Life, No Peace. Only Adventure . (to Hong Kong and back)

Today I will have been in the rollicking rolling country for next to a month. I have learnt a lot except any conversational Korean (it extends to “hello, thank you and how much?”). Well looking around myself I realize how blessed I really have been in this place. As said before, Korea is a shock to the system and it’s busy and dirty and those stretching landscapes of space I still haven’t seen but people have been kind. So kind.

Visas are always a nightmare; especially as a South African I have been told (more than a few times) that in fact” you can’t go there because of where you were born.” Well this weekend was one of the first times in my life (besides when I watched my American friend forced to give the Mozambiquan border police R1000) that my passport gave me something. As I am South African I cannot go to Japan to procure me Korean visa and thus I was bought a ticket to the crazed monster of a city that is Hong Kong. Not that I don’t want to go to Japan, but it is down the road whereas Hong Kong is somewhere I never will go otherwise. (Strange blessings with the guise of closed doors. Fabulous) So on Wednesday I took a bus then a plane at 11pm to be deposited into Hong Kong at the glorious hour of 12.45. Now a week before I had remembered that an Australian I had met two and half years before in Italy told me he was in Hong kong these days. After a facebook message or two he told me that not only would he meet up with me for a drink in Hong Kong but I HAD TO stay at his house and he would come find me at the airport.

So at the hour of 1am, Seth and his Cantonese girlfriend Sheks met me at the airport to take something like an hour bus ride back to his apartment (thus their mission was something like 3hours for a near stranger) where I was lead to a happy mattress which opened up its arms to my tired eyes. The next morning I woke to the sound of my alarm but immediately dozed off only to wake up and look at the time to see 12 ‘o clock. I rocketed out of bed, grabbed my passport and hoody and ran out the door, down the street and onto the subway. My whole reason for being in the country was to get my visa and I was meant to be at the visa office at 9! Feeling grateful that I had had enough experience on a subway to figure out what is going on (yes it’s not that hard but I can be brainless often enough) I looked around and thought “WOW Hong kong hello” there were people, and people and people, I couldn’t get the first train, or the second or the third as there wasn’t enough space for more people to squish next to more people. At this point I had reached half-awake freak out mode until I snuck a peak at someone’s watch. It said 8.30am. Knowing that this was not right I did some other watch snooping. 8.35am. This definitely accounted for the people traffic and what exhilarated relief. I was not going to botch up my one responsibility that I was sent there for.

Sometime later I handed in my visa documents and helped myself to a generous R30 breakfast and coffee from a restaurant. As I sat there, calmly eating breakfast I looked out the giant windows at the bright sky, I was so warm I wish I could have taken my shoes. There was no litter on the streets, the sun was out, the sky was blue and I finally there was English, EVERYWHERE.

One thing one must know about Hong Kong, is that it is no horizontal city. Now that could be said about Seoul perhaps too and the rest of Korean cities to an extent. There are buildings on buildings as space is precious and you may walk up 7 floors before getting to your desired shop or restaurant. But Hong Kong is different, it is like a smog filled ocean, you walk through the subway into a mall, up a floor and an escalator then to a business district and more restaurants and the mall connects to the next mall and the next street. No longer are we walking on the ground but we are up down and around and everything is so connected, you go through a mall which connects you to a staircase which goes down a corridor and out a door, into a door, past some shops up an escalator and you are in your apartment. I followed my hosts around amazed at the connectedness of it all, hazy mind following my feet as I took in sights and smells and the ever changing crowds of walking people, walking after and around more walking people.

In Hong Kong people live in minuscule apartments. Mine in Korea is small, theirs are unbreathable. The space is enough for a single bed and one can walk next to the bed. People don’t have kitchens, there is no space for a kitchen. Even the Hong Kong harbor grows smaller every year as more land for more people becomes the need they concrete the sparkling water so more people can walk on more ground and buy more things. Living in tiny holes in the wall their life is outside where people rush around and get more money just to spend more money and then get more money to spend some more. In this, Hong Kong opens up yet another dialogue in my head about my greatest fear, that life can be described as simply an accumulation of getting things, money to get things and then more money to get more things. Circular Boring. Mindless. Madness.

Now I had some time to relax and Seth’s girlfriend decided to show me around with her friend. How blessed to have some real Cantonese people showing me their city. We went to this amazing restaurant that served us all sorts of things from Chinese omelets to sugary sweet yet savory buns. They laughed at my chopstick skill (something I thought I was getting quite impressive at) and expounded on the ways of the Chinese language. Now, I know that perhaps everyone knows this but me (well I do know now) but I had no idea that Chinese was only a written language. That a Cantonese person living in Hong Kong cannot communicate with someone who speaks Mandarin but if they needed to they could communicate perfectly through writing to each other as Chinese is the standardized written language. Neither did I know that Chinese had no alphabet and that it was simply a flow of ideas and every idea has their own symbol. This blew my mind. I asked them how they read out loud in school as the written words to not correspond to phonetics at all and the answer I got was that they simply constantly translate while they read. And later when we went to a bookshop I saw them reading and laughing together. But they weren’t even reading as I know it! These ways of language completely blew my mind and I felt this thick burning jealousy for the Chinese as something so natural to them was so unfathomable to me.

