Morning Exercise in Belchers Bay Park

     T'ai chi is what you see, starting around 8 most every morning in parks and public spaces around China and Hong Kong.  This morning I decided to walk across the street and check out the t'ai chi in Belchers Bay Park.  As soon as I found a bench I sat down and watched a dozen or so late middle-aged women doing the graceful choreographed traditional dance to recorded music that I used to watch last year on the apartment grounds in Shenzhen.  After the dancers finished I wandered through the park and watched assorted groups and individuals doing their t'ai chi and other exercises.  On the far side of the park I ran into a group of 30-40 mostly older people going through an exercise routine.
     After I'd been watching this group for a few minutes a pleasant woman named Grace came over and introduced herself and invited me to join in.  Why not, I thought, and accepted her invitation.  She led me over to the older gentleman I'd already discerned was their leader and introduced me to him, a Mr. Lee.  Several others then introduced themselves and had me come and stand by them so they could tutor me.
     I went through the rest of their exercises with them for the next half-hour or so, with lots of eager hands-on help from the people around me.  Some of the stretching, squatting, lunging, balancing, rotating and resisting moves felt familiar.  Some were unfamiliar.  For example, we spent quite a few minutes bending, pinching and working over fingers and their joints (to keep the hands in shape for calligraphy, I suppose).  We applied pressure to both sides of the the jaw with the hands and slid them slowly up toward the ears.  We put each elbow into the palm of the opposite hand and then rotated the palm around the elbow--good for blood pressure, I was told!  The most unfamiliar activity was the repetitive slapping of limbs that I've observed Chinese people doing so often.  We slapped the arms in a couple places, the armpits, and then the calves, knees and thighs.  One of my mentors came over several times and showed me how I needed to do it harder (ouch!), otherwise it's no good, he said.  I assume this activity is to help blood circulation.
     After we finished the exercises, I chatted with the 5 or 6 people who'd introduced themselves to me.  I learned a little bit about them, and they asked me how long I'd been in Hong Kong and if I live nearby, as they all do.  They encouraged me to come back again, maybe even tomorrow, as they meet there every morning at 9.  They told me that there are several others from abroad who come.

     I asked to take a picture of those who were still there just before I left.  Here they are.  The woman on the far left, Janey, was very kind and attentive to me.  Next is Ellen whose family was originally from Taiwan, she said.  Mr. Lee, the leader, is in the light gray sweats.  I didn't meet the man in the brown sweater--he was getting advice from Mr. Lee after the regular exercise session ended.  Elizabeth in the quilted coat said she grew up in Hong Kong, lived in Calgary for 35 years, and now is back in Hong Kong taking care of her 92-year-old mother.  On the right is Shiva, who came to Hong Kong from Nepal 20 years ago and owns a restaurant just down the street from our apartment.  He was very friendly and insisted that I bring my husband to come eat at his restaurant sometime, which we'll do.
     I ran into Ellen on Belcher Street late this afternoon on my way home from a walk.  She saw me first, called out my name, greeted me with a big smile, and told me that she'd just picked up some prints she'd had made of the photos she'd taken this morning at the same time I'd taken a few pictures.  She handed me a set of 3 prints and said she hoped she'd see me tomorrow morning.
     What a friendly introduction to the neighborhood from lots of new people!
     And I just checked:  no bruises tonight from the arm and leg slapping, thanks to all the help showing me how to hold my hands correctly.

