chinese new year shenanigans

Hong kong recap. Going to fight the urge to change the font to century gothic. Sometimes times new roman is enough. Classic and whatnot.

Chinese new year, 2011. What to do? it’s a notoriously crazy holiday, as are all national holidays in china—everyone coming/going home, diy fireworks shows, brutal traffic. This year I thought it best to get out of the mainland, so I visited my friend, jake, in his new town of hong kong. Able to leave china without breaking the bank. ‘twas rad. First impressions: super clean public toilets, clean metros, lots of southeast asian folks congregating and playing cards in public spaces, lots of rich douchebags, the same shopping options as luxury malls in china, fewer people staring and pointing at foreigners, less spitting.

Day 1. fly out at 9:10 in the pm. I had a vague idea of where I was going and what I was doing, but it would ultimately involve a lot of stops along the way in places I’d never been before with landmarks I didn’t know and streets that sounded foreign, even more so than regular Chinese ones. Because they were. It all was. I also had to fight the urge to panic prematurely at every stop. Nothing actually went wrong, but I could feel the panic lurking there in the back of my mind. But from beginning to end, it was relatively painless traveling. i had no trouble getting to the airport in chongqing. I thought it would be more difficult to hail a cab than it was, considering it was Chinese new year’s eve, but no issues.

Landed in Shenzhen, saw a student from school. we’d been on the same flight. i thought I recognized her at the airport, but there have been plenty of times when I’ve thought a kid was a student and confused the hell out of him/her by being uber-friendly, only to realize it wasn’t actually a student I knew. But she actually was from the chongqing school and her mom forced her to talk to me in the airport. Funny shit.

At this point I was still able to use my phone to communicate—still on the mainland. So I informed some peeps that I was in Shenzhen, about to begin phase 2 of operation hong kong. Step two was to take a taxi to the huang gang border. This was surprisingly easy. I was probably over charged, but I negotiated with a non-legit cab driver to take me there. After he drove me a bit in his own car, I switched over to an actual cab a few miles from the airport. Then to the border crossing. Pretty simple, I guess. Even for me. I was nervous at this point because once I crossed the border I wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone in china or in hong kong, because my phone is only for the mainland. So I was going to be in hong kong going through all these procedures and methods of transport with a pretty tenuous time frame/exact meeting point. And all after midnight without a working phone. Poor planning on my part, but it lent the whole thing the air of “the amazing race” or something like that.…

Anyhoo, at huang gang, I filled out a departure card, waited in line, then crossed the border. The hong kong version of the border is lok mau chao. There was some confusion for me when I was figuring out the logistics of crossing the border so late at night, but that sort of cleared things up for me. Huang gang/lok mau chao is the 24 hour one. So no problems. after I got through huang gang, I boarded a shuttle bus to mongkok. I was able to pay for that ticket in rmb, but was concerned about not having any hkd for the taxi that would ultimately get me to friends in hong kong. This was the first time I fought the impulse to panic. Instead decided to worry about that when I got to it, because winging it always works for me. Nervous laughter…. so we take the bus for a little bit, then have to stop and get off, again filling out more forms to cross a border. This is when my phone no longer worked. I was a little confused by all of this, having never crossed a border by bus before. But I assumed that all the other people on my bus were supposed to be going to the same place, so I’d just follow them. again, not a bet that usually pays off. we get through, get back on the bus and are on our way to the general mongkok area. I’m still on the correct timeframe at this point, which doesn’t usually happen for me, even in places I’m familiar with. But it was all pretty easy to do. so I got off the bus in mongkok, still with no hkd, and get a cab. When it came time to pay him at the Olympic metro station, I played dumb and just handed him the total in rmb. It worked. Probably better for him too since the rmb is worth slightly more than the hkd. So there I was, in the general area of where I was sposed to meet the dude with whom I had no means of communication at that point. we eventually found each other, but this was after about 25 minutes of wandering around the metro station, with no real back up plan if we didn’t happen to meet. I was in the right general area, but that general area was large and confusing, so it took a while. But It all worked out, so, cool.

Met jake’s other friends, rita and Stephen. They were visiting from shanghai. We were all staying in his tiny (cozy) apartment. So we walked back. his apartment’s on the 35th floor of a building with 48 or 49 floors. crazy. You have to take 2 elevators to get there. The first one takes you to a meeting point for all the apartments in the complex. Second one takes you to the actual apartment. There was a key card for everything and very friendly security guards who always said hello in English. It was just massive.

When we got in it was about 2 am already. I was welcomed with a giant glass of whiskey and a glass of wine. From California. Not from china. That was nice. Always been a fan of mixing my alcohols, particularly wine and whiskey.
But we stayed up until 4-ish drinking and talking. It’s been such a long time since I drank wine. Wine that isn’t Chinese and shitty. So that was cool. Stephen and rita took the bed (recently-engaged). Jake took the floor, I took the couch.

