We had to leave our 5-star Dongguan hotel after just one night – very sad. I was in a big rush this morning to try and take advantage of the free, fast internet to a) update my blog, b) call home to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and c) call the airline to continue the quest to change Pollo’s ticket. However, I couldn’t access the blog website. Eugene had said that he’d tried the last couple nights and had not been able to either. It didn’t occur to me until I spoke to my parents later that blogspot.com may be restricted by the Chinese government. It’s so easy to forget, with all the industry and evidence of capitalism that we’ve seen so far, that this is still a Communist country with major restrictions of liberty and information. Of course, most of these cities are part of Special Economic Zones, where I guess more free press (and other freedom of information) may be allowed than elsewhere in the country.
Our 1.5 hour transfer today wasn’t very interesting scenery-wise, except for some great pictures of vegetable fields against a backdrop of huge industrial buildings. Sort of like bits of Watsonville transplanted to San Jose. Also, we saw orchards of fruit trees all hung with plastic bags. We imagined the bags were protecting the fruit, or hastening the ripening, perhaps? We arrived at the University in Guanzhou. There were lots of apartment buildings all around, with clothes hanging from the balconies as usual. Not many people, but a lot of big, impressive buildings. It was sunny for the first time since Sai Kung, and beautifully warm. I almost wished I had shorts on.
After the start, Pollo rode and I walked to the second pit, located halfway around the course (which was an oval of 4K on the curving university roads. On the way, I stopped and sniffed the air, trying to locate the elusive floral scent that I’ve smelled from time to time since we arrived in the country. It’s the most beautiful scent, but I can’t associate it with any particular flower. Anyway, I was standing and sniffing, and a young man on a bike stopped and said, “Hello.” I tried to ask where the smell was coming from, but he was definitely confused by my question. He asked where I was going and I pointed over to the mechanics’ area with the wheels. “Oh,” he said, “I thought you maybe lost.” I suppose I looked lost, standing there sniffing the air with a goofy smile on my face! I asked him if he was a university student, and he said that yes, he was studying at the College of Technology. After our brief conversation, he pedaled off on the very old bike he was riding, and I was left to reflect on the incredible hospitality and kindness of the Chinese people we’ve met so far.
The pit area was right next to a walled complex which was identified by a sign as a “Military Administrative Zone.” There were 3 snallish chow-dogs guarding it and barking if anyone got too close. The police here are omnipresent, but though they are stern, they are not unapproachable. Yesterday we saw them enjoying their lunch while guarding the course, after a truck delivered boxes of food.
One thing that keeps striking me about China is the cleanliness. The streets and sidewalks are absolutely spotless. Everywhere one goes, there are women (always women) sweeping up the tiniest pieces of litter into their makeshift dustpans. Despite all the problems one hears about, I imagine Beijing will be better prepared to host the Olympics than a lot of other big cities with infrastructure challenges. The level of volunteer (and paid) mobilization here is phenomenal for this cycling event.
Eugene was briefly in a break of 4 or 5 riders, and got second in an intermediate sprint…don’t tell the Danish guys, but I think he’s gunning for the points! Alberto was well-positioned to get in a break, but it didn’t look promising for one to succeed today. Everything was being brought back. For all that, when it came to the sprint, it arrived in a big bunch with no lead-outs, and Amaurys got boxed in again. However, his placing today (top 10) shows a gradual improvement…we still hope he can pull out a podium or even a win by the end of the week. Unfortunately Simon (the Hong Kong rider with Mengoni for this race) crashed with just over 2 laps to go, and bruised his knee and scraped his ear. Hopefully he won’t have any major soreness tomorrow.
The hotel was again close to the race start/finish, so the guys rode, and I walked, to the lobby. There we collected our bags (I am starting to wish I had packed much more lightly) and trooped up to the rooms. Lunch was in a canteen/dining hall (part of the university) a 5-minute walk away. Accustomed as I’d become to the delicious food at the hotels thus far, the cafeteria fare was a comedown. The only really yummy thing was the choy (I’m not sure exactly it’s name, but it’s a bright green vegetable with a few florets like broccoli, with tiny yellow flowers). That’s consistently delicious everywhere I’ve eaten it in China. Maybe that’s the secret to Chinese health. I have definitely noticed a lack of obesity here – or even chubbiness – compared to the U.S. There are 2 race organizers or officials who are fat; they wouldn’t even stand out in the U.S., but here they look absolutely enormous.
I wanted to go for a ride again, but Pollo’s agenda was a nap, and so without a riding buddy I resigned myself to catching up on internet stuff and washing some clothes (by hand in the sink). I asked in the hotel lobby about a washing machine, finally resorting to drawing a picture to get my point across, but was told there was none.
As we walked to dinner later on, I finally found the source of the elusive, lovely scent. It’s a bush with tiny white flowers. I’ll take a photo tomorrow when it’s light out, and try to find out what its name is.
We caught highlights of the race on local TV tonight, which was fun. Meanwhile, I cursed the slow speed of my internet connection as I tried to get my blog up online…but at the same time was thankful that the proxy server (showed to me by someone who shall remain nameless in case the Chinese government should find and nail him) allows me access to the blog at all.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Dongguan Guancheng (Stage 2)
I was sorry to leave Shenzhen so soon; I enjoyed the hotel and the bustling street life outside. But stage 2 is in Dongguan, so we boarded the buses at 8:30 and were soon en route. After a nearly 2 hour ride, during which the most notable sight was the impressive large-scale topiary in the road medians and verges, we arrived at the race start. Dongguan appears to be a very new city. The Dongguan Exhibition Center, where the race was centered, is a modern marvel of steel, glass, and concrete. At 10:30 in the morning, the very wide streets were very, very empty. The course was a short (4K) rectangle, and the streets connecting one side of the course to the other were closed to traffic, with police guards making sure the course was secure. There was something eerie about the modern aspect of the urban architecture, the perfection of the flower beds in front of the huge buildings, the emptiness of the streets, and the solemn police presence.
The race start had a different feel altogether. Although there weren’t crowds of people watching as there had been in Shenzhen, there was a company of little kids on bikes waiting their turn to lead the racers to the start line. These little tykes, about 4-5 years old, were all in matching suits and Santa hats, and had balloons tied to their matching blue bikes and Olympic ring flags attached to their handlebars. They were adorable, of course, but the most amazing thing was how well-behaved they were. They all waited stoically in their lines, hardly wiggling at all. When one little boy in the from row rolled forward about a foot, a woman came from the sidelines and spoke to him sternly for about 3 minutes. He blinked and nodded very seriously and scooted himself back to the line, and didn’t move out of place by so much as a whisker from then on.
When the starting horn blew, the racers streamed by on the sides of the children’s formation, and the race was on. Pollo and I went along one of the deserted streets to the other side of the course where the second mechanical pit was located, so we could offer a spare bike or wheels to any Mengoni rider who might need them.
I would have preferred to explore the city a bit, but everything looked so empty and lifeless, I wouldn’t have known where to walk. So instead I sat on the curb and wrote down some blog entries.
Eugene got in an early break of 4 that was eventually swallowed by the field. Then a pair of riders escaped and was away for a long time, eventually joined by one other. But this break too was consumed with just a few laps to go. When I saw Amaurys in good position with one lap to go, I got really excited because I think he can really compete with these guys in a head-to-head sprint. But unfortunately when the finish came, he was nowhere in the top 15. I guess there was no lead-out, so the sprinters in the front got swarmed by the whole peloton and Amaurys lost his good position.
The hotel was only a few blocks from the start/finish, so all the riders left on their bikes. With our friend Fasi’s help, I loaded our team cooler and all the gear on the bus and proceeded to wait for 20 minutes or so before they took off. We should’ve walked! When we got to the hotel, though, I was very impressed. This place was 5-star. The lobby had a huge aquarium with sea turtles, sharks, and fish swimming around. The elevators had beautiful stone mosaics on the floor, and rosewood panels. The rooms – wow! 12-foot ceilings, an extremely spacious and beautiful furniture. unch was ready. I decided to go easy because Pollo and I wanted to go for a ride after lunch.
We set off, first taking a picture of the hotel in case we got lost and had to ask someone how to get back! We were accompanied for the first few minutes by a couple Portuguese guys riding for the Macau team, but they were going shopping, so we parted ways at a main boulevard. A lot of the street signs have no English names at all, so we just followed our noses. The traffic here is a bit scary; many of the intersections have no traffic signals at all, so turning vehicles just push their way in. The honking and squealing brakes are intense.
We just rode around aimlessly, turning down an interesting alley here and there. We rode down a street that was all plant shops; there were orchids and poinsettias, mums and roses for sale. I liked best the bonsais, some of which were huge! I tried to ask the proprietor of one bonsai place how old one of the plants was, finally pantomiming a bent old person walking with a cane. She nodded, smiling, but couldn’t tell me how many years old it was.
When we got back to the hotel, we took in the view out of our 9th floor window. The number of construction cranes was really amazing. We could also see a plot of land – it looked a bit like a former mine, or a place that had begun to be cleared for a huge building but had been abandoned. It was planted everywhere with green crops in tidy rows. “Wherever there’s a bit of land,” murmured Pollo, “they plant something – anything.”
I had thought it would be nice to swim a bit in the hotel pool, as I haven’t had much exercise lately (and with all the great food, I fear I will be gaining quite a bit of weight!). But the water was so cold that I barely lasted 5 minutes. I couldn’t even swim crawl – the cold made it impossible for me to exhale under water!
Freezing from my cold swim, I jumped into bed to warm up, and was soon so sleepy that I didn’t even want to leave to eat dinner. Figuring it was about time to catch up on sleep (I’ve been skimping since we got here), I elected to stay in bed and enjoyed a nice, long rest. Thus ended my Christmas in China.
The race start had a different feel altogether. Although there weren’t crowds of people watching as there had been in Shenzhen, there was a company of little kids on bikes waiting their turn to lead the racers to the start line. These little tykes, about 4-5 years old, were all in matching suits and Santa hats, and had balloons tied to their matching blue bikes and Olympic ring flags attached to their handlebars. They were adorable, of course, but the most amazing thing was how well-behaved they were. They all waited stoically in their lines, hardly wiggling at all. When one little boy in the from row rolled forward about a foot, a woman came from the sidelines and spoke to him sternly for about 3 minutes. He blinked and nodded very seriously and scooted himself back to the line, and didn’t move out of place by so much as a whisker from then on.
When the starting horn blew, the racers streamed by on the sides of the children’s formation, and the race was on. Pollo and I went along one of the deserted streets to the other side of the course where the second mechanical pit was located, so we could offer a spare bike or wheels to any Mengoni rider who might need them.
I would have preferred to explore the city a bit, but everything looked so empty and lifeless, I wouldn’t have known where to walk. So instead I sat on the curb and wrote down some blog entries.
Eugene got in an early break of 4 that was eventually swallowed by the field. Then a pair of riders escaped and was away for a long time, eventually joined by one other. But this break too was consumed with just a few laps to go. When I saw Amaurys in good position with one lap to go, I got really excited because I think he can really compete with these guys in a head-to-head sprint. But unfortunately when the finish came, he was nowhere in the top 15. I guess there was no lead-out, so the sprinters in the front got swarmed by the whole peloton and Amaurys lost his good position.
