A New Home

For the last month, we have been living in our new 'house'. I use that term loosely because 600 square feet 20 storeys up a concrete tower cannot really be called a house. However many people refer to their apartments as houses and flats. We were going a bit stir-crazy in the hotel room. Two kids in a single room. We were having to put the kids to bed and then retire to the bathroom while they go to sleep. The advantage of the hotel is that you pay just one bill and it includes power, phone has a TV and basic kitchen equipment. We started buying stuff for our future flat so we wouldn't have to buy everything in one go.
We started looking for a flat in the housing estate across the road from the hotel because we quite liked the area--great parks, shops and restaurants. We went to an agent to get it sorted out because they don't have trademe and I can't read the newspapers. The downside of that is that you have to pay half a month's rent in commission. After looking at a few grotty flats--landlords don't clean the flat, new tenants get a week rent free to clean--we found one that was recently decorated with new kitchen and bathroom. It's got a great view of the town and was clean! You can negotiate the price for the rent and we made a lower offer, which was accepted and also negotiated a bit more time before we had to move in because we had already paid for the hotel. This ended up being a good idea because we could move in slowly and not all in one go, especially when you have to carry most of your stuff.

We managed to furnish the whole place (3 beds, a couch, dining table, rug, wardrobe) for about 12,000 HK dollars, just over $2000, thanks to IKEA.

The plan was to stay one weekend and go back to the hotel for the final week of our hotel contract but the bed was so cozy and the kids were off in a separate room (we could close two doors between us and them) we had such a great sleep that we decided to move in permanently. The only way we could move the heavy suitcases and kids' toys was to throw them into a couple of taxis. It was more difficult that i expected to actually get a taxi driver to agree to it. They don't seem to like carrying bags and small bits of furniture for some reason. Luckily a bit of bribery worked.
Our flat is in a private housing estate, one of thirteen towers in landscaped gardens that are kept immaculate by an army of workers. It also has another army of security officers who will even provide an escort service around the estate if requested. I don't know why it's needed as it's all pretty safe. Usually each private estate has a clubhouse that provides recreation facilities. Ours has an indoor and outdoor pool, two restaurants, an indoor air-conditioned playground, squash courts, billiards room, basketball courts, outdoor tennis courts, reading rooms and even a bowling alley. Outside it has a large BBQ area. The best part is that it is opposite our building. There is also a free shuttle bus service to the train station and to one of the markets.

The flat itself is light and airy with 3 bedrooms, two bathrooms and a separate kitchen. I quite like the kitchen, even though it's small, you can stand in one spot and everything--fridge, cooktop and sink--is easily accessible. It might seem big with all these facilities but its only 600 odd square feet. Here in Hong Kong everything is measured on the square foot. Real estate prices are quoted at dollars per square foot. The industry is quite dishonest, though, as they usually include all public areas--lobby, clubhouse, garden etc--in the flat's size. They divide the total area by the number of units and tack it onto the net size of the flat. It's pretty standard practice around here. Ours is supposed to be 820 square feet. You do begin to realise how much space you do have at home and how little you actually need. The kids get to play in the playgrounds that are generously dotted around the estate and everything is kept spotlessly clean.

So far, we're enjoying it and we have made friends with a few other couples in the neighbouring buildings. Jo takes the kids out every day for a good run around and all the kids sleep very soundly.

A Chinese Sports Day

Sports Day in the calendar in a Hong Kong school is a much anticipated affair, mainly because it means two days off teaching and usually an extra day’s holiday to recognize the hard effort staff and students have provided. For me, it was just another part of a long list of misunderstandings and being oblivious to what was going on around me, but a fun couple of days nonetheless.

Prior to the day proper I get my usual couple of emails all in Chinese. I usually ask my neighbour in the staffroom, Mr Put, to translate them for me or to give them a quick glance. Actually, his job assigned by the panel chair (HOD) is to read all the group emails first and then translate them for me but as he never reads his emails, it is up to me to decide whether any may be important—I try and do this by looking at dates and if my name is there. My name sticks out likes dog’s balls because the rest are written in Chinese characters—I always ask in this case as I assume this may be important. More often than not it’s not—they just like announcements here. On one particular email it had my name and the dates of the sports days so I requested a translation. This translation came back at that I’m assisting in using the starting gun. I got very excited because that meant loading cartridges, gunpowder on the hands, and I could fantasize about being a gangster or cowboy shooting in the air in celebration. One morning I heard my name in the midst of an announcement in Cantonese during a class and I looking pleadingly for a translation, but the kids would have got it more wrong than the teachers who told me later that my name had been left off the programme advertising ‘activities’. Sadly the translation stopped there, and I couldn’t shed any light on what ‘activities’ meant.

