mokudekiru

Time for Party Mode.

After extensive googling and asking friends, it became clear that the two party places to check out in Hong Kong are Wan Chai and Lan Kwai Fong. Wan Chai is semi-chill and LKF is very dance/clubby, so it makes sense to hang out in Wan Chai on the weekdays and LKF on the weekends (it is slightly RIDICULOUS on weekends). Also stay tuned for a romantic picnic spot and some incoherent sentences about the highest bar in the world.

Wan Chai – just go to Carnegie’s and dance on the bar

Children, gather round, it’s time for your lesson on Wan Chai!

Wan Chai is kinda old, grungy in a good way, and full of ex-pat bars and topless bars — it’s got a red-lighty history but seems tame these days. There are people out and about any night of the week, up and down Lockhart Road, but it can be sort of a weird crowd. Lots of older ex-pat dudes in groups, sometimes accompanied by local and/or southeast asian ladies (prostitutes? probs). Outside each nude bar was always a little old asian lady sitting there, but she didn’t do much to try and solicit us in. Not really our scene, old white dudes and hookers.

For a more student-aged crowd, follow the internet’s advice and go to Carnegie’s on a Tuesday or Wednesday (why YES, they DO have an angelfire website!)

But be warned: as soon as you step inside Carnegie’s, you will no longer be in Hong Kong, but in total ex-pat/exchange-student/traveler’s Narnia. White people THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.

For my Lund friends, Carnegie’s is just like stepping inside of VGs on Wednesdays / Kalmars on Tuesdays (all exchange students all the time!) Seriously, the resemblance was eerie…
Same playlist /waka waka.
Same demographics (Australians, New Zealanders, and Germans, I swear you’re EVERYWHERE.)
Same “It’s Tuesday And Therefore We Must Party” attitude.

Also, Carnegie’s is apparently THE ONLY PLACE.

I went there both Tuesdays, and then after the horse races in Wan Chai (a Wednesday), the exchange students we had just met and were hanging with were like,
“We’re going out in Wan Chai, want to come?”
“Maybe, where to?”
“Carnegie’s, where else?!”
SERIOUSLY??? I have been in this country for seven days and already know to be affectionately annoyed that we always go to that place. (Like I said, it’s Hong Kong VGs.)

So the deal with Tuesdays is that vodka-based drinks cost 10 HKD = $1.25, so yes, people are ordering (and consuming) in bulk. I wouldn’t wear my favorite shoes.

The other deal with Carnegie’s is that when the clock strikes midnight, you are GETTING ON THAT BAR and doing it Katy Perry style.

11:59 PM…

MIDNIGHT. And life is like this.

When you’re done getting your Sexy And You Know It on, go get keBABs at Ebeneezer’s with everyone and scream and shout, then hop in a cab and go home. Good job, you’ve just Wan Chai’d.

Lan Kwai Fong – Let’s cram all the party of Hong Kong into a two block radius.

I have never seen a more densely-packed party district. You sort of wonder what the point of having streets is, and then you remember that if there were no streets there wouldn’t be enough room for people to stand. This place is INFESTED with partiers on Fridays and Saturdays.

When you see this mural, you know you’re basically in the right place. (It’s not that hard though, go to Central and follow the exits to Lan Kwai Fong).

If it’s a weekday, you can chill at any of the numerous bars and sit outside people-watching. No bars really seem to have doors/very many walls, everything is very open and inside/outside run together. It’s seriously tiny, but everything is a bar or a club. Illustrated by this really wonky map of LKF.

If it’s Friday or Saturday though, not a lot of sitting will be going on because this will be happening:

I think it would be physically impossible to go to LKF and go to *a* bar. First of all, it’s totally unclear sometimes where one bar starts and another one ends, due to the general lack of storefronts/walls, and second of all, it’s a party tidal wave and you’d best just ride it out, wherever the current takes you.

Case in point, we stopped into one bar, Stormies, because we were mildly overwhelmed and this place looked relatively empty/calm. Then:

Me: “This looks like a chill place. Let’s just stop here and get a beer.”DJ: “EVERYONE IN THE BAR GETS FREE SHOTS”Cue “Shots” by LMFAO.

