Pictures: First Day, Second Day
Yangshuo was one of the most naturally beautiful places I've ever been.
Jenn and I got there Friday morning around 7:30AM, off of a sleeper bus from Shenzhen. Niether one of us had slept very much on the bus, and we mainly wanted to find a cheap place to stay and a bed for the next couple of hours. However, we ended up going in the opposite direction from where the hostel was, ironically, just down the street and wandered in a loop in the opposite direction. Along the way we stopped in at various hotels to compare prices, found the Bank of China, and generally just stared around at the shops, the people on bicycles, motorbikes, carrying loads of various things hanging off either ends of a bamboo stick, etc. It was a view of a more rural Chinese life than what I'd seen in Beijing.
Eventually, right after we'd come back and passed the place where the bus dropped us off, we spotted the words "Youth hostel" on a building across the square. It turned out to be what we'd been looking for, $15RMB($1.80US) a night for each of us for a double room with a private bathroom with a western toilet. The room smelled a little funny, but it didn't bother me. Did I mention the western toilet?
While we were registering we also booked a boat tour for 2PM later that day, at $50 each, and then went to our room to get a couple hours of sleep. Around 12PM we emerged again and went to find some money and some food. I cashed a travelors check at the Bank of China we saw earlier and we stopped at one of the many little noodle soup restaurants around Yangshuo for $3($.35US) miantang that was quite good.
We returned to the hostel around 1PM, and the guy who had booked us for the tour told us how to reach the small village where we were going to take our boat tour from, Xingjing. We took a minibus there for $5 each and when we got off a woman was there asking if we were from the hostel, and then she took us to the boat (after she finished her noodles and we had some tea).
The tour itself was pretty cool, I've never seen mountains like they have in that area. They're more like huge, stone fingers pointing up to the sky and covered in trees than any mountains I've seen before. The river was also very nice, peaceful and calm, and the reflection of the mountains in the water was just beautiful. It was also interesting to see the local people along the rivers, cleaning clothes, shoveling dirt, gathering seaweed from the river on bamboo rafts, etc. It felt like a completely different world.
Once we were back in Xingjing we stopped for coffee, then were guided back to the mini-bus to return to Yangshuo. An hour later we started shopping on Xijie (West Street), which is the main shopping market/foreigner area/bar area. It's not very long, as Yangshuo really isn't that big, but it took us a few hours to look at everything and buy what we wanted. We stopped at the 7th Heaven Cafe (and hostel) for dinner, which was decent western food, before returning to the hostel and going to bed early, after we had booked a bike tour ($50 each) for the following day at around 9AM.
......
I felt like a little kid again the next day when I rode my rented ten-speed behind our tour guide on his rickety, old bike through town and into the countryside. Yet though the dirt roads and cultivated fields of this part of rural China seemed very similar to where I grew up in the Catskills of New York, there were some noticeable differences. The fields were cultivated as far as the eye could see, with workers dotting the fields in the distance, tending to their crop. They had old mud-brick houses instead of modern American houses with shingled roofs and it was very odd to see so many people within just a mile in such a rural area, which gave me some comprehension of just what it meant for China to have a population of 1.3 billion. It also clarified why the Chinese had not upgraded the technology of their farming; they had no need or desire to. With so many hands available to work the fields, and in need of a job, they had no need for tractors and other such machines our farmers here use as a necessity.
After our guide unsuccessfully tried to talk us into a separate cave tour at some local caves we stopped for lunch at a little hut by a side road off the major highway and enjoyed freshly cooked food. I don't remember what the dishes were, only that they were delicious and we had far too much food for three people. When lunch was finished, we continued biking, though on the highway now back to town, with one stop at some butterfly cave/garden place (that I wouldn’t recommend you see if you ever visit Yangshuo and take the bike tour). Overall the trip took about four hours, and my sore backside was more than happy for me to give my rented bike back to the nice lady who owned it. From there we picked up our stuff and headed to the mini-buses that went to Guilin.