The hotel was only a few blocks from the start/finish, so all the riders left on their bikes. With our friend Fasi’s help, I loaded our team cooler and all the gear on the bus and proceeded to wait for 20 minutes or so before they took off. We should’ve walked! When we got to the hotel, though, I was very impressed. This place was 5-star. The lobby had a huge aquarium with sea turtles, sharks, and fish swimming around. The elevators had beautiful stone mosaics on the floor, and rosewood panels. The rooms – wow! 12-foot ceilings, an extremely spacious and beautiful furniture. unch was ready. I decided to go easy because Pollo and I wanted to go for a ride after lunch.
We set off, first taking a picture of the hotel in case we got lost and had to ask someone how to get back! We were accompanied for the first few minutes by a couple Portuguese guys riding for the Macau team, but they were going shopping, so we parted ways at a main boulevard. A lot of the street signs have no English names at all, so we just followed our noses. The traffic here is a bit scary; many of the intersections have no traffic signals at all, so turning vehicles just push their way in. The honking and squealing brakes are intense.
We just rode around aimlessly, turning down an interesting alley here and there. We rode down a street that was all plant shops; there were orchids and poinsettias, mums and roses for sale. I liked best the bonsais, some of which were huge! I tried to ask the proprietor of one bonsai place how old one of the plants was, finally pantomiming a bent old person walking with a cane. She nodded, smiling, but couldn’t tell me how many years old it was.
When we got back to the hotel, we took in the view out of our 9th floor window. The number of construction cranes was really amazing. We could also see a plot of land – it looked a bit like a former mine, or a place that had begun to be cleared for a huge building but had been abandoned. It was planted everywhere with green crops in tidy rows. “Wherever there’s a bit of land,” murmured Pollo, “they plant something – anything.”
I had thought it would be nice to swim a bit in the hotel pool, as I haven’t had much exercise lately (and with all the great food, I fear I will be gaining quite a bit of weight!). But the water was so cold that I barely lasted 5 minutes. I couldn’t even swim crawl – the cold made it impossible for me to exhale under water!
Freezing from my cold swim, I jumped into bed to warm up, and was soon so sleepy that I didn’t even want to leave to eat dinner. Figuring it was about time to catch up on sleep (I’ve been skimping since we got here), I elected to stay in bed and enjoyed a nice, long rest. Thus ended my Christmas in China.
Shenzhen (stage 2) – Christmas Eve
We were up and out of the hotel by 9, to travel by bus to the stage start in Longgua (a district of Shenzhen, I think). Wilson had decided to stay to try to change his ticket to depart.
The 4 buses carrying all the riders, plus the container truck with the bikes, had a police escort all the way to the start. The drive was interesting – we saw lots of huge apartment buildings where it appeared to be washday on Monday, as every single balcony was hung with rows of drying apparel. It’s funny how the small, common things are sometimes the most fascinating to the foreign eye! The driving (which, incidentally, is on the right side of the road as opposed to the left as in Hong Kong) is much more chaotic and aggressive here in China. Our bus driver wore our ears out with loud, prolonged honking, and had to throw the brakes on violently a few times as cars cut in front of him.
The riders’ area at the start was a barricaded area with a tent for each team. I am getting more and more impressed by the organization of this event; while it’s true that there’s a lot of “Hurry up and wait,” the race organizers are doing a tremendous job of getting people and equipment from one spot to another with a relatively small amount of hassle and almost no error. Also, the rider area was secured by police, and legions of red-jacketed workers with “Longhua volunteers” logos stitched on their caps ran around lugging water, manning the Port-A-Potties, etc. It seems that there’s a huge amount of national, regional, and local pride.
The course was a nearly flat loop of 4 kilometers on the streets of Shenzhen Longhua. Once the racers were off, I wandered around for a bit to explore. I went into a bank to try and change Hong Kong dollars into Chinese yuan. I asked someone for an English-speaking clerk, and was led graciously from one person to another until someone who could help me was found. After so much helpful effort on my behalf I felt bad to change me mind, but the pageful of information I would have had to fill out looked so daunting that I decided to forget the money changing for now. Bigger establishments (like the massage place from last night) accept HK dollars anyway, and it would only be for small stuff that it would be useful to have yuan.
I continued to a big supermarket, thinking of buying some running shoes so I could do some jogging from time to time (there’s no time to go for a ride, and my legs and back are starting to ache from lack of exercise). However, I couldn’t find anything that fit me and had enough support for running. I continued through the department store-like aisles until I found the grocery section. This was a great adventure. The bulk food section had all kinds of mysterious, fascinating things. The rice was in huge, 4-foot plywood cubes. I saw 2-gallon jugs of peanut oil and soy sauce. I saw about a dozen varieties of honey from all kinds of different flowers I’ve never heard of (Matrimony Vine, Blessed Mother something-or-other, etc.). Amazing! The grocery also had live fish, but surprisingly a rather small produce section. Maybe this means that people tend to buy their produce from outdoor markets where it’s fresher.
I bought a kind of Chinese candy apple, which was pieces of fruit on a stick, all covered with a passionfruit-y crunchy candy. Then I wandered back to the race area to see the finish. Our Mengoni guys were doing fine; I saw Eugene covering some moves, and Alberto cruising near the front. (He was trying to get in promising breaks all day, but wasn’t lucky with the ones he picked.) Amaurys won one intermediate sprint, which he went for just to test his legs. He got boxed in the finish, but 3 guys had escaped just a few seconds off the front in the last half lap, so the podium was sealed anyway.
There were huge crowd of people watching the race, which was really cool to see. They were held in place by police tape stretched between cones, but nobody tried to push in to get a better view.
There was a guy selling roasted corn, and another guy (with a wheeled cart onto which was attached a crude brazier made of a metal drum) selling roasted sweet potatoes. We bought some of each (I got charged more than Pollo when I went back a little later to buy more…an interesting phenomenon that we’d already noted in the Dominican Republic, but I was surprised to see here where Pollo’s as much a foreigner as me; maybe it’s a blue-eyed surcharge).
After the guys had recovered for 15 minutes or so and changed their clothes, we got ready to go. There were still a lot of bottles of sports drink provided by the race (it’s called Pocari Sweat, a name that would create a big obstacle to its successful sale in the US, I reckon). I offered them to the crowd, which was staring from behind the barricade in interest at the post-race happenings. At first no one held out his hand to accept the bottled drink, and I wondered if I were offending the crowd by offering it, even if it was sponsor product. But, finally, one smiling face separated itself from the crowd and its owner held out her hand; once the ice was broken, more and more hands came out to accept the sports drink. But how different from anywhere else I’ve been, where there would be shoving and pushing and yelling. The Chinese spectators were mostly silent, and rather unsmiling, but I still got the impression that they were enjoying the spectacle of the race.
Meanwhile, some women dressed in ragged clothes were collecting the empty cardboard boxes that the drinks had arrived in, and the empty bottles as well. They looked completely thrilled with this unexpected windfall, and we helped them collect up the “garbage” before we left. This country strikes me as so efficient – light years from the wantonly wasteful United States. I know there are so many negative consequences, environmental and other, of the huge economic boom in China in the last decade, but in lots of ways (at least on the surface, to my ignorant eye) the country seems to be tucking in the loose ends in a remarkably tidy way.
Waiting for the bus to pull out, I snapped photos from the window: a cobbler with his tools spread on a small tarp on the sidewalk; a woman pedaling a tricycle loaded with produce. (We also caught Cacoñema urinating on the street again, which we snapped on camera in our small act of revenge for his jerkiness.)
I was completely exhausted in the bus on the way home…I guess the jet lag works insidiously for a while after sleeping through the night is no longer a big hurdle. But when we got back to the hotel, I didn’t take a nap but instead worked on changing Pollo’s place ticket to return to the U.S. We still don’t have a real plan of what to do when the race is over, but we kind of like flying by the seat of our pants, and I’m sure we’ll work something out. I was frustrated by the slow internet connection, though…we’d been very happy to hear that the hotel offered free Ethernet, but in reality my connection was poor, and it was an exercise in patience to try and make a call on Skype, or upload my photos to the blog.
Pollo came back to the room after cleaning the bikes to tell me he’d seen a coconut stand. So we went down to walk around a bit. The area right outside the hotel was a really lively shopping center, and it was really fun to wander around at dusk when the lights were starting to come on.
There were tiny shops everywhere: really just open-fronted booths stuffed with merchandise: clothing, mostly, and beauty products, and bags, umbrellas, and belts and hair accessories. Pollo bought a “Levi Strauss” belt as he’d forgotten his and his jeans were falling down. Accustomed as I am to shopping in the U.S., I never would have thought to bargain, but to Pollo it was second nature, and he talked the proprietor of the mini-store down 50 yuan.
I went in a shoe store to see the merchandise more closely. Everything looked a lot like what you’d see in an American mall, at least from a distance of a few feet. Once you got closer, though, the extremely inexpensive prices made more sense, as it became clear that everything was a knock-off of brand name shoes. There were Vans look-alikes called “Valens” or something like that. Then there were also ones with real“Vans” labels. Once you picked them up, you could tell that the quality was not as good as the “real deal,” but the resemblance was amazing. It struck me that this is how Chinese manufacturers have become some of the most competitive in the world: start by copying the look of a known brand, and then gradually increase the quality of the copy while retaining the price-consciousness that made the first attempt so cheap.
We saw fake Oakley backpacks, fake Gucci belts…and all at prices that make the tourist with money in his pocket laugh in happy disbelief. Most of the people walking about were very stylish: what I mean is that their style is identical to what you’d see walking around New York. Boots are very big with the women here – almost all of them seem to be wearing either knee boots or smaller ones. The boots I’ve seen for sale, with plastic soles and high heels, don’t look like they’d last more than 10 minutes walking, but all the women here look very fashionable and I haven’t seen any broken heels yet.
There were a lot of people walking around, shopping, eating, and just hanging out. In fact, it struck me that this city – supposedly a rather soulless industrial and business (according to my Eyewitness Travel Guide) – is one of the most vibrant centers of urban life that I’ve ever seen. Even New York City, on a Monday evening at least, doesn’t have the bustle of this little corner of Shenzhen. (Maybe Times Square, but that’s all tourists, and we were the only non-Chinese that I saw here; I assume they live here but could be wrong.)
Even from our room when we finally returned, I could hear music coming up from the street, and see the lights of a small fair (complete with Ferris wheel) a few blocks away. I wonder if some of this extra excitement is due to its being Christmas Eve. When we went to dinner, the PA system (which here in China, thankfully, has been playing unadorned classical music instead of the synthesizer junk we endured in the Sha Tin hotel) was interrupted by a special live performance. A group of about 20 young people dressed in white robes and Santa hats sang “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Their musicality wasn’t amazing, but the intent made me smile…and even tear up a little bit. It’s hard to even remember that it’s Christmas since we’re so caught up in the race and the foreignness of China. But when we wake up tomorrow, it’ll be December 25th.