— Robert Boyce (@rboyce) February 10, 2012

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen bartenders pouring shots DIRECTLY into PEOPLE’S MOUTHS from the liqueur bottles before. Like, ALL CASUAL and stuff too. We spent a lot of time on this trip trying to identify precisely where the Zombie epidemic would start in Hong Kong, and in retrospect I think Lan Kwai Fong is a likely candidate. Zombies take note: start the apocalypse on a Saturday night.

So, clubbing.

I was told by an internet friend to go to Beijing Club, but when Boyce and I got in line there, we were shuffled by a bouncer to a different line a block away, for Magnum Club. Turns out this is a new place (looks like it opened in the past few months), so maybe that’s why they herded us that way.

Although the streets of Lan Kwai Fong were filled with trashy, trashed white people (the young ex-pats strike again), once we got into the club it was suddenly 100% well-dressed Chinese twentysomethings. We were literally the only non-Chinese people we saw for the next three hours. But if these people were never in the LKF street crowd, WHERE WERE THEY? And how did they even get to the club?!?!

Entering the club was as Twilight Zone-y as entering Carnegies in Wan Chai was, but in reverse: going from ex-pat zombie crowd -> Chinese mob.

The club itself was a well-executed, definition-of-club type club: club music, club lights, club outfits, club djs. I was really excited when they played Knife Party because that song is a) ridiculous, b) involves The Internet and blocking people on Facebook, c) Zombie-apocalypse appropriate, and d) danceable in a cray way.

Knife Party – Internet Friends by Knife Party

Queue the several hours of dancing. I wasn’t sure how into dancing Hong Kong peeps would be, but this crowd did not disappoint. They seemed like young professionals (lots of suits) rather than students, which isn’t surprising considering the outrageous cover, but also mostly guys, which is REALLY surprising, considering the outrageous cover…

The Outrageous Cover:
For girls – free.
For dudes – $400 HKD = $50 USD WHAAAAAAAT (okay, not as bad since mine was free, so we split it, but STILL.)

And yet, the club was somehow FULL of dudes. Boyce didn’t feel like it was super sausage-festy, meaning there were probably girls around there somewhere who I never actually saw because I was too busy being literally swarmed by dudes. Who were unexpectedly aggressive. Not in a scary way, or anything…but just, AGGRESSIVE. One guy who I had not yet seen, talked to, or danced with, who was standing a few people away from me, shoved his phone past 3 innocent bystanders and into my face, asking for my number. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT’S WITH THE LONG-RANGE NUMBER-GRAB ATTEMPT? Perhaps swarmy tendencies were further aggravated by me being the only foreign female in the establishment? Or maybe they were extra ragin’ because of whole $400 cover situation, who knows. Maybe this is just how things work in Hong Kong.

But so, so strange.

Eventually we left the club because it was 3:30 AM, and we hadn’t finished our LKF tour yet. We wandered into Club 97, which was a more Wan Chai style club, with a bunch of 19-year old looking dudes jumping and hitting this low-hanging vent at the back of the club for some unbeknownst reason. But it was annoying and we left, heading for old faithful 7-11, and then sat on the curb people-watching as the zombie-mob walked down the hill when 4 AM rolled around and the bars and clubs began to close.

We watched, entertained, as some dude puked down the street from us. We knew it was time to leave when a dude with a bleeding head (bottle smashed on it, perhaps?) sat down next to us to chill for a sec, with his friends. They looked harmless, but, come on, bleeding head? Cab time, BYE.

In conclusion…
Lan Kwai Fong probably had as much party mojo as the entire city of Lund, except that it was all packed into a 2 block radius instead of distributed evenly across town. I hereby challenge all future travel destinations to outdo LKF’s ridiculousity. Best of luck.

For a Super-Romantic Evening, Head to the IFC Mall Rooftop

Okay, you’re totally overwhelmed by Carnegie’s and LKF, and it’s time for a relaxed, romantic evening. Go to the IFC Mall Rooftop and have a picnic! Stare at the view of Kowloon, and ask someone to marry you.

The chairs/tables on the roof are for the public, but there’s a real bar here too. Also, lots of color-changing lights.

Then, take pictures with the pretty lights, and call it a successful evening. The mall is open until 1 AM so you have plenty of time, and on the way out be sure to stop by the bathrooms in the mall, because they are super-nice and you can get your shoes shined in the men’s room, as reported by Bhargav.

