Hong Kong and China

The first thing I thought when I got off the boat in Hong Kong and entered the giant shopping mall right off the gangway was “Welcome to 1.3 billion people”. I have never been so crowded anywhere in my life! The subway in Shanghai, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, shopping in Hong Kong…lots and lots of Chinese people! When we got off the boat in Hong Kong we took the Star Ferry over to the island from where we were docked in Kowloon.

Jess, Diego, Gabriel (both from Mexico…they have the coolest accents), and I walked around a bit and then made our way up to the famous site of Hong Kong: Victoria Peak.

We took the tram up the practically vertical hill, after posing with Madam Tussaud’s Jackie Chan statue, and when we reached the top it was one of the coolest views of a city I have ever seen. You could literally see EVERYTHING! The entire city was sprawling out before us; we could even see our ship! It was awesome to see Hong Kong draped in a hazy fog with the sun barely peaking through the clouds. On the other side of the peak was a beautiful bay with the setting sun reflecting on its surface…a beautiful place to spend our first afternoon in China!

The peak was interesting…a lot of touristy things, including China’s installment of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant! I just had to buy a tshirt…anywho we descended from the peak after happy hour, and went back to boat to change before heading out. We got to see the beautiful Hong Kong light show, put on every night around 8pm, before going to Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s restaurant and bar district.

The main streets of the district were crazy with lights and tons of people running around. We bought light-up sunglasses and bunny ears, being sold by the hundreds on the streets, and headed to Agave, a Mexican restaurant and tequila bar, so Diego and Gabe could have a taste of home!

We had all been missing guac like nobody’s business so having authentic chips, salsa and guac, nachos and quesadillas was AMAZING!! Diego took a bite and said he felt like he was home! All of Semester at Sea was essentially out on the two main streets of Lan Kwai Fong so it was fun to walk around and hang around outside the bars along the cobblestone streets and in nearby parks.

After experiencing Hong Kong’s seemingly never-ending nightlife, we spent the next day doing a little shopping (we bought some very cool, very Asian, panda hats), finding a hotel (eventually staying at “Mingle Place”, I kid you not), and enjoying the fact that our six best girlfriends were traveling all together for the first time! We had all done small groups or individual stuff with one another, but we had not been all together at the same time before, so that was really fun! We went out to a girls’ dinner and roamed around Lan Kwai Fong for our last night in Hong Kong.

Side note, some of the Loyola kids we had hung out with in Malaysia happened to be in Hong Kong that night and I ran into them in the streets! Random…
Getting to the airport at 6:00am for our 8:00am flight to Beijing was a little bit of a struggle, but we made it in plenty of time, totally unsuspecting of the news we were about to get and the blow our entire shipboard community would receive. Apparently the night before, a boy on our voyage named Kurt had been struck and killed by a drunk driver in Hong Kong. When we arrived at the gate for our flight all of the other Semester at Sea kids there were either crying, too shocked to comprehend, and staring at their computer screens trying to read our ship’s press release. Although I didn’t personally know Kurt well, his death hits close to home. He lived on my hall, he was in the cultural ambassadors club with me, he was Brad’s workout buddy. It’s hard to fathom that we’ve lost a fellow student, a member of this big, traveling family, and at this point everyone is trying to cope, continue to enjoy our journey, while keeping in mind how vulnerable we really are.
After a plane ride from hell (Kierstin decided to drape herself ALL OVER me and Jess and kicked me in the head in her sleep a few times…) we arrived in FREEZING COLD Beijing!

However, transportation from the airport was not as easy as we had thought…no taxis…and no one that worked there spoke English, a factor that became a very common thread in our travels. We eventually found a nice man who spoke English and he directed us towards the bus that would take us downtown to Tiananmen Square. After taking the bus we had to find a cab (not easy to hail because the drivers don’t ever want to stop and pick you up, and if they do they rarely take you all the way to where you want to go!), and get to our hotel, perhaps the strangest place I have ever stayed in my life. We found numerous random pairs of shoes around the room – on the bedside table, next to the door, etc. It was bizarre. We left the hotel to try to get to the Forbidden City before it closed, but no dice. Luckily we ran into a man named Paul, who helped us organize a tour for the rest of the afternoon and the next day. He took us down to the Temple of Heaven, maybe one of the coolest spots in Beijing. In the park that surrounds the temple many locals come to play cards, sing, dance, perform tai chi, picnic, see friends, and just hang out. It was a great taste of local culture. The temple itself is amazing, and it was especially cool for me to see since I had studied it in Chinese art class at UVA.

