Monday Night, Tuesday Day, Tuesday Night, Wednesday Early Morning

May 1, 2007

(Talking about Monday night in Hong Kong)

So pretty much right now we are all on the train waiting to leave from HK to Guangzhou. It’s actually pretty cool. I’ve never been on a train before. I’m sitting next to Lance while Mindy/Kaya and Uncle Jerry are up and over an aisle and Dad is sitting across the aisle from us talking to some random little Chinese lady. He got the odd numbered seat (we had nine and he got the ninth) and so his seatmate is a stranger. You can see where the Hongs are sitting on our coach because on the luggage racks above us we have our giant suitcases and whatnot whereas the rest of the section has like one shopping bag or stroller, if that.

Yesterday, Monday, was pretty sweet. It was mostly for Dad’s benefit. I enjoyed myself, but it was more about him enjoying himself. (Yay! The train is moving now and I’m facing the right way!) Anyway, yesterday Dad’s friend came and picked us up. He had a car, which is a luxury in Hong Kong, but it was nice. He’s the bishop of the Aberdeen ward here. Pretty cool. Nice guy. Name of Cecil Lee. He and Dad worked in the mission home together for quite a while. He also grew up with Dad’s good buddy Jeffrey Chan, also a mission friend. I think they might have been companions for a while or something. AAH! I just spilled a bit of water on the keyboard!! I’ll just use my shirt… uh.. hope it’s ok…

Where was I? Oh yes. Cecil Lee took a half day off of work and took us around town for a while. I really wanted to see the temple and Dad wanted to see the mission home (also in the same building) but Cecil said that the traffic would be way too congested and that for our time, it wouldn’t be worth it. He took us around to some tourist-y places (some of which we had seen the day previous, but we feigned interest and surprise anyway. “ooh! Look at that statue! What’s it stand for? Cool!!” etc.) and offered his commentary on what he knew. The coolest part of his tour, or one of them anyway, was when he took us for a quick lunch at one of the best places in Hong Kong. It didn’t look like much but it was so busy that as soon as a chair opened up, they wiped it down with a rag and sat you at the table with 5 other strangers. The whole little place was packed… but man was it good! Just a simple noodle shop, noodles in a broth with some beef, but it was way good! I ate mine with a little bit of the cooked lettuce they brought out too. Dad had the same thing but he had a curry flavor. Cecil ordered us a local honey and grapefruit drink that was.. interesting. It was good for a grapefruit drink.. except I don’t like grapefruit. It’s sour. I pretended to drink it though. (that is, until I inhaled a bunch of the pulp and whatnot at the bottom when I was swishing it around. That put a damper on my enthusiastic spirit, although I just shoved more noodles in and forced a sweet, cheesy smile with my cheeks full of grapefruit noodles when the waiter walked by.) It’s a good thing I’m vaguely proficient with chopsticks. I thought I wasn’t bad until I get here and that’s all everyone eats with. If I didn’t know how to eat with them, I’d feel really stupid asking for a knife and fork for stuff instead. Every meal I’ve eaten so far, actually, has been with chopsticks.

Time out. I just remembered something I kept forgetting to mention about the traffic lights.. they’re really interesting because they make kind of a… beeping sound similar to the sound you hear when you cross the road here, except it’s a constant noise on these signals. There are so many lights that sometimes it’s hard to see if it’s red or green, so the pedestrian light signals make noise instead. Every traffic signal has a speaker attatched to it also. When it’s red, and you can’t walk, it makes a slow tocking noise, and when it’s green and you can walk, it goes faster. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the beeping noises in Catchphrase. The slow one is not quite as fast as the regular noise in the game but the next fastest one is similar. BTW, the people drive like crazy here. It’s a million little streets like make a maze and they all move at 50 mph within inches of each other with their right hand drive vehicles and yet everyone is perfectly calm and I haven’t seen one crash yet. It’s incredible!! Dad just clutches the handle and slides around when we hit the corners.

Ok, back to yesterday. When Cecil said a quick meal, he wasn’t kidding. Everyone in there was eating SO fast. Think 50 people eating ramen noodles with chopsticks racing each other on steroids. Or something like that. It’s an incredible skill. Dad and I were trying to catch up but all we succeeded in doing was flipping the broth all over everything when we slurped the noodle instead. Dad had little drops of the highly noticeable curry broth sporadically on his khaki pants that he noticed as he was leaving. It was funny.

After lunch, we just went around to some places we saw yesterday, like the statues, Stanley Market, and then back to Aberdeen. Dinner was with his family at his apartment, a modest but delicious meal. I’m still thinking about it. I wish I could cook like that! The view from their apartment was amazing, too. It overlooked the harbor and at night when all the lights started going on it was beautiful! To think that a few thousand people actually had the same view was a crazy thought.