Ozone – Highest Bar in the World

I have no more energy to write anything even partially coherent here, but it’s on the friggin’ 118th floor. Drinks cost infinity dollars, and it’s ritztastic.

Don’t go on a foggy day like we did (oops) and get no view. It could have been 118 floors underground for all we know.

Which might actually have been MORE AWESOME.

Do bring your friends to Ozone, unless you want to hang out with groups of old asian businessmen, who are the only people who can afford this place and want to be at a bar 118 floors in the sky in a district where there is nothing else going on.

So, there is fun to be had in Hong Kong. QED.

The good news about food in Hong Kong is that it’s really hard to go wrong — everything is delicious. The bad news is that you’ll, at some point during your day, have to decide what to eat and it’s not easy.

How to Find Food

The only internet tool you need to aid in restaurant selection is OpenRice, Hong Kong’s Yelp equivalent. I recommend filtering by the location and then by dish or restaurant style – there is so much good food around that you shouldn’t really bother crossing town for something. Pay attention to prices and photos on OpenRice, and even if you can’t read chinese, it’s sometimes worth clicking on those reviews for the pictures.

Option B is to wander the streets, and though I did this if I was out shopping (okay, actually I would just go to the SOGO basement and buy takoyaki) it’s too easy to become paralyzed by choice. Just OpenRice it.

Dim Sum

Why hello Hong Kong. We come in peace, and in search of Dim Sum.

I mean, who doesn’t? Dim sum isn’t difficult to find in major US cities, but between the trek over to your local Chinatown and the social barrier to choosing dim sum over traditional (read: pancakes, omelets, and mimosas) brunch, the dim sum stars align less frequently than I would hope back home, particularly in large groups.

But with a dim-sum-ready team of travelers and readily available goods on nearly every block, all obstacles were vanquished. We sleep in, we wake up, and we DIM SUM IT!! to our hearts’ content.

The dim sum report is that actually, much of the available dishes were pretty similar to ones that exist in the US. Typically there was a bit more variety, but we didn’t see anything incredibly surprising on the menu or on other peoples’ tables.

The big difference though, was that every item had approximately 170% the flavor of the dim sum I’m accustomed to. This is your tongue on drugs? No, this is your tongue on Hong Kong dim sum.

If you’re ready to get militant about dim sum, apparently the place to go is Tim Ho Wan, a Michelin one-star restaurant. I’m sure it’s lovely, but we stopped by one day and the queueing was of the variety I normally reserve for Swedish clubs. In light of me being in the final stages of recovery from Post-Traumatic Queue Exhaustion after a semester in Scandinavia, we passed. And still ate plenty of good dim sum, elsewhere.

The hardest part about dim sum blogging is that since your food comes out one dish at a time, you will have the urge to just dig in, and may forget to photograph it…so I don’t even have pictures of some of the best things we ate. Alas.

One other tip: what are dim sum restaurants by day are often hot pot restaurants by night (dim sum is more of a lunch thing, hot pot a dinner affair). Which brings us to…

Hot Pot

A wintertime classic, hot pot is a mandatory experience in Hong Kong, as well as an exercise in teamwork. Bring four or five of your best friends to Tao Heung in Tsim Sha Tsui and put your name down on the list. While you wait, play in the electronics store downstairs, Fortress. Then head to 7-11, and loiter in a staircase for 15 minutes before heading back up to the restaurant.

When you finally get a seat, begin Challenge 1: Battle the Cantonese-only menu and order based on pictures (roughly 1/4 of the menu), color-coded lists of Cantonese words (the rest of the menu), using a combination of luck and basic kanji mastery.

Our results: We ordered WAY too much food.

After you order, they bring out a bunch of things and you make your own sauce. SO many things. Jane’s expert strategy was to just dump everything in in large quantities, and hers at least appeared to be the most delicious, so that’s the algorithm I’d advise.

Challenge 2: Order the dish pictured below.

We pulled this off successfully by pointing at the table next to us (who had received this before us), making hand gestures, and using the words “rice” and “leaf”. Not sure which of those steps were essential, YMMV.

Finally, our hot pot arrived, along with 20 plates of our mystery-order food (the waitresses were sort of giving us weird looks). Throw it in!

