Korea
Japan
Hong Kong
But there are so many other places I may wind up... (hopefully not jail or dead).
I am using this space as a blog, and as a way to dump the dailies I take from my camera (Panasonic GH1 and Samsung TL320). I want those who are interested to get a daily-updated, unfiltered view of my crazy Asian adventure.
Goodbye, my friend… Hong Kong - Day 69
Hong Kong has been home to many, many firsts, but tonight, was one of David’s lasts. David, you have been my friend, my brother, since 1993. We’ve had an incredible adventure these past 3 months; Seoul, Busan, Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo, Hong Kong…. Most people thought we were gay. That part sucks and is TOTALLY NOT TRUE, but the rest of the journey has been unbelievably amazing. I cannot believe that after so much time spent together, we are suddenly standing at the crossroads of our lives, on the same side of the tracks, facing different, distant unknowns. How can it be that I, the foreigner, the stupid, ignorant, white guy, gets to spend a few more months in this metropolitan paradise, while he, the man with real Hong Kong blood running through his veins, has to leave, drained of his finances, with nothing more than a heart and a hard drive full of beautiful, torturous memories? Life truly is unfair, and I feel guilty that it gave me the chance to stay, instead of him.
Ah, I won’t bore you any longer with my words, I’m just going to leave you with this (gay) pictorial sign off to my friend, my brother, David. This was tonight’s goodbye party
They got him drunk early on…
And then fucked with him.
NOT GAY! WE LIKE BOOBS! With nipples the sizes of bottlecaps. See above for example.
After dinner we went to LKF.
David was already hammered by this point in the night. So of course he was forced to drink a flaming lamborghini. I do not have a picture of what happened next, but I do have video. They turned off all of the lights in the bar and lit this entire structure on fire. You use a straw to drink alcohol out of this thing while it is on fire.
He seemed pretty happy after the drink, but then he puked, hahahaha
Then we went to some cage bar, and threw him into the cage with the dancer.
Then David became pass-out drunk.
So it became time to leave…
Sleepy….
The walk (stumble?) to the cab.
One last hug goodbye, too drunk to cry.
During the cab ride back, David’s mom called him on the phone. I answered (in Cantonese and English), and even called her by her name, but she didn’t understand me for some reason. So one of our friends took the phone, and told her David was drunk and couldn’t talk. Why would you do that!?! Never say that to someone’s mother!! Gah!! So I had to play damage control and make some shit up like “we were up all night last night, didn’t sleep, went to the gym today, David is just tired, yes he had some drinks, just like I did, but he’s not drunk, etc., etc…” Oh man I felt so bad lying to her. Wtf was I supposed to do?! My parents could handle that sort of news, but not his mom, no way.
Anyways, that’s the end of the night. Right now David is passed out drunk in his room, tossing, turning, and snoring. I am in the kitchen eating raisin bread and crying like a schoolgirl. Time to pass out. Only one day left…
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Oh my God… LKF, Hong Kong - Day 2
Actually, lemme take that back. Sleeping on a towel, on top of a stiff mattress covered in plastic, with humidity cranked to level 11, made for a shitty night. I woke up stuck to my bed. Actually, I’m not sure I even went to sleep that night. Bleh. Shower time.
This is our bathroom. Tiny, ain’t it? A quick shower revealed our desperate need for a shower curtain. I’m kinda splashy when I bathe, cause water is fun! But I ended up flooding the place. Sorry David.
But before bedsheets or shower curtains, we had to eat. And what better way to greet our first Hong Kong morning than with…DIM SUM!
David and I wandered around aimlessly for a while trying to find a dim sum place…as if we knew where the crap we were going! He got hungry, so we hopped into a Starbucks (damn that bitch loves that place…) for some crappy drinks. He asked the lady behind the counter where we could find a decent dim sum place. She was all….”next door!” On the second floor. Whaaaa! Coincidence? Or does Hong Kong just have badass dim sum places everywhere? Oh well whatever. DIM SUM!
It was actually on the third floor, but I’ll get to that later… The place was just about packed.
Word, time to order some shit! What no english menus? Oh right…China. At least they had pictures!
Side note: it wasn’t until our second trip to this place that we discovered that they did have English/Chinese menus. But you know what? The prices were jacked up over the straight Chinese menus! I know, I compared the characters. Weak! There was an average of 5 HKD markup.
To be honest, at this point in my life I didn’t really know anything about dim sum. I remember having it once in Sacramento with David and his mom one time when we were like 12. I remember not liking it, haha. So this was a pretty fresh experience.
David didn’t see anything he wanted in the pictures, so he asked the waitress if they had this or that. Turns out they did! The pictures don’t tell the whole story! Grub time was ooooonnnn.
