Mar 28 2005 - Tokyo, Japan - "Crouching Tourist, Hidden Dim Sum,... and the Land of the Rising Costs of Sushi"

Okay, time for Act Three - Tragedy strikes our traveller...

Note: This is a long one, sorry.

HONG KONG:

After Australia, I took a quick 9-hour flight over to Hong Kong for a few days of good ol' Chinese fun. I arrived in Hong Kong tired and not at all sure of what to expect. I was amazed at how easy and inexpensive it was to get from the airport to my hotel, surprised to see Bank of America branches all over the city, and, later, dismayed at how difficult it was to find a place to eat in my neighborhood.

I stayed in Kowloon at a place called The Park Hotel, supposedly 3-stars, but I won't be recommending it to anybody. After I got settled and requested a room change (the one I was in had mildew growing on the shower curtain and the walls, the bath wouldn't drain, and the windows were completely blocked by scaffolding so you couldn't really tell a big difference between day and night), I headed out for some dinner to a vegetarian Chinese restaurant recommended in my Lonely Planet guide and only a 5-minute walk from my hotel! It turned out to have been closed down. Then I walked around to try and find another place to eat that might have something like just plain noodles or a sandwich, but either the menu was confusingly written in English and therefore dubious or there was meat in everything so I finally ended up going back to the hotel for a recommendation. They suggested another veg. Chinese resto in the area that also turned out to be closed. I ended up eating at an Indian resto recommended in the Lonely Planet. So much for authentic Chinese. As for my impressions of the city that first night - it was a lot smaller than I'd expected. You always here of Hong Kong as this huge metropolis, and it is a big city, but everything is sort of built on top of each other so that getting from one place to another on foot actually doesn't take very long. The only time during my whole trip that I took a train was to and from the airport. Otherwise I was able to walk everywhere or took a boat.

Also, there was neon everywhere! I never noticed if there were street lamps or not because every storefront or restaurant or sign was lit up like it was their sole responsibility to light up all of Hong Kong. This definitely gave it more of that Hong Kong feel I was looking for.

The next day I was able to find another of the vegetarian Chinese restaurants listed in my guidebook and I was really excited to finally get to try some Chinese food in China. As it turns out, there are quite a few vegetarian Chinese restaurants around HK because, according to the Lonely Planet, even meat-eating Chinese people like to go veg. every once in a while because they think it's good for their health and because a lot of them are Buddhist and they want to get in good with the Big Guy.

Here is where tragedy struck: I go to sit down at the table and I needed to scoot my chair closer to the table. I grab the chair seat and pull it forward and start to sit down. Unfortunately the chair was slightly broken and the chair seat was not fully connected to the front chair legs and my finger slipped between the chair leg and the seat as I sat down and was crushed between the two parts. At first I just thought, "Ow, that really %$^#*@ hurts!" But then my finger continued to swell and turn red throughout lunch. After lunch, as I was blowing my nose, I heard and felt my finger go "POP!" Even more "ow!" Now I was pretty sure that I had broken my finger - of course, in typical Miki-style. I can never break a bone when I'm doing something cool like snowboarding or hiking a mountain. No, I only break bones when I'm doing something really non-strenuous like walking down an escalator or blowing my nose. Great. So I went back to the hotel hoping that my new room was ready and that they had a hotel doctor who could look at my finger. When I got back to the hotel, not only was my new room not ready, but when I told the guy that I thought my finger was broken and could he please have some ice sent to my room, I got absolutely no reaction. A few minutes later, as I was about to return to my gross room to wait for my new (slightly less gross) room, I mentioned that I thought my finger was broken again. I thought that maybe the guy had not understood me, so I as I told him again that I thought my finger was broken I made the international sign for "I think my finger is broken", that is, I mimed breaking my own finger. The hotel guy looks right at me and says, "Yeah, I know, " and goes back to typing whatever he's typing. So I go back to wait (for 3 hours) in my old room for my new room and then iced my finger for the rest of the night. I ended up going to sleep around 6pm just because there was nothing else to do. Project for the next day: go the American consulate to look for sympathy and a doctor.

The next morning I was all pumped to get to the American consulate, where I imagined some nice middle-aged American woman would look at me with kind eyes and put her arm around my shoulders and say, "You poor thing, don't worry, we'll get you an appointment with the Consulate doctor right away." So I walked down to the ferry docks and hopped on one of the famous Star Ferries to go from the part of HK I was staying in to go over to HK Island, where all the governement and business offices are. The boat ride was pretty cool and you could see all the buildings on the other side of the harbor. The ferry ride, upper deck, only cost about 25 cents. The best bargain in HK. So long story short, there was no nice American lady to greet me at the consulate with an immediate appointment with the consulate doctor, but, at least, the security guard at the entrance was very nice. I eventually asked another American in the waiting room if she lived in HK and if she knew of any English-speaking doctors. She was super nice and got me an appointment with her doctor for that afternoon, so I thanked her profusely and headed over to the doctor's office. The doctor didn't think it was really necessary to do an x-ray as the treatment would be the same with or without an x-ray and confirmed that I had probably fractured my finger. I was told to just tape the broken finger to the finger next to it as a kind of splint and that it would take about 4-5 weeks to completely heal.