Bishop’s daughter Vanessa is going to "Especially ForYouth" in Provo this July, so they’re all going to come over on a trip. He might go to Yellowstone while she and her friends are at camp! I definitely want to meet up with them if/when they do. His wife told me that if I was here one more day she’d take me shopping. Oh, sweet travel gods! Alas. I had to tell her that we were leaving on the next day, the holiday (Labour Day.. one day holiday in HK on May 1 but a week in mainland China. May 1-7). She told me that she’d just have to go shopping for me instead. Yay! Now the question is.. what to get?!

I really wanted to send my missionary friend Caleb a postcard while I was here because I seem to be having quite a hard time getting mail to him in Samoa. In fact, I don’t even know if he knows I was going to China. I know that the HK postal service is one of the best in the world.. but then I couldn’t find his address anywhere and I didn’t have the internet to get it from!! So I guess I’ll have to mail it from Beijing or something.

Right now we’re passing some little shacks with banana trees and sugar cane out front. The dirt is really reddish. I think we crossed the border because the billboards have a lot less English than the ones in Hong Kong.

Here also is the weird comparison of brand new, high technology facilities right next to like the ghetto slum buildings with laundry hanging out the windows. There’s so many people that land is at a premium. HK especially.

Oh man. Uncle Jerry keeps checking with everyone to make sure we have money to give Uncle. He’s like really paranoid that we’re going to be dishonorable or something to the village elders. They’re roasting a big old $1100 pig for us for dinner. I think they decided for us that we were eating the pig.. but then I think we have the privilege of paying for it. Go fig.

Danny boy sure has been crying a lot lately. The plane was kinda bad but just now he screamed loud enough to wake the dead. I don’t even think MY lungs have the capacity for that much volume. Ah, the young.

Good grief! I always jump when another train comes on the track alongside outs. They’re both high speed trains going a billion miles an hour and when they’re within a foot of each other going opposite directions it creates like a vacuum between the two and it makes a quick sucking noise and they pull slightly towards each other. And I’m by the window. Oh baby.

I’m sick of filling out all of these little cards that you have to do whenever we go anywhere. Coming into HK, out of HK, into China, probably out of China, into the hotel, out of the hotel, into the bathroom, out of the bathroom…. Ok, not so much that last part… but just about.

Off to the station! I’m going to check my bags and make sure everything is in order. We should be getting to the station relatively soon. It’s a two hour train ride. I’ll post more after the village experience… or when I can find free internet, for a change.

(Tuesday Night in China)

Now we are at our hotel. It is in Kaiping rather than Taishan because there aren’t any hotels in Taisan (or Toi-Shan, depending on how you pronounce/spell it.) Man, am I glad for that. This hotel is SO NICE! It’s a five star hotel with a tennis court and spa… it has ashtrays randomly and the sand in them is raked regularly and then they stamp it with the hotel’s symbol. The view is great and overlooks a river, but the pollution is really really really bad in China and here is no exception. In fact, the smog is so bad that it looks really foggy/cloudy everywhere. As I look out the window right now, I can’t see anything but smog. I can barely see the mountains in the distance and the buildings all look hazy. It’s unfortunate.

When I got off the train, I lost my purse. It was hooked over my shoulder on top of my other bag straps and the bottom bag was really heavy. When I leaned against a counter type thing to wait for everyone, my purse was resting on the top of it, and when I left, it slid off my arm and sat on the countertop and my other bag was so heavy I didn’t notice the weight difference. I got all the way to the tour bus before I realized it was gone and then everyone was like “oh she’s a goner” and I was even more miserable because then they treated me like I was even younger and more inferior to them than before. Blasted… anyway, I ran in and dove through the literal hundreds of people at the station (today is the first day of the [week]long holiday. Let’s just say I have no doubt in my mind that China has millions of people) and ran up 2 flights of stairs and passed 2 escalators en route to sprinting the last section of hallway. Luckily, it was still there, hiding behind a decorative like banister head thingy but still in plain sight. We were the last train to arrive on that platform so no one else had been through AND we were the last of our entire train to unload and assemble.. so I was lucky. No one else had been through there after us. When we left that area and went into the main one, oh boy, there were the people.

Then we rode a bus for a while, had a weird lunch, rode the bus even longer, watched a guy make a 3^rd lane on the shoulder of the highway, watched some guy get out in a traffic jam (there was an accident and the traffic was already high due to the holiday) to take a potty. He stopped his car, jumped over the rail, tripped, fell the rest of the way down the empty hole/canal/ditch thingy, clambered back up, started to pee, and then traffic starts moving again while his car just sat up on the freeway, parked and motionless. Hehehe. It was funny.