A couple hours and $20RMB later we were dropped off, well, somewhere in Guilin. We hadn’t thought to bring a map of the area, but with my limited Mandarin skills (and about two hours of wandering around), we managed to make it to the bus station that had buses back to Shenzhen where we go over the border back to Hong Kong. We didn’t explore Guilin any more due to our heavy bags and the fact that we hadn’t see anything interesting during our lost wandering, just bought our tickets and waited until our sleeper bus arrived to take us back to Shenzhen.
Pictures: Days 1 & 2, War Museum, Palace, NYLA Club
Day 1 - Arrival, 2002 World Cup Stadium, a mall
The first day of the tour, Saturday, started out early because we had to be at the airport by 7AM to meet our tour guides. The sun came up outside while we waited for the whole group to be ready. There were nine of us who went: Tracy, Sabrina, Mathias, Surabhi, Tom, Mya, Sanne, Yeelo and me. We caught the bus to Central, then took the airport express line in the MTR.
Once we got to the airport, we met our tour guide, got our tickets, checked our baggage, and had time for breakfast before we left. I just got a mocha at Starbucks, and while I was sitting there drinking it, it struck me how funny it was so see so many white people in one place. Even though Hong Kong has a lot more foreigners than just about anywhere else in China, the population is still about 98% Chinese. Seeing so many non-Chinese in one place after living in Hong Kong for over a month was startling. I can't imagine how wierd it'll be when I get back to the States.
We all pretty much just slept on the flight over, then got out of the airplane, out of the airport and into our tour bus. Somwhere in there our group of 9 was merged into the tour group of about 40 or so, the rest being Hong Kong residents, and generally older than we were.
Our first stop was the 2002 Seoul world cup stadium. It took us over an hour to get there from the airport, on a highway that was actually on the right side of the road again, surrounded by open countryside. It was nice to see open space and fields again after the building-crowdedness of Hong Kong. The stadium itself was okay, looked like any other stadium I've ever seen in my life.
The next stop was a shopping mall in what looked like some kind of downtown area. I didn't really have much idea of where I was at any given time because the tour was in cantonese, given by a particularily annoying women we all really disliked by the end of the tour because she never stopped talking. An hour there on the bus, talking. Two hours somewhere else on the bus, talking. Non-stop talking. Ugh.
Anyway, the shopping center was okay, certainly different from anything in the States, though I saw another one like it in Beijing. It was mostly clothing, and each floor was a specific kind, like men's clothing, children's clothing, shoes, etc. And it wasn't like a big department store, it was many aisles filled with different sections with a person selling their merchandise in each section. It's really hard to explain in words, actually, and I don't think I managed to get a picture of it.
While I was there, I just bought a couple pairs of earrings, ate at the food court on the top level (I'm a traiter to travellers everywhere; I ate pizza) and spent the rest of the time in the arcade. I was with Surabhi, Mathias and Tom for most of the time. No doubt the best part was the arcade where we played air hockey and took a bunch of pictures with a photo booth.
After that we were taken to someplace to have dinner, Chinese food, then drove for over an hour to our hotel for the night, and I went to sleep early after a nice bath.
Day 2 - Spa, the themepark Everglades, another shopping area, sleepover
The next day started out with one of the nicest parts of the trip, the spa. I think we were there for 2 or 3 hours, and it was just wonderful. We all got into our bathing suits in seperate women/men locker rooms, and spent the rest of our time in the warm pool, in the hot tubs, both normal and medicated, and in the sauna. One thing I really liked was this waterfall type thing in the middle of the main pool. When you sat/stood under it, it poured down on your shoulders and it was like getting a neck/shoulder massage. Very relaxing.
Next went to a theme park called the Everglades. It looked like any other themepark I've been to in my life, but we did get an opportunity to learn how to make Kimchee, a smelly Korean dish made with cabbage, chives, hot chili powder, etc. We even got to take our kimchee back with us, which we could eat after it had been in the fridge for 10 days. Sadly, I left my kimchee behind in the last hotel we visited.
