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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

On our 2nd to last day, we took the ferry out to Macau. Macau is basically the Vegas of China. Lots of casinos and gambling. We didn’t make it over to the big American casinos (MGM, Wynn etc.) But the traditional casinos reminded us of something out of a James Bond movie. People are very well dressed and are there to play baccarat. No shorts and sandals with a theme restaurant and screaming children like Las Vegas. It was like gambling from a bygone era. We went to the slot machines downstairs and lost $2.

The water at the dock was very choppy, and I was very worried about a rough seasick ride out there. But once the boat got going (with its jet engines!) it was just like a mildly bumpy plane ride, and was no big deal.

We went mainly to the old Portugese side of town:

We were wandering around the old town, and found ourselves 4 stories underground in “The Daiso” Imagine a 99 cent store selling cool Japanese stuff that is clean, bright, and well lit. As opposed to the ones here that sell expired mustard and are a mess. We get home and find out there are 6 of them in Northern California, oh well.

Multiple stores up and down the street were selling every kind of jerky you could ever imagine: pork, beef, boar, piglet, chicken, duck. The vendors would stand out in street with a jerky sheet and tongs in one hand, and scissors in the other. They would snip off pieces for passers-by. It was pretty good, but slightly greasy.

And out of nowhere was this little toy store packed in every square inch with stuff. We could barely move around inside. What’s weird is that they had a ton of American DC Direct stuff for super cheap. Which I assume is because they were made in the region.

Church ruins:

To counter the Shenzen copy-medicine:

An Astro Boy credit card at the bank:

Apparently this place has a reputation. Hundreds of shops selling copy-watches and copy-handbags. We also got to shop at the factory next door. We are led down a hallway of stalls, all with their metal shutters down. One of them is open a crack, we are quickly shuttled in, and then the door is closed behind us. Inside is wall to wall fakes of expensive brand name status items. The factory does not keep any items in stock. You look at which fake knockoff you want, then the person in the store says your order over a cell phone. A few minutes later there is a knock on the metal shutter. The shutter rises up a few inches, and a handbag comes flying under the door. This way the police aren’t able to raid a store full of fakes, since only a few demo items are actually “in stock”.

We were bored with the other tourists comparing their real Louis Vuitton bags with the fake ones, so we went to the mall next door. Imagine walking down an aisle, and having people shout at you and grab you in every direction saying “Copy-watch! Copy-bag! Dvd, what you want!?” We bought one copy bag. To get the bag, the woman running the store sends a small girl up all the way to the top shelf. She then proceeds to push up the drop-ceiling tile, and crawl up inside the ceiling to get the bag from their stock. We then realize that the walls and ceilings of this mall are STUFFED with fake clothes and bags. This mall will explode in a toxic ball of flame if there is ever a fire.

This got very tiring after about an hour of being harassed, touched, and yelled at. So we went outside, ate a red bean paste bun, and sat on a bench until it was time to leave.

Copy Kinder eggs. Where Warner Brothers and Disney have a new spirit of cooperation. The Dwarves enjoy playing yo-yo, while Elmer and Bugs hatch from the same egg at Christmas time:

Things we learned about Australia from the Australian woman sitting next to us on the tour: It is the worst place in the world to live because they never put clothes on sale. Even things that are 3 seasons old!

I always thought entering a communist country was like in the movies. Giant walls with barbed wire, fierce guard dogs, soldiers with M16s, searchlights. The reality was just a boring airport-terminal like area.  It took less time in line getting in and out of China than going through US customs (where 3/4 of the lines are closed all the time. Sort of like shopping at Frys).

The tour went to this “painting village”, where you can buy copy-paintings. Then boing boing does a post on it days later, weird coincidence.

No need to leave China, a miniature version of the world theme park is here too.

Wal-mart conquers the world:

Housing that looks like it was made out of Legos:

Shipping container houses:

The Konka factory! This was a big deal at Disney in 1999. We all ran out to Fry’s to get Konka DVD players, since it was the first time players were down to $100 or so. It broke 2 weeks later.

The mysterious durian. We’ve heard so much about this strange spikey-football looking fruit. I mean even Andrew Zimmern couldn’t eat it. He spit it out. We happened to walk into a supermarket while waiting for the travel agency woman to return, and the official durian guy was there with his gloves and facemask breaking them open and serving them, fresh. An opportunity you can’t pass up. So here is the truth. Yes it smells like rotten garbage. No it doesn’t taste that bad. Its kind of like a sweet onion that went stale. Not great by any means, but I’m glad I tried it.

