San lin fai lok ;P

Happy 2004. My first entry of a new year...and my god am I neglectful. I've never been good at keeping in touch with people, calling people when I say I will, or writing entries when I should (as the flame in my last entry shows). I'm leaving Hong Kong the day after tomorrow and and I only wrote one entry, checked my mail twice, sent my friends CHRISTMAS cards yesterday and didn't have a flight home until a few days ago ;P Yeah, I think my resolution is to work on...timeliness? Anyways...

What did I do since the 21st? In brief, on Christmas Eve Kenneth and I watched the Hong Kong Ballet's performance of the Nutcracker which was quite fun. There were millions of people walking around outside for absolutely no reason. It was shocking... ;P New Years was spent trying to weasle our way into Times Square, and when that didn't work we went back to Kowloon and rang in the New Year in front of the Penninsula Hotel. Yesterday, I went to Macau and Kenneth and I ate all sorts of delicious portuguese-chinese (aka macanese) delights...my new favorite dessert is serrdura. Its heavenly.

The rest of my stay in HK was spent eating, shopping, looking around shady shitholes in Kowloon for bootleg Blythe dolls and a bootleg Anna Sui planner. I rarely went over to Hong Kong Island, except to see AD once and a trip to Stanley we made...other than that it was mainly for eating or what have you. I spent most of my time in Kowloon, which was fine with me since I prefer to see more "local" stuff anyways. We went to shady-ass shopping arcades full of porn and anime crap, walked around markets lined with hookers, and shook our heads at the many "sangwo" walking around (uh, me and Kenneth's code word for this god-awful fashion from the 80s meets Japanese kogal.) I bought lots of silly clothes and took lots of silly pictures...but of course I did lots of cultural stuff and went to oodles of shrines and even went on a little tour of the New Territories were I had this amazingly good steamed egg cake thing in a yamcha restaurant...we also did this super won't-find-in-tour-guides thing were you hurl oranges with wishes tied to them over a tree...needless to say, I can't throw worth shit.

Things that interested/surprised me about HK:

- Hong Kong is full of really good food ;P Found lots of food I love....goose...serrdura...ma lai gou

- Hong Kong winters feel like Los Angeles ones, and that is very very very nice.

- The streets smell "interestingly"...sometimes really good, sometimes stomach-turningly disgusting

- There are lots of people here. o.o Its not the people on the streets that surprise me, but how many of the buildings that make up the skyline are apartment buildings...its like thousands of little hives in the sky.

- Hong Kong street fashion is alot more casual than Japan's, but you definately have your Japanese wannabee dressers and then the truly HK-style dressers...lots of weird dressers, and definately a lot less trashiness. Japan's become the world of the ubershort skirt...here you actually have school girls wearing their skirts a palm-length from the knee (shocking!) instead of a palm-length from the crotch. But you still see everyone carrying a fake Louis Vuitton bag ;P

- Hong Kong is really CLEAN. Cleaner than downtown Tokyo definately (that whole lack of trashcans in Japan might be the problem there ;p) I suppose the fear of SARS and that $200 fine for littering will do that to a place.

- People are very religious/superstitious...going to a temple in HK (I suppose China too) is a completely different experience than going to one in Japan. In Japan it feels like the people do it for fun/tradition...in HK people live it and believe it seriously...well, at least thats how it APPEARS. Maybe they fake it better ;P

- That food making game by that Taiwanese game maker, ya know the machines that have like 40 games on them and you touch the screen? Yeah, anyways, that food making game is amazingly addicting and a good way to learn how to read food names in Chinese ;P

- People are really rude, but not as rude as I expected. It might just be culture shock from coming from Japan, but I can't stand being rammed into without an apology, having people cut in line in front of me, or having vendors tossing money or flyers at me instead of handing it to me. But of course, lots of people are very nice...I guess I really got used to that "fake niceness" in Japan.

- Things here aren't really that cheap. :(

Jason: You're the only J-kun I know, so keep it up if you want to. :D

Posted by Janelle at January 6, 2004 08:26 AM