Hong Kong Vacation Days

I say vacation days, but really it was just my weekend, haha.

I teach only one class on Tuesday (it was initially supposed to be two, but no one signed up for the second one, alas...), so after that I hopped on the metro to catch a ferry across the bay to Hong Kong!
Except, as it turned out, there were no more seats on the two ferries I could have taken....so...... I hopped back on the metro after texting a co-worker to discover that I couldn't get a cross-border car where I was so I had to go to a different checkpoint.

Getting off the metro, I found that the checkpoint was not actually within walking distance and that the bus routes were too uncertain (I have a better grip on them now, as it turns out my new apartment is closest to the same metro stop), so I hailed a cab instead.

On the way to the checkpoint, my cab gets grazed by another car, so the driver pulls over and chews the guy out. Luckily we're basically in the checkpoint parking lot, so I can just get out there. When I go to pay with my phone, the app doesn't work, and the driver's like "can you just pay cash?" Well, I'm exactly one yuan short of cash....but at this point the situation is so ridiculous that he just takes the money and shoos me away.

The checkpoint itself is easy, but I forget to go to an ATM to get money until I've walked halfway to the HK taxi line. I try to explain to the driver that I have no cash, ask if I can pay with a card, and he assures me that we can stop in Kowloon (<- an absolute TRAVESTY of a spelling considering how it's actually pronounced in Cantonese, YIKES) where I can pull out cash. Whoo, okay.

So that all goes well, except by this point it's clear I'm going to be an hour or more late for the time I told the hostel I would check in, and my phone plan doesn't serve HK, so I can't message the hostel because I forgot to do it while I had wifi. Yikes.

Well, we get to the hostel, but the thing about....pretty much anywhere you want to go in Hong Kong is that it's in an old skyscraper and you have to take an unbelievably sketchy elevator to get there. Such is the case with my hostel, but I follow the signs and make it to the proper floor. HOWEVER, I was in the elevator with a woman carrying like three huge shopping bags, and she sees me and my backpack, and she asks me "hostel?" and I'm like "yeah." And we end up walking the same way.

I hold the door for her, but the sign overhead doesn't read the name of my hostel. However, there's a possibility of the Chinese characters being pronounced like my hostel's name if you read them in Cantonese and not Mandarin so? I go for it. Whereupon I realize that it's not the entrance to a hostel, but rather a section of rooms, and their front desk is somewhere else. So it's not my hostel at all.

But I'm too late. Carly (her English name) figures out that I speak a little Mandarin, insists that she'll treat me to dinner, and now I'm her "beautiful American little sister" (her words, verbatim). I find the check in to my actual hostel and drop my stuff off while Carly lurks uncomfortably outside the door to the amusement/concern of the hostel owner.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that Carly is Not Well - she's flighty, a little anxious, and a little too pushy. She's also pretty incessantly filming and photographing us together with the clear intention of making it look like she speaks English well. I basically decide that being a human accessory is worth the price of a meal, so hey. I go along with it. (It's also around 10:30pm, I'm exhausted, and I haven't eaten since before work....so....)

Make-your-own noodle bowl, HK style milk tea (MY ADDICTION), crispy fishskin, and grilled hot dogs (surprisingly popular in south China)

We went to this noodle restaurant, but before even ordering, Carly decided that she was too hungry to wait, so she went out and bought sweet soup and fried bread for us to split. She started eating it, and the one of the waitresses came over and was like "please...don't do that," and I was like "yeah okay," but Carly seemed like she couldn't understand why it was a problem. Anyway, I had already ordered when Carly left because I was wholly unsure if she was returning, so she only added on the fishskin and the hot dogs.

I should also add that she was asking other customers to take pictures of us, and they were all mildly confused but good-natured enough to go along with her for a bit. It was all very strange.

ANYWAY, the food was good, and I got the soup, bread, and fishskin leftovers for breakfast the next day. Carly left after we finished eating to go buy something somewhere, and I was just like "yeah okay bye!!!!!" We didn't exchange contact info or anything haha, and I lowkey spent the rest of the trip praying I wouldn't see her even though we were staying on the same floor (and I didn't). She wasn't mean or anything, but she definitely made me feel strange.

So, that was Tuesday night. Wednesday I had a massage scheduled for 1pm, so I spent a lazy morning in the hostel before heading out to get lunch. I...ended up eating at a McDonald's because I needed wifi to double-check the location of the massage place.... So much for a health day lol.

But I did finally get a deep tissue massage! It was my first time getting a professional massage, and it wasn't at a super fancy spa or anything, just a fairly plain little parlor. It felt like an optometrist's office, almost. The massage itself was super intense, and I'm really glad I did it! I'm a very touch-oriented person (surprising coming from a dancer, I know), and it was just really nice to have all that hands-on therapy. At the end the masseuse did a few "knocking" movements on my head and back that inexplicably made me want to laugh, so overall it was a good experience.

Afterwards, maybe because I wasn't used to the pressure of a deep-tissue massage or maybe because of the McDonald's, I felt kind of nauseous, unfortunately. So I went back to the hostel, AT WHICH POINT, the old woman who took the elevator with me asked if I lived in this building, and I was like, no no, I'm in a hostel. She, of course, wanted to come see my hostel. I saw a repeat of Carly, but I wouldn't very well prevent the woman from getting off the elevator with me and going to see the hostel. Luckily, she seemed genuinely interested in the hostel and went immediately to the front desk (where the owner kind of side-eyed me for bringing yet another woman I clearly didn't know well) and engaged her in real conversation. I hovered for about a second until the old woman thanked me, and then I bolted to my room, dove onto my bottom bunk, pulled the curtain and pretended I wasn't there.

That crisis averted, I basically dozed until dinner, when I set off to explore the neighborhood and ended up going to a sleek little Japanese restaurant.

Nice picture displays are good advertising because they help the tourist who has a hard enough time with simplified Chinese characters and suffers with traditional, thank you very much.

The door slid open when you pressed the button on the side. V cool, v sleek, v modern.

 I've gotten pretty used to eating alone, and the atmosphere inside was nice. I also like Japanese places because they tend to have the best options for ordering a complete meal (small soup and salad, main course, and dessert).

Grilled mackerel with lemon!

CREAM PUFF

After that I went back to the hostel, slept, and the next day I took the metro back to Shenzhen! Easy-peasy.

I love these funky hostel signs.

THIS ONE'S MY FAVORITE but I definitely didn't see it when I first walked in....OOPS haha.

It was a weird trip, y'all. But I got through, and more impressively, I got through packing all my stuff on Thursday night after traveling the whole morning. -thumbs up-

Peace <3