Saturday, July 21, 2007

A Day in the Special Administrative Region

Why did I go to Hong Kong, some of you may be wondering? Let's discuss Chinese visas for a moment. In Vancouver I was issued a three month tourist visa. Essentially legit; I just happen to be continuing some Canadian work while I'm visiting. I'm not in any business dealings, and I'm not being paid any money by a Chinese company. I would think China would be happy with the presence people such as me - my net effect is one of bringing money into the country. But the procedure for renewing one's visa while in the country certainly doesn't reflect this expected happiness. In Changchun, even when I went with in with our friend Lorenzo, who was in the army and is a Communist Party member, and is good at Getting Things Done, there were still more hoops to jump through than I would like: I would have to register my address with the local police (if I'm a visitor just wandering around spending money willy-nilly, why would I have an address?); I would need to show that I have 24,000RMB deposited in a Chinese bank (what on Earth is up with this requirement?); and after all this, I would only get a one-month extension. We had been told that renewing the visa in Dalian might actually be easier (after all, Dalian has real tourists; why would Changchun have any tourists?), and although it did seem like an easier prospect there - no requirement to register or have a wad of Chinese money in the bank - the extension I would have got there would still have been for only one month, from the time of renewal (not from the original expiration). This wasn't of much use as we were in Dalian about a month before my original visa was to expire.

Enter the old standby idiosyncrasies of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Messed up that it's supposedly part of China, but going there is easier for Westerners than it is for mainland Chinese. Anyway, Hong Kong is rife with travel agents who have the connections to issue Chinese visas for a mild premium.

So in my one full day in Hong Kong, that's what I did fairly early in the morning - go to apply for the visa. Way easier than in Vancouver. Show up, hand over my passport, tell them what I want, pay the fee (which wasn't unreasonable), come back and get it in the evening. (What I'm used to at the Consulate is showing up, filling out an extensive form, waiting for two or three hours, and then coming back for it three or four days later, unless I were to pay twice the price.)

I had time to spend, and the Lonely Planet was my friend; I decided on two destinations, one of which I chose mostly because it happened to be near the random MTR stop I had just got off at. I was glad I ended up going to this one - the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre. It's where the handover of the Island from the Brits to the Chinese occurred ten years ago. I read that it had some record-breaking sheet of glass as a window (seven stories high), but I had no luck in getting to it on the inside (a guard said the area was closed), and from the outside I couldn't see anything that didn't look like your typical glass walls, looking to my amateur eye like they could be made up of smaller panes of glass as there was much support structure behind it. Oh well. I saw some other tourists and walking near them made out some French, so I figured I'd ask them if they knew where the grande fenĂȘtre was. While I was very pleased that they didn't respond in English and actually tolerated my français for the entirety of the short conversation, they seemed to think the window was visible from the outside and pointed me back from where I'd come; I went back and looked again but to no greater avail.

My next destination was the Peak Tram, a funicular railway that leads to some high-up spot on Hong Kong Island and gives a great view of the surrounding area. By the time I was done there I was ready to find the guesthouse I'd booked for the night. I decided to try somewhere actually mentioned in the Lonely Planet that night; hopefully I would get a window this time. The downside of not staying at the same place was that I had to carry my backpack around all day - as if my body wasn't dealing poorly enough with the heat and humidity already. Good thing I always heed the Hitchhiker's Guide and have a towel with me everywhere.

After unloading and showering at the Welcome Guest House, located in yet another Mansion on Nathan Road, I met up with one of Alison's fellow TEFL'ers1, Clem (who is originally from Hong Kong and is now back living there). He treated me to dinner at quite a nice Thai restaurant nearby. (In general the foreign food in the area is quite diversified and of decent quality, from what I've heard.)

That's basically it for my Hong Kong story. The next morning I got up and MTR/KCR'd it back to Luohu ("Lowu" on the HK side), cleared customs, eventually found the bus back to the Shenzhen airport, had a "Sausage Burger with Egg" at McDonald's there while Internetting a bit (I could pick up a wireless signal from McD's, Starbucks, and KFC simultaneously), and flew to Beijing. More on that later.

Also stay tuned for my comments on Hong Kong, which will mark my return from monotonous storytelling back to witty (?) observations of life.

1Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

One Country, Two Systems: The Second System

(This was written on Sunday night at about 1:00am... with some additions the next evening. I realize I probably carry on at too much length in here - I guess that's the trouble of writing with everything too fresh in my mind. I should have waited till my memory started to fade a bit. So I put in a few headings to divide this up into arbitrary parts so you won't be scared away by the length.)

Part One

Here's my adventure today.

