The first week went well and I spent a lot of time recovering from my jet lag, Denmark to US was a lot harder than US to China for some reaso
n, who knows. We headed into Hong Kong our first weekend which is where most of the current Flickr pictures are from. Hong Kong is quite a bit pricier than Main Land, the houses that can be seen in one or two of the pictures as being on the peak have sold for as much as $250 million usd. On the topic of the peak we took the must do tram ride to the top, great view of what is a city like no other, tops of skyscrapers are at eye level when standing on the viewing deck. A definite must do for all those visiting Hong Kong. We met some kids on the tram ride from UNC that are in a Intl. business program that couples with Hong Kong University and low and behold Copenhagen Business School, doing a semester at each with 15 students from each of the schools in attendance. This meant they were in Denmark the entire time I was there as well which was a hot topic of discussion. We grabbed names and plan to meet up again.Back to Hong Kong though, the city could be best described as an Asian New York City. Seven million people keep the streets packed, but the cities recent past is never too far away. Scaffolding on buildings is still constructed of ba
mboo and, as can be seen in my pictures, the old fishing boats are still used by many people to make a living. But the real story in HK is the shopping, I have never seen so many malls packed together, it is all finance and shopping. As Americanized as they come. Designer everything real and fake poor out of the PRC into this mecca of consumerism in the East. It is strange to see such an affluent city knowing that there are slum like areas less than two hours away that we passed through on our way to the city. Some areas we saw on the way in were so decrepit they would make any US ghetto look like a Club Med retreat. But none the less the former British Colony is there.We spent most of our time in HK wandering around the city. The two pictures above are two of the more curious things we saw. One was a woman fishing for tiny fish through grates in a peer, she was one of many doing this. The other I was later told was a picture of the all day picnics the maids have every Sunday on their day off across Hong Kong. Apparently they group together by country they are originally from throughout the city and construct makeshift mini walls out of cardboard to secure their areas for the day. It was very odd when we first stumbled upon it, but I guess it's a weekly occurrence. We went out and had some drinks with our coworkers in Lan Kwai Fong on Saturday night. This area of Western style bars is nothing short of the expat center of Hong Kong on any given night. We called it a night pretty late and had to take a taxi back as apparently the Subway closes at about midnight, odd for such a large city I thought, but unlike NYC Hong Kong isn't an up all night type metropolis.
We returned to the PRC on Sunday along with a new employee that we met at the Airport. We got to do a ride through the border instead of foot crossing, this made the whole thing a no hassle move, very nice.
We met Austin, the other coop who had been in hiding since his face was swollen from his minibike accident, on Monday. It was nice because he filled us in on a lot of the local area and explained that there was enough to do around the factory to keep us from needing to waste your money every weekend going to Hong Kong. He took us into downtown Fenggang the following night and showed us the Wal-mart (pronounced wa-eh-ma here) and the pirated dvd shop. We grabbed some beers and a bite then headed back to the factory. We hit up the scaled down version of billiards that is popular in the area and which there are about 20 outdoor tables for 100 feet from the factory gate. This coincided with more beers obviously. Being American we are stared at constantly, but at the pool place it was even more so, crowds formed around us, and with no one speaking a word of English but ourselves we enjoyed the ability to comment out loud about the hilarity of the whole situation. This continued for about three hours as we played the mass of the crowd diminishing and replenishing as passers by saw we weren't Asian. We called it a night around 12:30am and paid a whopping $1.25 for the 3 hours of games.
OK I will continue writing later my computer battery is about to die.
(Pictures of view from the peak and the ridiculously expensive houses/apartments on it)
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