Wilson left after dinner to catch his taxi back to Hong Kong. He’d succeeded in changing his flight for tomorrow (Christmas Day), but didn’t want to risk delays at the checkpoints and so elected to leave tonight. We’ll miss him – who are we going to tease relentlessly now? Oh…and I forgot to pay up for losing the Scrabble bet…but I’m sure Wilson will remember. I can hear him now in a month, “!Oye chica! !Todavia me debe el dinero del Scrabble!”
The 4 buses carrying all the riders, plus the container truck with the bikes, had a police escort all the way to the start. The drive was interesting – we saw lots of huge apartment buildings where it appeared to be washday on Monday, as every single balcony was hung with rows of drying apparel. It’s funny how the small, common things are sometimes the most fascinating to the foreign eye! The driving (which, incidentally, is on the right side of the road as opposed to the left as in Hong Kong) is much more chaotic and aggressive here in China. Our bus driver wore our ears out with loud, prolonged honking, and had to throw the brakes on violently a few times as cars cut in front of him.
The riders’ area at the start was a barricaded area with a tent for each team. I am getting more and more impressed by the organization of this event; while it’s true that there’s a lot of “Hurry up and wait,” the race organizers are doing a tremendous job of getting people and equipment from one spot to another with a relatively small amount of hassle and almost no error. Also, the rider area was secured by police, and legions of red-jacketed workers with “Longhua volunteers” logos stitched on their caps ran around lugging water, manning the Port-A-Potties, etc. It seems that there’s a huge amount of national, regional, and local pride.
The course was a nearly flat loop of 4 kilometers on the streets of Shenzhen Longhua. Once the racers were off, I wandered around for a bit to explore. I went into a bank to try and change Hong Kong dollars into Chinese yuan. I asked someone for an English-speaking clerk, and was led graciously from one person to another until someone who could help me was found. After so much helpful effort on my behalf I felt bad to change me mind, but the pageful of information I would have had to fill out looked so daunting that I decided to forget the money changing for now. Bigger establishments (like the massage place from last night) accept HK dollars anyway, and it would only be for small stuff that it would be useful to have yuan.
I continued to a big supermarket, thinking of buying some running shoes so I could do some jogging from time to time (there’s no time to go for a ride, and my legs and back are starting to ache from lack of exercise). However, I couldn’t find anything that fit me and had enough support for running. I continued through the department store-like aisles until I found the grocery section. This was a great adventure. The bulk food section had all kinds of mysterious, fascinating things. The rice was in huge, 4-foot plywood cubes. I saw 2-gallon jugs of peanut oil and soy sauce. I saw about a dozen varieties of honey from all kinds of different flowers I’ve never heard of (Matrimony Vine, Blessed Mother something-or-other, etc.). Amazing! The grocery also had live fish, but surprisingly a rather small produce section. Maybe this means that people tend to buy their produce from outdoor markets where it’s fresher.
I bought a kind of Chinese candy apple, which was pieces of fruit on a stick, all covered with a passionfruit-y crunchy candy. Then I wandered back to the race area to see the finish. Our Mengoni guys were doing fine; I saw Eugene covering some moves, and Alberto cruising near the front. (He was trying to get in promising breaks all day, but wasn’t lucky with the ones he picked.) Amaurys won one intermediate sprint, which he went for just to test his legs. He got boxed in the finish, but 3 guys had escaped just a few seconds off the front in the last half lap, so the podium was sealed anyway.
There were huge crowd of people watching the race, which was really cool to see. They were held in place by police tape stretched between cones, but nobody tried to push in to get a better view.
There was a guy selling roasted corn, and another guy (with a wheeled cart onto which was attached a crude brazier made of a metal drum) selling roasted sweet potatoes. We bought some of each (I got charged more than Pollo when I went back a little later to buy more…an interesting phenomenon that we’d already noted in the Dominican Republic, but I was surprised to see here where Pollo’s as much a foreigner as me; maybe it’s a blue-eyed surcharge).
After the guys had recovered for 15 minutes or so and changed their clothes, we got ready to go. There were still a lot of bottles of sports drink provided by the race (it’s called Pocari Sweat, a name that would create a big obstacle to its successful sale in the US, I reckon). I offered them to the crowd, which was staring from behind the barricade in interest at the post-race happenings. At first no one held out his hand to accept the bottled drink, and I wondered if I were offending the crowd by offering it, even if it was sponsor product. But, finally, one smiling face separated itself from the crowd and its owner held out her hand; once the ice was broken, more and more hands came out to accept the sports drink. But how different from anywhere else I’ve been, where there would be shoving and pushing and yelling. The Chinese spectators were mostly silent, and rather unsmiling, but I still got the impression that they were enjoying the spectacle of the race.
Meanwhile, some women dressed in ragged clothes were collecting the empty cardboard boxes that the drinks had arrived in, and the empty bottles as well. They looked completely thrilled with this unexpected windfall, and we helped them collect up the “garbage” before we left. This country strikes me as so efficient – light years from the wantonly wasteful United States. I know there are so many negative consequences, environmental and other, of the huge economic boom in China in the last decade, but in lots of ways (at least on the surface, to my ignorant eye) the country seems to be tucking in the loose ends in a remarkably tidy way.
Waiting for the bus to pull out, I snapped photos from the window: a cobbler with his tools spread on a small tarp on the sidewalk; a woman pedaling a tricycle loaded with produce. (We also caught Cacoñema urinating on the street again, which we snapped on camera in our small act of revenge for his jerkiness.)
I was completely exhausted in the bus on the way home…I guess the jet lag works insidiously for a while after sleeping through the night is no longer a big hurdle. But when we got back to the hotel, I didn’t take a nap but instead worked on changing Pollo’s place ticket to return to the U.S. We still don’t have a real plan of what to do when the race is over, but we kind of like flying by the seat of our pants, and I’m sure we’ll work something out. I was frustrated by the slow internet connection, though…we’d been very happy to hear that the hotel offered free Ethernet, but in reality my connection was poor, and it was an exercise in patience to try and make a call on Skype, or upload my photos to the blog.
Pollo came back to the room after cleaning the bikes to tell me he’d seen a coconut stand. So we went down to walk around a bit. The area right outside the hotel was a really lively shopping center, and it was really fun to wander around at dusk when the lights were starting to come on.
There were tiny shops everywhere: really just open-fronted booths stuffed with merchandise: clothing, mostly, and beauty products, and bags, umbrellas, and belts and hair accessories. Pollo bought a “Levi Strauss” belt as he’d forgotten his and his jeans were falling down. Accustomed as I am to shopping in the U.S., I never would have thought to bargain, but to Pollo it was second nature, and he talked the proprietor of the mini-store down 50 yuan.
I went in a shoe store to see the merchandise more closely. Everything looked a lot like what you’d see in an American mall, at least from a distance of a few feet. Once you got closer, though, the extremely inexpensive prices made more sense, as it became clear that everything was a knock-off of brand name shoes. There were Vans look-alikes called “Valens” or something like that. Then there were also ones with real“Vans” labels. Once you picked them up, you could tell that the quality was not as good as the “real deal,” but the resemblance was amazing. It struck me that this is how Chinese manufacturers have become some of the most competitive in the world: start by copying the look of a known brand, and then gradually increase the quality of the copy while retaining the price-consciousness that made the first attempt so cheap.
We saw fake Oakley backpacks, fake Gucci belts…and all at prices that make the tourist with money in his pocket laugh in happy disbelief. Most of the people walking about were very stylish: what I mean is that their style is identical to what you’d see walking around New York. Boots are very big with the women here – almost all of them seem to be wearing either knee boots or smaller ones. The boots I’ve seen for sale, with plastic soles and high heels, don’t look like they’d last more than 10 minutes walking, but all the women here look very fashionable and I haven’t seen any broken heels yet.
There were a lot of people walking around, shopping, eating, and just hanging out. In fact, it struck me that this city – supposedly a rather soulless industrial and business (according to my Eyewitness Travel Guide) – is one of the most vibrant centers of urban life that I’ve ever seen. Even New York City, on a Monday evening at least, doesn’t have the bustle of this little corner of Shenzhen. (Maybe Times Square, but that’s all tourists, and we were the only non-Chinese that I saw here; I assume they live here but could be wrong.)
Even from our room when we finally returned, I could hear music coming up from the street, and see the lights of a small fair (complete with Ferris wheel) a few blocks away. I wonder if some of this extra excitement is due to its being Christmas Eve. When we went to dinner, the PA system (which here in China, thankfully, has been playing unadorned classical music instead of the synthesizer junk we endured in the Sha Tin hotel) was interrupted by a special live performance. A group of about 20 young people dressed in white robes and Santa hats sang “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Their musicality wasn’t amazing, but the intent made me smile…and even tear up a little bit. It’s hard to even remember that it’s Christmas since we’re so caught up in the race and the foreignness of China. But when we wake up tomorrow, it’ll be December 25th.
Wilson left after dinner to catch his taxi back to Hong Kong. He’d succeeded in changing his flight for tomorrow (Christmas Day), but didn’t want to risk delays at the checkpoints and so elected to leave tonight. We’ll miss him – who are we going to tease relentlessly now? Oh…and I forgot to pay up for losing the Scrabble bet…but I’m sure Wilson will remember. I can hear him now in a month, “!Oye chica! !Todavia me debe el dinero del Scrabble!”
Race Start in Hong Kong and Transfer to Shenzhen
We had an early start, with instructions to have our luggage downstairs in the hotel lobby by 6:30 a.m. We were initially supposed to leave at 7:30 for the race start, but at breakfast were told to be ready at 7:10. I wasn’t quite able to organize myself by that time, but it turns out I needn’t have worried, as the buses didn’t depart until after 7:45 anyway. As Gus said early on, this race will be a lot about “Hurry up and wait.”
On the way, from the vantage point of the bus’s high windows, I took some photos of interesting things I saw. There was an open truck carrying some open plastic containers of some kind of food stuff. I snapped a photo, and the Chinese girls behind me on the bus giggled. I turned around, a little shame-faced, and showed them the photo, shrugging as if to say, “Hey – it’s interesting to me!” I am feeling like the much-maligned Japanese tourist with camera glued to his eye …but so many everyday things here are so different that they become worthy objects of photos to me.
At the race start in downtown Hong Kong at the HSBC building, it was a circus! The first 15 kilometers of the race would be neutral, meaning non-racing, and the reason for this was that these first miles – through the Harbor Tunnel and over a major bridge – would be open to 200 recreational riders in addition to the 96 racers. It was pretty fun to see the eager recreational riders lining up with their timing chips in place. A lot of these riders were on folding bikes with 20” wheels, and some had mountain bikes or very old road bikes. Some, on the other hand, were equipped with the latest and greatest in bicycle technology; the home of which is arguably right here in the South of China.
Unused as I am to the duties of soigneur (a term for the person who, literally “cares for” the riders on a team by attending to their nutritional and other requirements at the race), I was a little frazzled by trying to make sure everyone had everything they needed. By the time all the Mengoni boys were ready to go at the start line, I realized I really had to pee. I told Gus, who was driving the caravan car (loaned to us, incredibly, by our friends at Champion System), that I had to find a bathroom. If the caravan took off before I got back, well then I’d just have to stay at the start. I ran off, and got back just in time to clamber in the car before Gus peeled out behind the other cars.