It starts after having lunch with Alison next to her school. I go to get a cab to take me to the airport. I've been told this should cost about 80 yuan, but that you have to bargain for that beforehand. So I ask the first driver how much to take me to the airport, and he says 100. I counter with 70, figuring that might get me 80, and he goes off on some tirade that I don't understand, the conclusion of which is 90. I walk away but he calls after me so I go back and he continues to chatter away too quickly and with too many words I don't know, so I call Rebecca (one of the staff at Alison's school) to translate. Turns out he's still saying 90. So I figure he's a jerk, and go to the next guy, who says 70 right away, and buys me an iced tea along the way when he gets one for himself. I just feel bad because he tries twice to start some conversation during the drive and even with him speaking slowly and me asking him to repeat himself, I still don't understand. But anyway, I get to the airport, check in, and wait. I sit quite far away from my gate just like everyone else because there's shade there and all the seats near the gate are below a large glass portion of the roof. But before all that, on the drive there I see a couple of amusing (to me) billboards on the highway, with equally humorous pictures accompanying them which I wish I'd photographed: "No Drunken Driving" and "Do Not Drive Tiredly." Anyway, it's meant to be a 2:40 flight and it starts boarding at 2:39, and takes off at 3:20. But I really have no complaints, as I had the window seat and the middle seat of the three was unoccupied. Even after the stop in Nanjing nobody got on to fill that seat.

Some bits of note on the flight itself:

  • Before takeoff, the flight attendants went around and counted the passengers with little clicky counter.

  • There are ads for some brand of baijiu (white liquor) plastered all over the overhead compartments.

  • There's no first class or business class on the plane.

  • At both Changchun and Nanjing, there was a bridge to board the plane, just like I was used to before China. (Other domestic flights I've taken in China involve a really wide bus carrying passengers airside.)

  • Despite what I've heard about some Chinese pilots (even on international flights) not speaking English, at least one of the pilots spoke it well. From the other one I couldn't decipher a single word after "Ladies and gentlemen." Oh, and everyone making announcements says "zee," not "zed." Bah.

  • Two hours in, they play an overloud airline promotional video, followed by the flight attendants leading the passengers in a little stretching routine. The strangest bit though is that just after this they play some more promo video, still too loudly, but this time at least one stewardess is doing an interpretive dance (or is it sign language?) along with it! It lasts for five minutes, and everyone applauds after it!


Okay, so we land in Nanjing at 5:40... I try to use the wireless Internet, and am pleased to find an unsecured one available, but it turns out to be a China Mobile one that requires a login. I'm initially disappointed, but then I find an "English" link on the page that comes up, and it seems like I should just be able to text something to a certain number from my phone and get a password, which I can use and have the access charged to my phone. I try it, but the message I get back is all in Chinese and doesn't seem to contain a password. My hopes are dashed again. Oh well, I don't have a long wait, so I give up.

I get in line again for the plane when it starts reboarding, and I'm getting a bit annoyed at the not-atypical observation that a lot of people seem to be budging and cutting in front of the whole line. Then a nice gentlemen shows up and says to me that I shouldn't be waiting in line: "Transit passengers board first." Oh.

Part Two

The plane arrives at about 8:45 at its final destination: Shenzhen. It's 35 degrees out, so I'm glad the large bus taking us to the terminal has air conditioning. Where's Shenzhen, you ask? Right next to Hong Kong: a 20-yuan bus ride away. First things I see when I get in the airport are a McDonald's and a Starbucks. I'm not sure at first which bus to take and a final find someone inside who can tell me the number, then back outside I go, warding off the many many people approaching me saying "taxi." One of them, after I decline to ride in her taxi, asks where I'm going, and points me at the bus whose number matches the one I'm looking for. So much niceness there is, hiding behind much more rudeness... or if not rudeness, at least loudness. I buy a ticket for the bus but it turns out the one that's sitting there isn't the one that's going to take us. The one with the same number that pulls up in front and unloads its passengers isn't going either. But the one that pulls up and unloads in from of that one is. Shortly after 9:00 we're off, and the ride's a bit over an hour.

Again with the bulleted list, this time about the bus ride:

  • It isn't a full-sized bus: Each row in the bus has two seats on the left, one on the right. The abnormal thing is that there is a fourth seat that could flip down and fill the isle. Practical enough, but I wonder perhaps if the reason I haven't seen the like before is that it may not pass whatever standard buses have to meet. (The Code of Vehicles From Which Passengers Are Likely to Be Able to Be Pried in the Case of an Accident, maybe?)

  • A bus next to us at one point has the name of its coach line (I guess) printed on the side: Flying Horse. But the "rse" part doesn't appear, due to a wheel well or something. I have myself a juvenile chuckle.

  • There are some road workers along the way removing some white lines from the road. With hatchets.


