Building Juice (and Aberdeen)

In Central, I have become intimately acquainted with the quick pace and building juice of downtown. Building juice - in case you were wondering - is the phenomenon whereby an assortment of condensation and other questionable liquids drip off of the sides of the massive buildings in Central, and land on you. Building juice only preys on you if you’re foolish enough to be on a sidewalk instead of a raised walkway. It’s a phenomenon I have yet to experience in any other part of the world, and it is a special kind of gross.

As cool as the north side of the island, Central, and Kowloon are, I wanted to see more than just the big-city side of Hong Kong. Key thought: I wanted to see if there was a part of HK where I could escape the building juice. Here’s the secret about that though guys… HK is kind of just a collection of big cities in close proximity to one-another. So, as much as I thought I was being very clever in heading down south to Aberdeen, and through places like Repulse Bay and Deep Water Bay, they’re not really ‘more than just the big-city side of HK’.  I mean, they’re not Central with its glitz and shopping and endless food options, but by Canadian standards 80,000 people is still a city.

I will take this moment to point out that even in Aberdeen, Deep Water Bay and Repulse Bay there were massive high-rise condo towers. Like… serious high rise condo towers. HK island is all about that population density.

We don't have high rise condos like this in Kamloops, and our population is supposedly a bit larger than Aberdeen. 

Anyway, my biggest goal of the day was to take a sampan tour. This was to entail hopping onto a tiny boat, and puttering around the harbour to see Aberdeen and the neighbouring island Ap Lei Chau from a marine perspective. I have to admit, I was expecting a different sort of watercraft than what is actually considered a sampan. For whatever reason, I thought a sampan was more like a gondola. A narrow, skinny little boat without a top-covering, that might have a small outboard motor on the back.

A sampan! Admittedly, not the sampan I took, which had a black hull, a red covering, and notably more decoration on the inside. Pinwheels and roosters were a particular theme.

Yeah, not so much. Turns out sampans are like the dune buggies of watercraft. They all sort of look the same, but none of the parts or components involved in making them appear to actually be the same. They’re similar in that they’ve all sort of been cobbled together from bits of other boats, and then painted and wrapped in a skirt of tires to mitigate impact damage. Also, all the ones I saw had little roof coverings on them. (Roof coverings are a good thing, the sun is serious business over here!)

There was a fleet-style sampan tour from one of the other docks, but the first tour I found was with a more independent fellow who took tourists that were caught by a middle-aged lady in a straw hat on the pier. For the record, I am noticing a trend in HK. That trend is that little middle-aged and elderly women are not to be messed with, or underestimated, under any circumstances. They get shit done!

So once I’d been caught by this middle-aged lady, she pointed me to the next sampan in line. We haggled over an appropriate price, and I hopped into the sampan for what I consider the most awesome private sampan tour ever! The perk of doing the tour this way was that I definitely ended up not sharing my sampan with 15 other people. I also ended up going literally all over the harbour, and being able to ask the captain all sorts of questions. (Although captain sounds overly official for this vessel. Pilot? Sure, we’ll call him a pilot.)

The front side of Jumbo, the floating restaurant. 

The back side of Jumbo, the floating restaurant. 

The first thing we did was tour past a set of docks specifically for outrageously expensive-looking yachts, which were on our way to the floating restaurant ‘Jumbo’. Seriously, one of the big tourist attractions in Aberdeen is a massive floating restaurant. It looked like the whole thing lit up in lights at night, and I’m told it consists of three levels of different food venues. It hosts everything from dim sum and a cafeteria to swanky high dining on the top floor. It was also kind of entertaining to swing around the restaurant in full circle and note that the polished side faced Aberdeen, and the backside facing Ap Lei Chau was… a little ghetto.

These buildings have holes in them because legend has it that there is a dragon who lives in the mountains behind them. The dragon goes from the mountain to the ocean each day, and if there weren't holes in the buildings to allow him a path, he'd just knock down the buildings to get to the water.

Once we’d seen the restaurant we headed back, deeper into the harbour. I’m going to go ahead and call what I saw next ‘neighbourhoods’ of boats. It was like the harbour itself contained another city that sat, floating, between Ap Lei Chau and Aberdeen. Several neighbourhoods were devoted entirely to different classes of fishing vessels. I say vessels because some looked to have a uniform paint job to them, and so might have been part of a fleet of some sort.