It was my first experience riding in a caravan car, and it was pretty darn frightening…no offense to Gus’s driving, which was very skilled for sure. Since he’d given up our #9 caravan position to wait for me, he spent the entire 15K neutral section, plus a good part of the first lap, regaining our spot. Speeding past the recreational riders panting along was nerve-wracking, especially when there wasn’t much space to pass. It was cool to see the riders streaming along overpasses and through the tunnel, and it struck me what a big deal it is to hold this race here, in such a big city. I guess this was sort of analogous to NYC’s 5-Borough Bike Tour, or the NYC Triathlon, where the city allows major highways to be closed down for these special events.
The 8-kilometer circuit, which the race covered 7 times, had a few tough hills, the major one of which was over a kilometer in length. I had been hoping that all the sprinter boys on the team would be able to hang at least until the last time up the big hill; but I was saddened to see Pollo drop off early on, along with another rider from Macau, I think. I tried to cheer him on, but once the legs are done, they’re done. The rest of the race was a bit dispiriting for me, but I tried to pay attention to the information we were getting over the race radio and note the numbers of the riders in breakaways. Eugene had been the first one to attack, and threw a few more challenges out during the course of the race. Unfortunately he didn’t make it into the move he created, because it ended up staying away (with 4 riders) for the win. Wilson had been fighting hard to stay with the peloton up the hills, but finally on the 5th lap he was popped too. We hoped he would be able to stay within the time limit riding on his own.
After the race, we piled back into the bus to return to the hotel in Sha Tin; just for showers, lunch, and loading the bikes for the journey to Shenzhen. So that our riders could go up to the rooms and relax a bit, I promised to stay outside with the bikes until they were loaded onto the truck. This was a long wait. The race organization had procured a 40-foot container, and basically the whole race minus the people would be transported in this container. It took a few willing workers quite a while to rearrange the bike boxes and other boxes of equipment enough to fit 96+ bikes in the container. They basically just crammed all the bikes in – most of which had hurriedly been protected with foam tubing over the frames – and relied on the lack of space to keep the bikes from bouncing around.
We’d each been issued a lunch box to eat while on the bus, and the food ended up being quite a source of entertainment as well as sustenance. There was a whole roasted duck leg each, a hot dog, a ham & cheese sandwich, a tangerine packaged in plastic, and other little treats. I don’t know what possessed me to look at the list of ingredients on the orange drink box, but I exploded into laughter when I read, last on the list, “Contains fish products.” I can’t decide whether that was an editing error, or whether the orange drink really had something fishy in it!
One of the European riders (nationality and team affiliation withheld to avoid getting spit upon later) was terribly rude to one of the young Chinese Champion System riders. This young guy had washed his bike clothes after the stage, and had hung the wet spandex on hangers over his bus seat to dry during the trip. This Euro hotshot (who had been in the break in today’s stage) said loudly, pointing at the clothes down the aisle, “That’s disgusting.” He then poked the kid and said, “You, hey, put those in there; yeah, thank you,” tossing a plastic bag at him. We were horrified by his arrogance – especially since he had just returned to the bus after an egregiously obvious public urination. Digusting, indeed! From then on we turned firmly against this jerk, giving him the nickname of “Cacoñema.” If you want to know what it means, you’ll have to ask a Dominican, but suffice to say that it references his skinhead, and it’s kind of rude.
On the bus ride to Shenzhen, we saw lots and lots of macaques in a little forest on the side of the road. (And we had been so excited to see the one in Tam Pak Chung!) The ride was long (over 2 hours with all the traffic). We also had to cross the border into China. This involved everyone exiting the buses at one checkpoint and showing passports and visas. Then we got on the bus again, rolled a few hundred meters, and everyone had to disembark again, this time with all our bags, to pass customs. The forms they gave us on the bus to fill out were kind of excessive: we had to fill in the same information about 3 times on different pieces of paper. The health quarantine questionnaire was kind of funny in the wording; we were asked to check the appropriate box if we had a cough, sore throat, rash, or “snivel.”
We couldn’t see much from the bus, and the sky was very overcast and gloomy again. Everyone was glad to finally arrive in Shenzhen. We tumbled out into the courtyard of the hotel and eventually trailed gratefully up to our rooms.
We were all pretty downcast after a first stage in which 2 Mengoni riders had been dropped, and for the first time our table wasn’t the loudest-laughing one in the buffet hall. But the food was excellent – much more exciting than at the Sha Tin hotel. The hotel staff is also exceptionally attentive and polite here. There’s an attendant on each floor to help with elevator calls, luggage, etc., and they are all smiling and helpful.
After dinner, we decided to take advantage of the inexpensive massage service right next door to the hotel that Gus had scoped out. Apparently it was 198 yuan for a 2-hour massage, or less than $25. Pollo and I decided we’d like an hour each, but when we arrived and were ushered in by a beautifully-dressed young woman, we had some difficulty explaining our wishes. English speakers seem quite scarce in Shenzhen, unlike in Hong Kong, so my pantomiming is getting some practice. They seemed to be telling us that a one-hour massage was not possible; that it was 2 hours or nothing. I wanted to ask them if Pollo and I could get our massages in the same room, which I thought I’d succeeded in making clear. But then they tried to separate us, which Pollo was having none of. Finally, I understood that we were being separated just to undress and shower, and we’d meet up again after that. When we saw each other again a few minutes later, we were dressed in matching pyjama – type suits and foam rubber sandals. We followed our guide to a room where there were 2 massage beds. Then there commenced a long and confusing discussion on what type of massage we wanted. I guess this massage parlor, like some others I’ve heard about, had a kind of subtle subtext in the massage menu; I’m certain there were other types of “massage” options that they were not able to overtly describe. I hoped that our arrival as a couple would preclude any notion that we wanted anything other than a standard muscular massage, because communicating about something that subtle in the most basic English that our masseuse had at her disposal would be a recipe for disaster.
We ended up having a very enjoyable massage by these two young women, who chattered the whole time, occasionally giggling and laughing. The one who spoke a bit of English asked us some questions about our stay in China and was very personable and friendly.
By that time it was late, and we returned to the hotel to learn the bad news that both Pollo and Wilson had been eliminated by the time cut and would not be allowed to race the next day. This was a real blow; especially for Wilson, who had hung on so long and only been dropped from the group on the second-to-last time up the big hill. We tried pleading with the commissaire, but he was completely unmoved. Since there were several other riders in the same position, he would have had to allow them all to race. Apparently, the race organizing committee even wanted to get the racers back in (since there were a few Chinese riders in the sad position of having been time cut); however, the comm’s word is law, and even the organizers couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe next year they’ll reconsider having a tough, hilly stage on the first day. What other stage race has the hardest day first?
Anyway, it was with low spirits that we finally fell, exhausted, into bed, to see if Shenzhen would show us a sunnier aspect in the morning.
On the way, from the vantage point of the bus’s high windows, I took some photos of interesting things I saw. There was an open truck carrying some open plastic containers of some kind of food stuff. I snapped a photo, and the Chinese girls behind me on the bus giggled. I turned around, a little shame-faced, and showed them the photo, shrugging as if to say, “Hey – it’s interesting to me!” I am feeling like the much-maligned Japanese tourist with camera glued to his eye …but so many everyday things here are so different that they become worthy objects of photos to me.
At the race start in downtown Hong Kong at the HSBC building, it was a circus! The first 15 kilometers of the race would be neutral, meaning non-racing, and the reason for this was that these first miles – through the Harbor Tunnel and over a major bridge – would be open to 200 recreational riders in addition to the 96 racers. It was pretty fun to see the eager recreational riders lining up with their timing chips in place. A lot of these riders were on folding bikes with 20” wheels, and some had mountain bikes or very old road bikes. Some, on the other hand, were equipped with the latest and greatest in bicycle technology; the home of which is arguably right here in the South of China.
Unused as I am to the duties of soigneur (a term for the person who, literally “cares for” the riders on a team by attending to their nutritional and other requirements at the race), I was a little frazzled by trying to make sure everyone had everything they needed. By the time all the Mengoni boys were ready to go at the start line, I realized I really had to pee. I told Gus, who was driving the caravan car (loaned to us, incredibly, by our friends at Champion System), that I had to find a bathroom. If the caravan took off before I got back, well then I’d just have to stay at the start. I ran off, and got back just in time to clamber in the car before Gus peeled out behind the other cars.
It was my first experience riding in a caravan car, and it was pretty darn frightening…no offense to Gus’s driving, which was very skilled for sure. Since he’d given up our #9 caravan position to wait for me, he spent the entire 15K neutral section, plus a good part of the first lap, regaining our spot. Speeding past the recreational riders panting along was nerve-wracking, especially when there wasn’t much space to pass. It was cool to see the riders streaming along overpasses and through the tunnel, and it struck me what a big deal it is to hold this race here, in such a big city. I guess this was sort of analogous to NYC’s 5-Borough Bike Tour, or the NYC Triathlon, where the city allows major highways to be closed down for these special events.
The 8-kilometer circuit, which the race covered 7 times, had a few tough hills, the major one of which was over a kilometer in length. I had been hoping that all the sprinter boys on the team would be able to hang at least until the last time up the big hill; but I was saddened to see Pollo drop off early on, along with another rider from Macau, I think. I tried to cheer him on, but once the legs are done, they’re done. The rest of the race was a bit dispiriting for me, but I tried to pay attention to the information we were getting over the race radio and note the numbers of the riders in breakaways. Eugene had been the first one to attack, and threw a few more challenges out during the course of the race. Unfortunately he didn’t make it into the move he created, because it ended up staying away (with 4 riders) for the win. Wilson had been fighting hard to stay with the peloton up the hills, but finally on the 5th lap he was popped too. We hoped he would be able to stay within the time limit riding on his own.
After the race, we piled back into the bus to return to the hotel in Sha Tin; just for showers, lunch, and loading the bikes for the journey to Shenzhen. So that our riders could go up to the rooms and relax a bit, I promised to stay outside with the bikes until they were loaded onto the truck. This was a long wait. The race organization had procured a 40-foot container, and basically the whole race minus the people would be transported in this container. It took a few willing workers quite a while to rearrange the bike boxes and other boxes of equipment enough to fit 96+ bikes in the container. They basically just crammed all the bikes in – most of which had hurriedly been protected with foam tubing over the frames – and relied on the lack of space to keep the bikes from bouncing around.
We’d each been issued a lunch box to eat while on the bus, and the food ended up being quite a source of entertainment as well as sustenance. There was a whole roasted duck leg each, a hot dog, a ham & cheese sandwich, a tangerine packaged in plastic, and other little treats. I don’t know what possessed me to look at the list of ingredients on the orange drink box, but I exploded into laughter when I read, last on the list, “Contains fish products.” I can’t decide whether that was an editing error, or whether the orange drink really had something fishy in it!