(HK$16.80 = US$2.18)

So before we left for Hong Kong , we had read that you needed to apply for a visa to go to mainland China a few weeks in advance. Well it was too late for that, so we put it out of our mind. But then, reading travel books on the way there they mention you can get a one day tourist visa at the border or through a travel agent. For a moment I considered doing the visa at the border thing. Boy am I glad we didn’t do that. What a disaster that would have been, standing there at the border trying to communicate with grumpy communist customs agents. And even if we did get a visa, then what? Stand outside the border crossing with a Best-Buy blank stare on our faces? Travel agent, much better idea. So began the RPG like journey of obtaining a visa for 100 xp.

Step 1, go to the hotel travel agent and say you’d like to go to Shenzen. They arrange tours for you, and get you a visa. Great! Where do we sign? Oh, minimum groups are 3 people. We are 2 people. Travel agent suggests finding someone else to go with us. Ok, so how do I randomly find some stranger to go China?

Step 2, we walk into a random travel agency on the street. The woman at the counter is very nice and informative and tells us China has changed all the rules for visitor visas because of the Beijing Olympics. Visas are only issued on Mondays and Fridays, (its Saturday) and the price has increased to US$150 per person. She suggests we try our hotel travel agent, duh. It looks like it ain’t gonna happen, until she mentions we could try one of the luxury hotels down the street.

Step 3, go to hotel down the street and talk to their travel desk. They hand us the brochure, and they do China day tours! And they will arrnage it for you! Great, where do we sign? What? Our room number? Oh, well technically we aren’t guests here. They tell us call the number on the brochure, and goodbye.

Step 4, call brochure number (very glad we bought that HK sim card). The woman answers the phone in Chinese, this could be a problem. I hesitantly say “Hello”, and I’m in luck she speaks English. What’s that, we should talk to the hotel travel desk? Not helpful. But then, she says IF we can make it to Causeway Bay and the travel agency main office there before 2pm, they can help us.

Step 5: Ok, so now we rush down to the subway and try to find the hotel in Hong Kong Times Square. We wander around bewildered looking for the hotel  , and give up and decide to get a taxi. The taxi takes us….. 1 block. Doh. So now we rush in to the hotel office, and….. the woman is out to lunch. It turns out the woman on the phone meant -After- 2′oclock, not Before 2. Oh well, we go to the market and buy a durian while we wait. (story for another post). The woman shows up, we talk, and she needs copies of our passports… and we have them! Success! The tour is arranged, and  a lesson in planning ahead is learned. As we talk to the travel agent, the durian smell is leaking out of its plastic wrap, plastic bag, and backpack and filling the air of the swanky hotel with the stench of rotten garbage.

The good: The park is clean and everything is nicely detailed. It looked like they spent some money on the place. It does not look like the bargain-rate mall that California Adventure is. Its weird to think I am  standing on an artificial;y reclaimed island, on what would have been underwater 10 years ago. Yet here are the familiar sights of Main Street USA.

The bad: This is mini-Disneyland. WAY smaller than at home. No Pirates, Matterhorn, Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, Haunted Mansion, Toontown, Adventureland etc etc. Not just less rides, but the lands themselves are physically smaller. And its true, no one waits in line, everyone cuts constantly.

Although for 1/3 of the park in the US, they also charge a lot less , in  the neighborhood of US$35 as Disneyland California climbs closer and closer to $100.

We start on the Disneyland Railroad, which is missing the cheesy dinosaurs. The narration starts in Chinese, and then switches to the fake old west drawl american version. No one listens to the narrator telling people to remain seated. and they are all standing and taking pictures.

High School Musical parade in Chinese. Weird. I don’t see the appeal of American high school to a foreign audience, but what do I know?

Finally got to see Philharmagic. I almost ended up working on this, and many of my friends and co-workers did work on it. It starts on a tiny little screen, and I’m thinking “this is it? This sucks”. But once the lights go down , the little screen open up into 3 gigantic ones.  Some nice gags in the seats for wind and water spraying on you.  This will hopefully come to California someday.

Space Mountain. The one big E-ticket here. Waiting room is planets hanging from the ceiling, instead of big fake spaceship. This one seems significantly better than California. Better star field effects, some nebula-like projections you go through, asteroids, seems like they juiced up all the fx, pretty cool. And best of all , you can walk right on with no line on a Friday night.

The Stitch Adventure. Awful, like being tortured. And we wasted 15 minutes of our 2 hours waiting for this show to start. Its a real-time CG Stitch being mo-capped from someone behind the scenes somewhere. He doesn’t speak Chinese. None of the kids in the audience speak English. This is very awkward and uncomfortable as Stitch asks 10 times “What’s your name? What’s your name? You don’t know your name?”  And the kids look at their parents, and then at the screen, and aren’t sure what to say. Note to Disney, hire a bi-lingual Stitch.

