Attention our precious guests!
Attention our precious guests!
Hong Kong was excellent, my new favorite city! It’s beautiful day and night, and truly the place where east meets west. It’s a modern, sleek, financial business mecca, but the many bright neon signs are dominated by Cantonese script. We stayed in Chungking mansions which from the outside looks somewhat derelict, a dominating shabby office block building. On the steps are many hawkers who see you carrying a bag and attempt vigorously to get you to stay in their guesthouses. Once inside we had to navigate our way through the labyrinthine passages past the small shops selling postcards, Indian food, mobile phones and sim cards, electronics and hats, to find the rickety elevator to take us to the Maple Leaf Guesthouse. Once up there we were greeted by the incredibly nice proprietor and shown to our tiny space-aware room. We did have a miniature double bed (fine for me but at nearly 6ft Dan struggled) with a closet sized bathroom. It was so cute I loved it, though I didn’t fully appreciate the smell of deep fried Indian appetizers that more than occasionally wafted through.
As true travelers, we hit up all of the free/cheap tourist activities; strolled along the Avenue of Stars, watched the cool light show (I’m a sucker for anything bright and colorful), strolled through the markets, took the ferry and tram up to the peak to admire the view and did a fair bit of people watching. I honestly loved it there so much; I want to start learning Cantonese and move out there! It’s such a big bustling metropolis I was not expecting the people to be so friendly. They were real stars! For example, on our way through the airport as we were leaving a young woman stopped us and asked if she could do a brief survey regarding tourism in Hong Kong. She asked how many times I’d been to the city and to my response of my first time she asked how I liked it and I said that I really enjoyed it and can’t wait to return to that she said:”ah Hong Kong welcomes you for next time!” what a wonderful attitude! (much better than Thailand “land of smiles”).
Amazing HK light show
LA also was cool, not what I was expecting. We stayed in a hostel off Hollywood Blvd, a couple of blocks down from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Our first day we went to Universal studios, the rides there were a lot of fun, and seeing sets from Desperate Housewives and other stages on the backlot was quite surreal. The next day we hit Six Flags Magic Mountain and that was AMAZING!! Whiteknuckletastic! The best ride was X2, where you climb incredibly high, the seating arrangement so that you are on your back headfirst as you plummet at God-knows-what speed but the seats spin round 360⁰ up and down loop the loop. It was mid afternoon we rode X2 I hadn’t eaten for hours nothing in my stomach and I still wanted to throw up!
There’s quite a dingy side to the city, and it’s so sprawling. We decided to walk down the famous Sunset and Santa Monica Blvds, and we walked for quite a while through what seemed to be industrial blocks or weak concrete strip malls consisting of pawn shops, launderettes and liquor stores. To get to the fancy parts where the beautiful people go I guess you have to cover some distance by driving, which I don’t really know how anyone could be bothered with the traffic (a 12 minute drive from Dan’s brother’s hotel took nearly an hour during the day). We hadn’t seen any celebrities and were somewhat disappointed- we’d had a near miss the night before with Paris Hilton who’d been partying down the road from us but I was too lazy and couldn’t care any less about her to make the effort to go out star spotting. It was our last day so we decided to cut our losses and head to the Hollywood-Highlands area again, get a few snaps of the famous sign and Angela Lansbury’s star on the Walk of fame. As we wandered out of the Kodak theatre we saw a crowd of people, and I saw a person dressed as an armchair. Bemused by such a random costume I was about to exclaim loudly to Dan about said armchair when I saw what the crowd was looking at … James Cameron; megadirector of Terminator, Titanic and Avatar. I was just in awe, this star-spot made up for the previous 3 day drought! He was giving a speech at the inauguration of the creator of Cirque Du Soleil into the walk of fame. I’m still delighted that I’ve seen someone of such epic talent and fame – it by far blows seeing the fat singer from The Zutons out the water.
JC
We headed to the downtown area still in awe, to visit the fashion, jewelry and toy districts. This was the best day of window-shopping I’ve ever had. The products really were sights to behold. Instead of fancy high-end stores like Chanel, a winter grotto toy stores like Hamleys and beautiful jewelry stores. What we found were ugly ass velour blankets with terrible pictures of Marilyn Monroe or the lone wolf howling at the moon and glitter t-shirts stating “sexy bitch”, miserable toys that already looked broken and the most offensive jewelry designs that make Craigslist look like Tiffany’s. Brilliant!
Hollywood and LA are unusual places, and a little disappointing. I was expecting the glitz and glamour so often portrayed but it seemed to be an even tackier version of Vegas, seedy and sad. The place reeked of crushed dreams and rape. On our last night, there was a premier for some film directly across the road from the McDonalds we’d stopped in for food before our flight. A few meters away from us were celebrities in their $1000 dresses grinning and sparkling for the cameras, while right next to us a gang war was about to start, the manager was kicking out a homeless woman while another guy was trying to steal fistfuls of sugar packets and napkins. It was about to kick off, we inhaled our food and got the heck out of there.