My colleagues are very caring and considerate and many of them asked how I was planning to get to the stadium, as it was held in a purpose-built venue. Many offered bus numbers and trains to take. Brian, the organizer and head of PE, had already given me some maps with a bus I could take to Tsing Yi (pronounced Ching Yee), an island not far from the school.

On the appointed day I went to the designated bus stop but had to wait about 20 minutes, I must have just missed the previous bus. Unfortunately, instead of going directly to the destination like my school bus, this one meandered around the place going to as many stops it could. Instead of taking 25 minutes like my usual bus, it took an hour to travel a similar distance. I got to the bus stop and terminus and had to look for the sports ground which was well signposted but 30 minutes late. I had many calls from concerned colleagues worried that I might be lost. I eventually made it in time to see the Chinese flag being paraded around the ground. I’m just disappointed I missed the female militia in miniskirts and boots.

The first races are the hurdles and I am excited about the starting gun, we go over to get ready and I am handed the gun, which is actually just an air horn connected to a microphone that trips the timer. I was gutted but tried hard not to let my disappointment show. My job was to start the races but sounding the horn and dropping a red flag (note the symbolism). Some student helpers did the “on your marks, get set…” then I fired, I mean, pressed the button. I thought the 'on your marks' was some kind of universal expression, much like OK and 'testing' when they speak into a microphone and it starts cutting out--you'll hear a whole lot of Chinese and then, "...testing, testing.." but I later found out that they had taught the whole school the English race start for my benefit.

Later in the day, Brian informed me that I was running in the 100 metre C grade final. I thought this was the activity that I was entered into. This would be easy, I thought. When I was a kid I always was in the 100 metres final at high school. What does one do in this situation? Let the kids win because it wouldn’t be fair if the teacher beat the kids? It was the C grade so they couldn’t be fast and I didn’t want to show them up.

Later in the afternoon it was time to have the finals, and it was time. I lined up with the racers, some of whom asked if I was nervous. I had an interview with one of the senior students over the stadium loudspeaker. I reached my mark, got set and the horn went off. All the boys raced ahead of me leaving me chugging away on the track. The kids in the crowd cheered, or laughed at this bald, middle-aged man being thoroughly thrashed—these kids were fast! I was embarrassingly slow. I think my time read 19 something seconds—I think I used to do it in 14 seconds at school—not hugely fast, but respectable.

The kids were pretty good about it and I thought that’s good, it’s over. But no, the ‘activity’ hadn’t been run yet as I was to find out the next day. Day two, a Friday, saw more finals and the relays. The bonus too, was that it was only half a day so we could have a three and a half day weekend as Monday was a holiday. The kids all had T shirts of different colours for their form classes and all their entries went toward a grand prize for the form class with the most entries etc, which encouraged a lot of participation. The relays were also run as an interclass competition with each class sitting together in the stands chanting slogans creating a fantastic atmosphere. After the relays I was dragged over in front of the stand to be in the egg and spoon staff relay. We were in three teams, representing the three school houses. Brian was in my team and brought up my race the day before. He said some thing which sounded like. “You just need to get fitter”, but what he actually said was, “you fatter, when you first come you have no stomach.” I put it down to all those yum cha lunches. I vow to cut back on BBQ pork. For the race we couldn’t use eggs because they would mess up the track so we had to use ping pong balls. They are quite difficult to keep on a spoon I can tell you. We seemed to do quite well but I’m sure we had an extra team member because we managed to come last.

Jo and the kids came for a visit and managed to see the awards ceremony, which they do with a podium and medals and there were short speeches. The kids loved the sense of achievement and the ceremony. This included me as I was brought up to receive my bronze medal for coming third in the teachers’ relay!