I know this picture looks pretty pathetic, but at one point we had a HUGE stack of empty dim sum containers on our table. David told me to take a picture and just as I busted my camera out, this ninja waitress came out of nowhere and took em all! So this is the only pic of our meal I managed to snap. I can assure you, by the end of it, our table looked like a culinary battlefield. We ate hardcore.
What was really neat about this place is that it was on the 2nd floor (which is actually called the third floor in America), and it offered a really cool view of the street, for those who were seated close to the ceiling-high windows. Love it.
Oh good, you see this picture? The dim sum restaurant is that floor on the top. Clearly, that’s the third floor, but in Hong Kong, the floor order goes Ground, Level 1, Level 2, etc. This slight difference in wordage makes a huge difference when giving and receiving directions!
With stomaches full of Chinese joy, it was time to go shopping for the house. IKEA!
Man, I saw so many people passed out on IKEA furniture. But you’d do the same after 1 trip through the Causeway Bay IKEA. That place is a MAD HOUSE.
It took David and I well over an hour just to make it to the second floor (their basement). Next to the stairs to go down, there was a rack with a buncha different hand puppets on it. David and I each picked one up and started playing with them, making silly noises, giving them names. It was so goofy, and we were busting up the entire time. Adjacent to this rack of fun was a large window separating the end of the first floor and the IKEA restaurant/entrance. Underneath the window there was space to hide, just large enough for two people. We know what we had to do. PUPPET SHOW!!
We had no idea if anyone was watching, but it was hilarious. We put on a solid one-minute show before people on our side started giving us looks.
It took us days to find bedsheets we didn’t hate, and about 10 seconds to find a decent shower curtain.
This is the view coming back from IKEA. See the McDonald’s in the distance? Just past the Price Rite, 7-11, and HSBC bank? Our building is on the right. Hell yeah, Hong Kong. It boggles my mind how many resources are right there in front of our house. Oh, and behind where I’m standing is a 24-hour grocery store, a movie theater, several department stores, specialty brand clothing stores, cell phone shops, restaurants (both high and ‘low’ class), an electronics store, a starbucks, and God knows what else. It’s incredible. I can access all of these stores within a 1-minute walk from my building’s entrance. Where else in the world can you do that?!
A note from David (he wanted me to mention the other things around our building): Well, two or three doors down to the right is a bakery, with BOMB ASS dan tat. There are also a few more cell phone shops, restaurants, and a beef jerky joint on the corner. To the left, is a fucking awesome-ass hair salon ($11 USD for a salon cut and shampoo! From a hot girl!), a rotating sushi bar ($3 HKD salmon nigiri!), a recruiting agency, a bookstore, god so many things!
Menacing view! (of our building’s entrance).
This is the main day-shift security guard at our building. He’s such a jolly dude! We call him the “happy guard” (cause neither of us can read Chinese names). Here he’s giving David directions on how to get to an electronics store that sells adaptors. And here are his directions:
The fuck does that say?! Those are the worst directions I have ever seen man! Maybe he’s a little too happy…
Look at how much my room sucks. It looks a lot better now, I swear! Hmm…but I don’t seem to have a picture of it yet. Ah, too lazy to take one, maybe later…
Tim was told us to meet him in SoHo to meet his friends. The SoHo/Central area is full of rich people and posh stores, LIKE THIS FUCKING COACH STORE OH MY GOD
I think this walkway is supposed to be famous? I think it’s called Hollywood Road (I could be wrong, it’s what some foreigners told us when we got lost).
Hong Kong is full of really cool-looking environments. The wall’s texture + the streetlight just look so damn awesome!
We met up with Tim and his friends at a place called Classified; a wine a cheese bar. David and I were hella late cause we got lost, and they were just about finished when we arrived (what a horrible first impression!)
After Classified, everyone decided to go to Lan Kwai Fong. It’s the bar area in Central where lots of people like to spend their weekend nights. David and I had no idea what we were about to get ourselves into…
BOOM! Down some stairs and into the devil’s mouth we flew. This place is insane. Closed down streets littered with people spilling out of over-crowded bars, dancing sporadically when a beat filters through the door and smoke and haze of the night. Women showing every inch of their legs and fashionably covering the rest tumbling down steps in a drunken mess, attracting glazed, hungry stares from any male with eyes, a beer, and a popped collar. This is the bar scene on Hong Kong island. Actually, not much separates this bar scene from all of the others all around the world, but when Hong Kong does something, it goes all out. Like, if you happen to come across a lamp store in Hong Kong, chances are you’ve just discovered lamp street where the entire street is literally dedicated to lamp stores. In similar fashion, this Lan Kwai Fong (LKF) area is packed to the brim with bars and clubs, one right after the other spanning at least three adjacent streets, and stretching up into the sky.
On the ground level we came across this group of dudes yelling something about the “Happy Corner.” Before I could ask Tim what the happy corner was, he yelled out to the guys, “hey! He doesn’t know what the happy corner is!”