The temple was where the emperor came three times a year to make sacrifices and pray for a good harvest. After the temple we crossed the street to the nearby pearl market where saltwater and freshwater pearls are available for unbelievably great prices….we’re talking $20 for a Tahitian saltwater black pearl necklace. China was cheappppp! We left the pearl market, raced back to the hotel to change, and headed out to experience a big piece of Chinese culture – an acrobatics show. And it was weird. Really weird. Some spinning plates, other juggling extravaganzas and some cool flippy things.
Lots of balancing other people in precarious positions on seemingly weak parts of the body. And surprisingly they messed up quite a lot…clearly lots of work to do before they can go to the Olympics!
After the show our interesting adventure began. In case you all were wondering, I can now speak Mandarin, a few phrases at least. We hopped in a cab, and tried to tell the driver where to go, meaning I tried to sound out the name of a restaurant. No luck. Hm…so since not a single cab driver in all of Beijing (or Shanghai for that matter) speaks English I set to work in my handy phrase book trying to find some way to communicate to this man where we needed to go. For a quite hilarious thirty minutes, I threw out random phrases at this man such as “dinner”, “food”, “chopsticks”…finally he understood what I wanted, so I repeated the name of the restaurant and the street name and we were on our way! When he figured it out my reaction was to say “perfect!” pretty emphatically, which by the driver in my tone of voice – he thought it was hilarious. I told him what it meant (henhao), and he was super excited to have learned some English. So I decided that since I has had so much fun communicating with him, I would try some more. So I threw out “children?”, “son?”, “daughter?”, etc. and waited for a response…none of which I understood. I wish someone had it on video, it maybe was the funniest semi-conversation I’ve ever had. The restaurant ended up being in a very remote/random area of Beijing, and no one inside spoke English. Wine was extremely hard to come by (as was the check). Finally we figured everything out and were off. Kierstin wanted to stop at the Intercontinental Hotel on the way back to our own hotel so she could use a proper bathroom…everywhere we had been that day had been holes in the ground, per usual Asia. I swear each one of us wanted to sleep in the bathroom of the Intercontinental is was SO much nicer than our hotel! We stole their rolls of toilet paper.
The next morning we woke up early to start our full-day tour of Beijing and the Great Wall!! We met our guide, Sunny, who was this adorable 26-year-old girl from Beijing, and headed out into winter. It was quite a shock since we had just come from humid Vietnam and Malaysia. She took us to Tiananmen Square, explained about the statue in the middle, talked about all the surrounding buildings, the most interesting of which houses Mao’s embalmed body.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to see the body, and we headed over to the Forbidden City, by far the coolest thing. The city itself is huge! There are so many different buildings, gateways, gardens, statues, etc. We walked through the main gateway and over one of the five bridges that span the encircling moat. Naturally we posed for a picture with the giant Mao poster.

We walked through the numerous gates, all whose names are running together in my head because they essentially sound/mean the same thing. Gate of Harmony, Gate of Middle Harmony, Gate of Supreme Harmony…something along those lines. The buildings have been beautifully restored and the red, gold, blue, and decoration just popped! All the buildings were red with a gold roof, the colors of the emperor. We saw where the emperor performed important ceremonies, where his concubines lived, where his eunuchs lived, where the empress lived, where the bridal ceremonies took place, where the emperor took naps, you name it, we saw it.
Boy had a room for everything. We ended in a beautiful garden with some of the oldest trees on earth, literally. So that was way cool. We left the Forbidden City and started to make our way towards the Great Wall, about an hour and a half away. We stopped at a silk factory on the way, where we got to try to pull the silk fibers and make them into sheets…we were awful! Then we stopped at a jade factory, where we got to learn about the entire extraction and production processes of jade objects and jewelry.
Finally THE GREAT WALL!! Oh my god. I can’t even explain how cool it was. We went to the Mutianyu section, took a chairlift up the steepest mountain of life, and landed on the wall. The sign we read said that this section of the wall is built on a 1,000m-high mountain range (hence the chair lift), some of the sections laid out on cliffs! The wall was meant to look like a flying dragon as it snaked across the mountain peaks.

We commenced the climb up the wall, and it literally is a CLIMB! By the time Jess and I got to the top (lazy bones Kierstin and Laura Flynn stopped halfway up), we were sweating bullets, but were euphoric. It was by far one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen. Since we’ve missed out on most of fall along our voyage we were so excited to see the leaves change color in China. Red, green, orange, and yellow trees enveloped the Wall and covered the mountains. The air was fresh and brisk, it reminded me of why I love fall so much. So there’s not really much else to say about the wall. It was beautiful and awesome and incredible.

They also had the coolest way to get down instead of the chair lift….a toboggan. Probably the most awesome ride ever. P.S. Isn’t it weird that I’ve seen 2 of the 7 wonders of the world on this trip? Pretty exciting!
We left the wall and made our way back to Beijing to see the Olympic stadiums, including the bird’s nest and the water cube. For someone that was so absolutely addicted to the Olympics while they were on, and my parents can both attest to that, it was such an awesome experience to see those venues!