The next morning we got up and so began the next 3 days of shopping. Or window shopping for me. Chongqing, for a place so seemingly devoid of foreigners, has a lot of foreign comforts. So I never feel like there are things I can’t get. It’s nice, but it could promote some expensive tastes. i bought some small things, including a watch whose performance is questionable. I’ve already developed the nervous ocd habit of perpetual watch winding. I’d like to think it makes me look cool (or just nervous?). Not a good sign if you always need to check your watch’s time against your cell phone. Other than that, some cheap earring (we’re talking 15 hkd) and some sriracha, I wasn’t much for consumerism, other than the traditional things that can be consumed—food and booze. There’s something pretty spectacular about a lack of open container laws (korea, china, hong kong). Because riding around on a double decker bus in a city you’ve never visited is pretty cool, but doing it while sipping on a bottle of strongbow cider at 3 in the afternoon just infuses the whole experience with so much more meaning. Nostalgia is heightened by a nice afternoon buzz. And you can buy cans of Boddingtons in the convenient stores. That IS convenient!

Where we went on each day is sort of a blur. Booze and amount of time passed since I committed events to memory have conspired against me on this one. I also didn’t really plant myself in the agenda-forming process. I figured there were already 3 other people who had a good idea of what to do, best just to trust them. I think that’s why everything was so relaxing for me. I didn’t have to compromise any of my sight-seeing expectations, because I simply never had any. but we went to a lot of different districts, took a lot of different modes of transportation, ate a lot of good food, and did a lot of walking. There was a ginormo dim sum hall involved (seems like an injustice to call it a mere restaurant when we were at table 234. that’s a fuckload of tables and people in one dim sum locale), the hong kong version of times square, gratuitous ferry rides, so ho and Hollywood, the peak, causeway bay, the walk of fame (replete with Jackie chan’s star), st. john’s cathedral, a really great grocery store/sandwichery in one of the malls at a subway stop, a ginormo fireworks display over the harbor. All of these were things the 4 of us enjoyed together. Having just met Stephen and rita [properly] for the first time, I was actually amazed at how well we all got along for the next few days of complete togetherness. It was great. a surprisingly smooth group vacation. And they were just really cool people, so there wasn’t any forced camaraderie or awkward silences that usually color my interactions with other people.

After rita and Stephen headed back to shanghai, had one more night/day, just jake and I, before I had to head back to the direction of chongqing. So after seeing the happy couple off in the afternoon, we got some road beers and hopped on a double decker bus. Took that bus all around the southwestern part of the island. Then transferred to another bus and headed back up toward wanchai. From there we walked around a bit, amidst all the neon, and shiny gold and throngs and general commerce. It was very cool, very big city, but in a different way than shanghai big city. The douchebag contingent was less present in the majority of hong kong. There were certainly some parts with their fair share of them, but those also happened to be the places with good Mexican food. So we ended up there later, surrounded by heavily-cologned older men on the prowl and gap year kids self-consciously drinking booze, waiting for someone to call them out. but the food was good, as was the bucket of beer. Wandered around for a bit, debating whether to make it a big night or not. Ultimately decided against it—booze and a movie.

Next day we got up, packed a bag with some wine and headed to the ferry station. Lamma island was only 20 minutes away and it seemed like a nice day trip. I think I took the most pictures there. We disembarked the ferry and then tried to take a turn off the beaten path, as all the passengers from the ferry were walking en masse through the main street. It was kind of surreal and zombie-like. so we found said beaten path and wandered around for a bit, taking in the subtropical environs of a sort of remote island off the southwestern coast of hong kong. It was downright pleasant. And the whole time we were granted some perfect weather—jacket weather + sandals=goodness. Eventually headed to the beach, popped open that bottle of wine and had a good long chat.
Leaving hangzhou was really good for me, professionally, but I’m someone who hasn’t had a lot of friends in my life, having only ever really needed jules (and rory, in more recent memory). But in hangzhou I made some actual friends, people that I actually felt sad about leaving. Jake was one of those people. I hadn’t had a best friend in such a long time, and someone who was actually present in a current context of my life, and helping to develop that current context. I don’t know how to explain it. seems like when I talk about “friends”, it’s in reference to this sort of hazy past in which nothing current remains, other than the memory of those friends and some awkward encounters on infrequent trips “home.” But even the memory isn’t current, aside from the fact that it exists now, but it’s based in the past and on nostalgia and a time/place and events that become less and less familiar as real, tangible things. time doesn’t erase them entirely, just the edges. But in hangzhou, I made friends. And they are still real to me, and it makes me profoundly sad to think about their eventual/inevitable blurring. So seeing jake made me exceedingly happy, and really fucking sad before I was even gone. Because I don’t get to see him on a regular basis anymore. That sucks to realize, especially when you’re actually in the middle of one of those rare meetings. Sigh.

Anyhoo, hong kong was good. Got me thinking about a lot of things, a lot of which I won’t mention here, but one of which is where to go next. There’s still that trip to yunnan that never happened, and a course in Vietnam I’m thinking about for late summer/fall. We shall see.