After that we had a Korean BBQ dinner, which was very good. You basically cooked the meat yourself and mixed it with rice and some vegetables. Pretty tasty. Through the meal I talked with a young couple from Hong Kong, maybe late twenties early thirties. They both spoke pretty good English and I found out that the wife was a Mandarin teacher, which was cool. I got to practice a few words of Mandarin and just enjoyed the meal.
Soon dinner was over, and then they took us to a another shopping area, this one consisting of a line of stalls and stores on each side of a large street. I liked that shopping, where you get to bargain more. I ended up getting a few nice scarves and a pair of pants.
Our allotted time for shopping ended too soon and we headed to our next hotel destination, which turned out to be a skiing resort quite far away from the city. That night we all had a sleepover in one of the rooms, because that hotel didn't have beds, they had futons to go on the floor. By combining the futons and blankets for the four rooms we had been given and sharing the space, we made a pretty comfortable sleeping area.
Of course, we didn't put that all together just to sleep, so we ended up staying up late, to 4 or 5, playing cards, drinking games, talking and generally having a good time. That was my favorite hotel of the three we stayed in while we were in Korea.
Day 3 - War Museum, Casino, Palace, Club NYLA
During day 3 we had a hard time getting up, which was expected, and spent the in-between-places-bus-rides sleeping.
Our first stop was the museum for the war that seperated North and South Korea. We couldn't actually go inside the museum since it appeared to be closed, but we got to wander the grounds for half an hour, seeing airplanes, tanks, replica bombs, etc. The architecture of the museum reminded me a lot of DC, with it's towering columns, large set of stone steps, benches, fountains and trees. I would have liked to stay there longer just for the atmosphere, but I bought a few touristy items to take home and then got back on the bus.
As we were headed towards our next destination, a casino, I remember looking out over the fields and forests and thinking about how peaceful it looked, and how different it must be from what it was during the war, when the area we were travelling over was surely where at least some of the war was fought back and forth.
The casino wasn't that fascinating, over an hour I lost a little money at the blackjack table and the slots, and concluded that gambling is pretty pointless to me. Blackjack is fun, but I don't need to bet money to do it.
After the casino we went to the palace museum. It wasn't very old, as it had been rebuilt in the 1950's after the war, but it was still worth seeing as it had been rebuilt to look as it would have been. It was mostly pretty peaceful, especially around the two lakes that were on the grounds. It wasn't just one big building like you might think of, but many different buildings spread across the grounds, similar to the palace in Beijing. It's hard to describe, so you'll just have to look at the pictures when I get them up.
We spent a couple hours there, taking pictures and looking around, I bought some postcards and a Korean phrase book in the folk museum's store, and then we were back in the bus again. Our next stop was dinner, another Korean meal, soup this time, and then we took a couple hours to get to our next hotel, which was in the actual city of Seoul.
That night we decided we were going to go clubbing, so after getting settled in, changing our clothes and getting directions to a club, we headed out. We got in two cabs to get to the clubs, and that was certainly an interesting experience, as we spoke no Korean and the cab driver spoke no English. We hadn't even thought to get someone to write down the name of the club in Korean. Somehow we managed to get there, both of the cabs, only to find out that the club we had been recommended to was closed for renovations. We basically stood around confused for a while while Yeelo bargained with the conceirge to get a deal at another club. Eventually they reached some kind of agreement, and we all ended up in two taxis once again, and ended up at a club called NYLA.
The club was certainly unique. First of all, you had only two choices as to what to drink: beer and whiskey, and you didn't really pay individually, you paid by table, which would either get you one whiskey or 8 beers, as I recall. It was pretty expensive for either one. Second, there was the huge TV screen that routinely showed pictures of the trade towers consumed in fire and smoke, which was upsetting to say the least, though I don't believe it was meant to glorify the bombings. It seemed like the idea of the club was some kind of unity with the States, thus the name NYLA (New York, Los Angles).
And then there was the social interactivity between men and women, which isn't really the appropriate description for it. Basically, if there were more guys than girls at a table, a waiter would come over and drag a few of the girls off to a table where there were mainly guys. And I mean that literally. They would come over, grab your arm, and pull you over to a table. If you protested too strenuously, eventually he would give up (the waiters were all male), but since that was the way things were there, most girls didn't really protest to that degree. Also, if a guy at a table saw a particular girl he was interested in, he would ask the waiter to bring her over, and the waiter would.
