Elad’s blog

When I was in highschool, the literature teacher taught us about medieval jewish poetry in Spain. One of its characteristics is that there is no wild nature there: every flower has its place, every bird is in its position. The trees are carefully cut, and the floor is orderly arranged.

Just like the park here in Kowloon.

It has several areas: an aviary (to see birds), a sweaming pool, a small chinese garden (with water pool), an ‘adventure land’ (in which children play at citadel-like building), and even a flamingo pool, which hosts a few dozens of them (only that here they stand on both legs - probably the water isn’t hot). Everything is very ordered, just as expected from a park between the towers, where land is a precious asset.

After the park I went to the space museum. There are two complexes of museums nearby: one includes the space museum, art museum, and a theater; the other includes the history museum, science museum, and a campus of HK politechnic institute, as well as a large public library.
It turned out that they had today a ’space day’ or something like this, so there was no entrance fee at the entrance to the museum, and there were many peoply there.
The museum itself has several areas, and I was most impressed by the innovative and imaginative ideas there. For example, in the children section there is a sandy soil to which the children can throw stones and watch the formation of craters; there is this huge spring that comes from the ceiling, to which a child can be connected to feel the 1/6 gravity of the moon (he can walk while connected to the spring); there’s this MASHPECH-shaped surface on which small metal balls fall in a helical orbit, to demonstrate a grativational well and planetary motion in gravitation field; and many more.
I should have guessed that the chinese names for start-groups would be much more imaginative than the greek ones (on which the west rely). Common names include dragons and ladies, snakes and other motifs from the chinese cultures. What I didn’t guess, though I should have, is that in different parts of the world (or at different times in history) stars were combined into groups in different ways - so the same star can belong to different group depending on your position in the world! Actually they showed some really nice examples: I saw at least ten names for the ‘ursa major’ (the big bear) group, including the chinese ‘beaurocrat’ (picturing this group as a stand on which the heavenly beaurocrat collects money) and ancient egypt’s ‘parade’ (they added more stars to this group, to form a celestial parade of a man, an ox, a crocodile, and some other animal I don’t remember right now). There is also a big planetarium there, and from the roof you can have a guided watch on the sun.
The museum was very nice. After finishing my visit there, I found just behind it a nice promenade, dedicated to movie stars (just like Holywood’s ’star street’). Every few steps there’s a name of a chinese film star, with his hand on concrete. The only name I recognized was Jacky Chan (I’m probably misspleing it, but I don’t remember the correct way to write it), adn it was nice just to walk there.
My noodle war continued this lunch. I could have just eaten normal food, but I’m not the man to give up so quickly! It does, though, give you this urge to destroy the old Chinese civilization. No wander china has so many enemies!
After lunch it was quite late, so I couldn’t go to the History museum as I originally planned - well, now I have a reason to return to Hong-Kong!

One look at Victoria peak this morning was enough to decide I’m not going there. The peak is over the clouds, and I have no intention of repeating yesterday’s arrival into clouds. Overall, most of the time here the sky are grey, but there is no rain and it is hot.
The streets are filled with girls this morning. They stand at every corner, and try to raise up money for some christian organisation (which is apparentely having a ‘flag day’ today). Of course I’m not donating anything, especially not for christian organisations, but since only girls and no boys are visible (and remembering that in yesterday’s petition there also were only girls) I started to think of a possible reason. Is it because girls are better in raising money and support from persons, or is there something deeper here?
I’m probably going to a museum of some sort. I don’t feel like going to Aberdeen (a small village here, which claims to be the only non-tower place in HK) and the peak is cloudy. In 7 hours I will go to the airport, on my way to Australia.

