Kung Hei Fat Choi!

This weekend, we are experiencing our first Chinese New Year in Hong Kong as we welcome in the year of the dog! We have learned a few very important things:

The major tradition that ex-pats must quickly study up on is the practice of Lai See, which is the giving of money in red envelopes to a variety of people to wish them good luck and good fortune in the new year.  Anyone who regularly provides you a service including doormen/women and taxi hailers at apartment buildings, security guards, any regular hair dressers or manicurists, for example, should be given Lai See (money in a red envelope).  Traditionally, you also give to people at work or in your personal life who are younger and/or unmarried.  In fact, Nate’s HR department actually gives packs of the red envelopes to all managers with the expectation that you put money in envelopes and give them out to your direct reports, those in a lesser positions than you, and those who are unmarried. (Can you even imagine the legal nightmare this would create in the US?!  Sure, I’ll just hand out my personal money in whatever amounts I determine appropriate to a whole bunch of employees while at work!  It takes some getting used to.) There are A LOT of rules to follow with Lai See in order not to offend people, including: 

• All money given must be new, crisp, perfectly flat bills.  Coins and older, wrinkled bills are very offensive.  The lines at the banks leading up to the new year are massive as only certain banks give out freshly printed money at specific hours.
• There can only be one bill per envelope.  If you want to give someone $200 HKD, you would give 2 envelopes each containing a $100 bill. 
• Nothing can be given in 4s, as 4 means death in Chinese culture.  Do not give someone 4 envelops, $40 or $400...you get the idea.
• Envelopes must be presented and accepted with two hands. Actually, this is a the case with all items in Chinese culture, so at least this one I'm used to!
• There is an emphasis on older people giving to younger people, so you may not have your child hand an envelope to anyone.  This is a tough one for young kids as the envelopes are typically beautiful and shiny!  In general, you give "big to small," "old to young," and "senior to junior.”
• When presenting the envelopes, you can say, Happy New Year (Kung Hei Fat Choi) and/or wish them good health (Sun Tai Gin Hong!)
•  For a two week period, you should always keep red envelopes on you with a variety of dollar amounts so you are prepared regardless of who you run into. 

Other than Lai See, here are some additional things we've learned: 

• During New Year's weekend, dragons are walking the streets!  It's not quite Game of Throne's style much to my disappointment, but they are beautifully made, red and yellow dragons carried underneath by about 10-15 people per dragon holding sticks.  In most apartment buildings, you can opt in to have the dragon visit your apartment. Apparently, when you let them in, the dragon runs through every room in your entire house and then you are supposed to feed it lettuce, which it them regurgitates and spits out.  I am still googling to try and understand the precise background on this, but what I do know is that this whole home invasion is supposed to bring good fortune!  Unfortunately we won't be here that day, but I think this would have been a pretty hilarious site with a paper dragon carried by a ton of people throwing half chewed lettuce all over your apartment. We must plan around this next year!
• The whole city gets crazy busy in the weeks leading up to the new year and then completely clears out.  Traditionally, Chinese people will spend this 4 day period with their families, much like Americans would for Thanksgiving.  Chinese people travel home and the ex-pats, which make up 30% of the HK population, take advantage of the long holiday by jetting off somewhere.  Hong Kong ex-pats leave here for holidays in Europe, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and a host of other cities around the world.
• Kumquat trees are a big deal for Chinese New Year, as are tangerines and oranges.  According to an online food ordering service here, (legit enough, right?) this is for a couple reasons.  First, the color symbolizes "gold" which warrants presence in a home. Secondly, in Mandarin, the word, "tangerine," sounds similar to "luck" and the word, "orange," sounds similar to "wealth."   I made sure to buy a beautiful kumquat tree in a green ceramic dragon pot at the flower market in Mong Kok a few days ago.  Nate's parents are visiting from Tennessee, and they were kind enough to indulge me when I wanted to go to the flower market not only days before Chinese New Year, but also on Valentine's Day, one of the busiest days of the year there!  We had both kids with us, so in addition to navigating the crowds with two strollers, Nate's Dad was fighting the foot traffic and the MTR (metro) craziness with my ceramic potted kumquat tree in hand!  In retrospect, this may have been cruel.  On second thought, at least I gave him a heavy weapon to jab people with as you generally just get walked into constantly in Hong Kong!  Even with the crowds, the market of flowers upon flowers for blocks was just beautiful.   