One of the European riders (nationality and team affiliation withheld to avoid getting spit upon later) was terribly rude to one of the young Chinese Champion System riders. This young guy had washed his bike clothes after the stage, and had hung the wet spandex on hangers over his bus seat to dry during the trip. This Euro hotshot (who had been in the break in today’s stage) said loudly, pointing at the clothes down the aisle, “That’s disgusting.” He then poked the kid and said, “You, hey, put those in there; yeah, thank you,” tossing a plastic bag at him. We were horrified by his arrogance – especially since he had just returned to the bus after an egregiously obvious public urination. Digusting, indeed! From then on we turned firmly against this jerk, giving him the nickname of “Cacoñema.” If you want to know what it means, you’ll have to ask a Dominican, but suffice to say that it references his skinhead, and it’s kind of rude.
On the bus ride to Shenzhen, we saw lots and lots of macaques in a little forest on the side of the road. (And we had been so excited to see the one in Tam Pak Chung!) The ride was long (over 2 hours with all the traffic). We also had to cross the border into China. This involved everyone exiting the buses at one checkpoint and showing passports and visas. Then we got on the bus again, rolled a few hundred meters, and everyone had to disembark again, this time with all our bags, to pass customs. The forms they gave us on the bus to fill out were kind of excessive: we had to fill in the same information about 3 times on different pieces of paper. The health quarantine questionnaire was kind of funny in the wording; we were asked to check the appropriate box if we had a cough, sore throat, rash, or “snivel.”
We couldn’t see much from the bus, and the sky was very overcast and gloomy again. Everyone was glad to finally arrive in Shenzhen. We tumbled out into the courtyard of the hotel and eventually trailed gratefully up to our rooms.
We were all pretty downcast after a first stage in which 2 Mengoni riders had been dropped, and for the first time our table wasn’t the loudest-laughing one in the buffet hall. But the food was excellent – much more exciting than at the Sha Tin hotel. The hotel staff is also exceptionally attentive and polite here. There’s an attendant on each floor to help with elevator calls, luggage, etc., and they are all smiling and helpful.
After dinner, we decided to take advantage of the inexpensive massage service right next door to the hotel that Gus had scoped out. Apparently it was 198 yuan for a 2-hour massage, or less than $25. Pollo and I decided we’d like an hour each, but when we arrived and were ushered in by a beautifully-dressed young woman, we had some difficulty explaining our wishes. English speakers seem quite scarce in Shenzhen, unlike in Hong Kong, so my pantomiming is getting some practice. They seemed to be telling us that a one-hour massage was not possible; that it was 2 hours or nothing. I wanted to ask them if Pollo and I could get our massages in the same room, which I thought I’d succeeded in making clear. But then they tried to separate us, which Pollo was having none of. Finally, I understood that we were being separated just to undress and shower, and we’d meet up again after that. When we saw each other again a few minutes later, we were dressed in matching pyjama – type suits and foam rubber sandals. We followed our guide to a room where there were 2 massage beds. Then there commenced a long and confusing discussion on what type of massage we wanted. I guess this massage parlor, like some others I’ve heard about, had a kind of subtle subtext in the massage menu; I’m certain there were other types of “massage” options that they were not able to overtly describe. I hoped that our arrival as a couple would preclude any notion that we wanted anything other than a standard muscular massage, because communicating about something that subtle in the most basic English that our masseuse had at her disposal would be a recipe for disaster.
We ended up having a very enjoyable massage by these two young women, who chattered the whole time, occasionally giggling and laughing. The one who spoke a bit of English asked us some questions about our stay in China and was very personable and friendly.
By that time it was late, and we returned to the hotel to learn the bad news that both Pollo and Wilson had been eliminated by the time cut and would not be allowed to race the next day. This was a real blow; especially for Wilson, who had hung on so long and only been dropped from the group on the second-to-last time up the big hill. We tried pleading with the commissaire, but he was completely unmoved. Since there were several other riders in the same position, he would have had to allow them all to race. Apparently, the race organizing committee even wanted to get the racers back in (since there were a few Chinese riders in the sad position of having been time cut); however, the comm’s word is law, and even the organizers couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe next year they’ll reconsider having a tough, hilly stage on the first day. What other stage race has the hardest day first?
Anyway, it was with low spirits that we finally fell, exhausted, into bed, to see if Shenzhen would show us a sunnier aspect in the morning.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Sha Tin with a Brief Foray to Hong Kong Central
Sha Tin – Day 3
We woke around 7:30 and I checked out the morning view from our 8th floor window; over to a park with a temple-looking building with an enormous green hill behind. To the side of the hill are some high-rises, which frame the view in an odd and somewhat jarring way.
After breakfast, we went down to the “bike room” in the garage of the hotel to take the bikes out for a spin. Unfortunately, I had neglected to check if the bike the Champion System guys had loaned to me had been unloaded into the bike room. Since it had not been, I was out of luck and out of a bike to ride. (I had brought along my fixed-gear track bike, but after the generous offer from Louis to loan me a road bike, I had not put the track bike together and it was still in bits in its suitcase.) Deciding that by the time I’d put my bike together, the guys would probably have returned, I elected to just spend the morning organizing photos and working on the blog.
For those that know me well, this blogging thing may come as somewhat of a surprise. I have not generally been known as a technophile, and so the digital camera, laptop, and constant internet access which are all required for this effort to share my experience are things that are, in combination, quite new to me. Writing the blog is a good opportunity to reflect on each day, and distill the sights and other senses into a meaningful and accessible format. It will also be a wonderful gift to my future self; I have an appallingly poor long-term memory, so the photos and text of the blog will help me remember what I experienced.
Anyway, the morning was spent indoors, which depressed me a bit when I thought of all that’s to explore outside! However, I’ve decided that Pollo and I will spend a few days here when the race is over, at which point I can check out all the guide book highlights, as well as a few places interesting only to me because of my parents’ history here.
In the early afternoon, we assembled down in the hotel lobby to go to the press conference and team presentation at the HSBC headquarters in the center of Hong Kong. We clambered aboard a double-decker bus and proceeded on a very slow, traffic-delayed journey to the city center. Wow – what a difference from the other side of the island at Sai Kung. This place looks like New York’s skyscrapers were transplanted to San Francisco’s hilly neighborhoods. The high-rises shoot up from every hillside, and are so towering as to make even this city girl feel provincial!
We arrived with quite a bit of time to spare before the team presentation, and soon everyone needed the bathroom. As the fearless communicator of the group, I found myself trailed by six spandex-clad Mengoni riders as I searched out a toilet. We went downstairs from the bank’s main entrance to a room that had what looked like a giant safe opening in the far wall. Assuming we were in the wrong spot, I turned to go, but saw a guard so thought I’d ask her. She nodded in comprehension as I requested a toilet, and beckoned us to come with her over to a locked door. She used her key card to open the door, and waved us through. Eugene, the idiot, made some crack about robbing the bank, which made me want to crawl under the carpet with embarrassment, or perhaps instead shoot him. Anyway, we wandered around in the back halls (I think they were employee areas) for a while before we found the restrooms. When we came back out, the guard looked very relieved to see us; I’m sure she had been wondering what mischief we were getting up to back there.
The team presentation was fun as these things go; besides introducing all the HSBC honchos (sponsoring the race) and the cycling federation honchos (organizing the race), they had BMX riders doing tricks to liven things up. Afterwards, we were hustled back to the bus stop by a young Chinese woman with a perfect British accent, who apparently is working for the race organization. I find it interesting that there are many Chinese in Hong Kong who speak no English at all; many who speak it well but with a (Chinese accent; and some who speak it as if it were their first language (which perhaps it is). It is truly a bilingual city, in that most of the major commerce seems to be conducted in both English and Chinese.
Although we got into the city center today, I don’t feel that I got to know Hong Kong much better at all as a result. Like other big, important cities I’ve been to, it seems, on the surface, to be remarkably similar to other big cities. In other words, there’s less of a “foreign thrill” to the downtown; also it seems a bit impersonal. I hope to get a better feel for the place when we return at the end of the race.
I had my most interesting moments of exploration in the late afternoon, when I went out to buy laundry soap to do a load for the team. (The hotel offers a self-serve laundry service, but inexplicably does not have soap for sale.) After trying several places, and using charades to communicate my quest to Cantonese-speakers, I was directed by an English-speaking woman to a supermarket at the end of a pedestrian-only street. I wouldn’t have found the store on my own, as its entrance was completely unprepossessing; nothing like a grocery store in the U.S. Inside, the aisles were narrow and crowded, and the cashier line was long. I eventually made it out with my purchases and, while I was rearranging the bags in my hands, a sweet and obviously very healthy kitten ran up to me miaowing. I petted him for a while, then he ran back from whence he’d come; he seemed to live in a hardware store next to the grocery. This hardware store was amazing: tiny, and absolutely crammed to bursting with merchandise. There must have been some order to it all, but it was not evident to my untrained eye!
We had an early night, due to a 6 a.m. wake-up call in the morning before the race. Pollo and Amaurys were snoring by 8 p.m., and I am yawning over the computer here at 9. Tomorrow we race, and in the afternoon we’ll make the 2-hour bus transfer to Shenzhen. Mainland China, here we come!
We woke around 7:30 and I checked out the morning view from our 8th floor window; over to a park with a temple-looking building with an enormous green hill behind. To the side of the hill are some high-rises, which frame the view in an odd and somewhat jarring way.
After breakfast, we went down to the “bike room” in the garage of the hotel to take the bikes out for a spin. Unfortunately, I had neglected to check if the bike the Champion System guys had loaned to me had been unloaded into the bike room. Since it had not been, I was out of luck and out of a bike to ride. (I had brought along my fixed-gear track bike, but after the generous offer from Louis to loan me a road bike, I had not put the track bike together and it was still in bits in its suitcase.) Deciding that by the time I’d put my bike together, the guys would probably have returned, I elected to just spend the morning organizing photos and working on the blog.
For those that know me well, this blogging thing may come as somewhat of a surprise. I have not generally been known as a technophile, and so the digital camera, laptop, and constant internet access which are all required for this effort to share my experience are things that are, in combination, quite new to me. Writing the blog is a good opportunity to reflect on each day, and distill the sights and other senses into a meaningful and accessible format. It will also be a wonderful gift to my future self; I have an appallingly poor long-term memory, so the photos and text of the blog will help me remember what I experienced.
Anyway, the morning was spent indoors, which depressed me a bit when I thought of all that’s to explore outside! However, I’ve decided that Pollo and I will spend a few days here when the race is over, at which point I can check out all the guide book highlights, as well as a few places interesting only to me because of my parents’ history here.
In the early afternoon, we assembled down in the hotel lobby to go to the press conference and team presentation at the HSBC headquarters in the center of Hong Kong. We clambered aboard a double-decker bus and proceeded on a very slow, traffic-delayed journey to the city center. Wow – what a difference from the other side of the island at Sai Kung. This place looks like New York’s skyscrapers were transplanted to San Francisco’s hilly neighborhoods. The high-rises shoot up from every hillside, and are so towering as to make even this city girl feel provincial!
