Today I took the Star ferry from the island city of Hong Kong to the Peninsula, which is Kowloon. I almost took the ferry across last night to watch the light show, but I was so tired that I scrapped that idea and just returned to the hotel. Which brings me to something I found very interesting.
Yesterday I noticed hundreds of women in variously sized groups around the central bus terminal, MRT station and post office, which are all adjacent to one another. These were women of differing ages and the groups could be from four to about a twelve people. There were no males; there were no children. It looked like dozens and dozens of little encampments of homeless people, except that all the women were nicely dressed, clean and obviously well fed. Many had shopping bags from department stores or electronics stores, etc. They generally had large quantities of food that the whole of each group was sharing. The whole thing was rather mystifying to me at the time.
The women had laid out flattened cardboard boxes to mark out a space for their group. The edge of the cardboard was the edge of their space. All the places they congregated were wide, covered walkways. So unless there was a monsoon and it started raining sideways, they were protected from whatever. Mostly that’s the sun this time of year.
It seems that there a LOT of Filipino maids in Hong Kong. These maids get one day per week off, on Sunday. When their day off comes, they congregate in groups with their friends and/or relatives. They eat, gossip, do each others hair and nails, go shopping and probably talk about their employers. I even saw one young woman piercing another’s belly-button! They do it all. And they do it one the street. By around 7 PM on Sunday night, city workers or staff start coming around and collecting the cardboard to haul it off the street. There is a nightly light show at 8 PM that is best viewed from the other side of the bay but I think they want these women out of the way when the tourists are returning to their hotels for the night.
Oh, and as long as I’m talking about things Asian, they still use bamboo here for scaffolding when they’re constructing a new building. Yes, still. Really. If you see a big pile of bamboo on the street you know that construction in the area is imminent. It’s strong, pretty much impervious to the elements, cheap, very light weight and it can be used over and over again. They put netting or plywood across the bamboo at street level to protect pedestrians and netting all the way around the building being constructed or rehabbed. Everything is so close together that they can’t allow falling construction materials to go whichever way they want to. Runaway items must be kept close to the building lest they smash into a car, another building or a person walking by. It looks a little strange to the Western eye, but it works and seems quite sensible.
Anyway, enough of that. Let’s move on to what I did in school today. (The school of my international education anyway…) Let’s see….I had taken the ferry to the peninsula. The ferry costs $2.50 HK, $7.20 HK equals $1.00 US. So it’s cheap. It takes about seven minutes to cross. It gives one a nice view and some good photo ops, but I really wanted a little more, so I walked down a couple of piers and paid $80 HK for a one hour narrated tour of the harbor. It was very informative and really interesting. It also gave me a great orientation on how the various places I’ve been and things I’ve seen thus far interconnect.
Kowloon skyline
Hong Kong skyline
After the harbor tour, I headed for the MRT to go to bird park. On the way to the MRT
(Subway, remember?), I passed a building advertising Chinese handicrafts. OK, I’ll bite. I like crafts, as long as they’re good. So I went in. Wow. Let me say that again. WOW!!! These were handicrafts like Monet is finger painting. Carved jade sculptures of the most fantastic workmanship I have ever seen. Mammoth ivory. Coral. Jade in white, green, purple, rose. Bunches of grapes with birds eating them, life-sized and carved from a single piece of jade. Floral arrangements. People doing various tasks. Animals, dragons. Coral, jade, mammoth ivory in every direction, each piece more fantastic than the last.
Public art near ferry pier
One mammoth ivory piece was one of those balls inside of balls inside of balls things, on an ornate stand. Each ball was open-work lace carved in ivory. 35 balls in all, each rotating freely inside of the other. This is the stuff that fine are museums are made of. This was the same kind and quality of art work that I saw in the Palace Museum in Taiwan. Only all of this was for sale.
more sculpture
There were many antique pieces for sale also. As I was looking at one of the cases an Aussie gentleman turned to me and said, “can you believe the prices they have on this stuff? That one little bowl is over $1000 Euros!” He was incredulous. He also apparently thought I could relate to what a Euro is worth, but whatever… I gently pointed out to him that the piece he was looking at was made sometime between the late 1600’s and early 1700’s and that it was something of a miracle that it was still intact and looking like new. Only then did he read the rest of the card beside the bowl, that fine print below the price with all the details. He said, “oh” rather quietly, “well I guess that explains it.” Yes, I guess it does.
From their I rode the MRT to a point near my destination and walked to the Bird Park. Well, eventually I got to the bird park. First I passed the goldfish market. About a block of every kind of goldfish you can possibly think of and quite a few I’m sure very few of you have seen before. Plus turtles, salamanders, tiny lobsters, crayfish, you name it. All for sale. Many in plastic bags of water, hanging on pegboard in row upon row of fishies in baggies. All very much alive, swimming in tiny circles.
bags of fish for sale
After the goldfish market, I came to the flower market. This was larger, covering about three square blocks. Every kind of plant and flower you can think of was for sale here. And more orchids than I have seen in my life. All at prices so cheap it almost made me cry. And I couldn’t buy a single thing because there was absolutely no way for me to carry it legally back to the US. Crud cakes (keeping it clean here…).
more flower market
flower market
Finally I reached the Bird Park. I had read that people here are very fond of their birds. That’s a really massive understatement. The blurb I read said that people take their birds to this park in their little cages and sit around in the park with them. Sort of. Primarily this is a block-long birds and everything-related-to-birds market. Yes, there were some people in the park with their pets. The cages for these pets are ornate wood affairs with fancy porcelain bowls for their food and water. Intricately carved wood and ivory holders for bits of fruit for the bird are hooked onto the wood.
someone’s pretty baby
more birds
birds anyone?
