So I don't post here nearly as often as I'd like now, and I only recently realized I have posted very little about what my day-to-day life is actually like here. Part of it is because my day-to-day life is consistently very busy, part of it is that I've really settled in here. When my stay in foreign cities had an expiration date, I'd take note of everything that was different about that place and write about it and try to capture all those details and feelings that I might later forget. But as my stay here is indefinite, I come to accept that this is my life and sometimes forget to marvel at how unroutine my routine would once have seemed. Most of my friends now are based here and are generally not hanging on every word I utter about Hong Kong. But without ado, a really candid summary of my life in way more detail than anyone wants:
1) Work
I have a job at Ove Arup here, a rather large engineering company that does so many different things we have to sort them out into groups and assign these groups letters and are close to running out of letters. My group is called Building Sustainability, formerly Building Physics, and we do a number of things but mostly modeling out designs and using fancy software to see how good those designs are. Some teammates do a lot of work with green building certifiers like LEED and China Green Building Label but my subteam mostly builds 3-d models of developments using specific software and then try to "mesh" it into a workable crystalline structure and then run some hightech computational fluid dynamics over the development. At the end, if we did everything right, we might be able to see how wind flows through the development, or how hot the place can get, or how thermal dynamics affects air flow. If it sounds very complicated it kinda is and you should be really impressed that I do this, but in reality I understand very little of what I do and have to basically follow a lot of instructions and trust that smarter people than I discovered the laws of physics, programmed them into these softwares, and then told my bosses how to use them. Though my firm is British, the staff here is 90% local and my sub-team entirely local except for me. At some point a few months ago my team decided to talk to me only in Cantonese and that has primarily stayed true. We are supposed to get in at 8:30 and work til 5:30, but most people get in around 9-9:30, and then leave anywhere from 6:30 to never. I think my average leave time is 6:45. Wrapping up past 8pm is not uncommon, although I'm lucky that my worst nights have only been around 10pm. Cultural miscommunication is often an issue, sometimes language related, sometimes not. Work culture in Hong Kong takes a long time for westerners to figure out, and as someone without much experience with work culture anywhere, it may take me a particularly long time to figure out.
2) Ultimate
I play ultimate a lot here, basically whenever its available. I've touched on this in a previous post but I'll reiterate and expand here. In DC, there are so many ultimate options. There's 7-8 pickup games during the weekdays, as well as Georgetown practices and scrimmages and multiple leagues to join year-round. The summer leagues are stratified into four levels, and it's hard to count how many club teams there are in the area. Here I know everyone who plays, whenever there's a game or pickup, and probably who will show up. The players are composed of maybe 60% ex-patriates, mainly from Canada and the US but also Australia, UK and Europe. The other 40% is local with a few mainland Chinese coming in and out. A couple committed players from Shenzhen will actually cross the border and take an hour and a half plus trip to play weekday games at the higher Hong Kong level. Anyway very quickly I melded into this community and made countless friends, and even won an award for Best Newcomer of the Year.
Tournaments are big highlights of my calendar here and bear only a casual relationship to tournaments in the US. In college, just about every tournament I went to involved renting a car and driving to some remote grassy part of the east coast where we could get plenty of field space. We would stay at the most plebian of roadside motels, fitting 7 or 8 in a room back when our club was low on funds. We would play 4 games amidst one bye against mostly anonymous college competition, then head out and hang out with our team. Here in Asia, ultimate communities only exist around the major metropolises. Even a slightly smaller city like Xiamen or Chengdu don't have an ultimate scene, and the smallest place that I've heard hosting a tournament is Bali and Jeju Island in Korea. Instead, people find ways to fit tournaments in Bangkok, Beijing, Pnomh Penh and here in Hong Kong, and players fly from all over the continent to partake. For our tournament in Bangkok, I met someone who came in from Dubai, and in a hat tournament in Hong Kong, one of my teammates actually timed his vacation from Washington, DC around this tournament. Imagine players convening from Canada, Mexico, UK and France into New York and playing in a tournament within the city limits. For someone familiar with the US scene, this is unfathomable.