So, we've got a kumquat tree, we've got tons of fresh crisp bills in envelopes ready for Lai See, and we even purchased a conglomerate of red and gold CNY decorations that I hung around the apartment with Isla. Tonight, there are fireworks and then tomorrow we will visit the famous Lam Tsuen wishing tree.  While I'm quite sure we are mis-translating some customs and still have a lot more to understand, I'd say we've at least got a few parts of this holiday down! 

One Step, Two Step, Three Step, Four...x1000!

I recently went to my post-baby medical appointment and was really looking forward to getting clearance to work out (at least officially - I’d already gone running twice and nothing seemed too broken).  I was happy to hear my, using Isla’s terminology, “Lady Gaga” had healed up nicely, but was warned that my abdominal muscles were actually torn and I needed to start physical therapy as soon as possible.

I’d so very much been looking forward to finally doing some of the amazing hiking around Hong Kong and figured that I didn’t need my abs intact too much for hiking, so I instantly planned back to back days of it!  Much like around the Hong Kong business and mid-level districts, the major theme of hiking around here is stairs!

First up was “The Twins,” where you hike two beautiful mountains overlooking the sea with a lush valley in between the two peaks.  I arranged for my friend, Meg to meet up with Maggie, my grad school buddy visiting, and me in the morning.  We hopped in a taxi and asked it to take us to the Parkview Apartment Complex, which is near the trail head.  Before we got all the way to Parkview, we saw the small trail map on the side of the twisty turny road and asked to get out. We hopped out on the side of the road, I tied the baby to me in a baby wrap, (after all she was now 7 weeks old and hadn’t been hiking yet. Total slacker!)  

From the road, we immediately started climbing up.  You must first summit over “Violet Hill” before even reaching the start of the hike.  It wasn’t until we reached the first summit that I realized we hadn’t even actually started The Twins hike yet.  Ridiculous. Leave it to Hong Kongians to describe a hike and then leave off the part where you have to summit 1 mountain before you can start the actual hike!  Then we went up. For a long time. The article I read said this hike, not including the first pretend peak, was 1200 steps.  That seemed about right.  Just stairs after stairs after stairs winding up. The view was amazing though and makes the stairs totally worth it!  Then stairs down, down, down.  Afterward, your knees mostly just feel like jelly. Exploring this area is the island is such a unique way to experience remote nature right alongside the bustling city. We met a few interesting people along the way, most of which stared at me for a bit and then did a double take and asked, “Is there a baby in there?!”  I’m not sure what else they thought I had in there, but Monroe definitely got some baby props for being adventurous that day!  She also gets some mad props from me for eating really well in the back of the taxi on the way back (yes, I breastfeed my baby in the back of taxis - this place is a far cry from the US in terms of child safety, but more on that in a future blog post!)  After some very chilly but sweaty hiking, we warmed up with some amazing Japanese ramen and beer.  It was the perfect end to a perfect morning!

The next day, the whole family and Maggie headed to hike Dragon’s back, one of the most famous hikes in the area, as the landscape across the top looks just like a jagged back of a dragon with views of the sea on either side.  We should have known better after doing The Twins, but again, we underestimated the hike to get to the hike.  Isla weighs a solid 35 pounds now so this pre-hike when she refused to walk turned out to be the biggest work out Nate’s gotten in in months!  The guidebook basically says to ride to the Chai Wan MTR (metro) station, then just walk through a cemetery and start hiking. I can see how someone would say this, but you actually have to climb about 8 flights up stairs up the vertical cemetery, then another long curvy one through the woods, then you get to a path that still isn’t the hike, but eventually leads to another path that leads to the hike. NBD, thanks stupid guidebook.  I learned my lesson again as Nate, Maggie and I all split one cliff bar across the next 5 hours.  I now know to add 2 hours, 500 stairs and 6 granola bars to every hiking plan in HK!  Dragon’s Back was beautiful and we didn’t even hike it on a clear day!  I can’t wait to go back (with lots of snacks and perhaps minus my 2 year old) and take in the stunning landscape again soon. 

Perhaps the most crazy part of this Dragon's Back day was our travel back home.  The hike just drops you out on a curvy, narrow road that winds down to the end of a peninsula at a beach called Shek-O, but where you end the hike, there is fast traffic and minimal sidewalk.  We didn't actually have a plan for how to get back, but when we saw a public bus coming, we didn't hesitate. Our rationale was that, where ever the bus was going was better than where we were as we could either get a taxi from down at the beach or get closer to an MTR station on the bus.  We quickly ran onto the bus and we couldn't believe what a wild ride it was.  We couldn't even make it to seats without falling over and gripping onto the bars for dear life as the bus accelerated quickly and then flew back and forth around the curves.  By the time we got to our seats, 2 of us had fallen over and Isla was laughing hysterically. The ride continued to be shockingly fast and curvy.  I remembered reading somewhere that if you chose to take a bus to Shek-O, you were, "taking your life in your own hands," as the article put it. I can now vouch for this!  We ended up back at an MTR station, tired and starving.  Luckily, there was a bakery inside the MTR station, so we gorged ourselves on some egg tarts before hopping back on the train.  