Standard black-hulled fishing boats. Excellent for pre-lunch drinking and fish BBQ's. 

Others were… well, they stayed afloat? I’m sure they also had functioning motors that moved them from place to place, but being as I didn’t see them move, I can’t guarantee that statement. Also my marine vessel knowledge is very limited, aircraft are much more my speed. The boats were stuffed to the gills full of character though! I’m not much of an artistic photographer, but I enjoyed zipping around between them, taking a ton of photos. Most of the boats that weren’t the standard black and maroon- or black and teal-hulled were painted other bright colours. Some had people on them having barbeques, others had a group of men happily drinking at about noon, and some were so derelict they appeared to have been abandoned.

A fishing vessel all tucked in for the day. Please note the wonderfully bright yellow hull, which I am very partial to.

When I asked about a particularly large, rectangular vessel that looked like it hadn’t moved in months, the sampan pilot pointed us towards it and explained that it was a houseboat. So I was right about people living in a sort of floating city between Ap Lei Chau and Aberdeen, but it looks like it’s a last resort place to live. As we got closer to the rectangular houseboat, I realised that there was actually a whole neighbourhood of them all roped together. Some were large, like the rectangular one, others were very, very tiny. Most of them had some sort of dingy attached to them, which I imagine would be used to get to shore and back.

The rectangular houseboat in question. As we came around the front of it, there was a fellow hanging his laundry out to dry. So... not abandoned after all. 

To be fair though, depending on where your houseboat was anchored, it didn’t look like you’d necessarily need a dingy. Once we were out of the houseboat neighbourhood, we came into the fish market.

There is a whole network of vessels that are all roped together to sell fish, and the network is large enough that it has a whole side of the neighbourhood that is connected to the docks on the Aberdeen side. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there on a market day so I couldn’t explore that. Once I was off the sampan though, I did take a wander along the dockside of the fish market. There were a few dockside boats that were open, and one even had an iron barbeque out front that was cooking whole fish wrapped in tinfoil in the embers of a fire. I did go look at the final, cooked product. It was displayed on a stick, skin and eyes still attached, and I confess that I have no idea how one would go about eating it.

A hat for the tourist and everything.

Also fish skin is gross.

Towards 2:30pm I was starting to melt. Ap Lei Chau is known for its vertical mall, which primarily sells furniture and housewares, but also does discount fashion like Hugo Boss and Alexander McQueen. I need you to know that there are worse places to seek refuge with AC than an outlet mall.

Also, there are malls literally EVERYWHERE in Hong Kong. I may actually have spent half of my vacation navigating through malls, specifically because they have AC.

Watching the cargo ships over dinner.

It’s kind of funny being in a vertical mall. I hadn’t ever really thought about it, but our malls in North America are basically all horizontal. Chinook Mall in Calgary, for example, is only three long floors stacked on top of each other. Space is way to valuable in HK for something like that, so instead everything is done vertically. Horizon Plaza was the name of the mall, and it was a cool 28 floors or so. On the very top level is a furniture store called Tree that I’m sort of in love with, with its very own window-side café where I had dinner. It was wonderfully scenic, I ate dinner and watched the huge cargo ships come in and out of the harbour one ‘city’ over from Aberdeen against the sunset.

(If you're interested in taking a look at Tree, which you totally should be, there's a link here. It's particularly fun because it was started by a lawyer, who decided that law was much too stressful, and went into furniture design instead. Here's hoping that ends half so well for me.)

There was an MTR station under construction not too far from where I ended up catching the bus back to Central at the end of the evening. I have to say that once it’s connected by rail to the rest of HK, Aberdeen actually looks like it might be an awesome spot to live. In particular, it had a notable lack of building juice.

The bridge connecting Aberdeen to Ap Lei Chau at night, form the bus stop.

Canada Special-Flavour Honey

So as I said before, getting out of Central has sort of been my mission for the past few days. For clarity, Central is the main downtown district on the north side of the of HK Island. Across from Central there’s a peninsula sticking out off the mainland that is considered part of HK called the Kowloon peninsula. From there, north of the peninsula are the New Territories that also ‘belong’ to HK, and the outlying islands (like Lantau) that are scattered around HK Island.

Basically, HK sprawls way more than I thought it did, and that meant I had loads of non-Central territory to cover.

