Chinese New Year in Hong Kong

Gung hay fat choi! (Happy New Year!)

On Saturday January 21, I flew to Hong Kong with four friends and stayed three nights for the Chinese New Year holiday weekend. We had booked a hostel right in the heart of the city, but had not arranged any sort of itinerary. We just showed up and figured out what to do. Even though our stay was really just 2 and a half days, I felt like we saw enough of the city. Overall, I'd say the experience was good, not great.

I think Hong Kong would be a great destination for any traveler who has never been to Asia. I felt like it was Asia-lite. In Hong Kong, you're submerged in a very densely populated country where 90% of the people are speaking Cantonese. Many restaurants have roasted ducks hanging in the windows and chinese lanterns are hung outside all of the shops. On the other hand, everyone also knows English, the city is very modern and developed, it's easy to get around, and you can find any kind of cuisine there. So in many ways, it feels like any major modern city like San Francisco, but kind of like if all of San Francisco was Chinatown. It would make a perfect stepping stone into other parts of Asia. Since I've lived in Asia for 6 months now, I experienced no culture shock in Hong Kong, which made the overall experience slightly underwhelming.

The temperature was a nice escape from the bitter cold of Pohang, staying in the 50's for the most part. Unfortunately, the sky was gray the entire time, so it hindered the potential beauty of the city and the islands. We spent a good portion of our first full day just walking around and exploring. We found a few outdoor markets that were fun to walk through. They were insanely crowded, and at times overwhelming. I bought a few cheap items for myself, like a shirt that has Chinese characters with English translations in very poor grammar and spelling, a pair of salt and pepper shakers that are hugging each other, and an oil painting of one of the city streets.

That night, we dined at a Chinese restaurant for some dim sum, which is essentially just a variety of small dishes that we all passed around and shared (I believe we ordered about 10 different dishes total). Some were delicious, like the sweet beef buns and the fried squid tentacles, and other dishes were questionable. After dinner, we walked to the harbor that overlooks Hong Kong Island and the main skyline. Every night at 8pm, the skyscrapers display a light show, so we thought that would be a fun thing to see. We got there about 15 minutes early, and noticed a sign advertising the "symphony of lights" that were were about to see. Ooh, a symphony of lights! we thought. How exciting! So the light show began, and each building had some lights that flickered on and off at different times. Then spotlights shined from the tops of some of the buildings, and green lasers shot into the sky at random moments. 10 minutes later, it ended. Was it entertaining? Sure, for about 30 seconds. Was it symphonic? Absolutely not. I felt like declaring shenanigans on this false advertisement!

After we had a good laugh about the disappointing light show, we walked down Hong Kong's walk of stars, which is similar to Hollywood Blvd's sidewalks with famous actors' stars in the pavement, except Hong Kong's walk of stars profile China's biggest stars, like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. They even had a life-sized statue of Bruce Lee in one of his action poses. Although I always despised Hollywood's walk of stars, it was fun reading the unfamiliar names of countless Chinese actors and realizing that there's a whole world of fame completely unknown to the Western world.

The next day, we were unsure of what to do. We didn't want another day of walking and exploring, but we didn't know of any interesting sights/activities that sounded particularly interesting or fun. We ran into another English teacher from Korea that we knew, and he recommended we check out the New Years fair on Hong Kong Island. So we made our way over there only to find a whole crew of workers tearing down the fair. Ok, now what? While wandering around the park in a slight drizzle, Nathan did some careful investigating of the tourist map and found out about a fishing village on one of the smaller islands that offers a more traditional and cultural experience. Great, we thought, let's get out of the city and try something different!

One streetcar, ferry and bus ride later, we arrived at the fishing village. We're very glad we decided to check it out, it was probably the most interesting thing we did/saw. Similar to the "floating village" I saw in Cambodia, a large part of the community lived in homes on stilts over the water. The homes were incredibly modest and poor, yet the people did not appear to be poor or struggling. We were free to walk through the community. It was close to sunset, and most homes were full of large families preparing their dinner. It seemed very family/community-oriented, very warm. We got pretty hungry after awhile, but none of the dried fish hanging outside every restaurant looked appetizing. We weren't THAT hungry. We decided to head back to mainland Hong Kong and get some dinner.

Later that evening, we stumbled on the New Years parade, which included several traditional Chinese dragons that seem common for Chinese parades. We also saw the characters from Star Wars marching in the parade... I'm guessing that wasn't traditional for Chinese parades. We had a very early flight back to Korea the next morning, so I called it a night not long after the parade to get at least a little sleep before heading out.

Like I said earlier, my experience was good not great. I certainly didn't love the city, but it was cool nonetheless. It was probably the most densely populated city I've been in, which was exciting most of the time, and overwhelming/annoying once in a while. My time there helped solidify my feelings that I am not much of a big city kind of guy, and really need natural beauty to look at. It is a wonderfully diverse and multicultural city, with people from all corners of the world practicing all religions of the world. It also has a nice East-meets-West feel to it since it was a British colony for 100 years (cars drive on the left side of the road, and the street cars are double-deckers like the buses in England).

I won't be traveling internationally again until I leave Korea. I've definitely made good use of my vacations so far, visiting Japan, Cambodia and Hong Kong in the last 6 months. I'm now going to focus on saving money, but will try to do a small adventure each month, like going to Busan or Daegu (some of Korea's biggest cities besides Seoul) and I will try to visit the DMZ (de-militarized zone) that separates North and South Korea. When I leave Korea at the end of July, I am hoping to spend a week in Mongolia before heading home.