It was in the late 13th or early 14th century that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy. Thus, when the first italian cook made his first vermiceli soup (soup with noodles), the chinese had already had over 2000 years of practice in eating noodle soup with chopsticks.
At the centuries that passed since, the chinese people continued to use chopsticks, while the europeans used forks. By mere evolution, every chinese child can handle the chopsticks better then me, nowadays.
This sad fact was extremely clear in my daily struggle with the sticks, at today’s lunch. The noodle soup today came with meat balls, and the restaurant owner - along with one nice customer - tried to teach me how to use the sticks. Unfortunately, they both held the chopsticks on their right hand (everybody here except me is doing so), which made the battle very hard - as you probably remember, I’m left handed with extreme poor motoric skills on my right hand. At the end, of course, I managed to eat everything - but had to use my left hand for this.
A question for all you engineers and engineering students. It comes from the field of control: what is the optimal position to hold chopsticks? limitations: they have to sit comfortably in your hand (which rules out the ‘drawer’ answer), your hand must not touch the soup (which adds a parameter of the palm size), and you must have the most precise control on the sticks. The most correct answer will be awarded a decorated chopstick.
Most of the day I did electronics shopping. I bought a few accesories to my camera (including a marine pack, so I can send you underwater pictures from Australia) and a diving-computer, to enhance my dives. I was very disappointed, though, to discover that they only hold here the cutting edge, most new things. I couldn’t find any of the things Oded requested, because they are too old. I also didn’t find some of the older things I wanted for myself.I did find, tough, an amazing variety of 3G cell phones (Nokia rules!) and some MP4 equiptment (anybody: what is this standard? I knew only of MP3!). During my shopping I entered this magasine shop, which turned out to be an Anime shop - Arik, you would love it! It was all full with anime magasines, of every size and color.
At the evening I went back to the electronics area (a small street parallel to Nathan Street), to look for a battery I wanted, and found out that the street was closed to vehicles and was full of pedestrians - for no special reason, just for fun. It was very crouded, and I enjoyed wandering there a bit. Before doing that I had a dinner at a japanese fast-food store, and noticed that rice is much easier to handle with chopsticks than noodles - the noodles disturb each other, while rice seeds merely fall from the stick if you don’t eat fast enough. This is why asians had to become so quick - their way of eating forced them to! (It also forced them not to have good steaks, and the warm weather made them eat a little, which can explain why they are generally small and quick people). Anyway, I was walking in the street (the MIDRAHOV) when I noticed a bunch of girls signing up a petition. Of course I joined - it turned out to be a petition a newspaper named ‘The Epoch Times’ arranged against the chinese governement, who tries to close the paper for being anticommunist. I actually recieved a free copy (today’s special edition. The headline: ‘Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party’. The nine commentaries include things like ‘On how chinese communist party is an evil cult’ and other - Arik, you’d love this stuff. Try looking at their web site). After joining the petition, I had this nice conversation with one of the girls, and she suggested me to go to Victoria Peak tonight for a good view of Hong-Kong, so I went there.
A few words about the geography of HK colony. HK is a set of several islands (the biggest one is called Hong-Kong, but there are also other islands - for example, Lantau island) and a peninsula (called Howloon) that has a direct connection to the mainland. All the islands (there are many of them) are connected through bridges, tunnels, and ferries. Victoria Peak, found on Hong-Kong island, is the highest in the entire archipelago - it rises some 600 meters above the south chine sea.
It was nine o’clock in the evening. I was in Howloon. I wanted to get to the Peak. A short description of the way is: I walked. I took a bus. I took a ferry. I took another bus. I took a train that climbs to the peak. I arrived to 22:20.
On my previous work, I learned to pay attention for details. For example, when constructing a system (the technical term is ‘integration’) you should save in the box more space than just required for the parts to sit together, because when inserting them in they usually go in various angles and you need space for the working tools, too. So if you don’t want to go into a battle of accusations with your mechanical assistant - just make sure he also plans a way to construct the box, not just how it will look in the end. This evening I had the opposite problem: I arrived nicely to the peak, and in time to go back from it, but only to discover that it was inside a cloud and I could see nothing, not to mention any photography. It was really frustrating, because it was all kind of impulsive, and because I entered the cloud inside the train, on half of the way up (and on the mid-way down, I went out of it and could suddenly see the city). I stayed in the peak for some 10 minutes, saw that there’s nothing to see there in the night when you’re inside a cloud (fog looks the same everywhere), and went back down. Could I know this? probably not. Sometimes, paying attention to the details just isn’t enough.
Anyway, it was a nice thing - getting there and back while there’s still transportation (buses here stop around midnight; the ferry service ends at 23:30). I learned at the hard way that the buses here don’t give you change (It costed my 2 HK$, around 1NIS) , and managed to arrive back to Howloon, when I’m going to get some sleep.