Cantonese Spoken Here

     The few words of Mandarin that I learned last year when living in Shenzhen aren't very useful for communicating here in Hong Kong.  China has a handful of major dialects.  The dialect spoken in Beijing, Mandarin, is the official dialect of the People's Republic of China.  The official dialect in Hong Kong is Cantonese.
     The British returned the administration of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China 15 years ago in 1997, after its 99-year lease on the Hong Kong New Territories expired.  But even now after the handover, Hong Kong isn't exactly part of China.  It's called a Special Administrative Region of the PRC.  It has a separate government, a separate financial system (Hong Kong Dollars are used here instead of Chinese yuan), a separate legal system ( which affords certain freedoms not found in the PRC, including freedom of speech), and a separate official dialect, what they've traditionally spoken here, Cantonese.  Cantonese is actually spoken in many areas of southern China, including the city of Guangzhou (formerly known in the West as Canton), but the official language anywhere in mainland China is Mandarin.
     Even though people from various parts of China often can't understand each other's spoken dialects, the written language is the same, in theory.  However, Hong Kong uses what are called traditional Chinese characters and the PRC uses simplified characters.  When you walk down the street in Hong Kong and look at the signs, you notice that the Chinese characters have noticeably more brush strokes than the characters you see on signs in mainland China.
     Fortunately for me, English is the other official language in Hong Kong and many people speak English, a remnant of the British presence here for more than 150 years.  However, I've read that more and more Hong Kong schools are de-emphasizing English and instead are requiring students to learn Mandarin.  This reflects the growing amount of travel between Hong Kong and the PRC and the growing interdependence of their economies.
     I've started writing out a little cheat sheet with a few phonetic Cantonese words to carry in my pocket, so I can start practicing some basics like hello, goodbye, thank you and sorry.
    

View from the Window Over the Kitchen Sink

     I don't find this scenery uninspiring.  In fact, I've spent more than a few minutes looking at the handmade sign in the second window over from the right, wondering what it says.  We're 7  stories above the street, so it's not as if someone could walk by and read it.  Maybe it's not a sign, maybe it's a poem that's been posted for our enjoyment.  I should see if I can zoom in to take another photo and then have Terry ask one of his Cantonese-speaking acquaintances at work to interpret it for us.