The one HK exclusive! Fantasy Gardens. Gazebos in a garden with Disney characters you take pictures with, boring.

No Tom Sawyer island, but here the Tarzan Treehouse is on an island and the rafts go there instead.

Small World. Brand new for this year. And will open in…. 2 weeks. Oh well, just missed it.

Marie. what is the deal with Marie from the Aristocats? Why is she so popular here? Every piece of merchandise can be broken down into 4 categories, Mickey, Pooh, Stitch, and Marie. I barely remember the Aristocats, and here she is knocking Goofy, Donald, Minnie, etc off of the top spot. Stitch is super-popular as well, as seen in his awful show above.

Chopsticks:

One more Disney park checked off the list (only Paris is yet to visit).

After the monastery, Disneyland was right on the way back, and very convenient to get to from the Train (just like Tokyo Disneyland).  When we got to the tickets booths I was worried they were closed since there was hardly anyone around. One lone ticket window was open, the main customer service one. I asked if they were open, and they said yes but, “We close in 2 hours, and I don’t know if you can see everything in that time.” I had done my homework and know that this is pretty much mini-Disneyland and 2 hours seems like plenty. This place is Empty. On a Friday night, there’s hardly anyone here.

The plan for the day was to go out to Lantau island and take the Ngong Ping 360. Love the slogan: It’s blue. It’s green. It’s love naturally. We needed to get some HK money first. The man in the luggage claim of the subway was nice enough to get up from his counter, show us where to go, and tell us which exchage had the most favorable rates. We’re used to the US style of customer service, which is usually a blank stare followed by “uhhh, I don’t know, its not my department”.  After a lot of going back and forth, and breakfast, we didn’t get to the cable car to the monastery until after 12:30.

The suburban outlying areas, it must be the middle of nowhere because they had an outlet mall:

Hmmm… how odd. All the people are coming down the ramp, away from the cars. And none of the cablecars seem to be moving. And if you look real close, it sort of looks like people are in the cars, but that can’t be right? An announcemnt comes on and says there is a slight delay and they apologize for the inconvenience. So we wait in line. And wait, and then wait some more. The nice cablecar lady tells us it will be up again in 5 minutes. So we wait some more. Ok, 30 minutes later, we figure screw this and get in line for the bus. Which was a very good move. We find out later on the news that the cars broke 15 minutes before we got there, stranding people for hours in mid-air. The whole thing was closed all day and the next day. Yeah it’ll be going again annnnyyyyy minute now.

By the time we got on the bus, the line behind us was quite long as people in line for the cablecar gave up and started to take the bus instead. On the way up to the monastery firetrucks and ambulances were speeding by us heading for the station to rescue all the stranded people.

The big buddha:

delicious vegetarian snack made by monks. Fried taro root, noodles, dates, and green tea cake:

good advice.

Random Hong Kong note: Officially the iphone isn’t released here, but every single electronics store had them for sale. And I saw more Nokia N95’s in just the economy section of the plane, than I’ve seen in the US ever.

Kowloon Night Market. So here is where we learn the concepts of copy-watch and copy-handbag. Basically as you walk the blocks of stalls , people will call out to you if you want to buy a copy-handbag. They have the selection of fake designer merchandise plus nice printed glossy catalogs for you to choose your designer fakes from. They had a  bunch of tacky Mao watches with the watch hands as his hands. I figured I would see them everywhere, so just wait to buy them later. Nope, never saw them again.

Ate at this market on the street. Had curry chicken ( had too many bones), and sweet and sour pork. Unlike here at home, it was mostly delicious pork, and not mostly dough.

I remember reading this article in Wired 10 years ago. And since then my imagination was full of all the wonders of pirate software and computer goods I would find at the Golden Arcade Shopping Plaza. In reality, years later it was just a mostly regular shopping mall like anywhere else there. We must have really looked lost, since a very nice woman came up to us and asked us if we needed help finding someplace, and pointed us in the right direction. There were a few stores with pirate software, but not that many. I WISH I could have had my camera out to take a picture of the fantastic signs in one of the pirate booths. Over the rack of photoshop and game copies for HK$5 the sign says basically “Do not steal these discs, police will be called” Oh, the irony! I looked all over for the rip-off versions of Final Fantasy 7 and Titanic for NES, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.

After the arcade, we grabbed some fantastic pork and berry buns from this store:

A seriously drunk guy, who was double-handing Smirnoff Ice sat down and stared at us, and gave us a napkin. So we left.

Note on Hong Kong:

Restaurants do not give out paper napkins. Some places will sell you a little package of tissues. So if you go, hoarde any napkins you can in your bag.