I spent the rest of the day sightseeing in Hong Kong Island. I went to the top of Victoria Peak. Then, I rode the world's longest escalator, which was actually pretty cool. They put this escalator in to cut down on all the traffic that was occuring with all the people who live high on the mountain that is HK Island. So the escalator runs vertically along the mountain and goes in the down direction from about 7-10 in the morning and then runs up the rest of the day. So I took the escalator all the way up and walked back down, passing some open markets and Starbucks. HK was a lot like any other big city, but it was also very different. There are definitely times when you can see how this city is straddling the first and third world. On the one hand, the Central district is full of huge skyscrapers, the Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton hotels, a huge freeway overpass system for pedestrians, Louis Vuitton and Valentino shops, etc., but then you walk maybe 10 minutes east of this area and there are the huge old apartment blocks and shops piled on top of shops piled on top of shops and the number of other foreigners in the area becomes noticeably smaller.

The next day was my last full day and I had been debating whether to take the 1-hour ferry over to Macau, the former Portuguese colony handed back over to China in 1999, or to explore the islands surrounding HK. In the interest of time and money, I decided to visit some of the other islands that make up Hong Kong. First I visited Lantau to see the 26-foot outdoor bronze Buddha at the Po Lin monastery. The first thing I noticed was how small the seats in the bus were. I'm definitely of average height by American standards, but the rows were so close together that even my knees were touching the seat in front of me. It was really funny to see these two really tall German guys trying to squeeze into the seats. They were sitting in a row with three seats, so they both had to turn sideways with their knees touching in front of the middle seat so that they could sit "comfortably" on the bus. The Buddha itself was interesting, but to be honest, in my opinion, once you've seen one giant, outdoor, seated, bronze Buddha, you've seen 'em all and this one was only slightly less interesting than the other one that I've seen in that this one was built in the 1960s, so it makes the effort just slightly less impressive due to its newness. It was cool to be able to eat at the Buddhist (read: vegetarian) monastery restaurant. I had noodles with 3 different kinds of tofu. The one that turned out to be my favorite was also the one that looked the most unappetizing, I swear, the sauce looked like it was made from blood and soy sauce. But it was tasty and chewy! The most interesting part of the visit for me was seeing what the comparatively uninhabited island looked like. It's hard to imagine anything natural in Hong Kong because there are so many buildings and so many people just everywhere, so visiting these islands was a way to imagine what Hong Kong must have looked like before the 20th century hit. On Lantau and Cheung Chau, there are people who live there, but the towns are small and there is lots of greenery and natural landscape to see. The other island I visited was Cheung Chau. Although the main town that you arrive in by ferry seemed to have a lot more people and was more bustling than the town where the ferry lands in Lantau, there were way fewer foreigners here than in Lantau. I definitely got more stares here. But it was also a more residential place and had a stronger neighborhood feel - like everyone walking around knew each other, which they probably did. I did half the walking tour outlined in the guidebook and took some interesting pictures. Unfortunately a lot of them were out of focus, I don't know why. Probably one of the most interesting sights on the "tour" was the fishmonger's stall in the market in Cheung Chau. It looked like what most Western aquariums would look like. There were several kinds of shellfish that I had never seen before. And, did you know that clams can swim?? I didn't until I saw it happen at this fish stall! And they're really fast too! I literally stood there open-mouthed, shocked at how much different stuff there was at this fish stall... I think the fishmonger thought that I was a little slow.

That night I arrived back in Hong Kong with just enough time to do a little of the famous HK shopping. I headed to the Night Market, so called because it's only open at, you got it, nighttime. There my coolest purchases were a bargained down to $3 camera case for me and a Beijing Olympics t-shirt 3 years early for my dad. I considered buying a fake desiger purse, but then I thought that I'd better not just in case I got stopped at customs... more on that in a minute. That was pretty much it for my HK trip. I spent the rest of my time there packing up that night and getting to the airport three hours early the next day, I didn't want to take any chances in leaving HK and getting to my home away from home, Tokyo.

TOKYO:

Okay, so here's the customs story: I get to Tokyo with my brand new Japanese passport with not a stamp in it, that I got in France last year from the Japanese consulate. So, here I am, my Mexican-looking self, extra tan from my month in Australia, hair extra frizzy from the five hour flight from HK, and I walk right up to the "Japanese Citizens" line at passport control. I got some confused looks from the passport ladies when I said, "English please." Then, when I got to customs, a very nice young Japanese woman, whose broken English was definitely better than my broken Japanese, proceeded to ask me very nicely if I minded her looking in my bags. She went through everything, even my dirty laundry, to see if I had anything bad, and asked me specifically if I had any counterfeit items - luckily, I did not. So that's a lesson to you all, if you're ever flying from HK to Tokyo and you look Mexican but are really Japanese-American but you got your passport in France where you don't live and it has no stamp showing that you were ever in Japan and you actually live in the United States, don't buy counterfeit designer purses, because you might get stopped. And frisked. I think her actual words were, "May I touch your body?" Hahahaha. I love my people.

But, seriously, folks, Tokyo was great. I got to see my aunt's new condo, where you can see Mt. Fuji from the balcony on a clear day. I also got to practice my Japanese with my completely non-English-speaking grandmother. That was an adventure that I think scared her more than anything. Haha. I couldn't stop laughing at how bad my Japanese was, especially after I had had a few minutes to think about something I had just said to her and realized that it completely wasn't what I had meant to say and made absolutely no sense. She probably thinks that her poor American granddaughter has special learning needs. In the end I was only able to spend 3 full days in Japan because I had to come home early for a family emergency which is now all sorted out and taken care of. But I had fun while I was in Tokyo and it definitely confirmed that I want to live in Tokyo again someday. Next time I'm there, hopefully it'll be for a while and you can all come visit.

So now I'm back in California, searching for a job that won't suck my will to live, and living off the memories of my month and a half adventure. Hope you're well and planning your own adventure. Can't wait to hear the stories!

Anyway, as the cartoon says, that's all folks!!

-Miki :)