Before I even knew what was going on, the group rush over, picked me up…
and repeatedly smashed my genitals into the corner of this building. Luckily I was able to fend the four of them off with my MIGHTY SUPERHUMAN GREEK POWERS!
After killing them and eating their organs, I laughed it off with some fellow strangers.
We walked into a bar called Fong, and David and I decided to treat our new friends with a round of shots…. of tequila!!
supersmash!!!!
Wait, lets back up a minute here. See those shots? Those are 1oz glasses, not 1.5! What kind of crap is this? Oh and, the tequila was watered down!! WHAAA?? And the bill? 560 HKD for 6 shots (thats…fucking over $70). >:| screw you Phong.
Oh well, as you can tell by the pictures, we weren’t gonna let it ruin our night.
After Phong, we went to Bar 7-11 (that is, the 7-11 convenience store, haha) and bought some cheapo booze! Oh and my new friends? Here, let me introduce them to you:
From left to right: David, Sam, Kate, Siu Chung, Tim. All hella cool people! I’m not gonna post all the pictures, but we had a silly ass time that night.
Tim tried hitting on this girl. Yup, it was that awkward bwahhahahaa
oh snap! rejecteeeed!
Then the night started getting a little crazy and fuzzy. We ended up at this hotel, taking the elevator to the top floor. There was a bar on the inside! It took some negotiating to get us up there for free, I’m not sure how we managed. I think either Tim or Sam knew someone there.
Now check that view out. That’s the view from the bar. wicked.
Like the said, the night started getting fuzzy, I think my camera was drunk, too.
At that hotel we were all dancing around, having a good time. Then Tim suddenly shoved me into this girl. I said I’m sorry but she….started dancing with me?! That shit never happens! Then Tim shoved David into one of the girls’ friends, and they started dancing too! And pretty soon we were all dancing and having fun!
After a while, David and I noticed that all of our friends had disappeared. Huh?! We tried calling them, but no one picked up! We were so confused, but we kept on dancing, cause we thought the four of them went off together to hook up, hahahahahha (which was totally not the case….right guys?)
So David and I kept dancing with those girls. They eventually took us to some other jam-packed club and got us in for free! There I danced my ass off, but I’m sorry, the girls turned out to be not that interesting to talk to…they had no passions in life, nothing compelling to say; talk about anonymous personalities! I mean, I know you can’t really dive into any sort of dissecting and significant chatter with 120 dB of UNCE UNCE UNCE pounding your ears into submission, but at least a few words can be adequately exchanged here and there, enough to get a feeling, you know? Hey girl, are you into anything? Music? Art? Riding lawnmowers? Something??? It could be the dumbest thing in the world, but if you’ve got passion for it, you’ve got my undying attention.
I guess none of that stuff really matters, I just danced! It had felt so long since I had let go at a club and simply danced for the love of the music, but the music that night was doin it for me. I totally stopped dancing with that one girl and just went off in my own world, haha. I was going crazy, so much so that people actually stopped to watch, and they were…clapping for me? Nuts, I know! And the killer is that all of the people behind the bar were cheering me on, too! And they gave me a free shot! That never happens to a dude! I win.
I was a sweaty mess by the end of the night. The girl I was dancing with wanted my number, but I didn’t have a phone at the time so I had nothing to give but my email, hahaha. I didn’t want to go near her cause I was all sweaty and nasty, but she gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Score! I think she wanted more, but….eh I’m too old fashioned. I don’t give it up that easy, ho! God I’m such a loser.
Oh but wait! I didn’t get to the fucked up part. It’s a good thing I didn’t pursue that woman. David overheard some shit on the dance floor, but he wasn’t sure who it was concerning. About a week or so later, it was confirmed by the girl he was dancing with that night. Apparently, my girl….is married. MARRIED?!?! What the fuck, woman! What the fuck what the fuck! What the fuck kind of fucked up shit are you doing to your husband? To your marriage? What kind of shit are you trying to drag me into! Why did you dance with me like that?? Why did you kiss me? Why why why!!! You dumb, stupid, horrible person. You better not try to blame your marriage problems on some guy you met at a bar, I had nothing to do with this. It was your choice to dance with me, and to take me to another club and dance with me some more. You weren’t drunk. WHAT. THE. HELL.
Oh man, when I found this out, I was so damn angry. I wanted to smash things. The world became a cold and ugly place that day.
She emailed me a few times. Once her friend confirmed with David that she was married, the emails stopped. Good fuckin riddance, tramp.
Anyways, that was an interesting night to say the least.
We ended it with some good ol fried noodles and meat down the street from our place. That plate of food was under $4 USD at 4:00 in the morning. Aside from the cheating bitches, I love Hong Kong.