Hot pot is very similar to Japanese nabemono, although the dipping sauce is different and the Hong Kong version seems to involve more fish balls. (Either that, or we just ordered too many fish balls.) We also ordered this tube of fishball paste, where you squeeze it out of a tube (like icing a cake!) and it makes sort of a fishball noodle in the hotpot. Pro tip: cut the fish-noodle before squeezing the entire tube into the pot in one, long string.

The tofu rolls in the next photo (bottom right corner and just above the plate of meat) were fun — submerge them in the water with your chopsticks for ~30 seconds, sauce them up real good, and enjoy.

If anyone can identify the white stuff in the bottom left corner (yes, that’s what she said) please tell me what it is, because it tasted good but none of us could figure it out. Mushroom? Fish-based? Alien intestines?

In Japanese families doing nabe, there’s typically one family member who completely dominates all things nabe – temperature, when to put in what, when to take it out. I believe the technical term for this control freak is a nabe-bugyou in Japanese, a bugyou being a certain feudal-period shogun administrator. I’m not sure if there are nabe-bugyou in Hong Kong style hot pot, but none of us were particularly domineering, so after about an hour of hot pot our pace dropped off considerably, yet we kept slowly trying to push forward and consume most of what we’d ordered.

After people started dropping off like flies, we gave up, got the bill (surprisingly low), and headed back to HK Island, only partially defeated by the hot pot experience.

By far our most intense and epic meal. (For locals, this was probably just Regular Ordinary Cantonese Meal Time).

Cha Chaan Teng

Think Hong Kong-style diner. A wide range of comfort food, including pastries and omelets, but also sandwiches and meat, so you can choose whether you’re feeling more breakfast, more lunch, or both. This NYTimes Travel article explains cha chaan tengs pretty well.

We went to Honolulu Coffee Shop in Wan Chai one day for our usual 2 PM brunchtime. Went both breakfast and lunch, ordering egg tarts, an egg & pork with rice dish, and sandwiches (not pictured).

See, kinda dinery? I drank some yuanyang, a mixture of coffee and milk tea, making it taste like a cantonese bizarro chai bomb.

Friggin’ amazing. Huge fan of egg tarts and how they’re just slightly sweet. And flaky.

Props to Bhargav for capturing ALL THE YUMMY of this dish in one fabulous photo

Char Siu at Joy Hing

Here’s one where we were Doing It Right, thanks to Bhargav’s local resident friend, YinTing, who helped us follow in the footsteps of Anthony Bourdain. She brought us to Joy Hing, a char siu (bbq pork/other meat) restaurant deserving of its own Wikipedia page, and totally took charge. Like a boss.

Basically, all I can say is MEAT. Go there. Order some stuff. Eat it.

The green stuff is full of garlic and incredible.

Tan Tan Noodles

This was purely an OpenRice discovery — the best Hong Kong style food in our immediate vicinity while staying in Tin Hau was a restaurant called Sister Wah, a tiny hole-in-the-wall place like Joy Hing, serving Tan Tan noodles, which we discovered were incredible. The broth was very peanuty, and the dumplings were probably the best dumplings in a soup I’ve ever had. The only problem was that I could only eat approximately 1/3 of the noodles. Luckily, my travel buddies left a less embarrassing amount of noodles in their bowls.

Other Asian Food

Just because you’re in Hong Kong, don’t feel pressure to eat chinese food for every meal, as they have delicious eats from all around asia. The thai food we had in SoHo was very interesting (no pics, sorry) and didn’t taste anything like thai food I’ve had in the US. Having not been to Thailand I can’t comment on authenticity. That restaurant was where I discovered that my maximum mango enjoyment comes in the form of mango + sticky rice.

Time for a whirlwind tour of our non-chinese asian eats.

Indian Food at ChungKing Mansions – a giant apartment complex full of apartments-turned-Indian-restaurants. At the bottom, you’ll be hassled with flyers from each of the restaurants, so find the one you want and you’ll be led up some sketch-ass stairs to your restaurant. Ours was called Taj Mahal and pretty yummy, but not super spicy. Here’s the fish masala, my favorite of our selections.

Korean food at Arisu – where they start with completely the appropriate amount of kim chee. Do Korean bbq, and try the seafood pancake, which seems to be Korean okonomiyaki. It’s sort of like hot pot, but less of an Event and more like dinner.