I don't actually say this from personal experience, since I wasn't dragged off anywhere, though all the rest of the girls at our table were at one point or another. I think it had something to do with our waiter, who told me I looked "just like Brooke Shields" (the model), that I was "very beautiful", "you don't have a boyfriend!" "How long will you be in Korea?" and got a little touchy-feely by the end of the night.
Other than that, I did ask him about some things, like whether or not Koreans liked Americans (he said that "of course" they did, with a shocked look that I would consider anything different), whether or not they got a lot of foreigners in the club (about once a week, and apparently Coby Bryant, a famous basketball player in the States, visited about a year ago with "a lot of bodyguards"), and I asked why the pictures with trade towers, but he never got back to me on that.
After a few hours of drinking and dancing, we left around 4AM, somehow managed to get the taxi cab to get us back to the hotel, and got a couple hours of sleep.
Day 4 - Sleeping on the bus, Myung Dong, Departure
After our late night, we slept on the bus from when we got on around 9AM or so to around 12PM. I think we missed an expensive crystal shop in that time, ah well.
By the time we started waking up a bit, we'd arrived at another shopping area, called Myung Dung. I enjoyed it there, though it was less of a market than just streets with stores up and down them. I managed to get a pair of jeans in my size, which I never expected to do while I was in Asia, so that pretty much made my day, though I won't tell you how much they cost. We were there for a couple hours, wandering around the stores and having lunch at a restaurant where our tour guides had given us a coupon for a free meal.
After that we got back on the bus and headed back to the airport to catch our flight and return to Hong Kong.
My day here tends to start out early in the afternoon, say around 2PM. After the first couple weeks of class I stopped bothering with the pretense of waking up early to go to my lectures and simply started sleeping in, as anyone who knows me here can tell you. My ability to sleep to all hours of the day, through fire alarms and the loud, occasionally shrill voices of my hallmates is a constant source of curiosity & amusement to my friends.
Anyway, so my day starts with the usual getting ready for the day stuff (shower, etc), and then I leave my hall and walk to one of two bus-stops. The one closer to my hall is where the mini-buses stop and and farther away on the larger street is where the double decker buses roll through. The mini-buses are generally cheaper, will drop you off about anywhere along the route where you ask them to stop (in simple, and no doubt bad, Cantonese that I learned in my first couple of weeks here), the bus drivers generally speak no English whatsoever, and you have to know where you want to go and which number mini-bus will get you there, because there are no bus schedules where the mini-buses pick you up.
As for the double-deckers, they're a little easier. When you go to their bus-stop, each bus that stops there will have a schedule listed that tells you (in both English & Chinese) what number goes where, how much it is at the location where you are, what time the buses start & stop running, etc. The bus driver is more likely to speak English, though it won't be necessary for you to speak with him because you just hit the stop button when you want to get off at the next stop. The downsides on the big buses are that they tend to be more expensive than the mini-buses, only stop at specific locations & are slower than the mini-buses.
On both of the buses you can use either exact change or an Octopus card to pay for the ride. An octopus card is basically a stored value card that automatically deducts from your account when you press it against the card-reader in the buses (as well as the card-readers of various vending machines, stores, etc). You can refill the card in the MTR(subway) stations or at any 7-11 store (which abound here in HK). A lot easier than fumbling for change whenever you're getting on a bus with a line of people behind you, and as an HKU student I get a student Octopus card, which gives me a 50% discount off the MTR fares.
So, after a 15 minute or so ride, I get off at the main entrance to Hong Kong University. From there, I take a lot of stairs and at least one elevator to get to class, a common theme at HKU. I can remember trying to find my way around campus before classes started when I first got here in September. Being used to Drexel's campus, which basically consists of simple, flat, city blocks, when I looked at the map of HKU I pictured all the buildings basically next to each other on one level, where you'd just walk across courtyards & such to the other buildings. It didn't exactly work that way.