The Hong Kong customs port at Luohu is a busy busy place. Even at 10:30pm on a Sunday. Oh wait... I guess that time might have reason to be busy. But I was a bit overwhelmed nonetheless. Got through there pretty uneventfully. By accident I went first to the floor where the lineups were for Hong Kong/Mainland Chinese residents; when I ended up on the correct floor it was pleasantly less busy. Stood in line for a bit until I realized I'd forgotten to put my date of birth on my exit card, which made me realize I'd left my pen back at the counter; in the time I took to go back and get it a large (tour, or something) group came in and got in front of me. Oh well, I had more time to read the signs above all the lanes, which rotated their messages through English and Chinese versions of "Foreign Passport,"1 something-or-other else, and "Consult a doctor if you are feeling unwell."

Part Three

Once though customs I hop on the Kowloon Canton Rail (KCR), the light rail system in the area. My destination is Tsim Sha Tsui, an area of Kowloon2 rife with guesthouses. I'm under the impression that I need to switch to the MTR3 to get there, though I'm a little confused that the terminus station of the KCR is also called Tsim Sha Tsui ("Tsim Sha Tsui East," actually). The Lonely Planet's map seems to indicate that the KCR station is quite aways from the actual Tsim Sha Tsui district, so I stop at Kowloon Tong where I can mosey down to the subway. I take a quick trip along two MTR lines to my destination, where I see signs saying that it links to the KCR there. Hmph.4

By now it's about midnight. When I reserved my single room in the Cosmic Guest House I estimated my time of arrival as "afternoon." I said that back when I thought my flight was going to be a couple of hours. When I realized that it would be five-plus, I sent an e-mail off to the guest house saying I'd be getting there "later in the evening." I know that was an understatement, but nonetheless I believe them not to read their e-mail. Before I could arrive there and find that I didn't have a room though, I had to decipher this address:
12/F Block A1, A3, F1, F4
Mirador Mansion
54-64 Nathan Rd
Tsim Sha Tsui
Kownloon HK5


Here's how it turns out:

  1. The "54-64" doesn't mean "unit 54 at address 64"; it simply seems to mean that the address in question is for a large building that occupies the space that could be taken up by numerous buildings numbered 54 through 64.

  2. "Mirador Mansion" is the name of the building. The area seems to have many such "Mansions" and they're basically high-rise apartments, built in some kind of quadrangle so there's a courtyard in the middle.6 The bottom couple of floors comprise some manner of market.

  3. "12/F" refers to the floor, and "Block A1, A3, F1, F4" is a bit unusual in an address and means that the guesthouse's rooms are spread over four different "blocks" of the mansion (each possibly accessed by a different elevator). Actually, I think it might just be two blocks (A and F) and two units in each of those blocks.



Before I know all this, I simply manage to locate the "mansion," in the vicinity of which it is impossible to walk with a backpack and have someone try to get you into their guesthouse less than once every ten seconds.7 Being the sucker that I am (and also seeing that the entrance is mostly gated and manned by a guard and I'm not sure if I can enter on my own), I go with one of the guesthouse pushers who's quoting me a price less than the one for the room I've reserved. The room is tiny and unwindowed but it has air conditioning and a shower. I say maybe and go off to find something more Cosmic. Once I discover the grisly fate of my reservation I figure I'll go back and take the tiny room, but not before indulging a curiosity: I passed a Holiday Inn not far down the road, and I wonder how much a room would be there.

I should mention that on the walk down Nathan road I received a number of offers, some for "massage," some for "sexy massage," and one to "spend some time with me for money" (I think that's what she said) - I guess I didn't say no firmly enough to this last lady because she followed me a bit to offer more of an explanation; it went something along the lines of, "Because you should enjoy yourself while you're here, and you could have a good time." I said it sounded very nice but no thank you. When I reached the Holiday Inn there awaited another such proposition outside; when I turned it down the lady who offered it asked if I wanted a hotel room. I said yes - I was outside the Holiday Inn, after all, but there was a staircase down and I wasn't sure if the entrance was at street level or downstairs, so I gestured down the stairs and asked her "Is it down here?" She gave some manner of affirmative response so I headed down the stairs. When I noticed she was following me I had to explain that I wanted a room by myself, and finally she left.

The only staff I find in the Holiday Inn are some floor cleaners, so I give up and go back to Mirador Mansion. Not seeing my would-be hostess,8 I almost go to look at a room with yet another guesthouse owner, but happily as we're about to board the elevator, the lady in question comes out and I tell her I'll take the room. And that's that.

1Strangely, I noticed at least two instances of people abbreviating this to "passport" rather than to "foreign" (or one of its derivatives) - like when I was on the wrong floor, someone saw me and said, "Passport? Downstairs."

2For those that don't know about Hong Kong, as I didn't until a few days ago, it's made up of a few areas. Hong Kong Island (self-explanatory) and Kowloon9 are two of them: Kowloon is the chunk of mainland just north of the Island.