Mid-Autumn Festivities

The word festival is always a delightful one to hear but here in Hong Kong it always seems to have more significance. The word comes from the word or feast, meaning some type of gluttony is officially encouraged, just as the same way carnival comes from the Latin word for meat. A celebration where lots of meat is eaten. At the moment it is Mid-autumn festival where the order of the day seems to be mooncakes. They are mad on mooncakes. Months before the festival there are displays in the supermarkets and women dressed in a traditional costume selling their brand of mooncakes. It’s very much like out lead-in to Christmas, and they have that too. Or Easter, and they get that one too.

Mooncakes are pastries which have a sweet crust and filled with lotus seed paste and have a salted hen’s or duck’s egg in the centre. They are very rich and delicious. The idea is the egg is supposed to resemble the full moon.

The mid-autumn festival celebrates the harvest and is timed with the full moon, usually in early October or late August, depending on the phases of the moon. As with most important festivals here it is a public holiday, although this year it fell on a Saturday. Thursday was a holiday for National Day and if we were in Mainland China we’d get a week off, called the Golden Week. No worries, we’ll get a long weekend in a couple of weeks for Tomb Sweeping day when people go and tend the tombs and pay respects to their ancestors.

So along with eating traditional mooncakes and new types, like the ‘Snowy’ (covered in white icing and with a huge range of very sweet fillings, intended to be eaten cold or frozen) people will come out late at night to view the full moon and turn on their lanterns. Kids have all different types from cartoon characters to butterflies and they stay out really late. They used to have traditionally candle-lit lanterns but some kids used to make little bonfires of them leaving piles of wax and soot for the council to clean up, so they just simply banned them. Now they have to have battery operated ones—think it’s a conspiracy from the battery makers personally.
Poppy thoroughly enjoyed her Mid-Autumn Festival with her cousins, staying up late and getting to eat ice-cream in the warm evening under the glow of a full moon and thousands of coloured lights.

Cheung Chau

Hong Kong is not only a land of skyscrapers and high density housing, it has hundreds of islands scattered throughout the territory. Lantau is the largest and now seems connected to Hong Kong, although it’s a pretty impressive bridge. When you fly into Hong Kong you will land on Lantau, also home to Disneyland. Yet, and because Hong Kong is a land of total contrasts, the other side of Lantau is like going back in time. You can take a ferry to a village called Tai O which typifies some of the traditional fishing villages, with houses on stilts and many houseboats.

Last weekend we went to one of my favourite islands, Cheung Chau, which lies to the east of Lantau and the south of Hong Kong and Lamma islands. Jo and I went here back in 04, took a sampan across the harbour and walked around the southern part of the island and had a nice cold Blue Girl before heading back on the ferry. It was a truly magic day. This time it was to celebrate my nephew Eddy’s 4th birthday.

To get to Cheung Chau you need to take a ferry from Hong Kong Island itself, under the shadow of the monolithic IFC tower. If you saw the latest Batman movie, this is the one he ‘flies’ down from. Across from this tower is the International Commerce Centre, which is still under construction and will be taller than the IFC when finished next year. It was planned to be even taller but had to scaled back to some regulation stating that buildings can’t be any taller than the mountains surrounding the city. It will be the third highest in the world. So between these two behemoths is the ferry terminal to Cheng Chau.

It’s a pleasant 50 minute cruise to the island and you approach the island from its western side, through a typhoon shelter ( I now understand why having been through one already) and this artificially sheltered harbour is filled with all sorts of vessels, from small sampans to quite large residential junks. We had a yum cha lunch at one of the many restaurants that line the waterfront and then walked to hundred metres or so to the other side. Cheng Chau is a bone shaped island with two wide clumps at the north and south. It is very resorty, but not in a glitzy way, it reminded me of a cross between the less touristy parts of the Greek Islands. On the other side there is a golden sanded beech and we settled down on the beech to have a swim and to relax.

The beach sits on a nicely concave bay and it looks over to Lamma Island in the foreground and the southern side of Hong Kong Island in the distance—that is if you could see it past the pollution. Not only air pollution but there were all sorts of things floating in the water—I need not elaborate. In a similar way that we advertise the fire danger there was a dial near the lifeguard station that read ‘water temperature 28 degrees; water quality, very good. I would hate to see what ‘bad’ was. But all in all, it was a relaxing time. True to what usually happens in public places there seems to an endless list of things you cannot do at the beech or park. One of these was play ball sports, so that put an end to the idea of beach cricket. A woman life guard came over to tell the kids off, whereby my sister-in-law, Natasha, asked her to get somebody to clean the beach up in a tongue-in-cheek way. A few minutes later, a Hakka woman in her ubiquitous black hat came along, cleaning the beach. Too bad about the blue condom still floating in the water.