We took some quick pictures and headed off to our last stop in Beijing, a small teahouse where we got to do a tea-tasting of authentic Chinese teas…then it was off to the airport!
Our flight was delayed so we arrived in Shanghai a little later than expected, but we checked into our hostel, which was great because it was like a camp cabin. It had 3 sets of bunk beds complete with fans, hooks for clothes, lockers, a Western-style toilet (yay!), and a somewhat normal shower. These were big plusses compared to previous hotels and my hostel in Malaysia…wow. We headed out to the Bund, the famous collection of old 1920s era buildings (mostly old banks, but with lots of restaurants, clubs, and bars in there as well), that flank the river separating Pudong from the rest of Shanghai. On the other side of the river was the famous Shanghai city skyline complete with the Pearl Tower (the one with lots of randomly places spheres) and some building that looks like a bottle-opener. Take a look.
Shanghai is fully of swanky restaurants and even swankier bars and clubs with overpriced drinks and even more overpriced appetizers, but I guess that’s the way it goes in one of Asia’s most modern and developing cities.
The next day we left the hostel in order to meet the ship so we could drop our stuff before heading out for the day…only, when we got to where the ship was supposed to be…it wasn’t. Apparently while sailing from Hong Kong to Shanghai the boat encountered 15-18ft swells, the worst weather it had seen on the voyage. Thank god I wasn’t there! Anywho, I decided not to wait around, called my good friend Maggie from UVA who is studying abroad in Shanghai, and met her for lunch. It was SO NICE to see a friend from school, just a little reminder of home! I hadn’t seen Maggie since May, so it was awesome to catch up. She is doing great and LOVES Shanghai! She’s studying at a university in northern Shanghai (Fundong, I think), and has one roommate from Duke, the other is Chinese. Before going she didn’t speak a single word of Chinese, she had never taken a class. Now that she’s been there since June…she speaks it really well! I was so impressed! It was nice to go around town with her, I felt so much more confident I would arrive at where I needed to be…other times, you could never be too sure! So Maggie and I ate lunch at a cute little American restaurant, which was awesome because I had been craving a salad! China only likes fast food and fried food (dumplings, spring rolls, etc), which is good for some time and then your body starts to hate you. We grabbed a cab back to the ship so she could see my home, I dropped my stuff, and we were off for the night.

First we headed to Cloud Nine, the so-called “highest bar in Asia”. It is on the 87th floor of the Jing Mao building and gives you the most awesome view of the entire city of Shanghai. Like Victoria Peak for Hong Kong, but instead of looking out over the city from afar, you are right in the middle. It was really cool to see all the buildings light up at night. We left Cloud Nine and headed to Face Bar, a restaurant set in an old colonial style home in the French Concession district. It is actually a converted opium den from colonial times, complete with beds and lounges. It was some great Thai food too! Then we went back to Maggie’s apartment so I could see where she lived, meet her roommates, and call my mom to let her know I was alive. Then out again to Barbarossa, an interesting little Mediterranean place set in the middle of a lake in the middle of a park, only accessible by bridges. Our final destination, after our wonderful romantic evening of just us two, was Bar Rouge, to meet up with Victoria so we could have our three Theta sisters together! Woop Woop! That was really fun!

The next morning Maggie and I left her apartment and while she got coffee I perused the DVD store. 20 DVDs for $1 each…doesn’t get much better than that! I think Maggie thought I was going to buy the whole store…oops. Then we headed to the Yu Gardens and Bazaar, down in Old Shanghai. It was some of the coolest, most authentic Chinese architecture that I have seen! The buildings were white with black roofs, all overhanging, decorated with large Chinese characters in gold. In the middle of a large pond was a two-story teahouse, only accessible by sharp-angled bridges, which Maggie told me are to ward away evil spirits since they can’t turn corners…

We decided to grab lunch in this little hole-in-the-wall dim sum restaurant, and that was an interesting experience. There was no menu, it was one of those types of places that if you didn’t speak Mandarin, you didn’t eat there. There were items written in characters on plaques above the cash register with a price, and that was it. I had no idea what she was ordering for me! The other interesting part of this lunch was that it was communal seating…you sit anywhere there’s an open seat. So we ate lunch with three old Chinese women…in slight silence since they didn’t speak English (really no one in China does), and clearly my phrases “Do you speak English?” and “my name is Sarah” in Mandarin were not sufficient! But the dumplings. Oh my lord they were SO GOOD. Steamed soup dumplings. Yummmmmmy! My appetite was a little thrown off though by the way my Chinese tablemates were eating. Rules/manners/grace of any kind does not exist at the Chinese table. They eat with their heads practically in the bowl, shoveling as much food as they can into their mouths as quickly as they can, like someone’s gonna steal it! I contemplated doing it just to gage reactions. After lunch we walked around Shanghai some more, along the Bund and the river, until it was time for me to hop in a cab and head back to the ship…if any cab driver understood how to get me there!
All three of the cities I saw in China were amazing! They each had their own bit of character, something different. Hong Kong is definitely the New York, Beijing is more filled with culture and history, and Shanghai is the city that looks on the verge of the space age. Overall I loved the city of Beijing the most because there was so much to do and experience. The Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace, the zoo, the pearl market, the night markets, the Great Wall – this list goes on! I will definitely find my way back somehow, there’s still so much left to see! However my experience in Shanghai was one-of-a-kind because I got to share it with someone from home. It was easy, comfortable, a nice change of pace, and just fun to be around a friend I had known longer than 2 months! Maggie really made Shanghai great for me!
We get into Japan tomorrow and this is the port that I am probably looking forward to the most! I watched Memoirs of a Geisha yesterday in preparation….