City buzz never stops.
I did yesterday a nightly bar tour, just walking for a couple of local (non-touristic) bars, at the chinese allys by the harbour, and having one beer at each bar.
They play here games in their bars. Most commonly, the locals order a six-pack, which is a metal busket full of ice, in which six beer bottles float, and play this nice game: they have a can with five dices, which they throw on the table, and every one has to say the total sum of the numbers on the dices (there are variations: sometimes they say how many dices came out with a specific number, or they compete for some other aspect - in one version, ‘1′ has the role of a joker, and you need to get a good hand). In all the variation, the round ends with someone drinking beer (I don’t know if it’s the winner of the loser). Another nice bar game they have is that everyone pulls out his hand with a few fingers stretched, and they have to shout as quickly as possible the total number of stretched fingers. Again, the looser drinks.
Karaoke is also a common practice in the bars here, though all the songs are in chinese (which adds an oriental flavor to the experience). The beers, however, are mostly european (’Carlsberg’, ‘Heineken’, etc. are very common. I also had a beer called ‘blue girl’, which I didn’t know before, but I guess it’s also european).
From all the above, you probably understand that there’s much noise in the bars here - the dices shaking in the metal cans, the people shouting, the background music; however, the air is extremely clean - almost no one smokes here! Maybe it has something to do with the fact that cigarette packs here come with printed warnings (the usual ‘cigarette causes cancer’, ‘cigarette harms your children’, etc.) that are printed the size of HALF THE PACK. So when someone looks for cigarettes, they first see the huge warning, and only later - in small writings - the brand of the cigarette.
Hong Kong is trying unsuccessfully to diminish its British past. They still drive here at the left side, the streets have names like ‘prince Edward west’, and in many places there are signs in English (which is also widely spoken, almost everyone here knows English to some extent, even the bar tenders). However, in the small streets you can already find places that practice only chinese, like the Dim-Sum stall from yesterday.

I am now finishing my breakfast (an excellent Vanilla Latte they have here) and going to do some shopping.

Here’s the correct way to eat a noodle soup. You pick the chinese strange-looking spoon in one hand. On the other hand you hold the sticks they use instead of forks. You lower the spoon so it’s touching the soup, and picks some noodles with the sticks. You don’t really raise the sticks much - just enough to insert the noodles into the spoon. Now the noodles are comfortable in their small bowl, and you can raise them into your mouth and eat the soup while looking decent.
It may seem nice in theory, but it took me almost an hour to study and practice this. In this hour the entire chinese stall was staring at me, and the owner even offered me (twice!) a fork, which I bravely refused.
This Dim-Sum stall could be real start-up in Tel-Aviv (people, read well, you can make millions!). First, it’s only in chinese, so nobody understands what he’s ordered (at least, I didn’t understand). The menu has two parts: in the first part you have to choose two out of fifteen things, and in the second part you have to choose one out of four. All you get is an enormous bowel of soup, and as it turned out, the first list was the type of Dim-Sum (chinese word for KREPLACH) you wanted (I accidentally ordered one with shrimps and one which turned to be an octopus ball - both were really disgusting) and the second was the type of noodles (rice based or normal, thick or thin; I had the thin rice noodles - the toughest to handle with chopsticks!) in the soup.

Hong-Kong believes in towers. Even the buses here have two floors, and the only building I saw that was less than 10 floors was an episcopal church. Most buildings have at least 20 floors, some much more.
This city is truely cosmopolitan. I’ve seen - just in two roads next to Nathan’s street - stalls and restaurants for Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian, and even Euro-American food, and many others. I arrived here at noon (My flight was scheduled 11:30, but I arrived at Bangkok-airport as early as 9:00, so they let me on the previous flight, which left Bangkok on 9:50, so I didn’t have to wait at the airport at all), and when leaving the bus - before I had the chance to put my bag on me - immediately several indian immigrants (and one from Nepal) tried to take me to their hostels, which looked really disgusting. The nice thing is, that they are all in the same building: from floor 9 to 18, every floor houses two guesthouses, and all are fighting against one another. It took me a while to find a place that looks nice (it is run by an old chinese woman, and not by Indian guys. It looks very clean, compared to their places; it is much smaller, too.), and then I left my bag and went down a bit, to feel the pulse of the city.
The pulse is high. When you’re on the street level, and ignore the fact that you’re surrounded by towers and not by regular buildings, you see that the streets are full of people, vehicles and buses (yes, two floors) are rushing all around, and almost everywhere you look you see only neon lights. The internet is less frequent here than in Bangkok (I’m sitting right now at the ‘pacific cafe’ on Nathan street, when customers get free internet), and the city is much much cleaner.
I ordered myself a pair of sunglasses (they’ll be ready tomorrow). Right now, I don’t have the impression that it is much cheaper here than in other places, but maybe I just haven’t found the right places yet.

Following is a transcript from a tip in LAMETAYEL.
I’d love to have remarks on it or any additional information.

Another possibility is the youth hostels, I added link in my site.

