In any case, I've been working seven days a week for the past few months and the Dragon Boat Festival presented a nice opportunity to get away to Hong Kong for a couple of days. It was a nice trip even though everything seemed to go wrong. First, I couldn't book the hotel in advance because the only app that I can use with my debit card wasn't working. This is always a bad sign since the price in the app is almost never what the hotel actually offers when you arrive, even if they have rooms available. So my first stop was a hostel in Causeway Bay, a popular and central neighborhood on Hong Kong Island. The hostel was full by the time I arrived ( which was already after dark), so I had to find a 7 Eleven to buy a sim card for my phone. (Chinese SIM cards don't work in Hong Kong.)
Once I was connected to the internet, I was able to find a nearby hotel. I made my way there and discovered it to be in a building with about a thousand other hotels and apartments. Most rented by the hour and promised special rates after midnight. I wasn't bothered. I was getting a real room for the night and there wasn't anything that was going to ruin my Hong Kong weekend.
The price was exorbitant and the room was mediocre at best, though it was clean. I've heard of hotels in Chungking Mansions in Kowloon that don't have a lock on the door, but this place didn't have a key. The room was right next to the check in desk and the front desk guy told me he would be there to open the door when I came back. I did find the whole operation suspect, but I only left once to go eat and didn't have a problem getting in when I returned. However, I did discover upon my return that the room didn't have the correct outlet to charge my phone.
Hong Kong, you see, has the traditional British wall sockets in older buildings, but almost anything built after the handover has an amazing super outlet that will accept virtually an cord you can imagine: British, American, German, Chinese... I'd never stayed in an older building before, so I wasn't expecting the older outlets. Needless to say, I spent the majority of the next day out looking for a new hotel and trying to get my phone charged. I did finally settle on a nice hostel only a few minutes walk from the previous night's hotel, one which I have stayed at before.
Despite the fiasco with the hotel, I did manage to get an eye appointment and a new pair of glasses. Things like that are much easier in Hong Kong because there's virtually no language barrier for an English speaker, so I do save many of my seemingly ordinary tasks for my trips to Hong Kong.
The following day I wanted to go see the dragon boat races, a central part of the holiday in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, I wasn't an early riser that morning and when I arrived at the bus stop there was already a line of 1.5 hours for the bus in addition to the forty minute ride to get there. Since I had a train to catch that evening, I decided to forgo the races and just spend some time window shopping around Causeway Bay.
Finally, this week was children's day. That's an international holiday that's exactly the bullshit it sounds like. To be fair, it isn't really a day for the children, it's a day for overbearing parents to force their children to do shit they don't want to do like sing and dance in a school show. Which kinda ruins their day off.
I helped one boy memorize a long speech in English for the show. Well, kinda English. Actually, like most Chinese attempts at English, it was a completely incomprehensible word salad that would have been funny if they hadn't forced the boy to spend so much time memorizing it. Which he did perfectly. The whole episode just proves again to me that memorization is not the same as learning a language.
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