We arrived with quite a bit of time to spare before the team presentation, and soon everyone needed the bathroom. As the fearless communicator of the group, I found myself trailed by six spandex-clad Mengoni riders as I searched out a toilet. We went downstairs from the bank’s main entrance to a room that had what looked like a giant safe opening in the far wall. Assuming we were in the wrong spot, I turned to go, but saw a guard so thought I’d ask her. She nodded in comprehension as I requested a toilet, and beckoned us to come with her over to a locked door. She used her key card to open the door, and waved us through. Eugene, the idiot, made some crack about robbing the bank, which made me want to crawl under the carpet with embarrassment, or perhaps instead shoot him. Anyway, we wandered around in the back halls (I think they were employee areas) for a while before we found the restrooms. When we came back out, the guard looked very relieved to see us; I’m sure she had been wondering what mischief we were getting up to back there.
The team presentation was fun as these things go; besides introducing all the HSBC honchos (sponsoring the race) and the cycling federation honchos (organizing the race), they had BMX riders doing tricks to liven things up. Afterwards, we were hustled back to the bus stop by a young Chinese woman with a perfect British accent, who apparently is working for the race organization. I find it interesting that there are many Chinese in Hong Kong who speak no English at all; many who speak it well but with a (Chinese accent; and some who speak it as if it were their first language (which perhaps it is). It is truly a bilingual city, in that most of the major commerce seems to be conducted in both English and Chinese.
Although we got into the city center today, I don’t feel that I got to know Hong Kong much better at all as a result. Like other big, important cities I’ve been to, it seems, on the surface, to be remarkably similar to other big cities. In other words, there’s less of a “foreign thrill” to the downtown; also it seems a bit impersonal. I hope to get a better feel for the place when we return at the end of the race.
I had my most interesting moments of exploration in the late afternoon, when I went out to buy laundry soap to do a load for the team. (The hotel offers a self-serve laundry service, but inexplicably does not have soap for sale.) After trying several places, and using charades to communicate my quest to Cantonese-speakers, I was directed by an English-speaking woman to a supermarket at the end of a pedestrian-only street. I wouldn’t have found the store on my own, as its entrance was completely unprepossessing; nothing like a grocery store in the U.S. Inside, the aisles were narrow and crowded, and the cashier line was long. I eventually made it out with my purchases and, while I was rearranging the bags in my hands, a sweet and obviously very healthy kitten ran up to me miaowing. I petted him for a while, then he ran back from whence he’d come; he seemed to live in a hardware store next to the grocery. This hardware store was amazing: tiny, and absolutely crammed to bursting with merchandise. There must have been some order to it all, but it was not evident to my untrained eye!
We had an early night, due to a 6 a.m. wake-up call in the morning before the race. Pollo and Amaurys were snoring by 8 p.m., and I am yawning over the computer here at 9. Tomorrow we race, and in the afternoon we’ll make the 2-hour bus transfer to Shenzhen. Mainland China, here we come!
Friday, December 21, 2007
Sai Kung to Sha Tin - Day 2
We all woke pretty early again today, and I felt like a million Hong Kong dollars after a much better night’s sleep (even if it wasn’t quite long enough). Pollo, Alberto, and Amaurys went to ride in the country park (Pak Tam Chung), and I decided to ride to Sai Kung to look around again and eat breakfast there. I waited for Wilson, and we were finally about to set off when Eugene woke up and decided to join us. (Apparently Eugene, hard hit by jet lag, was up again at 3:30 in the morning. He took his computer outside, threading the ethernet cable through the window, to work on his blog, which seemed to succeed in making him sleepy enough to return to bed.)
We rode the 5K or so to Sai Kung, and as I pedaled I relished a nice feeling of familiarity with the road and the sights. It was my third trip to town, so I recognized a view of bay and islands here; an unusual gate there. This time I wasn’t in any rush to get anywhere, so I stopped for every single photo I saw framed in my mind’s eye as I wheeled by.
One thing that’s surprised me (although I don’t know why it should) is how clean it is. I’ve hardly seen a speck of litter anywhere. There are phalanxes of workers – all seemingly women, and many older, sweeping the streets and roadside parks and picnic areas. They have a uniform of a fluorescent green vest, and some type of sun-protecting hat. These hats – some the typical straw type (that one sees in photos of rice paddy workers) and some with a fringe of fabric like a large parasol – make them rather picturesque.
Wilson had fielded a phone call (on the cell phone graciously loaned to us by Louis) from Louis himself, asking us to meet him for breakfast in Sai Kung. It turns out that Louis lives near the town (in the hills above it). So as soon as we rolled into town, we went to the main square (Hai Pong Square). Wilson and Eugene were a bit ahead of me (due to my picture-taking propensity), and when I found them at a café on the square, they were sitting at a table with not only Louis, but also Pollo, Alberto, and Amaurys. I don’t know exactly how those three found Louis, but Sai Kung is a small and intimate enough town that they probably literally ran into each other.
Louis treated us to a good breakfast from the Western-style menu (“Eat up – it may be your last Western breakfast!” said he). As we were finishing, a group of schoolchildren about 8 years old approached our table, gently pushed forward by their young teacher. Two or three children gravitated to each one of us and haltingly, in a quiet but perfectly understandable English, one began speaking while the other(s) were poised to take notes. “We are studying tourism in Hong Kong. May we ask you some questions?” When they had asked us a few things and diligently transcribed our responses, they presented us with a hand-lettered pamphlet called “Welcome to H.K.,” with some recommendations on 5 places to go while in Hong Kong. The pamphlet revealed that the kids were from Chi Lin Buddhist Primary School.
I took my leave of Sai Kung with regret, as I really was getting fond of the little fishing village; the sense of discovery combined with a feeling that I was getting to know my way around was a very pleasant combination. We rode back to Po Leung Kuk, our camp, and quickly dragged our stuff out of the rooms to load into the Champion System truck that was awaiting us. We were driven to Sha Tin, about 20 minutes away. The drive was an eye-opener in that we completely left the park-like atmosphere of Sai Kung and Po Leung Kuk behind. Giant high-rise buildings, most of them appearing to be apartment complexes, rose up alongside the highways. We were impressed and amused most by two things: the prevalence of laundry hanging to dry out of nearly every window (even thirtieth-story ones), and the use of bamboo as scaffolding on even the most enormous edifices.
We arrived at the race hotel and waited a while for the rooms to be ready. The hotel – the Riverside Regal – is quite fancy, and the lobby sports a huge Christmas tree (real fir!). We passed the time until we could claim the rooms by watching a seemingly endless procession of small children and their parents coming down the escalator from the mezzanine. All the little ones were wearing uniforms of brightly-colored jump suits, which has struck me as very common here; from toddlers on up, all the children seem to be part of one uniformed group or another. These ones seemed to be coming from a Christmas party, and gleefully turned on and off their whirling fiber-optic toys, which they’d apparently received as favors.
After checking in, we met Louis and some of the other guys involved with Champion Systems for lunch just down the street. It was a humble local restaurant, and we ate seated outside on stools around wobbly formica tables. We mostly let our Chinese guides order for us, and thereby ended up with some fascinating appetizers such as jellyfish and breaded & fried chicken gristle. Wilson’s suspicious grimace and Amaurys’ wide-eyed look of shock made me joke that this trip was turning into a sort of GS Mengoni “Fear Factor.” I must say that I think I would kick the guys’ butts in this competition. The jellyfish was delicious, with a crunchy-soft texture that defies description, and a taste probably due more to the spicy sauce than to any intrinsic jellyfish flavor. I found the cartilage scrumptious in its garlicky coating.
Our guides wanted the Mengoni boys to see Sunday’s race course, so we loaded into the minivan and, following the huge Champion System truck, drove to the circuit start. We were near a huge (shipping?) facility with 40-foot containers stacked high; the ground was strewn with garbage and the air was thick with particulates. Eugene and Alberto had elected to ride the 8K circuit (which will be repeated 7 times in the race), along with 4 or 5 local Champ-Sys riders. So we followed them in the minivan, with hazard lights on, as they spun along the freeway-type road with big trucks thundering past. It is amazing to think this major road will be closed to traffic on Sunday. Louis had mentioned before that the sponsorship of HSBC had a major impact on making it possible to conduct the race in Hong Kong. (Eugene said the pollution was awful, which of course highlights the big question about the 2008 Olympic venue in Beijing – how will athletes handle the air quality in a highly industrial city of 15 million with infamous smog?)
After returning from the drive, I was so sleepy I felt I had to take a nap. I was in bed for 2 hours, and probably dozed for an hour and a half, before waking at 7 for a brief team meeting then dinner. The dinner buffet (accessible with a dinner ticket from the race organization) was plentiful and quite good. However, the dining room was equipped with enormous speakers on both sides, with an appalling montage of Christmas music issuing from them. This mindless mush of synthesizer-driven crud was really offending Eugene’s sensibilities, and he muttered darkly about yanking the plug of the nearest speakers. As bad as it was, I had to laugh when the medley segued from “Frosty, the Snowman” to “Auld Lang Syne” via a short clip from K.C. and the Sunshine Band. “That’s the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it, uh huh uh huh…” If it had only been trashy Xmas songs featuring Frosty and Rudolph I might have been less horrified, but I joined Eugene in groaning when I heard the synthesizer gang butchering “Silent Night,” “Little Drummer Boy,” and other genuine classics. Yuck!
There was some talk of going to the Night Market (which sounded to me like a compact Canal Street, with every brand-name knock-off for sale that one could imagine). However, there was a distinct lack of energy amongst us (especially for navigating an unfamiliar subway and contending with eager sellers at the market), and so we decided to just get a good night’s sleep. After writing a little about the day’s sights, that’s what I tried to do. I was dead to the world until sometime in what seemed to be the middle of the night, when the phone rang and a woman from the race organization, apologizing for calling so late, asked me to supply some biographical information on the team members. For goodness’ sakes! I was half-asleep, so I don’t really know what I told her. We’ll see tomorrow during the press conference and team presentation, I suppose.
We rode the 5K or so to Sai Kung, and as I pedaled I relished a nice feeling of familiarity with the road and the sights. It was my third trip to town, so I recognized a view of bay and islands here; an unusual gate there. This time I wasn’t in any rush to get anywhere, so I stopped for every single photo I saw framed in my mind’s eye as I wheeled by.
One thing that’s surprised me (although I don’t know why it should) is how clean it is. I’ve hardly seen a speck of litter anywhere. There are phalanxes of workers – all seemingly women, and many older, sweeping the streets and roadside parks and picnic areas. They have a uniform of a fluorescent green vest, and some type of sun-protecting hat. These hats – some the typical straw type (that one sees in photos of rice paddy workers) and some with a fringe of fabric like a large parasol – make them rather picturesque.
Wilson had fielded a phone call (on the cell phone graciously loaned to us by Louis) from Louis himself, asking us to meet him for breakfast in Sai Kung. It turns out that Louis lives near the town (in the hills above it). So as soon as we rolled into town, we went to the main square (Hai Pong Square). Wilson and Eugene were a bit ahead of me (due to my picture-taking propensity), and when I found them at a café on the square, they were sitting at a table with not only Louis, but also Pollo, Alberto, and Amaurys. I don’t know exactly how those three found Louis, but Sai Kung is a small and intimate enough town that they probably literally ran into each other.