And then on to half price sushi (with orange fish eggs on them- not my favourite) and on to Chinese huge bowls of noodle soup (by huge bowl, think of a big bowl and then make it bigger and then bigger and then fill it with lots of food and eat it by yourself) and on to electronic madness. We went to the place in Hong Kong where they sell cellphone after cellphone after cellphone and every toy imaginable and computers and climbing clips (probably not the ones that’ll save you from death) and batteries (a pack for R4) and and. Madness.. tiring. Madness.

That night I was given a gift. I was taken past the culture hall and I expressed an interest in watching the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Let’s be honest first before I say I absolutely loved it. Orchestra’s definitely bring back days of being 9 years old and told to keep quiet AND still while I watched another performance of my sisters playing in orchestras and trying desperately to count the pages of the conductor, hoping at this page turn it was actually the last. There were definitely moments when this contempt came back strongly BUT it was magnificent. The musicians were in such perfect synch and harmony together, the amount of violins were many and their bows looking like a machine, every up bow, every down bow, the same. The concert pianist was delightful, the flute players haunting, the man with the harp so peculiar. (How long I did think about the social implications of being a man with a harp and I wanted to know his story and what lead him there)

And then onto a bus and back to the airport. The Hong Kong airport confused me, it was 1am, I was tired, everyone was tired and I waited for my plane almost breaking down into tears when I went to the wrong terminal twice. Next to my seat was a coupon for a free starbucks. I got some free hot chocolate. What luck! I got on the plane, people were talking but I fell asleep and woke in Busan at 6am (South Coast of Korea) and found a quiet seat to rest my head and woke up at 10am. Then took a subway to the beach and waited a few minutes until Tiffany and my new friend Heather arrived (New friend at that moment that is). We then trawled the streets until we found a love motel named the WOW motel(these are exactly what they sound like but they are inexpensive) and we got a huge bed to share, mirrors on the ceiling and a HUMONGOUS bath (big enough to fit 3 people)

Well we grabbed some Soju (Korean rice spirit thing) and beer and went to the beach and enjoyed ah, the pure prettiness of the day, and the beginning of the Chinese New Year (why we were free of work). It was not cold, it was sunny, people were playing on the beach (bundled up playing) and we talked we laughed and we went home and had a colossal jacuzzi bath and giggled some more. Sometime later we found ourselves in a restaurant and then the plan was to go out later (they had straightened my hair and put makeup on me in the way that girl’s love to take me on as a project) but exhaustedly the plan failed and I went to sleep and woke up at the glorious hour of 9am.

We spent the next day on the tourist scene and Heather tour guided us to a Buddhist temple on the beach. Wow beauty, real, true Korean beauty. This temple sits on the blue ocean and looks out over pretty rocks and freedom. Space. Much needed space seeped into my body. There was a huge golden Buddha smiling happily, and weird little Buddha dolls with a huge dragon and happy pig statues grinning delightfully. And we continued on our “cultural” day to the modern art museum of Busan

Well what can anyone say about modern art? Except that well, it’s a bit sad and unamazing. Unless you are a sucker for concept or something. Perhaps I am not deep enough but we wondered around in a kind of stupor thinking “really? What? Why” and not in the good way. We entered a dark stall which was a sort of disco party, and then some circular curtains where we listened to people’s laughter (rather frightening) and some screens with 3 people of different ages dancing in unison and well... But until I read the blurb about what it was I kind of found something in it. Or I just liked the sentiments. As far as I understood it was about the state of man today, how everyone in their search for happiness in different ways never finds peace, only the seeking of adventure. In this constant money grabbing, working life happiness is seen as connected to economic success. This, in the context of Korea is very relevant. Korea has one of the highest (if not THE highest) suicide rates because no longer do people have to worry about simply eating but about being more successful than the next person. If you don’t make a success of yourself in this highly competitive society you are nothing and thus money and physical beauty is rated highly when it comes to true happiness.

I liked the sentiment. We moved on. More bubbles and bath time and a silly useless sappy movie that I loved. A rather disappointing supper (too little yum salad) followed by a bar and some new friends. We went to a noraebang which is where people go to karaoke, found out heather has a sing star voice while I croaked along and after some more friends later we watched a friend win 300 dollars at a casino and returned after fireworks on the beach at 6am. Glorious.

Well now I am back here. And there is so much more to talk about. How much time I have not had to talk about school and my student’s and about how I now go climbing 3 times a week, have met some beautiful people and perhaps I’m not overly ecstatic about Korea but I am loving how I am suddenly here and not really anywhere else. Life cannot be exciting and beautiful and easy all the time. My student’s do a fantastic job at not paying attention and being insanely annoying. And the Kindergarteners complain and cry and hit each other and say selfish thing. And there are so many buildings. And it’s a useless cold. But yes. I am so blessed for how my first month has unfolded.