Sunday Morning Walk

      I set out at 7:30 this morning to wander around the neighborhood and see what was happening early on a Sunday when things were fairly quiet.  It was another cool and gray day, a good one for heading up the hill toward Hong Kong University.  I climbed up 4 or 5 wide sets of stairs on Sands Street, walking between apartment buildings toward a dark green leafy canopy and what I thought was a park.  But there was no park.  Instead a tall wire fence barricaded the trees and a series of angled concrete slabs and giant drainage pipes among them.  An oversized sign warned of flash flood danger beyond the fence.  That reminded me of reading about heavy rains causing landslides that often claimed lives in the various squatter settlements on the Hong Kong hills in the not-so-distant past.  Being a product of the prairie--and feeling overly warm after only a few minutes of hill climbing on a damp morning--I had fleeting fond thoughts of flat land and gusts of cold, dry air right about then.
     Turning at the barricade there were more wide stairs heading uphill between more apartment buildings.  A little further on I looked down on the backside of an ancient temple, climbed more winding stairs and eventually came to a wide 4-lane road.  Clustered on the road were 8-10 serious bicyclists out on heart-thumping Sunday morning ride up the hill. I passed by the Jockey Club Student Village, a gleaming new complex hinting that I was getting close to the university.  This is the third time I've come across something related to the Hong Kong Jockey Club within the last day.  Yesterday I had walked past a Jockey Club  clinic and also a sports field, and when I mentioned this to Terry he commented that one of his business partners belongs to the Jockey Club.
     Reading online about this organization, it appears that the Jockey Club runs the betting on horse-racing, that it's the largest taxpayer and also the largest private charity donor in Hong Kong.  Here's a place where British and Chinese interests meet.  The English set up the Jockey Club for the amusement of the upper classes here in Hong Kong in the late 19th century.  The Chinese seem to have a greater-than-average attraction to gambling, which James Fallows has written about.  A couple days ago I walked through a newish arcade off Belcher's Street and noticed that the largest tenant was a race-betting outlet, with several windows for placing bets and a series of monitors replaying horse races.  The Jockey Club had done a good job making it appealing, judging by the intent faces staring at the screens and the lines to place bets.  Knowing now that this activity is supposedly generating tax revenue as well as funding community projects like the ones I'd walked by makes it seem less distasteful.
     Once I reached the Hong Kong University campus I walked past several solid blocks' worth of construction projects.  Finally the sidewalk disappeared into the dark recesses under a building.  I turned around and headed downhill, taking a series of steps, walkways and landings through some trees and down one side of a high-rise development and large multi-story shopping mall.  On one of the landings I watched a couple of elderly men doing their morning exercises, one rotating hips hula-hoop style and the other rotating his arms.  The incongruity of their healthful activity right outside a big KFC in the mall made me smile.
     Once down the hill I took a small side street past the curiously-named "Wonderland Nursing Home".  Terry says he's walked past at least 10 nursing homes close by our apartment.  I've only seen one other, "The Springfield".  (Who thinks up these nursing home names, anyway?)  These will likely be relocated after the subway line opens up.  This short side street connected with Queen's Road West, the first familiar street I'd walked on since setting out an hour earlier.  Queen's Road is the street Terry takes to walk to work in the Central area, and it's the street we'd currently take to go to the nearest subway stop about a half-hour's walk from our apartment.  I noticed a few people out wheeling suitcases and imagined that they were heading home today after spending the last week or so on their Chinese New Year break.  I wonder if tomorrow will be an especially grim Monday back at work here in Hong Kong, similar to what people in the U.S. feel after the Christmas holiday season is over.
     I turned the corner on Belcher's Street, the main street heading back toward our apartment.  More people were out than an hour earlier, a few buying newspapers, a few of them after food.  Some were sitting in tiny noodle shops having breakfast, some were buying fried breakfast breads to eat out of hand, and some were stepping into bakeries to get fresh egg tarts or wife cakes to take home.  An egg tart is barely sweet custard in a small individual pastry shell, and a wife cake is a hockey puck-sized pastry filled with winter melon paste, also mildly sweet.  I've had both and liked them. The ParknShop grocery store was open, and just inside one of the clerks was wrapping up a gift box of some treat that a customer was buying for a Chinese New Year present.  I noticed a poster in the window of this store encouraging people to ask for a sticker to put on their gift boxes in lieu of having them wrapped.  The sticker said "Save the Earth.  Use less wrapping paper" to make it obvious that the gift-giver hadn't been negligent.                  Finally I reached the Fortuneland Realty corner on Sands Street, where we turn to go to our nearby apartment.
     I hadn't taken along a map this morning so was relieved that in my hour of wandering I'd made a fairly neat circuit instead of getting turned around and lost in some rabbit warren of side streets. Getting a little lost will be a good adventure for another day's walk.
  
    
 

Change Is Coming

     The first afternoon I was here I took this photo of the map in Belchers Bay Park, the park that we can see from our kitchen window.  The green area is Hong Kong.  The light blue area at the top is the city of Shenzhen across the border in the People's Republic of China, where we lived last year.  The "you are here" red dot shows our Kennedy Town neighborhood on Hong Kong Island.  We are only a few blocks from Victoria Harbor, famous for its deep water and great views.

     Normally proximity to water in a densely populated urban area like this would mean high-priced housing.  But relative to other northern areas on Hong Kong Island, most residential areas of Kennedy Town are not exorbitantly priced.  Less than 20 years ago there was a slaughterhouse here that processed cattle arriving on the piers where you catch ferries nowadays, which I imagine didn't exactly lend a chic feel to this neighborhood.  But change is coming.  Construction started a year ago on a new subway line that will come within a couple blocks of this apartment.  When it's done in another couple years, most likely a lot of the old buildings here will come down, luxury high rises will replace them, and expats will displace many of the Chinese people who now live here.
     More circumstances measured in money...