Japanese Ramen at Ippudo – a Japanese chain that has come to Hong Kong in the last couple of years. I’ve had better ramen, but it was still quite yummy, and who doesn’t love some spoon decor?

Japanese snacks from 7-11 – I told you we were addicted. Let’s get Crunky and Meltykiss! This is what Katy Perry would do at 7-11 if she ended up there on a Friday Night.

Don’t forget your shanghai food

When you’re exhausted thinking about all your food options, don’t forget about your garden variety chinese restaurants. Our favorite was Shanghai 3.6.9, down the street from our Wan Chai crib. It was the very first place we ate in Hong Kong, around midnight after the 13 hour flight.

Tired and jetlagged, this is when we realized: well-chosen vacation destination, team.

If you’re still hungry, check out CNNGo’s 40 Hong Kong foods we can’t live without.

6 Reasons Hong Kong feels like being in Blade Runner:

1. Hong Kong looks like Blade Runner. Duh.
2. It never seems to sleep (e.g. everything happens at night).
3. Similar mixture of Asian people/food/languages with western ones
4. Both have pretty reasonable technological advancement. I think HK has fewer replicants, but at least they have full cell connectivity EVERYWHERE in the metro, even in tunnels. Good job making progress towards the expected tech accomplishments by 2019, HK.
5. In both places people mostly seem to mind their own business, and not stare at you or care what you’re doing. Unless you’re Harrison Ford, in a bar. That man cannot seem to stay out of trouble in bars.
6. Blade Runner would’ve been filmed in Hong Kong if it could’ve. (Thanks Marquis!)

Looks like Blade Runner

City. Mountains. Water. Three of my favorite things, together. In fact, I think this should be a requirement for any city (I suppose it sorta was back in the day, when boats were the only thing going on.)

As far as cities go, Hong Kong is GOOD-LOOKING. First of all, it has some sexy topology. Flying into Hong Kong is a definitively 3D experience. You feel like you’re docking your spaceship in Coruscant rather than landing on a 2D map.

But like human beings, Hong Kong is prettier at night. Suddenly you’re at the top of Victoria Peak and you are looking over all the skyscrapers like you’re Batman.

The Peak Tram is probably the most touristy thing I’ve done in my LIFE, but one way or another you MUST get yourself up to Victoria Peak. Non-negotiable.

Or you can cross over to the peninsula (the Kowloon side) and you get a crazy-nice view of HK Island. The nightly light show starts at 8 PM, which will make you wonder if the entire city is actually a TV screen. Cue a creepy-crawly feeling about consumerist modern society, slight existential questioning, and cheesy light-show music.

So take your pick. Blade Runner, Coruscant, Batman, Ghost in the Shell, or pretty much any other vertical city with flying spaceships that seems only to operate at night, and you’ve got the city layout down.

English and Cantonese

British rule technically ended in Hong Kong in 1997, and Catonese and English are the two official languages, yet I was surprised to see how much English there was around. Every sign, most menus, even our elevator signage (see previous post). Having never been in Asia outside of Japan before, where I could speak the language, this felt very weird at first due to the high crossover between written Chinese and written Japanese. I could ~read the signs, but they all were translated into English anyway, and I couldn’t understand what anyone around me was saying.

It felt like I was in Tokyo, except someone had removed the part of my brain that knows Japanese (a perennial fear/nightmare of mine) and simultaneously subtitled the ENTIRE COUNTRY. Gahhhh.

No resting!!!

Before embarking, I learned a tiny, tiny amount of Cantonese (via Pimsleur) which was almost entirely useless, except for of course, the two things Pimsleur is ALWAYS good for:

1) Knowing what the cab driver was talking about when you hop in and he’s like, “Bindouh wa?” (SHOCKER, it means, “where to?”) Sidenote: cabs are really cheap there. You can effectively cross the city for about $9 USD and there’s no tipping. There are cabs everywhere. Never feel stranded after 1 AM when the MTR stops).

2) Flirting in clubs when locals ask if you can speak any Cantonese, and then blurting out the one or two sentences you can actually say (but at least you can say them WELL, thanks to the Pimsleur repetition strategy). Seriously, this is the main application of Pimsleur and I think they know it. They teach you “I can’t speak [language you’re learning]”, “beer”, “wine”, and “your place or my place?” with a few other things thrown in on the side. I see where all this is going, 1960s-era language method).

