Hong Kong Disneyland

Hong Kong has a Disneyland. It gets kind of a bad rep from the locals here, for a variety of reasons. I’ve heard of its environmental and staff controversies, but I think the main issue is that Hong Kong people just don’t identify with it as their own park. Instead, my impression is it’s viewed as an American theme park capitalizing on the city’s booming tourism. I went to check it out with my aunt and a family friend.

It is quite small, enough so that we went through most of the attractions in half a day. Ride selection is especially limited, so I hope some expansion is in the works. It was surprisingly empty when we went on a Monday; I’ve seen pictures and it can get pretty crazy with the masses of umbrellas. You know the Chinese here are quite sun-and-rain-fearing.

Still, it was Disneyland, which means parades, fireworks, pictures with Mickey and the whole gang. The Lion King show was very good. Cultural tidbit: The show and parade are mostly in English, with the occasional Cantonese thrown in. I got a kick out of watching the very blonde Alice in Wonderland singing along. Such is the magic of Disneyland…

HK Disneyland has its own special MTR line. Cute!

Main Street, early morning.

Donald Duck is the best!

Princesses on parade.

I have to eat these at Disneyland. They didn’t have the turkey leg anyways. Blasphemy!

There was this really small 7-11 outside.

I’m heading to Thailand tomorrow morning, will be back Monday to update. Cheers!

Royale with Cheese

If you don’t speak Chinese, you may not appreciate this for all its lameness, but here goes. They have this burger at McDonald’s here that uses these rice cakes instead of buns. It’s called the Fan (the Chinese character for rice) tastic. The FAN-tastic. I’m not even joking. Observe:

I thought that so funny. They phased out Shake-Shake fries before I could document its similar cleverness, kind of disappointing but that’s life.

UPDATE: I went to McDonald’s in Thailand and they had Shake-Shake NUGGETS! I was so happy I just had to get them. So for your viewing pleasure, here is my Shake-Shake Nuggets Tutorial:

Step 1. Select your flavor – Seaweed Shake!

Step 2. Prepare the Shake-Shake Bag and the Shake-Shake Mix.

Step 3. Pour the Shake-Shake Mix into the Shake-Shake Bag.

Step 4. Shake-Shake!

Isn’t shaking fun?

And there you have it – your Chicken McNuggets just got that much worse for you.

Yum.

I love this city

After meeting up with some friends the other day, I had a good two hours to kill before heading to practice, so I decided to wander around the Jordan area. Wandering is easy, you just walk towards whatever street looks more interesting. I turned a few corners and found a great street for shopping and eating. Sometimes it seems that’s all people do in this city, shop and eat. I followed a curious alley and walked by some little restaurants. Now I’m pretty sure the alley is too small to have it’s own street name, which made me wonder who on earth would know of this place except the old locals. Which is probably good if you’re an old local, as you’d definitely not find any tourists or youngsters hanging around here. The workers there wash their dishes in a big bucket on the street.

After practice I ate at this dirty little shantyhouse of a restaurant across the street called Beijing Dumpling. The menu posted outside is in Chinese, which I stared at until the owner came outside and chatted with me in Mandarin and helped me decide what to order. Even at 10 pm the place was crowded, probably because it only seats about eight people. I sat at a booth across from some guy, close enough that our knees almost touched. Still not quite used to the lack of personal space in Hong Kong, I must say. The boss fried up my potstickers on his stove, which is more or less on the sidewalk outside. It was good stuff.

HK World Carnival

There’s a carnival in town and we went to check it out last week. Riding the train on the way there I saw some girl playing what looked like a surgical operation game on her pink Nintendo DS Lite. She was switching to different tools like scalpel, anesthesia, needle/thread, and a magnifying glass, and was frantically making cuts and ties with her stylus while racing the clock; it was fascinating. Gaming is way more mainstream here, especially for adults and females. I suppose if I ever succumb to a life of video game addiction I can always move to Asia where I won’t be regarded as such a looooooser.

I enjoyed the rides at the carnival, and the Cantopop they played along with them.

They had a fair share of classic carnival games like the ring toss, and also some games where you just pull a random string and see if you win anything. With my great luck, the answer for the night was a resounding “Sorry, Lose.”

I played this totally weird game where you have to take 5 black discs and use them to completely cover a yellow circle. It’s impossible!

Feel the frustration of stupid carnival games.

I got this huge thing of cotton candy. We ate it as it rained, except the rain was blowing from all over so the umbrella didn’t really help the candy from slowly melting. I didn’t notice until much later that it had liquified all over my hand, which sucked.

Topped the night off with a nice ferris wheel ride. Good times.

Windsurfing!

Cindy, John and I took some windsurfing classes at a water sports facility in Tai Po Market, one stop north of University. It was our first time getting off there and it was this really bustling village with a ton of people doing their morning things. So we took the bus to wherever the water was and stepped out and it was just complete silence except for maybe a few birds. It was kind of weird because I totally realized it was the quietest place I’ve been to in Hong Kong. It was just a park and some water and maybe some old dude watching the water.

We got to our lesson late and quickly found out our instructor didn’t know much English. At first he tried speaking to John and I in Putonghua, but soon gave up and had another guy in our group translate for us although his English was pretty bad too. So it was mostly 4 hours of this guy talking in Cantonese and we got kind of bored. After lunch we finally got into our snazzy wetsuits and pushed off.

I probably fell into the water ten times trying to get my sail up, but once I got the hang of it I had a blast. There was barely any wind but even a breeze will make you glide along. Turning was tricky, so it was mostly us getting pushed downwind and trying not to fall down, and we didn’t even notice how far we were from the shore until we were nearly upon this little island. Since we sucked at windsurfing upwind, the instructor had to tug us back in his motorboat at the end of the day, but we got to chill out and enjoy the view. It had mountains and clouds and sun, and soft breezy water all over, it was great!

Cindy’s cool with being towed:

John keeps his balance…

This picture doesn’t accurately depict the visual atrocity that was my outfit. Those are white shoes that I’m wearing, and my board was bright yellow. Looking down made my head hurt. Still a good picture though, no?