Of course all good things must come to an end and we had to head home. On the way back to the ferry we stopped off to have a fruit kebab—frozen pieces of fruit on a stick. Totally delicious and thirst quenching. At the ferry terminal we bumped into a young couple from the restaurant who had been taking photos of the kids and asked to take more photos and to pose with us. At the beach I had taken Poppy to the toilet a couple of times and people stopped to take photos of her and us. I am probably on Facebook somewhere in China with my pasty white body walking topless and barefooted on the footpath with a little blonde girl.

When we got back to Kowloon after another quick trip on the Star Ferry we went o the biggest mall I’ve ever been to—Harbour View. Lily took us to the food court there, and no McDonald’s in sight. You went around and ordered your food, all displayed with very realistic plastic models and then paid at a central till and then collected your food. Talk about delicious and cheap. Across from the food court we spied a bookshop. This was exciting as Bookshops selling English books are not very common where we live in the New Territories. It was a PageOne store and made Borders look a bit silly really with its extensive collection. Books are the only things that seem quite expensive so far, about the same price as back home. Because I am reading a book a week here I could live with paying a normal price for something.

Happy Anniversary China

Today is the 60th anniversary of modern China and it is a holiday. Sixty years ago Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the beginning of the People's Republic of China. In 1997 Hong Kong was handed back to China. Today they proclain One country, two systems, which means that Hong Kong can still be a capitalist powerhouse and decide its own internal affairs while still being part of the great republic. This supposed contradiction is quite typical of this place. We took the kids for a walk to our local park and it was full of people celebrating. The centrepiece of this was an American style marching band, peopled by hundreds of school kids (actually all girls) sweating away in these ornate uniforms. Now is it just me, but does it seem ironic that these people are celebrating a communist victory in a territory, still capitalist, once owned by Britain, with a traditionally Americain parade?

A Matter of Taste

As a child I was quite a fussy eater, I think we all go through that stage. I remember being young and Mum making the best meals ever. Whenever I went to have a meal at a friend’s house there was always that dread of what was going to be served up and would they be offended if I didn’t eat that huge pile of steamed pumpkin or rehydrated peas. Mum had millions of ways to make mince, chops and sausages taste like gourmet meals. Chicken cost too much and anything Asian, Indian, Italian wasn’t even on the radar.

Going to boarding school encouraged me to be a bit more adventurous. Only because we had to. Every meal we had to line up, say grace, get served something (usually dreadful), sit down at our allotted seat and eat. We were not allowed to talk until the duty master rang a little bell and then we could talk. Like Pavlov’s dog I still eat my meal and then talk—none of this European taking a bite, chewing, swallowing and then speaking. If you are Italian you cannot hold on to your fork and speak because you might stab someone in the eye when you gesticulate. I also think that eating in silence has made me a fast eater as there is nothing else you can do. However, we still had to eat everything on the plate, and I mean everything and we weren’t allowed to leave the table until we did. Masters watched us for any sign of trying to drop our food on the floor or putting it into our pockets. On one occasion prefects were assigned to feed the reluctant ones, those with food phobias—one boy could not eat anything pink, otherwise he would be sick. Another it was cabbage. Anyway, I remember the prefects feeding these guys like babies and one was sick back into his bowl, whereby the prefect just stirred back into the food and fed it back to him. Barbaric times. Particular horrors from those days for me were boiled leeks in a thin insipid white sauce and prunes in an equally distasteful ‘custard’ sauce. Funnily enough, I did develop a taste for lambs fry and bacon during my time there.

At a different boarding school in secondary school I remember them serving ‘sweetbreads’, which is either the throat or pancreas. This was served in a white sauce as I remember too. Luckily we didn’t have to eat everything at this particular institution.

A major influence on me was my step-father Sham, a Malaysian, who introduced me to The Curry and many other Asian delights. Although still traumatised by institutional food it encouraged me to be adventurous. So today, I like spicy (but not too hot as to kill the flavour) foods with interesting textures and colours. My wife’s family also introduced me to authentic Chinese cooking and its many varieties, especially the more northern cuisine.