Anyway there are only so many tournaments and only so many players within this continent that you get to know many of regulars right away, and then see them again a month later in a different country. The community is almost exhaustingly too interesting, featuring players from too many different countries speaking too many languages with too many great stories to share that I find myself sometimes afraid to meet any more people, because I know I'll want to learn all about their fascinating selves too. On a whole, the ex-pats are a lively combination of adventurous and well-cultured, but unpretentious and unentitled for after all they all play this fringe niche sport. The locals too share these same exact features, for they've gone out of their way to discover and pursue a sport completely foreign to their country.
Through this community I now have multiple friends in places I haven't been like Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Seoul.
3) Neighborhood
I live in a pretty lively neighborhood right by the Prince Edward MTR station.
The area can be considered part of the bustling Monk Kok area where many local restaurants align the street level and a notable street market attracting many tourists. That's not a huge part of my life, but they do sell fresh fruit and random useful items which I do utilize semi regularly. I live right outside a remarkably large food stand, selling everything from pig's liver to squid to waffles. I usually order dim sum style beef balls. Next to that is a ComeBuy, a chain bubble tea stand. This is notable since bubble tea has been one of my favorite things in the world for the last three years, and in DC I had almost no opportunity to get it. I would go way out of my way to go to the one little restaurant/bakery in Chinatown that sold half decent bubble tea for $4.50. This place sells much larger and much better bubble tea for $14 HKD, less than $2 USD. Within my immediate vicinity is also a nice bakery that makes great Chinese buns and several super markets and convenience stores. I had thought that the nearest supermarket was a 5 minute walk away, a considerably closer proximity than I had in any of the 4 locations I've lived in DC. However I was wrong. There was actually a Park n Shop on the 2nd level directly across the street from my house, where I can go from checkout to my room in under 3 minutes. All other daily services like laundry, haircut, clothing stores, electronic stores, flower markets and coffeeshops are within a 5 to 10 minute walk, a result of the sheer density of the malls and stores.
There are dozens of restaurants within that same walking radius, and among them I have sampled many typical Hong Kong "tea restaurants," congee restaurants, dim sum, Thai, Shanghainese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese as well as McDonald's (which I go to here but never in the states). The average dinner at many of them will be under $40. That's the thing about prosperous cities in formerly developing countries - you have really expensive areas and really inexpensive areas. In the states, the range is much narrower and the cheapest places are often immigrant areas. There's a large recreation ground near me where we happen to play frisbee, with fields and a small playground. Lots of elderly people walk around on the fields, sometimes doing slow motion tai chi, sometimes using the strange exercise machines in the playground.
There's a strip of bars in the neighborhood, which may have influenced my decision to settle here, but they are so far removed from any bar experience I had previously had. These are true local bars frequented almost exclusively by local Kowloon dwellers, most of them are smoky rooms with multiple karaoke TVs (featuring a random smodgepodge of English songs), dart boards and dice games. Few places allow you to just sit down and order a beer - you usually get a bucket of beers and "nuts", a small plate of tasteless fries that usurps away $25. There might be some bars that will have TVs occasionally on sports, and some places qualify as lounges where you can sit and chill, but for the most part a Westerner would have no idea what to do inside one of these establishments. Western bars exist in Wan Chai, Tsim Sha Tsui and of course, Soho and Lan Kwai Fong.
4) Living
Life was super exciting for my first two months here. I was living my dream in one of my favorite cities I'd ever been to, speaking multiple languages, meeting lots of new people from many countries. The novelty has been slowly dying down since then and now I no longer see new places, eat new food or meet new people on a weekly basis. Instead I'm doing laundry, buying groceries, spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning a perpetually dirty apartment and generally being exhausted. Hong Kong is a lightning fast city with perhaps the world's most efficient transportation, and as a result it doesn't waste time. It's gotten to the point where even though my commute is 15 minutes long, I rarely go 3 minutes out of my way to the ATM.