BTW: Somebody knows the exchange rate of HK$?

איך מגיעים:
מסין - אחרי חציית הגבול להונג קונג מ- - Shwnzhen לוקחים את הרכבת ל Kowloon - ויורדים בתחנה שמתחברת עם הרכבת התחתית (MTR נוסעים עם ה- MTR - עד תחנת Tsim Sha Tsui : ויוצאים ביציאה D

משדה התעופה – ניתן לקחת את הרכבת Airport Express ולרדת באותה תחנה (D), או במחיר זול בהרבה אוטובוס A21 שעובר דרך Nathan Road. 33HK $ לנסיעה.
כל זאת בכדי למצוא מגורים זולים שישאירו לכם כסף בארנק להמשך הטיול.

מגורים זולים:
ב- Chunking Mantion ו- Chunking Meridor ב-Nathan Road יש עשרות גסט האוסים קטנים וזולים.
מחירי לינה: כ- 60 $HK ללילה.

אטרקציות מרכזיות:
- Victoria peakגבעה המתנשאת מעל העיר, כדאי לעלות עם ה- Peak Tram. נוף על כל הטריטוריה ותצפית על המפרץ. מומלץ מאוד לעלות גם בלילה ולראות את המפרץ והאורות של קאולון מנגד.
בצד של Kowloon נמצאת הטיילת המשקיפה על האי הונג קונג. מבט נהדר על האי, בעיקר בלילה.
שייט במעבורת Star Farry)) בין Kowloon לאי הונג קונג: גם חוויה מהנה, וגם הדרך הזולה ביותר לחצות את המפרץ.
מוזיאונים - מוזיאון ההיסטוריה נהדר, מוזיאון החלל, מוזיאון המדע (ויש עוד הרבה). בכל המוזיאונים הכניסה חינם בימי רביעי, כדאי מאוד לנצל זאת.
Ocean Park, פארק גדול (יום שלם) הכולל הכל, רכבות הרים להופעות דולפינים ואקווריום דגים ענק (ויש גם פנדות). יש אוטובוסים מ- Central.
לקפוץ לסטנלי בדרום האי. טיילת ונוף מהמם על הים שמדרום, וגם שוק גדול מאוד המכוון בעיקר לתיירים, אך לא רק, יש תחבורה נוחה ממרכז האי, כ- 20 דקות נסיעה, “כפר הדייגים“ אברדין - מקבץ גדול של סירות דייג המשמשות גם למגורי המשפחות בצל גורדי השחקים.
להסתובב ב-Nathan Road , Central ובסוהו בלילה – לראות חיי לילה תוססים. כדאי לקחת את ה-Tram היחיד שנוסע ברחובות האי, אפילו סתם בשביל הכיף.
לרוצים לראות רחובות סינים “אמיתיים“ מומלץ לעבור לקאולון ו“ללכת לאיבוד“ ברחובות ובשווקים הפנימיים, מעבר ל- Nathan Road

קניות:
לפני היציאה לסיבוב קניות מומלץ לקחת את חוברת הבילויים וקניות שמחולקת חינם במרכזי ה-Tourist information בהונג קונג. יש סניף שלהם ליד המעבורת בצד של kowloon.
שוק סטנלי, שוק הלילה ב-Temple Stree. בשניהם יש הכל כולל בגדים במחירים מאוד זולים. מדובר בחיקויים תוצרת סין, אבל מאוד בזול.
באזור Mong Kok - אינספור חנויות בגדים ותכשיטים. כדאי מאוד לבקר בשוק הציפורים ושוק הפרחים. חוויה לכל החושים…
ב-Harbour City מרכז הקניות הענק והידוע של Kowloon.
לחובבי אלקטרוניקה ומחשבים לא לפספס את מתחם המחשבים ליד תחנת הרכבת - Sham Shui Po (יציאה D).

עלויות:
לינה בגסט האוסים הזולים - 60HK$ ללילה.
תחבורה - 20-30 $HK ליום, תלוי כמה מסתובבים.
אוכל - ניתן לאכול fast food מקומיים באחת מאינספור מסעדות מקומיות בכמה עשרות HK $, או ב-seven-eleven הפזורים בכל מקום בפחות. מחירי ארוחה טובה במסעדה - דומה למחירים מסעדה בארץ.
עלות יומית ברמת תרמילאים כ- 150-200 HK$ ליום כולל עלויות כניסה לאתרים ולא כולל קניות.

* 1 USD = 7.8 HKD (יולי 2004)