Black Rain

HK has a rainstorm warning system with 3 levels:

Amber: >30 millimeter rainfall per hour

Red: >50 mm rainfall per hour

Black: >70 mm rainfall per hour

The HK observatory is quick to issue such warnings which are then posted everywhere throughout the city. The whole city is pretty organized about handling and level of rain. Platic bags for umbrellas are distributed at the entrance of any building so that rain-soaked umbrellas dont wet all the floors. MTR stations have large drying fans at the entrances to speed up the drying process of shoes. An efficient drainage system ensures that the city doesn get flooded.

On Thursday, typhoon Chanthu was in southern china. It wasn't close to HK but close enough to ensure some heavy rainfall. Rainstorm warning black was issued. What does nadja do? grab her umbrella and roam the streets (or should i say 'streams' that used to be streets)...

Street Markets wait out the rain by sitting in 3 inche puddles of water

& streams of water pour down the roofs onto the sidewalks:

City Uni of HK

Eventhough uni was the reason I went to HK in the first place, I didnt have any pictures of the place until the last couple of days. You really dont take photos of the places that you spend most of your time at. Although in our case we weren't at uni that much: 4 times a week. Anyway, the City Uni campus is pretty compact. The main building is a little older but everything inside is new. They have good lecture theatres, hallways and a bookshop:

My two classes had a good mix of people from HK and mainland China:

All in all, the courses at city u were a good learning experience. The interraction with students and the mindset of the professors and guest speakers were very insightful. Here are some examples:

• One guest speaker made it very clear that 'us westerners' (looking directly at all the exchange students) have no idea what customer relationship management really is, and he poked fun at how much value the western world places on contracts. In his speach he held up a pretend contract in the air and waved it around to show how much it disgusted him.
• The CEO of the South China Morning Post denied that media censorship was even an issue.
• Another guest speaker talked for 30 mins about how president Hu Jintao 'plans' all his official visits up to the last detail-up to what he wears like this fact is some sort of revelation. However this was the only speaker that openly stated that all media is 'an act'.

Peak to Aberdeen Trail

Our last hike in HK started at the top of victoria peak and winded down the back side of the HK island mountain, past Pok Fu Lam reservoir, to Aberdeen harbor. We decided to hike in the late afternoon and we arrived in Aberdeen right after sunset.. perfect timing. We actually discovered how nice it is to hike in the late afternoon compared to mornings or during the hot mid day sun. good thing we figured it out on our lat hike :) Aberdeen is known for its floating village and floating jumbo restaurant.

City Pictures

HK by day & by night

a typical HK street

I scrolled through my posts and realized there is a lack of city photos. HK is afterall known for its expansive skyline. My blog makes it seem like I'm on some sort of hiking vacation in a park. Rest assured, I spend most of my time immersed in a bustling city that is home to over 7 million people. My appartment is smack dab in the middle of the older part of Kowloon in one of the many (scarily) skinny but tall buildings, surrounded by markets and busy streets galore. The journey to any destination here is an adventure. Property is one of the most expensive in the world, and housing complexes are unfathomably large (single housing complexes can be home to over 10,000 people).

Lamma Island

This is the second largest island out of the four that we've visited and hiked in HK. It's most prominent feature is the coal power plant which is HKs largest source of energy. Next to the massive powerplant is one windmill (HK is going green!). This was our second trip here, we wanted to explore the south side of the island, since we missed out on it the first time, and enjoy another yummy seafood lunch :) So off we went...

The hike started out great, slight incline, mostly in the shade, walking through jungles, past banana plantations and across a couple of lovely beaches. There were even some delapidated houses with jungles in the living room. More enourmous neon spiders were around too but we're used to them by now ("just duck under the tent-sized webs"). Then came the killer: neverending stairs up and over a mountain in the middle of the day, no shade, no wind, heat coming from above and below. I swore never to hike again. Luckily it was a short-lived promise (but we did take a 5 day break from hiking) :)

==> Me attempting to create shade

Our exhaustion was rewarded with a lobster lunch! I also got to try abalone for the first time... which, ive decided, is overrated. It has the consistency of an eraser (yes, i have bitten into one of those too). Lobster however is always scrumptious.

Seafood

Dried or fresh, food here is very seafood oriented. Makes sense, giving HKs fishing history and geographic location; surounded by ocean. The seafood experience is not for the faint-hearted or squirmy. Most seafood is alive until right before being cooked. Restaurants display rows of blinking, squirming crustaceans, shellfish, slugs and fish for you to pick and have cooked away from sight...

...while in wet markets your choice of seafood is gutted, descaled and beheaded so fast its heart still lays beating on the massive wooden chopping board:

The smell of dried & salted fish, mussels, abalone, scallops cannot be escaped when walking through the streets of HK. I like it. It will always remind me of HK.

MTR

Mass Transit Railway. Some facts courtesy of gov.hk:

• At present, the MTR system consists nine lines
• There are 84 stations along over 170 kilometers.
• Standard class adult single journey fare ranges from HKD $3.5 to $51.
• The nine lines carry an average of about 3.7 million passengers per weekday.

If you catch yourself traveling on the MTR between 8-9 am or 6-7 pm, you can expect a pretty solid reenactment of the phrase 'sardindes in a can'. People with claustrophobia, beware!