The Kowloon peninsula holds some of my favourite neighbourhoods, and I actually ended up going back on a few occasions to sweep up the little odd ‘n ends of sights that I couldn’t pack into just one day. Our Kowloon morning started with a leisurely dim sum at our favourite spot near the hotel, a stroll through the wet markets on the way to the star ferry, and then the Chi Lin Nunnery. We also stopped by the old Maritime Police Station, and then took the star ferry home once the sun had set so that we could see the Central skyline all done up in lights.

A butcher's stall, complete with pig's feet, hearts of al varieties, and a very nice butcher who let me take his photo.

The wet markets here are really something. As a start, they don’t just mean ‘wet’ as in ‘there is stuff in the market that is not dry’. Nothing is really dry by my standards in HK. What they mean by ‘wet’ is ‘ohmygodthat’sstillaliveandnowit’sbleedingonme’.

Now, I am a person who loves food. Unabashedly. I will try new food often regardless of whether or not I know exactly what it is, and a big part of how I travel involves tasting new food. I’ve become pretty accustomed to some of the different ways food is stored and prepared in other places. In Uganda, it was completely normal to see half a cow hanging in the hot, open air in a butcher’s shop window. There would be flies on it, but no one seemed fussed because you were taking it home to be cooked. In Cuba, I definitely heard one of the chickens that I ate for dinner being slaughtered a few hours beforehand when we stayed on a farm. I will also never forget seeing hundreds and hundreds of eggs stored in their little cardboard flats on someone’s deck instead of in a fridge. Possibly we refrigerate things a little enthusiastically in Canada.

This is going somewhere, I promise.

Where this is going is that I like fresh food, and I understand that in order to eat fresh food, someone has to kill the thing so I can eat it. On occasion, I’ve even killed my own food. (Primarily seafood though. Lobsters and shellfish totally count.) I am uncomfortable with the idea of inhuman slaughter though. So as I was wandering through the wet markets, it was pretty shocking to see fish laying out on the tables, or on ice, or in baskets, still blatantly gasping for breath. The fish crammed into buckets of water swimming on top of each other were more surprising than alarming, but I still jumped whenever I walked past and one smacked or splashed me.

Assorted, living, wiggling little shellfish at the wet market. They were a little bizarre to look at, but not shocking.

What finally got me was wandering through a wet market on the Kowloon peninsula and seeing how the fish were passed to customers before being taken home. Sometimes they were still alive through the de-scaling process, and that just looks like straight-up torture. More importantly, as I walked past a butchering counter I was initially quite satisfied to think ‘ah yes, big knife, lots of blood, it looks like this is the spot the poor thing finally dies’. I wasn’t really paying attention to the fish bits surrounding the knife and block, because I thought they were… well, fish bits.

HA! The girl is naïve.

One of the fish bits - which I swear was just a head and belly – was alive enough to startle as I walked by the table and made a swimming motion that jetted it forward and sent it flying off the edge of the table.

Seriously. This fish had no fins. No tail. It didn’t even look like it still had a spinal column that connected to its head, and it was still alive enough to ‘swim’ right off the edge of the table.

I probably yelped. The fishmonger laughed at my blatant shock, and I did that overly-polite-because-I’m-processing-what-just-happened Canadian thing and smiled back at him. Thumbs up! ‘Yes, very fresh!’ I left the wet market immediately after. I’ve been through other wet markets since. It’s not like I wouldn’t go back if I ever lived here and needed groceries. That disregard for a clean kill is something I’m uncomfortable with though, and it seems to be pretty common in the wet markets throughout the city.

Anyway, aside from alarming fish exploits, we also saw a truly amazing nunnery that has been the highlight of my trip so far. The Chi Lin Nunnery is on the Kowloon peninsula, set back into a hill next to a massive connecting point of three main roads. Part of what makes it amazing is that once you step into the gardens, the trees and the walls that surround the nunnery mostly muffle the noise from the vehicles and the highways.

 

The property is huge, the inner courtyard has several wonderful lily ponds, and the roofs are all curved and swooped. The construction of all the buildings is done without any nails, so everything slots together with beautifully elaborate joinery. The Chinese believed that putting together a building this way, without nails, symbolised a harmony between man and nature. Not only does it make each corner its own elaborate work of art, it really shows off the mastery of the architect and the builders.

The nunnery is connected by a white stone bridge to a garden, which is also pretty incredible. We didn’t see any nuns, but there are large sections of the place that are off-limits. I assume this is because those are the living and worship areas of the resident nuns and priests. If you’re ever in HK and you want to take some time out to go see a beautiful, traditional building and its accompanying gardens, I’d definitely recommend the Chi Lin nunnery.