     

Measured in Money

     Last March I spent a few days doing a lot of wandering around the Kowloon area of Hong Kong while waiting for our flight back to Minneapolis.  I remember feeling more and more overwhelmed and even sickened by all the retailing/banking/business activity just about everywhere I went.  It felt soulless and empty, and I was glad to leave it.
     On the flight over here last weekend, somewhere I read a native's comment on what she liked least about Hong Kong:  everything is measured in money here, she said.  That resonated with what I remembered feeling last March.  I thought of that comment again a couple days ago when I walked by this business pictured at right.  I should have crossed the street to see what exactly is displayed in the windows, but at the time I was just focused on the mocking name.
     One help for me in looking beyond the usual aspect of money in Hong Kong is a book recommended by our friend Colin Fong.  Gweilo is Martin Booth's memoir about living in Hong Kong as a child of a British civil servant in the early 1950's.  Booth weaves history and culture into his personal stories about places and people and adventures.  He writes, for example, about secretly exploring Kowloon Walled City, which his mother had told him was strictly off-limits because it was a well-known haven for the Triad, the Chinese mafia.  During the Communist revolution in 1949, not only did Nationalist Chinese flee to Hong Kong, but also Chinese gangsters.  Many of these gangsters enterprisingly set up opium dens and brothels in Kowloon Walled City, taking advantage of its being a virtual city state within Kowloon that was ruled by neither the British nor the Chinese.
     More later about Gweilo.

  

Here I Am in Hong Kong

The entrance to our apartment building.

     Terry met me at the Hong Kong airport just before midnight on Jan. 23.  A few days earlier the airport had set a new daily record for the number of flights in and out, but fortunately for me the lines were short and the crowds were sparse because I was arriving on Chinese New Year's Day.  It almost felt a little sacrilegious to be traveling on the most special holiday of the year for Chinese people.  Almost. I dislike wading through human thickets (what in the world am I doing in Hong Kong??) and I really dislike waiting in lines.  So arriving on a light traffic day seemed an auspicious beginning to my stay here.
     After a 25-minute Airport Express train ride and then a 5-minute taxi ride, we arrived at our apartment building in Kennedy Town on Hong Kong Island. Terry moved here in mid-December from the apartment where Leah and I had lived with him in Shenzhen, which is right across the border in mainland China from Hong Kong.  If he's not traveling in China, most of Terry's work is in Hong Kong these days.  He's able to walk to his office in about 45 minutes from the apartment.  Now while the weather is cool that's preferable to jockeying for a spot on a crowded bus, besides being great exercise.

     This furnished apartment is a 5th-floor walk-up.  I had been told that there are 125+ steps to get up here, but there are merely102.  The climb is not as arduous as I'd imagined.  The apartment is considerably smaller than the one in Shenzhen:  it has 550 square feet, and about 50 of that is a hallway between the living room and kitchen.  At left is our living room, which measures a cozy 8x11'.  The white space heater on the floor is our only source of heat, much appreciated especially the last couple mornings when the outside temperature has been around 40ºF.

     Our Shenzhen apartment had beautiful views of landscaped grounds and the bay.  At right is the nicest view from our new apartment, looking out the kitchen window more or less north/northwest over Sandy Bay, where you can just barely make out a few boats.  At right is a park.  I took this photo midday today.  Traffic continues to be light even though the Chinese New Year 3-day public holiday officially ended yesterday.  Many people take a week or even 2 weeks off for Chinese New Year.
  

     At left is the view across the street from our bedroom windows.  If you kept walking up the hill in this direction you'd come to Hong Kong University.

     This is the view looking down from our bedroom windows.  Note the double decker tram, which begins running between 4 and 5 a.m. and goes until 1 or 1:30 a.m.  See the bicyclist just ahead of the red taxis?  You don't see many of them here on hilly Hong Kong Island, where streets and sidewalks are narrow and congested and often have blind curves.
     Our apartment may be small and the views rather unremarkable, but it feels like home after just a few days.  And it's fun to be living with Terry again for awhile.