Coming to Hong Kong has meant the real deal. This is the place where the Western concept of Chinese food has come from. Most Chinese who left and started Chinese restaurants are from this area. The old fashioned term is Cantonese cooking. The Cantonese or Guangdong people introduced the world to the word dim sum. They almost solely use rice and noodles (often rice based) as their staples and love their seafood, pork and chicken. BBQ meat is a speciality and you will see pork flaps, ducks with their heads attached and the humble chook displayed prominently in restaurant windows, shining with their glossy red glaze. Chickens are often poached in a broth and are much lighter in colour. There are always plenty of vegetables, steamed or flash-fried in all sorts of delicious sauces. The range of mushrooms is staggering too.

They are obsessed with food here, it tends to dominate everything. A common greeting is ‘have you eaten (rice)?’. This is a question just like our ‘how are you?’ is not replied with the detail of our lives. It’s just being polite. At my work they were all very concerned about me and what I ate. They told me which restaurants to steer clear of and questioned whether the bread bun I had bought at the 7/11 was going to be sufficient. One of my colleagues went to a local that regularly delivered food (everyone delivers here—even McDonalds) to the staffroom and photocopied an English version of their menu for me. A popular choice is ‘the lunchbox’ which is any container full to the brim with a rice or noodle based dish. This can cost about 20 HK dollars (about 4 NZ) and it will fill you up. Trust me.

My colleagues in the English Department were very relieved to hear that I was not a vegetarian—there was a collective sigh of relief from them as the last 2 NETs were vegetarians. It makes it quite difficult to fit in because food is such an integral part of social discourse. They are absolutely fascinated about what I bring to work and it will become a point of conversation. If I haven’t eaten anything during the lunch break they will all fuss over me.

On my second week I was invited to the regular yum cha group. Yum cha literally means to take tea but it also means to eat as well, usually dim sum---small bites of food. Steamed in bamboo trays or deep-fried. It’s best to have an ‘eat first, as questions later’ attitude as some things just look—to Western eyes—a little odd. Take chicken feet for example. We usually cut that bit off or we don’t even see it. Here it’s cooked with the bird, as well as its head. In dim sum it’s marinated in a sauce, fried and then steamed. Back home I steered clear of these but here I thought that I should be like the locals and eat them. They actually taste quite nice. There’s no actual meet, just skin and bones. Most people like the feel of rolling the bones around in their mouth. I have also tried deep fried chicken cartilage (nice—like KFC) and fish buoyancy bladder (spongy and a slightly fishy flavour). I’m still working myself up for the tripe. The memory of sweetbreads is indelibly printed on my mind.

One day at the markets we went to a noodle place. Many places that have the ducks in the window also have pig’s intestines there—looking like a length of untwisted sausage, I’ve even seen them on sticks like kebabs. This particular place had a pot of them boiling on the stove near the entrance. We asked for an English version of the menu and ordered deep fried pork chop on noodles and dry fried noodles. Yes, we got the pork chop but it was in a noodle soup and the dry fried noodle was a noodle soup which had something that looked like onion rings in it. We ate them, pronounced them OK and then soon realised it was pig’s intestines—deep fried and then put into a noodle soup. I’m not sure if this is what we actually ordered or they just wanted to see what the gweilos would eat. Probably not the latter because all this is ordinary here. They also think that westerners only like western food, especially McDonalds. We just feed to Poppy, thought it would make a good 21st story.

Another great thing about here is that food costs very little. Most people will eat out 3 to 4 times a week because their living space is so small. Instead of inviting people to their flat for dinner, they go out. I asked one of my lunch partners if the yum cha we were having was considered good and he said it was fair considering the price. I then asked where I could go to get the best, and I was told any one of the 5 star hotels but, ‘very expensive, one time they brought out hot steaming crap, one hundred dollars for one crap!’ I nodded and agreed that one hundred dollars was a lot for a crap. Food is always very fresh and lots of flavour is to be appreciated, especially with the vegetables. I think my most favourite aspect is that you can be a pig at the table. You can slurp, bring your bowl to your mouth and chew noisily. And it’s perfectly acceptable to leave the bones and scraps on the table. My kind of town.

