Hong Kong!

Many thanks to Ada for a lovely afternoon at Hong Kong International Airport and for all the presents! :)

HK (now)

Now I know that HK can also look like this.

HK (before)

I used to think that this is what HK looks like.

HK

Immersion (or rather, a quick dip) into the Chinese culture

Language

The few words of Chinese I know are useless here, because here the Macanese, and the people of the Hong Kong SAR and some southern provinces of China don't speak Mandarin, they speak Cantonese instead(plus their regional dialects, of course). The written form of the two is the same, but the pronunciation completely different. Let me give you a short example: a phrase probably known to many people, feng shui, is pronounced across the world as something more or less similar to the way it's written. In Cantonese, it's pronounced more along the lines of [foŋ soü] (pardon my improvised phonetic spelling). The inhabitants of HK understandably use some English in their everyday communication. But it's not quite the same English we all know and love. They drop a few syllables here and there, change a few consonants and add a few glottal stops; and all that results in me having conversations with Ada that go like this:
So, what other peculiar things have you tried besides dog meat?
'Well, I've had ho'milk.'
I'm sorry, whoremilk?

And don't even get me started on the written form of the language. Whoever knows how to do consecutive interpreting or to translate into/from Chinese, is a genius, I swear. They might have these two characters written, let's say the word boy and the word dog. And, the great judges of context that they are, they then read it as 'Once upon a time there was a 12-year-old boy who got a Labrador puppy for his birthday and they've been inseparable friends ever since.' Alright, that was a slight exaggeration, but I'll give you a real example from some advertisement I saw on a tram here. There were three words: po, sum, and on. The words separately mean: safe, heart, safe. Put it all together and what do you get? 'This will keep your heart strong forever.' (A medicinal oil of the above-mentioned name, a HK specialty, if anyone's wondering.)

When I was at Ada's office on Saturday, I was confused about the way the keyboard looked. There were the English/Intl characters where they're supposed to be, and on every key, there were three Chinese characters. But surely there are thousands of these, how can they compile texts by using just a few hundred? I asked Ada about this and she gave me a wonderfully long explanation which I'm unfortunately unable to reproduce here on account of simply being too blonde to understand much about it. It went something along the lines of the computer prompting the user different characters, which (s)he can then choose from a drop-down menu. I also asked her about, for instance, country names. Apparently, just some random characters are chosen because they are pronounced in a remotely similar way to the country's name (in English, I guess), and that chain of characters then starts to denote the country. Estonia happens to consist of four characters, the first of which means love, coincidentally; and I can assure you the complete pronounciation of the whole set of characters is similar to [estəuniə] only when a really drunk British stag partier would attempt to utter it.

[The last two characters on the napkin literally mean 'sweet' and 'things', and together they mean 'dessert'.]

Food (you've been warned!)

Don't know about whoremilk, but milk cartons come with serious warnings here. 'Contains cow's milk.' Never would've guessed. OK, I won't be mean, the labels are there because there are simply too many other kinds of milk and milk substitutes available here. Coconuts are sold on the street, they dip a straw in it for you and you can enjoy the fresh sweetness right there and then. Soymilk is a given. Etc.

Mai, 'So, how adventurous are you about the food you eat?'
Dunno, depends on how hungry I am.

If there is one myth I remember from my childhood about the Chinese people's food, it's the one about them eating swallows' nests. Well, I found out on Sunday that it's not a myth after all, I ate some with sago and pomolo and survived to tell the tale. A nice dessert, although, with all honesty - repulsive at first. It was very difficult for me psychologically, but Ada didn't make a fuss out of it and so I agreed to try a couple of spoonfuls. It didn't really taste of anything (thankfully, not even of chicken), but the texture made me think about the poor birds with every bite I took.

The Chinese have a peculiar relationship with birds anyway. In practically any fast food restaurant you can order a baby pigeon or, for the sake of the argument, a roast chicken. Do you get a wing or a leg or two? Oh no. You get the entire f-ing thing! The picture of having an entire pigeon lying on your plate, looking at you imploringly with its empty eyesockets, supported by mountains of rice or potatoes that hold the bird's saggy neck up... Yes, good for dieting. I tried to reason with Ada, 'Why do they have to serve the entire bird, so many parts of it are not eaten anyway!' And she replied, wisely, that it's just tradition, and, moreover, it'd be bad luck to separate the whole. (Oh is this why there are so few pigeons in HK?)

Those who know me well are aware that I'm a natural at making a fool of myself in foreign parts (or anywhere, really). The most recent example is from a Vietnamese restaurant (my new favourite cuisine btw!). We were seated at a table and two glasses of tea were brought to the table. I was like, 'Yay, tea!' and started drinking. Ada looked at me and calmly said, 'Well, we drink that sometimes, yes, but mostly we use it to rinse the chopsticks in between bites.' ;)

HK, Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula, July 1st

That's it! I'm done! All it took was a small eternity to upload all the pics from HK & Macau here. I posted them like this now, but will later change their publishing dates so that they'd appear at the 'right' dates, not in the middle of Australia-related posts. (Funny how they actually have electricity here, but the connection speeds are from the year 1992, so the computers are just one step away from being utterly useless.)

Ada, thank you for everything :)

Ja miks mul on tunne, et ma peaksin siia külje peale kuskile panema küsitluse, et kas keegi üldse vaatab ja loeb seda pläma? :S
Ma isiklikult olen nüüd rohkem netis olemas, ja loodan teid kõiki rohkem netis näha. Endiselt igatsen teie järele...
Ja pr Hajameelsus isiklikult Kristiina vabandab kõigi ees, kelle sõnumitele/kirjadele veel vastanud pole. Parem hilja kui mitte keegi, onju.

HK, Lantau Island, Ngong Ping cable car

HK, Lantau Island, Wisdom Path & Po Lin Monastery