Mostly, getting by on English was very doable, though we didn’t go anywhere particularly remote. Most people at stores and restaurants aren’t going to speak English to you like at all, but they will ~understand what you say and do the right thing. They just won’t really speak in sentences to you. If you ask for something, they sort of look at you and often spew something off in Cantonese to another restaurant worker, etc. It was disconcerting enough that if I lived there, I would definitely want to pick up more Cantonese, though I imagine it would be hard to get practice since you’re not fully immersed in it often.

The only total Failure to Communicate situation happened when I was trying to buy laundry detergent. From 7-11. Then a drugstore. Then a grocery. Then finding it in the grocery. Each time, I struggled greatly with what the appropriate charade for “laundry detergent” is. It’s really hard to point at your own clothing in a meaningful way, without pointing at yourself. I eventually did find laundry detergent, no tears involved, but in the future I would have looked up the word before setting out for something that you don’t know is FOR SURE at 7-11.

Where the Fuck Do You Walk?

HK has a population density that’s allegedly the same as Manhattan (70k per square mile in the developed parts) but it feels roughly 4x as crowded. Seriously, PEOPLE, they’re everywhere. Japan sort of immunized me to crowded asian cities (Osaka Loop line before a concert, anyone? Tokyo at rush hour?) but there were two very weird things about Hong Kong and crowds:

1) The subways are not that crowded. In fact, even at rush hour, I don’t think my body ever touched strangers’ bodies inside the trains. The train *stations* were incredibly crowded — hordes of people on the escalators, going through the turnstiles… the throughput of the MTR was highly impressive, but each individual train car was still comfortable. Rush hour in Tokyo, you are being sardined into the train car by the 7 people you’re effectively spooning with, and you’d better hope your hands and your phone were already at eye level, because you won’t have room to move your arms. But in Hong Kong, I saw people actually WAIT FOR THE NEXT TRAIN instead of cramming in. No one touched each other — perhaps they have a more British sense of personal space?

The station is sorta crowded…why not the trains?

2) There is no correct side to walk on. UMMM!??!?! This is my first encounter with a culture that has not figured it out. In the US (and most of Europe I’ve been to), walk on the right. In Japan, walk on the left. And on escalators, there’s a standing side and a waiting side (in Japan which side is which depends on whether you’re in Kansai or Kanto, but in each place it’s at least CONSISTENT).

But no, in Hong Kong, just… MADNESS. CLOWNTOWN. Escalators were (generally) stand-right walk-left, but once you got off the escalator, the staircase might be the opposite way, and once you’re on the street GOOD LUCK, KIDS. The worst part is that in train stations, there are often arrows on the floor/walls to direct traffic, and from station to station, which side the arrows are on varies. Is that *really* necessary?

In light of this, I advise against walking-and-texting in Hong Kong.

I think the ambivalence about which side to walk on contributes to the overcrowdedness and mass chaos. Team Ramen also felt it might be indicative of a culture that was sort of refusing to make up its mind about some things.

Navigating this is your warmup.

Simple solution: spaceships and flying cars.

HECTIC!!! Hong Kong: 5 Places

1) Tsim Sha Tsui, for the food. Kowloon side, first MTR station. Come here 7 PM or later and it will just be madness. It’s also where some amazing food goes on. In this particular picture, where we got spicy crab and ate on the street (around Temple Street, probs), but Tsim Sha Tsui is also where we got Hot Pot, Korean food, Indian food, etc. Just be prepared for dinner to take a while, and that you probably will have to wait. The locals don’t seem to have a huge drinking culture, instead food culture is central, and people seem to spend all evening at dinner. Restaurants will be just as busy at 7 PM as 11 PM, and I never saw one closed before like, midnight (San Francisco can we do this, pretty please?)

I think too much spice/garlic to the crab ratio at this place, but spicy crab is theoretically a good idea

2) Ladies’ Market – I bought an excellent purse here. You’ll have to bargain for stuff; start with ~half the asking price. Also, do Temple Street at night.

3) Filipino nannies/maids all over Statue Square on Sunday afternoons. It’s a thing.