Louis treated us to a good breakfast from the Western-style menu (“Eat up – it may be your last Western breakfast!” said he). As we were finishing, a group of schoolchildren about 8 years old approached our table, gently pushed forward by their young teacher. Two or three children gravitated to each one of us and haltingly, in a quiet but perfectly understandable English, one began speaking while the other(s) were poised to take notes. “We are studying tourism in Hong Kong. May we ask you some questions?” When they had asked us a few things and diligently transcribed our responses, they presented us with a hand-lettered pamphlet called “Welcome to H.K.,” with some recommendations on 5 places to go while in Hong Kong. The pamphlet revealed that the kids were from Chi Lin Buddhist Primary School.
I took my leave of Sai Kung with regret, as I really was getting fond of the little fishing village; the sense of discovery combined with a feeling that I was getting to know my way around was a very pleasant combination. We rode back to Po Leung Kuk, our camp, and quickly dragged our stuff out of the rooms to load into the Champion System truck that was awaiting us. We were driven to Sha Tin, about 20 minutes away. The drive was an eye-opener in that we completely left the park-like atmosphere of Sai Kung and Po Leung Kuk behind. Giant high-rise buildings, most of them appearing to be apartment complexes, rose up alongside the highways. We were impressed and amused most by two things: the prevalence of laundry hanging to dry out of nearly every window (even thirtieth-story ones), and the use of bamboo as scaffolding on even the most enormous edifices.
We arrived at the race hotel and waited a while for the rooms to be ready. The hotel – the Riverside Regal – is quite fancy, and the lobby sports a huge Christmas tree (real fir!). We passed the time until we could claim the rooms by watching a seemingly endless procession of small children and their parents coming down the escalator from the mezzanine. All the little ones were wearing uniforms of brightly-colored jump suits, which has struck me as very common here; from toddlers on up, all the children seem to be part of one uniformed group or another. These ones seemed to be coming from a Christmas party, and gleefully turned on and off their whirling fiber-optic toys, which they’d apparently received as favors.
After checking in, we met Louis and some of the other guys involved with Champion Systems for lunch just down the street. It was a humble local restaurant, and we ate seated outside on stools around wobbly formica tables. We mostly let our Chinese guides order for us, and thereby ended up with some fascinating appetizers such as jellyfish and breaded & fried chicken gristle. Wilson’s suspicious grimace and Amaurys’ wide-eyed look of shock made me joke that this trip was turning into a sort of GS Mengoni “Fear Factor.” I must say that I think I would kick the guys’ butts in this competition. The jellyfish was delicious, with a crunchy-soft texture that defies description, and a taste probably due more to the spicy sauce than to any intrinsic jellyfish flavor. I found the cartilage scrumptious in its garlicky coating.
Our guides wanted the Mengoni boys to see Sunday’s race course, so we loaded into the minivan and, following the huge Champion System truck, drove to the circuit start. We were near a huge (shipping?) facility with 40-foot containers stacked high; the ground was strewn with garbage and the air was thick with particulates. Eugene and Alberto had elected to ride the 8K circuit (which will be repeated 7 times in the race), along with 4 or 5 local Champ-Sys riders. So we followed them in the minivan, with hazard lights on, as they spun along the freeway-type road with big trucks thundering past. It is amazing to think this major road will be closed to traffic on Sunday. Louis had mentioned before that the sponsorship of HSBC had a major impact on making it possible to conduct the race in Hong Kong. (Eugene said the pollution was awful, which of course highlights the big question about the 2008 Olympic venue in Beijing – how will athletes handle the air quality in a highly industrial city of 15 million with infamous smog?)
After returning from the drive, I was so sleepy I felt I had to take a nap. I was in bed for 2 hours, and probably dozed for an hour and a half, before waking at 7 for a brief team meeting then dinner. The dinner buffet (accessible with a dinner ticket from the race organization) was plentiful and quite good. However, the dining room was equipped with enormous speakers on both sides, with an appalling montage of Christmas music issuing from them. This mindless mush of synthesizer-driven crud was really offending Eugene’s sensibilities, and he muttered darkly about yanking the plug of the nearest speakers. As bad as it was, I had to laugh when the medley segued from “Frosty, the Snowman” to “Auld Lang Syne” via a short clip from K.C. and the Sunshine Band. “That’s the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it, uh huh uh huh…” If it had only been trashy Xmas songs featuring Frosty and Rudolph I might have been less horrified, but I joined Eugene in groaning when I heard the synthesizer gang butchering “Silent Night,” “Little Drummer Boy,” and other genuine classics. Yuck!
There was some talk of going to the Night Market (which sounded to me like a compact Canal Street, with every brand-name knock-off for sale that one could imagine). However, there was a distinct lack of energy amongst us (especially for navigating an unfamiliar subway and contending with eager sellers at the market), and so we decided to just get a good night’s sleep. After writing a little about the day’s sights, that’s what I tried to do. I was dead to the world until sometime in what seemed to be the middle of the night, when the phone rang and a woman from the race organization, apologizing for calling so late, asked me to supply some biographical information on the team members. For goodness’ sakes! I was half-asleep, so I don’t really know what I told her. We’ll see tomorrow during the press conference and team presentation, I suppose.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Sai Kung - Our First Day
We’d been told the night before that breakfast would be available in the cafeteria associated with the day camp at a cost of around 20 HK dollars (around $2.50 USD). So we rallied ourselves to go to eat. Ordering a meal was one of the more challenging cross-language attempts I’ve ever made. The cooks and cashier didn’t speak more than a few words of English. The menu, on a giant sign on the wall behind the register, was in both English and Chinese, but none of the staff understood our English oral requests. So the cook came over carrying a long bread knife, and indicated that we should step behind the counter and point to our selection high on the wall using the long knife.
By this means we ordered several ham and cheese sandwiches for the guys, as well as French toast. I ordered a red bean drink, and “sweet bean curd” (slightly sweetened silken tofu in a sealed plastic container). Then I decided to be really adventurous and order the noodles with fried bean curd. This turned out to be ramen-type noodles with some unidentified kind of meat. Hmm. Not tofu. Possibly not chicken either. Well, I’d ordered it and I may as well eat it, I thought, and did.
After breakfast we went for a ride. First we headed up the road into the Sai Kung country park. The terrain was very hilly indeed, and the narrow twisty roads climbed to some stupendous views over the High Island Reservoir. At one point, the guys (riding ahead of me) shouted out to "take a picture!" and I saw ahead some kind of monkey (blog readers have since pointed out that it was a macaque, or rhesus monkey) walking up the road toward us. I could even say “swaggering,” ‘cause this fella (very manly if the size of his bright red testicles was indicative) had no qualms whatsoever about our presence, and practically ignored us as he made his purposeful way past us.
After dead-ending at some unfinished road and riding back the way we had come, out of the country park, we continued along to the town of Sai Kung. Described as a fishing village (both by my parents and by Louis), I looked forward to exploring a bit. The first thing we saw when we arrived was a produce market in full swing right near the bus station. We bought bagsful of bananas, oranges, and tangerines. Alberto and Pollo saw some small guanabanas and snagged them, proclaiming them the tastiest they’d ever had.
Pollo saw a gadget he wanted at a nearby stall, and in his typical unhesitant way asked the proprietor (an elderly lady) “how much.” She said a lot of things very fast in Chinese, but eventually pulled out a coin to show Pollo how much to pay. He tried to take the coin from her to see the denomination, but she angrily pulled her hand away, muttering threateningly and not the least bit amused by our gales of laughter! After accomplishing my goal of finding the HSBC bank and getting some Hong Kong dollars, the general consensus was to head back to the “barracks” and rest for a bit. We rode the 5K or so back to Po Leung Kuk. Passing the cafeteria on the way back to our rooms, we heard a group of 11-12 year old girls singing "Jingle Bells" with great spirit, which made me grin. Christmas is coming, even in China!
Once showered, Wilson, Amaurys, and I decided to go back to town on the bus to get lunch and look around more. We started by asking a group of chattering teens where to get lunch. They recommended a seafood place just around the corner from the bus station, so we headed there and sat outside just a few feet from the railing of the harbor wall. Every time we got up to look at the lovely view of sampans floating in the harbor with mist-covered hills and islands behind, an old lady would approach, asking “Boat? Boat?” to see if we wanted to get a sampan for hire.
Relishing the feeling of truly being in a foreign and exciting place, I ordered a seafood soup, which turned out to be a very simple gingery broth with very fresh fish, prawns, and what I think were tiny lobsters snuggled whole amongst the bright choy sum. Wilson “stayed safe” with chicken fried rice, and Amaurys didn’t have a clue what to get. I thought I’d play it safe and order noodles with chicken for him. However, the crunchy noodles that arrived, with chicken in a sauce of mushrooms and greens, made him wrinkle his nose. After unhappily pushing the bits around on the plate and eating a few mournful mouthfuls, he proclaimed it the strangest chicken he’d ever eaten and declared he wished for McDonald’s instead!
Wilson was cold so the guys left me to pay the bill while they removed themselves from the breeze coming off the water. As soon as they got up, an old lady made a beeline for our table, and gestured to the plate with remaining noodles. Speaking rapidly in Cantonese, she somehow easily got me to understand that she would like to take the noodles. I conveyed my agreement, and she quickly upended the plate into a plastic bag. Just then, the hostess swooped in and chastised the old woman, turning to me in chagrin. As the old woman made a universal gesture of appeasement, I tried to say “No problem, I don’t mind.” I asked to have the remainder of my seafood put in a bag, so that I could later surreptitiously pass it to the old woman. This is actually the perfect arrangement from my point of view: no guilt about leaving food on the plate to go to waste, and no need to have the remains wrapped up for an uncertain future in a non-refrigerated room.
I walked around Sai Kung for another couple hours, buying custard tarts (the sort you find at a dim sum restaurant) warm from the oven for dessert and taking about a photo every minute. There was so much to see and marvel at! Then I discovered the indoor marketplace. On the ground floor was the meat and fish, and I wandered in utter fascination among the stalls. The meat was pretty standard for a western butcher shop I’d guess, except for the odd pig’s head (skin only) or trotters, and a lot of tongue. But the fish was completely amazing. I saw so many beautiful fish, and they were either live or very, very fresh. Some friendly stallkeepers pointed out the more unusual fare to me, including sea cucumber and some moluscs I’d never seen before. The squid with iridescent teal eyes were gorgeous, and the lobsters, with rainbow patterned shells, truly lovely. There were huge flat fish, eels, and masses of crabs with their claws tied together with bits of red plastic string or something that looked like tough grass. Never have I seen so many beautiful creatures in one place, except perhaps for an aquarium. Somehow, I think their doomed situation made them even more exquisite.
We successfully caught the correct bus out of town, and I was able, with only a few tries, to communicate to the driver that we wanted to be let off at Po Leung Kuk. Which is where we returned, tired and sated with new sights, smells, and sounds, by 5 p.m. Pollo and I took a brief walk outside the dorm along the mini mangrove swamp edging the bay and admired the orange disk of sun across the water, setting just above the fishing village of Sai Kung.