If I had to explain it, I would divide the campus into three sections, with each section on a different level. The engineering section of campus is on the right, and one level up from the central part; to get from one to another you have to take a flight of stairs in one of a few places where there are stairs. Then to get to the left side of campus from the central part, you have to go through the Cheung Yuet Ming Amenities' Center from the ground floor to the 5th floor or so, which turns out to be the ground floor of a building in the left section, like the Meng Wah complex, where I have my accounting class. Once you get used to it, it's not such a big deal, but at the beginning it confused me a bit, and by the end of that first week my legs were hurting from all the stairs.
From there, class commences, which is simliar to classes at Drexel, yet not quite the same. First, the subjects here are taught in English, yet the native language is Cantonese, and that is the language you will hear spoken everywhere except inside the classroom, and sometimes within the classroom as well. One thing I quickly got used to was spurts of Cantonese jokes and otherwise from the teachers here, where everyone laughs and I'm just sort of looking around confused. The English they do speak is at varied levels of profiency, and they generally have an English accent when they speak, which seems very odd combined with the Chinese accent. (Or maybe it just sounds odd to me, being American.)
Things also seem to move a little bit slower here as far as teaching & assignments are concerned, though I'm not sure whether that's because of the particular classes that I attend, because of the fact that English is a second language, or whether I'm just used to things moving fast at Drexel where my terms are 10 weeks instead of 13.
After my classes are done for the day, I generally have met up with friends in classes, or I then meet up with them in the main courtyard on campus by the library. If I'm in the mood to pay for dinner (which I was in the first month & a half or so I was here), we'd generally go to one of the campus restaurants and eat Chinese at Chueng Yuet Ming or the Student Union, or we'd eat "Western" at Super Sandwich, a place carrying sandwiches, soups, fruit & vegatable salad, muffins, rolls, pasta, baked potatoes, etc. Otherwise, we'd eat at the campus restaurant by the dorms (bad Catonese food that I avoid whenever ramen noodles is available, which means I never eat there) or we'd go somewhere off campus to one of the many & varied food restaurants that exist in Hong Kong, with a choice of both Chinese & Western foods. For China, Hong Kong isn't exactly the middle of nowhere.
Then I'd go back to my room in my hall, called Wei Lun Hall. Living here as been one of the more unique aspects of my life in Hong Kong. Here, living in the dorms isn't just a place to stay when you're away from home, it's considered a society, and each hall, and floor in that hall, has it's own culture. My hall is supposed to have the qualities of: loyalty, creativity, intelligence, etc etc. And my floor, gou lao, is the "Sincere" floor. The hall has activities, such as a weekly hall dinner, as well as various clubs & organizations that exist only within that hall. Each floor also has activities, such as: competing in inter-hall athletics and other forms of competition, weekly meetings, and weekly floor dinners.
There is an expectation that if someone lives in the dorms, they will participate in the hall & floor activities, as well as attend the initial orientation activites, which involve various activities a week before classes start, which is supposed to be difficult both physically & mentally. Since getting in is a selective process, if someone doesn't participate in both the orientation and activities throughout the year, they aren't likely to be allowed back to the dorm the next year, and they will most likely be ostracized in the meantime by the other residents of the floor & hall. Luckily for me, exchange students are considered exempt from this. I've never been good at "follow the leader" and the activities are generally in Cantonese anyway.
As for what this means in everyday life, there seems to be more of a "share & participate" mentality. Everyone uses the dishes, pots & pans and silverware in the kitchen, often the floor eats together, doors are supposed to be open to the hall when you're home. Other things that go on in everday life, though I don't know why, are things like people staying up late every night, they don't start going to be until around 3 or 4. The oddest thing for me is to go out on a Thursday or Friday night and come back at 5 in the morning to find my hallmates still up and about. It's certainly one aspect of hall life that I've found myself adapting to, though I don't exactly know why I stay up that late. Probably just stuck in a sleeping cycle.
Anyway, that's my life as of now. Hope it held something of interest. :)