4) Causeway Bay if you want to shop like you’re a teenage girl in Osaka (which I do). Go to SOGO in the morning, Island Beverly Centre after 1 or 2 PM (they only open in the afternoon, presumably for the schoolgirls), and visit all the shoe/clothing stores along Lockhart Road just north of SOGO. World Trade Centre (another block north) for your Uniqlo and MUJI fix. Takoyaki is in the basement of SOGO, as expected. Also, go to Retrostone for vintage stuff.

Two of my fave stores: Apostrophe, where I walked in and asked to buy the jacket the shopkeeper was wearing. She said “Okay but you should wear it in brown.” (hers was black). I tried on both colors and she was right (They always are. Ugh, I love shopping in Asia.) Second store, BESS, felt like an Anthro for slightly more edgy but equally rich girls. I purchased the only jacket I could afford.

Like, a third of the stuff I picked up. And Causeway Bay is just ONE good shopping district of HK.

5) Happy Valley horse races in Wan Chai on Wednesday Nights. Full of old ex-pats gambling on horses and drinking beer. Starts at 7, last race happens around 11 PM so you have a nice wide window in which to get dinner in Tsim Sha Tsui and then head to Wan Chai.

Now that you think you’re going to explode, time to chill out.

Calm Hong Kong: 5 Places

1) Kowloon Walled City Park – This used to be a super-dense mishmash of apartments built on top of each other, and very slummy, back in the day. Sounded pretty creepy and horrible, but it was demolished in the 90s and now there’s a nice park there instead. There’s bonsai! We went at dusk and it was peaceful though maybe a bit eerie.

A gate and some old stones are the only thing left, and we did many a photoshoot there. Here’s Boyce swaggin’ it by the ruins.

2) Hong Kong Park

There’s an excellent tower, from which I took the first picture in this post. Also, we were pretty big fans of the Tai Chi garden and its many statues we abused.

3) Place on the way down from the central mid-level escalators

The Central Mid-level escalators is the longest set of covered, outdoor escalators in the world (FUN FACT!) and riding them takes you on a walking tour of SoHo (lots of nice-looking restaurants) but without the walking. Eventually if you ride ALL the escalators (this takes a while) you end up alone at the end, the tourists mysteriously having disappeared from your side (how did they all know when to get off, anyway?) You’re standing on a road in super-residential Hong Kong. So what now? Luckily, I have the answer for you.

Turn left, and walk down Conduit Road for a while, until you see this staircase. Then take it, and you’ll be in a magical world under the roads, and the coolest place we found in Hong Kong.

I like it because it’s quiet, peaceful, and green, but you’re still reminded that you’re in Hong Kong since there are literally cars driving over your head. Real jungle meets concrete jungle. I also found a good spot to perch.

Photo by Jane Dinh

After you pass by this point, you will wander into the Botanical Gardens/Zoo, which had a very Jurassic Park feel to it.

4) Cyberport – It’s not really near anything, but I befriended some Australians who lived out here and this is the view they wake up to. Daily. UMMM??? The only thing better than finding awesome views while on hikes is finding them in your living room. So either go befriend some randos who live here too, or else try to get similar views from HKU.

I learned in HK and Singapore that I have a thing for views with lots of cargo ships and islands in the distance.

5) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – More crazy views and an entirely vertical school.

This is where Nelson is studying abroad (so jelly that he’s still in HK) and the layout of this school is ridiculous.

All the classes are in a single building and then you take a 10-story elevator down to the dorm (no floors in between, it’s pretty much a vertical tube), and then take another 10-story elevator down and you’re ON THE BEACH.

A few last tips about places

– If you like running, try Happy Valley (awesome view, you get to feel like a horse) and Victoria Park (nice running track, workout equipment scattered around it).
– Go to 7-11 religiously. It is your Japanese snack food haven, source of hydration, entertainment while waiting, and cell phone minute replenishment. They are everywhere.
– Stay somewhere convenient. We Airbnb‘d places in Wan Chai and Tin Hau for 5 days each, and these were crazy convenient and almost as cheap as hostels. Tin Hau was also next door to Victoria Park and Causeway Bay, so a good base for shopaholics. Beware though that your place may be so nice that you just stay in all day, watching Breaking Bad and reading metafilter. There’s no shame in that though, as you have all night to go eat dinner, watch horses race, and experience the Cantonese magic that is Hong Kong.

Wondering where’s the dim sum? Worry not. Posts on HK food and partying, plus all the Singapore stuff, coming up!