Finally, Max and I stopped at the old Maritime Police building. Unfortunately, I was hangry by this point. We’d forgotten to have lunch in the heat, it was getting late, and the hanger hit me. Max travels like a stray dog, which is to say he sort of wanders and sniffs his way through each new area. It’s a great way to travel, and I am notorious for doing something similar in museums, but when you’re hangry, slowly meandering through town is definitely not a preferred method of travel. Max was super content to stay and look at what was admittedly a beautiful old building, but I needed food.

I went straight to the nearest side street, saw a noodle shop with geese hanging in the window, and I was sold. It was another spot without English, but most places here have a menu with English in tiny writing under the Cantonese, or with pictures. I ordered a side of rice, cool lemon green tea, and a goose by pointing at photos, and then settled in quite happily. Just in case you were wondering, I did in fact eat the whole goose. Like all of it. It was amazing. A really classic way to cook goose here is to crisp the skin until it’s gold and shattering-ly good when you bite into it. The meat beneath the skin isn’t oily, but it is deliciously moist and full of flavour.

They do really give you the whole goose though, which presents a bit of a problem because there isn’t really a polite (Western) way to pick bones out of your mouth. Here, you just sort of tear/suck the meat off the boney bits, and then stack the boney bits in a little pile next to your dish.

Heading out on the Star Ferry, looking back at Central.

Yes. Really. It’s kind of satisfying to compare the little pile of bone to the rest of the dish you have left to eat, because you feel a little bit of a sense of accomplishment. It’s like a progress bar loading a big file, only… made out of food bits?

It takes some getting used to.

The servers were pretty entertained by the whole process. One of them had some English, and asked where I was from. When I said Canada, she became pretty excited. “Oh! Like honey!” What? Honey?

She explained that there was ‘special Canada-flavour honey’ at the store. Are we known for exporting honey? Is that a thing we do? I mean, we do have a lot of honey, surely, being as we’re a big country and we have plenty of bees. Nope. I finally got it when she said it was special honey because it came from leaves. She 100% meant maple syrup. It was an awesome moment.

Central Hong Kong skyline from the Star Ferry

I guess we really are known worldwide for syrup and cold winters. I’ll take it :-)

Surprise! Democracy and Congee

Yesterday and the day before, Max and I made a point of getting out of Central. He made the off-hand comment to a pair of local guys we’d met that so far, Hong Kong was actually more Western than we were expecting. They were pretty unimpressed with that, and let us know that once out of the main business district, HK became a lot more ‘Chinese’. Neither Max or I were totally sure what that meant, but we had been planning to explore other areas with our shiny new Octopus transit cards the next morning anyway. Wan Chai and the Northeast area of the Island were on our plate for the first day, and then the Kowloon peninsula was slotted for yesterday.

Aside from the massive scale of the buildings, this could be a Western city.  It's actually HK Central from one of the raise walkways by the Star Ferry terminal to Tsim Sa Tsui

I know what ‘more Chinese’ means now.

For the record, apparently Max and I were so wrapped up with being in Causeway Bay that I neglected to take a photo of the neighbourhood directly on top of the MTR (light rail) station for you to compare. You’re just going to have to take my word. Signs are hung horizontally on wire between buildings, there is much more Cantonese on the signage, and you hear significantly less English in the street. Instead of professionals in business attire, we were greeted by crowds of people in all sorts of clothing, from short-shorts and tank tops (for those of us who melt in the heat) to brightly-coloured full-length hijabs, and platform glitter sneakers with bows and K-pop street fashion.

Aside from all that though, our mission for the day was to eat congee at a local congee hotspot. Now, congee is essentially rice porridge. Having eaten it, I’m fairly certain there are some mild spices in it, green onion was sliced on top, and there can be an assortment of meat mixed in with the congee to add protein. Max and I found Hong Kee Congee without too much trouble, and were ushered in to a corner shop with about 20 peace officers for lunch. We weren’t sure exactly why Causeway Bay was crawling with police officers, but they seemed to be pretty relaxed, so we carried on with life.