3Mass Transit Rail - Hong Kong's subway system.

4I have since been informed that while the two stations are indeed connected underground, the KCR train does actually stop a fair distance away and it's a heck of a subterranean walk between them.

5It's a good thing I took some responsibility myself for this trip and didn't rely solely on Alison's babysitting. I wrote down the whole address, while she omitted the first two lines, thinking "54-64 Nathan Rd" sufficient.10

6...into which people can throw their garbage and cause a letter of complaint about hygiene to be posted on their elevator.

7Typical sales pitches include "Guesthouse?" and "Take a look first?"

8I wish I could come up with a word with less connotations, but all I can think of is "landlady" and that's not really correct.

9Call to light anything from Wayne's World, anyone?

10Well, it's more of an irrelevant thing than a good thing, I suppose, judging by the good it did me to find the place. And the full address also appears in the Lonely Planet, a copy of which I managed to bum just before leaving.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Somewhere and Back Again

A week-and-a-bit ago we got back from Dalian, with Alison's dad Simon in tow, arriving at the Changchun train station at about 6:00 am having spent the night in a so-called "soft sleeper" car - where the rooms are somewhat private and have two double bunk-beds. The fourth occupant was already snoring loudly when we boarded the train; he turned out in the morning to be a Korean fellow who spoke decent English and confessed to having been quite drunk the night before.

Backing up a step, Alison and I went to Dalian on the Monday of that week, leaving Changchun on Sunday night. To save some money we took a "hard sleeper" on the way there - this means the bunk-beds are three high, and there aren't really separate rooms, just doorless compartments. We still got a decent sleep though. The worst part of all this though was that Alison had much trouble buying the tickets from a very rude woman at a nearby hotel. Fair enough, it wasn't your typical ticket purchase: two hard sleepers there, and three soft sleepers back. But it really shouldn't have taken forty-five minutes, nor resulted in such emotional anguish to the buyer!

Our gracious hosts in Dalian were Matthew and his girlfriend Rebecca, who live in an apartment on the nineteenth floor of a five-star hotel. Alison knows Matthew from Chengdu, where they were roommates for a short time and Matthew was Alison's first Chinese teacher. He has been here for three or four years and seems pretty much fluent - it's encouraging to witness. Matthew now works (though not for much longer, I gather) for the head office of the school where Alison works, which is a nine-to-five-type job. Rebecca has the more flexible schedule of an English teacher, and she was so kind as to spend most of Monday and Tuesday showing us around the city. Dalian provided a very pleasant contrast to the China I have grown to know, living in Changchun: The city seems really clean, on the bus we witnessed actual large patches of greenery, and we even spent a while at the beach! The seaside is pretty novel when one's city is mostly concrete and dust with little water to be seen.

The idea was that we would meet Simon on Monday night at the airport and that he'd be arriving with two friends, Liz and Cathy. This failed to come to fruition on two counts. The first was that there was some miscommunication between Alison and Simon involving a less-than-healthy respect for the International Date Line. Simon was to arrive Tuesday, not Monday (and happily not Sunday). The second was that China Airlines (in keeping with its country's policy of doing basically whatever the heck it wants without providing compensation to those adversely affected by it) decided not to go through with the flight that Liz and Cathy were scheduled to take.

Liz's daughter Katie, who was finishing up a year of teaching in Dalian, fortunately knew the correct time of her mother's originally scheduled (and Simon's actual) arrival. This saved us from a day-early trip to the airport. And Katie had already arranged a driver for the trip back from the airport at this time, and she was nice enough to go with us to get Simon, even though she had to go back to the airport the next day.

All these confusions aside, the trip was a really good one. We spent Wednesday with Simon and ended up going to this one park whose attraction is a large hill with a metal slide coming down it. The ads called it "largest land slide" or something; it was basically like a waterslide but with no water. So we rode the chairlift to the top - this involved the slightly-harrowing passage over a highway with somewhat hokey-looking safety nets over where the lift and slide went over. They take your picture as you get to the end of the chairlift ride and then try to sell you it. Alison and I are pretty much in the habit of buying no such things, but Simon in his first day insisted on getting one. Anyway, for the slide down you ride a plastic small-wheeled seat with a stick to operate the brake. It was pretty fun, though in retrospect I would have liked to be less chicken and have more faith in the engineering of the slide's banking and such. I think though that I may have some cause to be cautious; this is, after all, the country where the "ground" of most electrical sockets seems to be attached to nothing, and where we have newly poured cement at the bottom of our stairs, and someone put a brick in the cement to act as a support for the plank that was placed as a bridge over the wet cement; now that the the cement has dried there is a brick sticking out of it, just waiting to trip somebody.