Happy Valley Racecourse

Tonight we made it to the racecourse in HK island Just in time for the last race of the season. It's a pretty impressive course surrounded by high rise buidlings. The land it sits on is invaluable. The racecourse itself was big, the horses on the other hand were surprisingly small 'fully grown' horses. They must be a smaller breed of horse.... Anyway, the mood was good given the two for one beer promotion and the concentration of expats was pretty high. All in all it was good mid-week fun :)

Shek O Beach & Dragon's Back

Today we hiked along the 'Dragon's Back' ridge trail on HK island to Shek O beach. In China landscapes are described in dragon forms. Many of mountains or hills together resemble a dragon's back (Kowloon actually means 'nine dragons'). This treck is listed as one of the worlds top urban hiking trails. It's experience level was supposedly high, but I think this was only due to the fact that unlike most other trails in HK this one was not paved. I caved in to the HK women's tradition of using umbrella's for shade, because it was just too hot. The views from the top were fantastic. Shek O beach on one side, stanley on the other. After the hike we had some yummy Thai food before sleeping on the beach for an hour :)

Cosmetics

Walking around in HK, you cannot go far before you past by some sort of cosmetic store. There are several larger chains here catering to the market. Because HK has no VAT, many people from mainland China actually come here with a long list of cosmetics to bring back to friends and relatives. Besides the cosmetic stores there is also a large focus on weight, which is odd because i have yet to see an overweight Chinese person here. By any western standard they are lean. Yet the shelves are filled with slimming tea and capsules. Alli diet pills are also advertised throught the city. Nevertheless as an avid observer of advertisements, my attention was drawn to the following 3 posters in the MTR station concerning cosmetic surgery:

Miss Paris ............... Dr. Reborn (Botox)

and my favorite:

Dr. Face

Uni Work

The past two days have been filled with work for uni. For my E-Marketing class group work we have to do a marketing plan to launch a fictional new online business. We decided to launch an online lollipop personalising business! Then for our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) course group work we have to analyze the CMR strategy used by a company so we chose My M&Ms, a company with a lot of overlap with our fictional lollipop business. This way we can maximize the industry analysis for both. The key here is efficiency! The sooner we are done with these reports, the sooner the sightseeing, eating out and shopping can continue :)

I've needed very little sleep since I've been here. I average about 5 hours of sleep each night. You would think i would be more productive as a result.... hmm. My point is, I'm going to try and get as much work done at night so as not to cut into daytime activities. Tomorrow's plan:

• Beach day at another supposedly great beach in HK called "Shek O" that was recommended to us recently (it feels like HK as an unlimited number of nice beaches)
• followed by sunset & dinner at Cafe Deco on Victoria Peak overlooking all of HK island and Kowloon. http://www.cafedecogroup.com/index.php?_topRm=1&group=restaurants
• Night cap cocktails at Aqua Spirit with a view of the harbour and HK island. http://www.aqua.com.hk/#/?eng&aqua&gallery&venue

...tough life...

Dessert!!!

I mentioned before that food is my biggest preoccupation here, in particular desserts. It's time I introduce you to my favorite dessert spots and dishes:

Honeymoon Desserts

• Green tea ice cream with 'black pearl' and vanilla sauce
• Durian crepe with creme
• Durian mochi
• Baked sago and custard with a mashed taro filling
• Glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame paste in a sweet ginger soup
• Mango and pomelo shake with sago
• Sweet bean curd with ginger syrup

Hui Lau Shan Healthy Desserts

• Mango Mochi
• glutinous rice balls with sesame seeds and crushed peanuts
• red bean soup with glutinous rice balls
• Shake: Mango puree with coconut milk and sago
• Shake: Aloe Jelly with mango puree
• Shake: Honey jelly with mango and coconut juice
• any of their pure fruit shakes (Papaya, honey melon, watermelon...)

This week we actually had a really good dessert at a restaurant called "Xi Yan Sweets" (enough said)... lychee sorbet with osmanthus wine:

Dessert is usually on the menu for my dinner in HK any night of the week and the shakes are for in between :) Luckily these two restaurants are chains so we're always delighted to stumble across one while sightseeing!

Gargantuan Mangoes and Spiders

I've already mentioned before how large some of the mangoes are here. HK imports 99% of all it's fruits since land is worth more for housing than farming. Most of the mangoes here come from the Philippines (the sweetest ones) and Taiwan (the biggest ones). Ive been on the search for the biggest mango and yesterday i found one the size of my face:

Today we decided to have a beach day at Tai Long Wan again (big wave beach). Located in the middle of the nature reserve there are a couple hiking paths leading up to it. We took a different path than last time, this one cut through some pretty dense vegetation. We soon discovered that we were entirely surrounded by the biggest spiders i have ever seen in my life. On average they were bigger than my hand and the body of the biggest ones we saw was larger than my thumb. They were hanging in webs above us and next to us. Needless to say we reached the beautiful (spider free) beach in record time :)

Fragrant Harbor

The Chinese name for "Hong Kong" directly translated actually means "fragrant harbor". It probably got it's name from a time when HK was merely a small fishing harbor where they produced incense which is burned as part of worship. Eventually they exported this incense throughout the world. Fun Fact: sandalwood use in Chinese incense today is imported largely from Australia. You cannot go through a single day without smelling incense in HK. It is everywhere, from the altars in restaurants to the altars in front of homes and stores. It's difficult to take pictures at Temples that aren't foggy from smoke:

Incense sticks come in all sizes: rocket shaped, short, tall, thicker spirals (which burn for 2 weeks).

Chinese Cake Baking Class

The two Nadja's entered another class organised by the HK tourism board. This one took place on the Tsim Sha Tsui area, near the famous Nathan Road shopping area where we learned to make 'Wife Cakes' and 'Egg Rolls' on a rainy afternoon. Wife cakes are two types of dough (when baked they create a flakey crust) with a sticky rice & sugar filling. You can buy them at any local bakery here and they're really yummy. Interestingly, the story behind wife cakes is they were baked by a husband who sold them to raise enough money in order to prevent his wife from selling herself to be able to support her sick father in law with medicines.

Under the teaching of two "masters" (in china it takes 10 years of training to become a master chef) our cakes and rolls turned out quite delicious :)