Truthfully, I’ve been missing Melbourne a lot lately, and discovering how and where to escape into nature brings Hong Kong up a notch in my book!  Now I just have to do all my PT exercises for my abs and knees so they they stay intact with the stair climbing insanity!!

 

 

Wild Boar...And Probably Also Wild Boar

Hong Kong it literally an urban jungle - crazy urban and actual crazy jungle. It is a tropical, forest-covered mountainous island that some wacky Brits in the 1840s decided was fine location to build one of the biggest cities in the world.  HK has 100+ more skyscrapers than the next biggest city by that measure.  We live in a 30 story building about 3/4 of the way up the mountain, surrounded by other buildings just as tall, it not taller.  Yet, much of the native wildlife still exists on the Hong Kong Island as well as on the other 260+ islands that make up Hong Kong.  We live two blocks from a zoo and park I take Isla to frequently.  It is a special combination of sounds every time I push her on the swing:  the sound of children playing at the park, cars rushing by on the overpass overhead, and then various kinds of monkeys screeching in the cages nearby!  Yet, the weirdest animal sighting by far happened a couple weeks ago when a wild boar wandered out of the woods and into the traffic circle in front of our apartment complex.  This guy waltzed past some taxis and proceeded to hang in the grassy area next to the building until the security guards chased him down the road (probably just to a coffee shop or nearby apartment complex!)  

This boar sighting occurred during the time my parents and sister, Alexa, were visiting.  My parents left a few days before Alexa, and I decided it was time for a more compete Hong Kong culture immersion for her.  I took her to this teeny tiny outdoor-only restaurant at the bottom of an ally and a stairway in Sheng Wan. I'd been wanting to eat here for months, but refrained while pregnant for fear of food poisoning, which is just a part of normal life here from time to time. 

The label, "restaurant," is being generous here - we're talking one guy sweating over a huge pot of...something, two small burners that resemble a Coleman camp stove, and a few buckets of various ingredients sitting on the ground outside.  There are about five plastic shared tables, where you eat right next to locals on very flimsy plastic stools with no back.  We were handed a menu that had Chinese characters along with what I believe was a very loose, partially accurate English translation.  Lex and I looked around at what most people were eating, which seemed to be noodles in various kinds of broth, most of which looked red.  We waved a woman over to take our order who looked to be about 90 years old.  It was quickly evident that she spoke no English at all, so we pointed to the menu and said "please" a lot.  She looked very confused and yelled at us a little until the man sitting next to me offered to order for us.  The man informed her that Alexa wanted noodles and vegetables and then told her I wanted noodles with chicken sausage.  She yelled something about tomatoes back for a while, so I just nodded yes to this and then she questioned the man incessantly about the chicken sausage as if she'd never heard of this before, despite it being on the menu in English.  Our helpful translator kept telling me she didn't understand about the sausage. I pointed to it on the menu again.  She threw her hands up and yelled what appeared to be her one English word, "TOMATOES."  I just replied, "yes please" and nodded again and she walked away.  Sometimes you are just never quite sure what you are going to get!  We were handed our bowls very quickly and we were happy to see they did look pretty close to what we ordered.  The noodles and tomatoes were great.  However, the "chicken sausage" looked like the most shriveled up hot dog I've ever seen.  The woman's staring and laughter when she put down my bowl leads me to believe either (a) they don't really even serve chicken sausage and this thing was just lying in basket on the floor near the stove for the past 2 years, or (b) It's wasn't really chicken. Given what I know about Hong Kong and China, and the wild animal I'd seen a few days earlier, I'd say there's a 50-50 chance I ate either cat or wild boar.  In all likelihood, it was probably "c," all of the above - 2 year old floor cat/boar sausage!  It was weird, but I'm really glad I finally fulfilled my dream of eating at this place, and, as an added bonus, neither of us got food poisoning!  I'll probably go back to eat there again, and I'll definitely order noodles with tomatoes, but I'll likely pass on the mystery meat.

The "restaurant." Your guess is as good as mine on it's name!