Tai Tam and a Camera

Ok peoples, I'm finally getting around to blogging about Hong Kong. Seriously, my procrastination of transferring travel journal entries to my blog is getting ridiculous! I will try to get you all updated about everything thus far both from the trip and the semester.


I arrived in Hong Kong Saturday morning around 9:30am. The night before was filled with goodbyes from everyone in Chiayi, followed by a 2am bus to the airport. It would be an understatement to say that I was tired when I arrived in Hong Kong! My plane landed at the airport near Lantau, which is about forty minutes from downtown. After landing, I proceeded to customs, which took quite a long time. There were quite a few planes that landed at the same time as mine, so there was a mass of people flooding to the customs line. After making it through customs, I took the airport train downtown Hong Kong. My stop was at the International Finance Center, which is the building that Batman jumped off of in the Dark Knight! Batman was absent this afternoon, so I continued on my way by taxi to Tai Tam.


Tai Tam is the area of Hong Kong Island where Mike Kersten teaches. It is outside of the city and is home to a lot of the foreigners that work in the city. It is a very ritzy area, I guess you could say the Malibu of Hong Kong. One thing that really struck me about Hong Kong is that it is like the San Francisco of Asia, it is very hilly! My taxi ride was a continuous up and down over the hills. The taxi ride from the IFC to Tai Tam was a trip with very stark contrasts: The IFC is right downtown, the hustle and bustle of the city, while Tai Tam is a more quiet area apart from the rich racing their sports-cars around the twisting roads. I had not envisioned Hong Kong as a place with such differing environments. I think my perception of Hong Kong as one very large city is probably the picture most people have in their minds when thinking about this city.

I arrived at Hong Kong International School around lunch time. I will be couch surfing at Mike's teachers apartment at the school while touring for the week. It is always nice to see a familiar face and stay with a friend while touring instead of a large hostel full of strangers. I am very thankful that Mike opened his home to me for the week so that I could have a comfortable place to stay while running around Hong Kong. After unpacking a few things and having some lunch, I was completely exhausted, so I took a nap. I had only about 3 hours of sleep the night before on the bus to the airport and I literally melt away without enough sleep.

Today (Aug 20) marked a year since arriving in Korea, so it was a reason to celebrate, what better way to celebrate Asia than to have German food? Wait a minute...yeah why not! Once I was recuperated from my lack of sleep, we took a bus to the Stanley area, which is located on the southern coast of Hong Kong island. This is still a very foreigner abundant area. We went to Murray House, which is an old Victorian mansion that has been relocated to this area and filled with restaurants. It is very strange for me to see so many Western buildings that have been a part of Hong Kong's history for over a hundred years. Coming from Korea where Westerners were not welcomed until about a hundred years ago, it is a stark contrast to the well established Western influence and legacy in Hong Kong. At Murray House, we ate at the German restaurant, where I had my first brat in over a year. It was pretty legit German food! Very strange to eat food that reminds me of family potlucks in Asia, but it was a nice way to connect my experience in Asia with my roots at home.


Early Sunday morning, I joined Mike and his friend Jose for a bike ride at 6am. It was my first bike ride in over a year, but I was determined to try to keep up biking up and down the hills. Oh my gravy! I am really out of shape! It was a gorgeous bike ride however and I really enjoyed seeing the area in a unique way. Tai Tam has such a beautiful mesh of green spaces and hints of urban modernism. We biked down to the beach and I was able to put my feet in the South China Sea. We had breakfast near the beach before biking back to the school.

We went to one of the local Lutheran churches later in the morning. It has been an interesting experience worshiping with so many different congregations in Asia, yet despite the geographical differences the message remains the same. After church, we went downtown Hong Kong to see the business sector of the city.

We walked by the IFC along with the Bank of China tower and the City Hall. As we were walking we passed by a lot of Filipino women sitting and eating together. Mike explained that these women work in the homes of the rich in Hong Kong as housemaids. They work for six days a week and receive Sundays off, which was why they were enjoying lunch together. Unlike other migrant workers that come to Hong Kong, they are never granted residency, even after they have exceeded the requirement of living in Hong Kong for seven years. Residency would help them be recognized as a contributing community of the city. It was an issue I had never heard of concerning Hong Kong and to learn about it while seeing the women enjoying their only time away from their work was very eye opening.

We passed the Hong Kong Mosque, which was just finishing prayers, on our way to Chunking Mansions. Chunking Mansions is a large building right downtown that is filled with a variety of mom and pop restaurants from all around the world. It was one of the coolest displays of the world coming together to share something that is very universal: FOOD! We ate at a Pakistani restaurant, which had excellent chicken curry with naan. I had some strawberry flavored goats milk, which was very rich and tasty.


After lunch, Mike had to head back to HKIS to make lesson plans. My mission while still downtown was to find a camera. At some point while in transit between Taiwan and Hong Kong, my two month old Samsung camera decided to die. Once again, I was camera deprived. I went to the electronics street downtown, which has camera stores lining the streets. It was quite an experience again to camera shop in Asia. Unlike my last experience in Korea where I had to muster enough Korean to figure out the megapixels of the Samsung, I found that every salesman in these stores spoke English fluently and were able to answer every detailed question. I decided on a Nikon, which was the brand of my first camera that lasted me five years. Now I'm ready to take pictures of my adventures through this city!