Happy Typhoon Holiday

Sunday 13 September
Tropical Storm Koppu forms over the Philippines. Warning Signal number 1 in force. Beware of strong winds and take precautions by tying down loose materials, says the Hong Kong Observatory site.

Monday 14 September
8.00 am. Hong Kong Observatory upgrades to Storm Warning 3 and Koppu is now a severe tropical storm. It is moving toward Southern China at 16km an hour. All in the staffroom are excited and many come past my desk to tell me that if it goes to 8 (there are only 3 numbers 1, 3 and 8) then we can go home. They also tell me that if the rain signal is red or black in the morning then I don’t have to go to work that day. Watch the TV for announcements.
12 pm. On way to yum cha another group of teachers repeat the same information. I try to explain the idiom “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”. On the way back from lunch I get soaked despite the use of an umbrella. The rain seems to be falling up from the pavement. I consider rushing into the staffroom shouting, “I have wet my pants!” but decide that my sense of humour will lose something in the translation. The wind picks up and turns my umbrella inside out. My pants are getting wetter.
2 pm. Many more colleagues file past my desk and tell me about black, red and the number 8. I wonder if they had watched the Ranfurly Shield game, but soon realise they are talking about a possible day off work.
4pm. The Hong Kong Observatory issues number 8. Government employees are let off work and those with long or difficult journeys are encouraged to go home. I look around. Nobody moves.
4.10 pm. Announcement from the principal in Cantonese. I don’t move. My neighbour in the workroom translates for me that we are told to go home. I look around. Nobody moves.
4.15 pm. I am the first to move. I leave work and walk to the bus stop, ducking and diving under bridges and shop fronts.
4.20. I reach my bus stop. I see one of the buses I could take, the 269M. I usually leave this one as it is always fuller than the 265M. I don’t move.
4.25. The 265M passes by the bus stop. Too full to stop.
4.40 Another 265M passes by the stop.
4.52. Yet another 265M. Gone.
5.00 pm. A 95% full bus stops. 20 or so try and squeeze on. Standing like sardines we travel home.
Tuesday 15 September.
6am. Try to turn TV onto see if Number 8 signal is in force. Nothing. Just a blank Screen. We don’t have a radio or the Internet. Look out the window. Nobody about. Lots of storm damage on buildings and trees. Think of the film 28 Days Later. Gulp and begin to sweat. I go down to lobby and feel relieved that there are people are about and they are not running after each other and eating each other. Girls at front desk tell me TV doesn’t go in a Number 8 wind. This means no school. Result.

A great picture of lightning from the night of the typhoon. Go here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/msiward/3914838185/

Kam Tin anyone?

Most people in Hong Kong seem to live in high rise apartments. Half the population live in public housing, up to 30-50 storeys high. Most of those who own property also live in high-rises but with lots of amenities like pools and gyms. We will probably look at an apartment when our short-term lease runs out at the hotel. They have 24 hour security and the kids can run around quite safely. There are some who live in villages.

Not far from Tin Shui Wai, where we are staying, there is a village called Kam Tim. We visited it last Sunday. To get there we had to take the ultra-modern West Rail train, all in air-conditioned comfort. Out of the station we walked over a bridge that spanned a very wide storm water canal and into a village. Most villages are on land owned by some of the original peoples of Hong Kong. The Hakka (meaning ‘guest people’, who migrated from the North in the 1600s) are distinguishable by their circular hats with a whole in the centre and a black cloth between the hat and the head. The Hakka women are most often seen sweeping roads and parks, usually elderly. Kam Tin is a Punti village, from a clan called the Tangs who have lived in the area since 940 AD.
Modern villages are built on clan land and can’t be sold and there seems to be a law prohibiting high-rise buildings. The limit seems to be three stories. It was quite nice to be somewhere you could mountains of green instead of mountains of concrete. The village had buildings of a range of ages, from brightly coloured new builds to obviously ancient ones, hundreds of years old with tiny doors.

Kam Tin was not very bustling which, was part of its charm but town elders or somebody must have thought it needed a bit of revitalisation, so in the middle there is a covered modern market. Imagine the Christchurch Art Centre with a roof. This was a bit too manufactured for my taste, but a walk down the main drag quickly transported me back to more unplanned style. We had lunch at a Nepalese restaurant which was very pleasant and the proprietors equally as pleasant. As the heat was killing us, we thought we should head back home and get back to the air-con. Outside the train station a modern market was in operation. Think Christchurch Art Centre again.