Meanwhile, random truck drivers’ wives waved at Kaya and Danny. You don’t really see babies here, due to the one child rule, and especially not Caucasian babies at that. Kaya and Danny really have been novelties. People stop and talk at them, smile, move their little arms, even take pictures. These truck drivers’ wives were no different. Even across the highway they were smiling and waving at them.

This hotel is sweet though. (The name is weird though.. some places it’s the Ever Joint Hotel, which reminds me of eternal marijuana or something, and other labels and flyers have the Pan Tower International Hotel on them instead. It’s got those fancy flags all out front with a fountain in the middle when you drive up. Wowsa.) Anyway, we got free slippers (like the ones all the Asians wear when they’re at home just being comfortable—Americans don’t really seem to do that) for both dad and I, free toothbrushes, toothpaste, razors, soap, etc. for both of us, our own personal safe, a big ole closet with a thick door, great view, down comforters (on hard beds again, which is weird, but I’ll get used to it) and thick towels. I want to go play tennis later but I have a few problems.. 1) no racket, 2) no one to play with, and 3) no time to go play. Dang it. I’ll have to include a picture of our room with one of these blogs.. Later I’ll make a slideshow and movie for sure so we can watch that too. Anyway, we go meet up with Uncle and Larry again in about 30 min so I’ll post the pics later.

(Wed Morning About Tuesday Night)

It is now 6:30 AM here. I keep waking up at about 5:30 every morning. Jet lag still kinda is kickin in. I'm bummed cuz this is the nicest hotel we've been in but we get to stay here the shortest amount of time. Last night was crazy. We had a 15 course banquet meal in the fanciest room in the best restaurant in the area, and people treated us like celebrities. I'll back up.

Larry and Uncle and his wife met us at the hotel. Uncle Jerry then had a private meeting with Uncle to decide how much money to give the ancestors and how to pay for the banquet and stuff and then we met back up around 6 for dinner. When we got to the room, they opened the double doors, and it was like a movie or something. There were about 60 people in the room and they all jumped up and started clamoring for our attention... they were waving and smiling and saying hi and stuff... they like pushed towards us like a pack of something. Mindy and I looked at each other and were like aaaahhh this is weird!! Neither of us spoke Chinese.. but Dad and Uncle Jerry were having a great time. We were like celebrities for the night. I had to be careful because when i stood up to get something or something, the whole room would stop talking and look at you like you were about to say something important or something. I just sat for the most part unless they were distracted in which case I slid to my feet and ran to where i wanted to go. They took all these pictures and shook my hand a bunch and they're putting us in the Hong Magazine and the Taishan newspaper and stuff. Sweet! When we left, they followed the bus out and were waving their little kids' hands and stuff at us. It was really quite interesting. I guess if you look at it from their point of view... If your dad or grandpa was my great uncle, it would be your grandpa's sister's sons coming from America to pay for a 15 course meal and then to visit the ancestors and stuff.. yeah, that could be a pretty big deal.

Today is the village and the ancestors... and the pig roast. Geez.

I gotta go shower. My pics are uploading and I'll add them when they're done.. if they ever get done. They're taking forever cuz there's so many.

( I hope I push the right buttons... everything is in Chinese on my command buttons so yeah)

wee the beach

In front of the statues on the south hong kong end of things.. repulse bay

This is a giant 2000 person capacity floating restaurant in the harbor. They say the food isn't that good but the decorations and stuff are excellent

The sampan ride

Houseboats/fishing boats in the harbor when we were on the sampan

Victoria peak.. notice the smog from China's pollution.. not fog

Dim Sum!

One of the many places that just sold food out on the street

Noodles we had with Cecil for lunch. They were amazing. No wonder they were one of the busiest places in hong kong! Don't look like much, but man, they were good. The beef was so tender i could have eaten it with a spoon (but i was too busy trying to wolf it down with chopsticks) and the broth was tasty. Mine were the plain rice noodles and dad's were the curry.

Us at the train station with our guide Matthew

Train ride from HK to guangzhou (Guangzhou is like the economic powerhouse of China!)

This was our lunch when we got off the train in china. Half of it looks normal.. but don't be deceived. The only normal thing was like the rice. Egg custard, some root, fungus... weird..

Babies and their moms and us on the bus ride to Kaiping to the hotel

A glimpse of our hotel lobby (the ever joint hotel.. weird name.. no one knows what it means.. i don't care, it's still an amazingly nice place)

Outside our hotel

Uncle and his wife meeting Danny

Some random signal tower they put up for a scenic view for tourists.. it didn't get visited as much as they had hoped.. but still cool. this is like 1/8 of Taishan. It's a small town of a million.

I'm not used to my shrimp staring at me

Cousins? Cousins' wives?

Banquet


hope that's enough pics for now!!

lauren