I ordered congee with beef and pork, Max ordered congee with fish. Max ate all of his congee, I did not. Firstly, the texture of rice porridge is… an acquired like. It wasn’t unpleasant, per se, but it’s definitely something I would need to crave in the dead of winter to warm my bones and fill me. It was like eating beef stew in 35 degree weather. I also thought I was playing it safe by ordering a beef/pork meat option. Not so much. I’m fairly certain I ate intestines. I’m not sure whether they were beef or pork intestines. I don’t really want to know what sort of tubular, slightly gritty meat-bit I did ingest to be honest. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it wasn’t something I’d volunteer to eat again.

Hong Kee Congee, complete with the little fellow who took our order, and grandpa in the right corner making rice paper from scratch.

The family that ran the shop though we were pretty entertaining. They were wonderfully kind, and being as they had almost no English, and we had no Cantonese, they had their school-aged son do all of the ordering with us. It was so good! He was hilarious. He took great pride in being able to translate and write down what we were looking for, and spelled out our bill for us when I couldn’t tell whether he was saying ‘thirty’ or ‘fifty’. “Fifty-four! F-I-F-T-Y!” So in the end, even though I’m not a fan of congee I had an excellent time watching the grandfather make rice paper for the various dishes from scratch, and meeting this awesome little kid. I’d legitimately recommend stopping by to have your own congee experiment if you’re in town.

After Congee, we went for large, decadent fruit smoothies. It helped mitigate the heat and heaviness of the congee.

After lunch, Max and I headed to Victoria Park. Victoria Park is pretty special in and off itself because it’s the only place in all of China where Tiananmen Square is openly commemorated. Last year was the 25^th anniversary, and hundreds of thousands showed up for a candlelight vigil. That’s pretty impressive, by just about any standard. Max and I weren’t really expecting anything outrageous when we went though, we were just expecting to see a pretty green space with some spiffy sports facilities. Also a pebble path.

Apparently you're supposed to walk along this in thinly-soled shoes, or bare feet, very slowly, and it has health benefits like increased blood-flow and stimulation. The stones are set vertically, so that the thing-side is actually facing up. Thin-soled shoes would be more comfortable and massage-like than the barefoot method I tried. 

What we got was a fairly massive pro-democracy protest, which explained the very high police presence. Maybe I live under a rock, but I didn’t realise that the student protests in HK were still happening. I knew they had happened. I knew the students effectively shut the city down for an extended period of time, but only because a late friend of mine felt very strongly about the need for open discussion about democracy and HK’s future moving forward. Since she passed though, I hadn’t come back to it. If only to understand the scale of these protests, you should check it out too. LINK 

I didn’t know the protests were still happening though.

By the time Max and I were set to leave, the march had started. There wasn’t any violence, but the police-to-protestor ratio was incredibly, incredibly high. The protests I’ve seen in Canada - which admittedly are few and far between by comparison to many other places in the world - might have a couple officers present, and a van or two. Assuming the protest even attracts that many people. The example I’m thinking of is the obnoxious pro-life group that showed up on campus every year during my undergrad. There were a few arrests, and pro-choice opposition showed up, but at its largest there were maybe 50 people there all at once.

This is the street-side view we had. The march went on well past when I stopped filming.

The ratio here was easily within the range of 1 officer for every 5 protestors. I’m not kidding when I say the police presence was through the roof. Officers were at intervals lining both sides of the march route, in the observing crowds along the route, they led the march, were the tail-end of the march, and they escorted notable persons within the march who sought out media attention.

For example, as Max and I were headed back towards the MTR station we passed a fellow being interviewed at the side of the route by a couple TV cameras. He and 4-5 people behind him were the only protestor presence. Aside from the man being interviewed, none of the others with him were at all interested in having their face on the camera. They actively hid their faces behind protest signs, and ducked away when the cameras tried to peak around. A police presence of two motorcycles and a van filled with officers in the front followed them.

Posters and advertisements like this are literally everywhere. I've seen sources saying that the election is later this year, but 2017 is on all of these posters. I don't know if that means the election is this year and the CE takes power in 2017, or if something else major is happening in 2015 and the election is in 2017. Politics are complicated guys!

The guidebook and the Internet tell me that there have been accusations of vote-rigging and interference in HK’s democratic freedoms by Beijing since the hand-over in 1997. This year, the position of Chief Executive is up for election and Hong Kong’s residents are keen to keep the freedoms they’ve become accustomed to. I’ll be keeping an eye on this once I’m back home. Watching Beijing deal with Hong Kong under the eye of international media seems like an opportunity to see how far China’s really come compared to Tiananmen Square.