Holidays

Blick über Hongkong

And now I finally get to write about the national holidays we spent in the area around Hongkong. Our flight went to to Shenzhen the industrial metropol that in the last couple of months you heard about in Germany mainly in connection with the vast suicide rate in some companies. We didnt get to see anything because we went straight to Hongkong by bus, but I heard a lot of funny stories about huge buildings just selling for example mobile phone displays and nothing else, and that in the way all the markets look like here: A lot of small shops that seem connected by some magic bond but everybody selling there things like on a basar with a whole lifetime or even a couple of geneartions of experience and expertise as salesmen. From the plane I got to see that throughout the city small greens hills just seem to rise out of nowhere, too steep to build something on them which makes the city actually look a lot more liveable. This is basically also the flair of Hongkong. Even though it is the city with the most high-rises in the world, through these steep mountains and the islands it becomes much greener and enjoyable. The public transportation in Hongkong is also just phenomenal and very thought through. There are busses, trams, metros, ferries, cheap cabs and helicopters. And they always seem to guess right were you are heading because if you have to switch lines, the one you need is usually just the one closest to you. And even though you're in a huge city, you can find yourself in wonderful spots in the nature within half an hour. We went to two smaller islands (Lamma and Cheung Chan) and then to a coast in the Northeast of the (new) territories. It really felt like I would imagine holidays on Fiji. In Hongkong everybody speaks English and Cantonese. Since basically all the signs are given in traditional characters (there are two sets of characters: traditional and the simplified that are used in the Peoples Republic introduced by Mao which is a little ironic considering that the only two people ever to simplify the chinese writing system in such a way both share some parallels in their CV – The first emperor Qin Shi Huang Di and Mao Zedong) and their pronounciation as well, I actually think I got to understand a little better the differences between „Mandarin“ Chinese and the southern dialects/languages. 

Saikong

In some spots the ocean seemed pretty polluted, so I really wouldnt have wanted to go swimming even if i had taken my swimming trunks. After four days we took a ferry to Macao, a former Portuguese colony, which is also seen as the Las vegas of Asia, since it legalized gambling. Some places looked quite nice but all in all I didn't really like it, it was dirty and grey. No trees on the streets like I'm basically already used to by Nanjing or Hongkong. Then we took a cheap ride in a very comfortable bus to Guangzhou, another former colony: this time french and a little english. I liked the city very much, it was amazingly clean, had a nice mixture of modern city but also very traditional looking quarters and the place were the colonists settled which in my opinion just looks like France. After some back and forth we got a really cheap but beautiful place in a hostel with river view. The food in Guangdong is really great. It is supposed to be China's best food, even though that is also the area in which people tend to eat the weird things people might hear about in the „West“. I also enjoyed the food places right on the street, where you could just sit outside in some garden furniture eating Chinese barbecue. In Nanjing I haven't found the relaxed atmosphere of these places yet.

And now I'm back. I had to revise a couple of things that I missed in school but fortunately it wasn't too much. On Monday we celebrated Ophelie's birthday and besides that I doubt that a lot of exciting things happened.