It wasn’t until I did some research that Kam Tin actually has a walled village inside it that we completely missed that dates back 400 years with a moat and really thick walls. The walls were built to keep out bandits and wild tigers back in the day, with big iron gates protecting the only entrance. Apparently the British stormed the village in the 1800s and sent the gates back to England for some lord’s private estate. They were returned but mixed up with some other village’s, so now they have a mismatched pair of gates.
I feel this village requires some further investigation and I’m sure there will be somewhere very pleasant, under the shade of a tree, where one can purchase a nice cold beer.

One Night in Wanchai

It was my first night out in town and I didn’t know what to expect. The shuttle bus from the hotel took me into town, down the freeway, passing New Territory towns like Yueng Long, Tsuen Mun, Tsuen Wan, over fantastic suspension bridges crossing islands and harbours. It only took 30 minutes to hit Kowloon. Once there the traffic reached a standstill. Taxis, buses and a plethora of German-made vehicles clogged the road. The minibus inched ever so slowly toward my destination, past the front of the very grand Peninsula hotel. The Peninsula was built in 1928 to be THE luxury hotel in Hong Kong to cater for the luxury steamers from Europe and the trans-Siberian railroad. They added a 30 storey tower in 1994 with a helicopter pad. I was lucky enough to land on that in 2005 in a trip arranged by a friend of my mother-in-law. Down on the road, I could only imagine it there, high above the crowds gathering in Tsim Sha Tsui. Reaching a snail’s pace and turning the corner I could see the full glory of Nathan Road, a neon jungle advertising everything known to humanity. Finally half an hour at arriving in town I alighted from the bus amongst a throng of people. I managed to meet up with the others—my brother –in-law and some of his work mates from his international school. We were booked into an Indian restaurant in Hankow road somewhere. Typically Hong Kong, the restaurant was hidden up a few flights of stairs—turn left and it was an Indian foot massage clinic, right an Indian food place. It was a great meal, buffet style with jugs and jugs of Carlsberg thrown in for free. Amazingly, every time my glass was empty, it was refilled! After dinner it was time to explore Wanchai over the harbour on Hong Kong Island. By day, Wanchai is a shopper’s delight, by night a barfly’s fantasy. Again bright neon lights beckon the clubbers like flies to the flame. Be careful though, a round of drinks will end up costing you an arm and a leg. By 4.30 am I was totally legless and stumbled along Hennessey road (isn’t that a Cognac?) to find my bus back home. I lurched myself onto the bus, the closest seat I could find to the door. Fighting back the nausea I fell into a stupor…An hour later I managed to find my hotel and my room.

Finally, I am in the classroom. Released from being chained to my desk. Today I got to see the whites of their eyes. I met my 6th form class, which I share with two other teachers. We'll be broken up into smaller, more intensive groups. They are very shy about asking questions--I can only suppose it's for fear of making a mistake. They were very pleasant and polite (sounds like a my stock reporting comment--but it's true!). The 7th formers were very quiet as this is the year they have the BIG exam that allows them into university and ultimately decides their fate. It is very big deal here. Everything is about the exam. It's very much like me when we had the Bursary exam but I think it's much more important here.

The staff here have been very nice to me and my Cantonese has not improved at all. I can only say good morning in their language. I feel like such an idiot when these kids can speak English to me. They are very humble about their abilities, but they speak well. The exams are actually quite gruelling, much more difficult than the English exam in New Zealand. Their focus is much more on the language itself, not literature. They will do that in their Chinese class.

Tonight I have my first social outing with some of my brother-in-law's work mates from his international school. It's a curry and lager boys' night out in Tsim Sha Tsui. Should be fun, especially when I don't have to worry about driving home!

I'm feeling quite happy today: I got paid! This means we can start assimilating into Hong Kong life. Shopping is a serious pasttime here, consumption is king. My favoutite type of shopping so far is food. Restaurants are everywhere, they are also very cheap as most people live in small aprtments and have very busy lives. You can have expensive meals but my favourites are the local eateries. The owners fall over backwards to help you and you can feed your family for the price of a Big Mac combo back home. Speaking of McDs, it is my challenge to avoid any Western fastfood outlet. I have been here for nearly 3 weeks and I'm still holding out.