By this means we ordered several ham and cheese sandwiches for the guys, as well as French toast. I ordered a red bean drink, and “sweet bean curd” (slightly sweetened silken tofu in a sealed plastic container). Then I decided to be really adventurous and order the noodles with fried bean curd. This turned out to be ramen-type noodles with some unidentified kind of meat. Hmm. Not tofu. Possibly not chicken either. Well, I’d ordered it and I may as well eat it, I thought, and did.
After breakfast we went for a ride. First we headed up the road into the Sai Kung country park. The terrain was very hilly indeed, and the narrow twisty roads climbed to some stupendous views over the High Island Reservoir. At one point, the guys (riding ahead of me) shouted out to "take a picture!" and I saw ahead some kind of monkey (blog readers have since pointed out that it was a macaque, or rhesus monkey) walking up the road toward us. I could even say “swaggering,” ‘cause this fella (very manly if the size of his bright red testicles was indicative) had no qualms whatsoever about our presence, and practically ignored us as he made his purposeful way past us.
After dead-ending at some unfinished road and riding back the way we had come, out of the country park, we continued along to the town of Sai Kung. Described as a fishing village (both by my parents and by Louis), I looked forward to exploring a bit. The first thing we saw when we arrived was a produce market in full swing right near the bus station. We bought bagsful of bananas, oranges, and tangerines. Alberto and Pollo saw some small guanabanas and snagged them, proclaiming them the tastiest they’d ever had.
Pollo saw a gadget he wanted at a nearby stall, and in his typical unhesitant way asked the proprietor (an elderly lady) “how much.” She said a lot of things very fast in Chinese, but eventually pulled out a coin to show Pollo how much to pay. He tried to take the coin from her to see the denomination, but she angrily pulled her hand away, muttering threateningly and not the least bit amused by our gales of laughter! After accomplishing my goal of finding the HSBC bank and getting some Hong Kong dollars, the general consensus was to head back to the “barracks” and rest for a bit. We rode the 5K or so back to Po Leung Kuk. Passing the cafeteria on the way back to our rooms, we heard a group of 11-12 year old girls singing "Jingle Bells" with great spirit, which made me grin. Christmas is coming, even in China!
Once showered, Wilson, Amaurys, and I decided to go back to town on the bus to get lunch and look around more. We started by asking a group of chattering teens where to get lunch. They recommended a seafood place just around the corner from the bus station, so we headed there and sat outside just a few feet from the railing of the harbor wall. Every time we got up to look at the lovely view of sampans floating in the harbor with mist-covered hills and islands behind, an old lady would approach, asking “Boat? Boat?” to see if we wanted to get a sampan for hire.
Relishing the feeling of truly being in a foreign and exciting place, I ordered a seafood soup, which turned out to be a very simple gingery broth with very fresh fish, prawns, and what I think were tiny lobsters snuggled whole amongst the bright choy sum. Wilson “stayed safe” with chicken fried rice, and Amaurys didn’t have a clue what to get. I thought I’d play it safe and order noodles with chicken for him. However, the crunchy noodles that arrived, with chicken in a sauce of mushrooms and greens, made him wrinkle his nose. After unhappily pushing the bits around on the plate and eating a few mournful mouthfuls, he proclaimed it the strangest chicken he’d ever eaten and declared he wished for McDonald’s instead!
Wilson was cold so the guys left me to pay the bill while they removed themselves from the breeze coming off the water. As soon as they got up, an old lady made a beeline for our table, and gestured to the plate with remaining noodles. Speaking rapidly in Cantonese, she somehow easily got me to understand that she would like to take the noodles. I conveyed my agreement, and she quickly upended the plate into a plastic bag. Just then, the hostess swooped in and chastised the old woman, turning to me in chagrin. As the old woman made a universal gesture of appeasement, I tried to say “No problem, I don’t mind.” I asked to have the remainder of my seafood put in a bag, so that I could later surreptitiously pass it to the old woman. This is actually the perfect arrangement from my point of view: no guilt about leaving food on the plate to go to waste, and no need to have the remains wrapped up for an uncertain future in a non-refrigerated room.
I walked around Sai Kung for another couple hours, buying custard tarts (the sort you find at a dim sum restaurant) warm from the oven for dessert and taking about a photo every minute. There was so much to see and marvel at! Then I discovered the indoor marketplace. On the ground floor was the meat and fish, and I wandered in utter fascination among the stalls. The meat was pretty standard for a western butcher shop I’d guess, except for the odd pig’s head (skin only) or trotters, and a lot of tongue. But the fish was completely amazing. I saw so many beautiful fish, and they were either live or very, very fresh. Some friendly stallkeepers pointed out the more unusual fare to me, including sea cucumber and some moluscs I’d never seen before. The squid with iridescent teal eyes were gorgeous, and the lobsters, with rainbow patterned shells, truly lovely. There were huge flat fish, eels, and masses of crabs with their claws tied together with bits of red plastic string or something that looked like tough grass. Never have I seen so many beautiful creatures in one place, except perhaps for an aquarium. Somehow, I think their doomed situation made them even more exquisite.
We successfully caught the correct bus out of town, and I was able, with only a few tries, to communicate to the driver that we wanted to be let off at Po Leung Kuk. Which is where we returned, tired and sated with new sights, smells, and sounds, by 5 p.m. Pollo and I took a brief walk outside the dorm along the mini mangrove swamp edging the bay and admired the orange disk of sun across the water, setting just above the fishing village of Sai Kung.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Arrival in Hong Kong
All my life, I’ve heard my mother and father’s memories of Hong Kong. The names “Deep Water Bay,” “Kowloon,” and “Lantau” evoke a kind of nostalgic yearning for me, though I’d never known the places themselves. My mother was born and raised on the island(s), and my father was living and working there when he met my mother in the late 60s. Neither of them has been back since 1972, which has perhaps imbued the locale with even more mystique for me. In my family, it is an island trapped in memory’s amber; we know realistically that it has changed beyond their memories’ recognition, and yet we insist on imagining it as it was.
At age 28, 35 years after my parents left for the last time, I finally have the opportunity to visit Hong Kong; to explore the island as it is now, and to try and fit the bits of memory into a 21st century reality. Pollo’s cycling team, GS Mengoni, was invited to participate in the race by one of the team's sponsors (Champion System), which is based in Hong Kong. With a lot of frequent flyer assistance from my parents, and the promise to help the team out as a “staff” person, I was able to get a ticket to tag along.
The dreaded 15-hour flight to Hong Kong wasn't bad at all, really...at least for the first 7 hours. When the movie screen, between showings, showed us 4,000-odd miles still to go and 8 more hours, time did start to drag a bit. I couldn't sleep much at all, but for all that was feeling pretty wide-awake (if physically exhausted) when we finally alighted in Hong Kong around 8 p.m. Louis, the team sponsor from Champion Systems, met us along with some of the riders with the Hong Kong team. They had the Champion System team truck, so we loaded all the 6 bikes and luggage with ease.
I couldn't see much on the dark drive from the airport, and so I didn't feel much of that thrilling “I'm in a foreign country” realization. It started to build, however, when Louis informed us that we were headed to a country park near Sai Kung in the New Territories. (We’d be spending the night in the dormitories of a summer camp facility.) “Sai Kung!” I realized with a thrill of recognition…that’s where my mom had showed me (on her 1960’s map of Hong Kong) that her family had kept their sailboat when she was a child.
We arrived at the Po Leung Kuk Day Camp, and dragged our luggage to our “suite” in the dorms. Despite the late hour (after 11 p.m.), young girls were running around the building, screaming with laughter and high spirits. Some of the guys started putting their bikes together (an interesting proposition in a small common room about 12’ x 12’, and the rest of us just sat around in a jet-lagged stupor.
There were 6 teeny beds, and 7 of us, so I volunteered (as the only gal) to occupy the smallish vinyl-covered couch in the common room. I guess the less said the better about my night’s "sleep!" I woke (for the 20th time or so) at about 4:30, when Eugene was padding back and forth around the room. “What’s going on??” I croaked. He muttered in response, “I can’t sleep. I’m going for a ride.” It was pitch black outside, but arguing with a sleep-deprived zombie in spandex seemed unwise and, frankly, would take more energy than I had. Eugene left, and I tried vainly to position myself more comfortably on the couch and ignore my increasingly aching legs. Suffice to say by the time light came creeping through the window, I was not feeling exactly refreshed. But jet lag wasn’t allowing any of us to sleep, so we crawled out of bed. Eugene had returned, and recounted his night-riding adventures, including an encounter with a wild boar up in the country park!
At age 28, 35 years after my parents left for the last time, I finally have the opportunity to visit Hong Kong; to explore the island as it is now, and to try and fit the bits of memory into a 21st century reality. Pollo’s cycling team, GS Mengoni, was invited to participate in the race by one of the team's sponsors (Champion System), which is based in Hong Kong. With a lot of frequent flyer assistance from my parents, and the promise to help the team out as a “staff” person, I was able to get a ticket to tag along.
The dreaded 15-hour flight to Hong Kong wasn't bad at all, really...at least for the first 7 hours. When the movie screen, between showings, showed us 4,000-odd miles still to go and 8 more hours, time did start to drag a bit. I couldn't sleep much at all, but for all that was feeling pretty wide-awake (if physically exhausted) when we finally alighted in Hong Kong around 8 p.m. Louis, the team sponsor from Champion Systems, met us along with some of the riders with the Hong Kong team. They had the Champion System team truck, so we loaded all the 6 bikes and luggage with ease.
I couldn't see much on the dark drive from the airport, and so I didn't feel much of that thrilling “I'm in a foreign country” realization. It started to build, however, when Louis informed us that we were headed to a country park near Sai Kung in the New Territories. (We’d be spending the night in the dormitories of a summer camp facility.) “Sai Kung!” I realized with a thrill of recognition…that’s where my mom had showed me (on her 1960’s map of Hong Kong) that her family had kept their sailboat when she was a child.
We arrived at the Po Leung Kuk Day Camp, and dragged our luggage to our “suite” in the dorms. Despite the late hour (after 11 p.m.), young girls were running around the building, screaming with laughter and high spirits. Some of the guys started putting their bikes together (an interesting proposition in a small common room about 12’ x 12’, and the rest of us just sat around in a jet-lagged stupor.
There were 6 teeny beds, and 7 of us, so I volunteered (as the only gal) to occupy the smallish vinyl-covered couch in the common room. I guess the less said the better about my night’s "sleep!" I woke (for the 20th time or so) at about 4:30, when Eugene was padding back and forth around the room. “What’s going on??” I croaked. He muttered in response, “I can’t sleep. I’m going for a ride.” It was pitch black outside, but arguing with a sleep-deprived zombie in spandex seemed unwise and, frankly, would take more energy than I had. Eugene left, and I tried vainly to position myself more comfortably on the couch and ignore my increasingly aching legs. Suffice to say by the time light came creeping through the window, I was not feeling exactly refreshed. But jet lag wasn’t allowing any of us to sleep, so we crawled out of bed. Eugene had returned, and recounted his night-riding adventures, including an encounter with a wild boar up in the country park!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
