the old hangout, Folk Bar on Jiefang lu (Liberation road).  My friends had thought that my cab would take longer than it had so they had already moved onto a new watering hole, but that was fine with me because I had a nice time drinking a gin and tonic catching up with the bartender Jimmy.  I met Jimmy last year and we instantly became friends, he is from the city of Huaihua in far western Hunan where I spent last year teaching English.  I also got to say hi to the boss of the bar, who last year in a moment of memorable exuberance had bought me and a friend a few free Belgian beers.  It was all very Cheers like, going to that place where everyone know your name and yadda yadda.  While walking the streets I know so well to the next bar someone even recognized me.  It felt like coming home, a feeling I had over and over again during my visit to Changsha.

The rest of that Friday night, my hangover-filled Saturday and the big Halloween party Saturday night don’t really need to be discussed.  It was a blast, but parties like that don’t lend themselves well to blog posts.  On Sunday, exhausted and happy after a weekend of reunions and making new friends, I caught a train back to Shanghai.  Why a train and not a plane you ask?  Well besides the fact that I like taking trains in China, I had to lug home two big suitcases packed with books.  You see, I love books.  Last year as a teacher I had shipped over a box of books before I arrived in Hunan and had continued to add to my collection as the year went on and by the end of it I had a sizable library.  Unlike many expats in China I can’t just give my books away or leave them for future American expats to read, I just can’t let go.  So I left my books with a friend in Changsha and on this trip I just barely got them home to my apartment in Shanghai before my arm fell off.

I had one day back in Shanghai before I was leaving again for Shenzhen on my way to Hong Kong.  I was lucky enough to see my old roommate from my days as a student in Kunming, which was incidentally when this blog was begun.  One highlight of his visit to Shanghai were the mugs (1 liter!) of excellent hefeweizen that we enjoyed at the Bund Brewery, a spot I will certainly be returning to.

The next day I headed back to the Hongqiao airport in Shanghai and flew south to Shenzhen, the special economic zone smack dab next to Hong Kong that is home to 10 million people and is a monument to the positives and negatives of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening.  The whole city is like one big construction site; yes, that can be said for every Chinese city, but in Shenzhen the land feels even more cut up and unfinished than usual.  Luckily I didn’t have to spend much time walking around Shenzhen, a city that holds onto the adjective “soulless” well.  There is a bus that ferries you from the Shenzhen airport to downtown Kowloon in Hong Kong, though you have to walk through customs yourself.

About the Hong Kong customs: it’s easy.  I tell you it feels wonderful walking into a part of China and getting a 90 day visa just for being an American, such a nice change from the mainland where visas are a real headache.  There’s one thing about entering Hong Kong that always cracks me up.  They have big colorful posters everywhere warning visitors about carrying in drugs, infectious diseases, and animal products.  Naturally, a tiny island city of over 7 million people next to the largest country in the world should be worrying about such things.  The poster explaining that you can’t bring in animal products has this hilarious picture of a rather short portly Chinese woman carrying a cheap plastic tarp bag (the carpet bag of China), and right beside her is this super hot Playboy model of a Hong Kong customs officer literally towering over the peasant woman (who looks mortified) and what is this Angelina Jolie of a Customs officer holding?  Why nothing less than a “black boned chicken” in all is dead raw-meat glory.  You’re probably scratching your head and saying “what?” but believe me, the poster is hilarious.

The bus ride from the border into the city of Hong Kong is short and takes you through bald hills covered in thin layers of concrete, like so many chocolate truffles, and past the tallest skinniest apartment buildings you will ever see.  Many of these skinny towers have a floor smack in the middle that has no rooms, so as to allow the wind to blow through the anorexic building.  The sheer swaying that the people living on the top floor of these places must experience, it’s enough to explain why Fengshui practitioners advocate living on the ground level.

I’m starting to think that Hong Kong is the home of my adult dreams.  In fourth grade a friend of mine and I laid down plans to travel across the Sahara on a Vespa scooter, now (sadly) I dream of living in Hong Kong – wealthy and comfortable.  (Hold on a second, I still want to travel through North Africa on a scooter!  I can move to Hong Kong when I retire.)

The city feels less like a archipelago of islands off the Southern Chinese coast and more like a metropolis placed in the exact middle of every shipping lane that exists on this planet, like the bustling space stations of the never-to-be-realized future that I used to watch on TV as a child.  It is simultaneously a place people go to on their way to another place and a destination in itself.  The way I always notice the city’s oh so inviting internationalness is by going to a Hong Kong supermarket.

As I noticed last time I visited the city, the upscale supermarkets here sell absolutely everything under the sun.  2008 saw Hong Kong abolish all wine duties on imported wine and the city is now certifiably the new center of the wine world.  If you want to auction off your case of 1982 Chateau Petrus, Hong Kong is the place to do it.  So, when I arrived in the city, in the concrete cave of a fantastically large mall (the forum of the modern Asian city), I quickly passed by the Starbucks (somehow nicer than our Shanghai versions, but I can’t put into words why) and hit up the super-deluxe supermarket.  There I perused the extensive wine collection that was, by and large, reasonably priced, unlike in Shanghai where wine prices are often jacked up like an American home before the recession.  I went with an organic Australian Riesling that was a comfortable 99 Hong Kong dollars, a gift to myself in that city of self pampering.  I also ordered a real cheeseburger that was fantastic.

While in Hong Kong I stayed in my company’s private apartment way up near the top of the mid-levels escalator in the land of polished Lamborghinis and private tennis lessons.  I think I’ll let the view speak for itself:

The building was just as luxurious as the view. They even sterilize the elevator buttons hourly:

I managed to make it up to the top of Mount Victoria, which I had skipped on the last visit due to an interminable blanket of fog.  I snapped some photos and walked slowly through the muggy forests and the egregiously expensive apartment complexes back down to the neighborhood I was staying in.

I then did the only natural thing and ordered a heaping pile of Mexican food for one.  This was followed with the purchase of a full pint of Ben & Jerry’s Mint Cookie ice cream (Hong Kong is the part of China that sells Ben & Jerry’s) that I took back to the apartment to chow on while sipping my Australian wine.  I had hoped to save the majority of the ice cream for breakfast (a favorite early morning meal of mine that I learned to love while studying in Burlington, Vermont), but the freezer was one solid block of ice.  I had to bite the bullet and eat the full pint of ice cream and drink the bottle of wine while simultaneously snacking on the leftover chips and salsa from my diabetes-inducing cheese-covered Mexican feast.  I decided to stay in and watch cable TV, so that I could more easily consume my ice cream (isn’t it interesting how TV makes eating forgettable, almost dream like?), before rolling my engorged body to the bedroom.  Lucky for me the master bedroom had such a wonderful view I forget all about the extreme levels of heartburn that were burning apart my digestive system.

And that was my vacation.