This is by far the longest I've ever lived abroad. It's the first time I've been gone so long I've needed to find a local dentist and doctor. I've needed to figure out the right way to do things instead of putting up with an imperfect solution because I'll be going home in a few months. While I speak a lot of Cantonese in my Kowloon neighborhood and use a lot of local businesses, my life is still far from local. Above is an example of a minibus route that took me a while to get over. Minibuses are buses that follow a route but stop only when you tell them to, and have routes written only in Chinese. It's hard to adjust to a busing system in any new city, but the challenge in Hong Kong is particularly intimidating. As a result I stuck a lot to the quite legible map of the MTR, which may be the best subway system in the world
I don't cook quite as much here as I would in the states. It was a large part of my life in DC, between finding Chinese groceries, experimenting with various dishes, and inviting friends over for dinner parties. Cooking was once a three or four time a week occasion - now it's a once a week occasion, not counting ramen. Though I know longer have to struggle to find my Chinese sauces and ingredients, I rarely have the time or even the kitchen space to make use of them. When you get back from work tired at 7:30, you're rarely in the mood to cook and eat at 8:30. What more, cooking is a significant cost saver in the US, but it actually costs money here! Eating out is so cheap and none of the meals I make are simple enough to be that inexpensive. The real reason to cook at home is to avoid the unhealthy oils that you'll find at just about any roadside restaurant. That said, I do eat plenty of ramen here and it is oh so good.
Finding cool places to go is often an issue. In DC, I would pass by restaurants or bars and notice they seemed interesting, or hear by word of mouth of a place, or through Yelp. I could easily sit on a bus and spot a cool restaurant, and then gather with friends later that week to try it out. There's none of that here. So many of the cool places in Hong Kong are not at the street level, because this is such a vertical city. There could be this an amazing hot pot restaurant located at the 15th floor of an abandoned-looking building in Yau Ma Dei, and you'd have no way of finding out just by walking by. It's all word of mouth or OpenRice, Hong Kong's amazing restaurant app. In addition, my feeling has been that Hong Kong is not a place of distinguishable establishments. There are great restaurants all over the place, but few of them have captured me with a sense of uniqueness and the feeling that I couldn't get the same stuff right across the street. Perhaps this will change as I get more familiar with all the restaurants - I still go to chain restaurants without realizing they're a chain. However, I do know that whenever ex-pats bump into each other and realize that they've both spent time in Beijing, they will inevitably start listing off bars and clubs from the city. Beijing is full of memorable bars with quirky character. Hong Kong? There's little room for character in a glossy packed night club charging $500 for cover in LKF, and the places in Wan Chai have all the ingredients of lower class seediness without any blue collar charm. The whole feel of the place is actually quite cool, and on a whole the nightlife in the city is great. Somehow though, it fails to produce any defining establishments for me.
5) Traveling
So far, all my trips since I've arrived here (which is a trip in itself) including - Kaohsiung, Singapore, Bangkok, Guiyang, Beijing, Shanghai and Osaka - have been for either ultimate tournaments or to see friends. That's a fair amount of traveling, but it's been actually surprisingly easy and affordable. Hong Kong is well situated for exploring Southeast Asia and East Asia. Lots of flights go in and out of Hong Kong, and most of them are short. The longest flight of all these trips was to Singapore, a mere four hours. There is simply so much to see in this part of the world, and I've actually only been to two new countries since I've arrived (Taiwan, Japan). Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia are all nearby and unexplored wonders for me.
1) Work
I have a job at Ove Arup here, a rather large engineering company that does so many different things we have to sort them out into groups and assign these groups letters and are close to running out of letters. My group is called Building Sustainability, formerly Building Physics, and we do a number of things but mostly modeling out designs and using fancy software to see how good those designs are. Some teammates do a lot of work with green building certifiers like LEED and China Green Building Label but my subteam mostly builds 3-d models of developments using specific software and then try to "mesh" it into a workable crystalline structure and then run some hightech computational fluid dynamics over the development. At the end, if we did everything right, we might be able to see how wind flows through the development, or how hot the place can get, or how thermal dynamics affects air flow. If it sounds very complicated it kinda is and you should be really impressed that I do this, but in reality I understand very little of what I do and have to basically follow a lot of instructions and trust that smarter people than I discovered the laws of physics, programmed them into these softwares, and then told my bosses how to use them. Though my firm is British, the staff here is 90% local and my sub-team entirely local except for me. At some point a few months ago my team decided to talk to me only in Cantonese and that has primarily stayed true. We are supposed to get in at 8:30 and work til 5:30, but most people get in around 9-9:30, and then leave anywhere from 6:30 to never. I think my average leave time is 6:45. Wrapping up past 8pm is not uncommon, although I'm lucky that my worst nights have only been around 10pm. Cultural miscommunication is often an issue, sometimes language related, sometimes not. Work culture in Hong Kong takes a long time for westerners to figure out, and as someone without much experience with work culture anywhere, it may take me a particularly long time to figure out.2) Ultimate
I play ultimate a lot here, basically whenever its available. I've touched on this in a previous post but I'll reiterate and expand here. In DC, there are so many ultimate options. There's 7-8 pickup games during the weekdays, as well as Georgetown practices and scrimmages and multiple leagues to join year-round. The summer leagues are stratified into four levels, and it's hard to count how many club teams there are in the area. Here I know everyone who plays, whenever there's a game or pickup, and probably who will show up. The players are composed of maybe 60% ex-patriates, mainly from Canada and the US but also Australia, UK and Europe. The other 40% is local with a few mainland Chinese coming in and out. A couple committed players from Shenzhen will actually cross the border and take an hour and a half plus trip to play weekday games at the higher Hong Kong level. Anyway very quickly I melded into this community and made countless friends, and even won an award for Best Newcomer of the Year.