Some of the cages, which averaged about 10 inches across and 12 to 14 inches tall, easily ran $100 to $150 US, without the bird. That’s just the cage and the goodies to make it a special home for Tweety. The birds that were visiting the park with their owners were obvious points of pride. And almost all of the owners strutting their stuff were men. There guys were extremely proud of their little feathered friends and I could pay no greater compliment that to take a picture of one of these birds and their ornate “house”. The guy holding the cage tended to preen more than the bird.
another pretty baby
Not so with the birds that were for sale. A couple of times when I was about to take a picture of some birds that were for sale, the sellers got right up in my face and started chewing me out in Chinese. I’m not sure why. They weren’t doing anything illegal. The birds were well cared for. I don’t have a clue what ticked them off so much about my trying to take a picture, but they were absolutely P. O.ed about the whole thing. Whatever. I just moved on to another seller that wasn’t so touchy about their birds. No rhyme or reason to it that I could discern.
Prime birds for sale
About the birds. Most were small. Almost all were songbirds of some type. Beautiful to listen to. Beautiful to look at. A few were larger birds, parrots, mynahs, conures, etc., diverse and usually colorful. Many shops sold bird food. But not just seed or dried fruit. We’re talking live food, crickets, grasshoppers, meal-worms, etc. All kinds of stuff. Plus all the cage furniture and the wood cages. A small, nice-looking wood cage could go for as little as about $12-15 US, and up (of course). They were really inexpensive for what was a really nice product.
I kept wishing I could find a way to get one home without the airline crushing it, but I’m not sure how. Without adding another suitcase, hard-shell this time, and paying even more over-my-allowance fees. (I have made a vow to myself. After this I’m traveling with one or two changes of clothes plus extra underwear and socks, and washing them often. Either that or I have to completely refrain from buying souvenirs for everybody I can think of. Plus, a trip like this causes me to do most of my Christmas and birthday shopping for close friends and family for the next year, ’cause, hey, when am I going to see stuff like this again? And at these prices? I think I’ve gotten a bit carried away. OK, I know I’ve gotten a whole lot carried away. But it’s all so pretty and so cheap!) Can I justify or what?
Anyway, out of the bird park, which is more market than park. Back past the flower market. Another pang of regret for the things that could have graced my garden and home. Back to the MRT. All the while getting more and more hungry and looking for a place to eat. Back to the docks and, in desperation, doing something I had thus far avoided, eating at a chain restaurant. But at least it was an Outback, not a McDonalds! Real food. Red meat. I even made them give me a salt shaker. That’s another thing, Asian restaurants do NOT have salt and pepper shakers on the tables. They look at you strangely if you ask for salt. But I’ve been sweating like a pig for almost a month now (St. Louis isn’t humid. Asia is humid. And it never cools off. Not even at night) salt and red meat (another thing that isn’t all that common here) have become a constant craving for me. I satisfied both tonight. Well, mostly. I’m still salt deprived. And there’s not enough water or juice on the planet to completely rehydrate my body. Believe me, I’m trying to drink enough. But I have to breathe sometime…Oh yeah, they have a soft drink here called “Pocari Sweat” really. It’s popular, supposed to be sort of a Gatorade-type thing. I just can’t bring myself to drink something called “sweat”. Ick.
After I ate I went back down by the ferry docks and found a spot on the raised viewing platform for what is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest, longest-running light and music show in the world. A couple dozen buildings on the Hong Kong skyline near the harbor light up to music. There’s a lot of neon and color here on most of the buildings. Not as overwhelming as Las Vegas. Sort of Vegas with taste.
HK adores its bling. Everything is colored lights, bling and glitter. Lots of crystal, chandeliers, etc. Most commercial buildings have some kind of moving colored lights on their exterior walls at night. So add some lasers on top of a few buildings that already have their own private light shows going on, co-ordinate them all, have them strut their stuff individually and in concert with one another and set it all to music. Voila! You have HK’s nightly light and music extravaganza. It was nice. It was pretty to look at. Maybe I was too tired. I was underwhelmed. But I’m glad I saw it. I would have felt like I’d missed something if I hadn’t seen it. It’s the one thing that everybody here talks about and says you just have to see it. So see it I did.
Night skyline after the light show..
Light show
The I went down the stairs and walked the HK walk of fame. Like the stars on Hollywood Blvd. in CA. Except that I never saw a single name I recognized. Plenty of stars and hand-prints in the concrete. Just nobody most of us have ever heard of. Granted, I only walked about two-thirds of it. I’m told Bruce Lee is on it. Him, I’ve heard of. Never seen one of his movies, but at least I know who he is. His star must have been on the other end of the walk. Then I went back to the hotel. And now I’m going to sleep.
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