Tournaments are big highlights of my calendar here and bear only a casual relationship to tournaments in the US. In college, just about every tournament I went to involved renting a car and driving to some remote grassy part of the east coast where we could get plenty of field space. We would stay at the most plebian of roadside motels, fitting 7 or 8 in a room back when our club was low on funds. We would play 4 games amidst one bye against mostly anonymous college competition, then head out and hang out with our team. Here in Asia, ultimate communities only exist around the major metropolises. Even a slightly smaller city like Xiamen or Chengdu don't have an ultimate scene, and the smallest place that I've heard hosting a tournament is Bali and Jeju Island in Korea. Instead, people find ways to fit tournaments in Bangkok, Beijing, Pnomh Penh and here in Hong Kong, and players fly from all over the continent to partake. For our tournament in Bangkok, I met someone who came in from Dubai, and in a hat tournament in Hong Kong, one of my teammates actually timed his vacation from Washington, DC around this tournament. Imagine players convening from Canada, Mexico, UK and France into New York and playing in a tournament within the city limits. For someone familiar with the US scene, this is unfathomable.
Anyway there are only so many tournaments and only so many players within this continent that you get to know many of regulars right away, and then see them again a month later in a different country. The community is almost exhaustingly too interesting, featuring players from too many different countries speaking too many languages with too many great stories to share that I find myself sometimes afraid to meet any more people, because I know I'll want to learn all about their fascinating selves too. On a whole, the ex-pats are a lively combination of adventurous and well-cultured, but unpretentious and unentitled for after all they all play this fringe niche sport. The locals too share these same exact features, for they've gone out of their way to discover and pursue a sport completely foreign to their country.
Through this community I now have multiple friends in places I haven't been like Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Seoul.
3) Neighborhood
I live in a pretty lively neighborhood right by the Prince Edward MTR station.
The area can be considered part of the bustling Monk Kok area where many local restaurants align the street level and a notable street market attracting many tourists. That's not a huge part of my life, but they do sell fresh fruit and random useful items which I do utilize semi regularly. I live right outside a remarkably large food stand, selling everything from pig's liver to squid to waffles. I usually order dim sum style beef balls. Next to that is a ComeBuy, a chain bubble tea stand. This is notable since bubble tea has been one of my favorite things in the world for the last three years, and in DC I had almost no opportunity to get it. I would go way out of my way to go to the one little restaurant/bakery in Chinatown that sold half decent bubble tea for $4.50. This place sells much larger and much better bubble tea for $14 HKD, less than $2 USD. Within my immediate vicinity is also a nice bakery that makes great Chinese buns and several super markets and convenience stores. I had thought that the nearest supermarket was a 5 minute walk away, a considerably closer proximity than I had in any of the 4 locations I've lived in DC. However I was wrong. There was actually a Park n Shop on the 2nd level directly across the street from my house, where I can go from checkout to my room in under 3 minutes. All other daily services like laundry, haircut, clothing stores, electronic stores, flower markets and coffeeshops are within a 5 to 10 minute walk, a result of the sheer density of the malls and stores.
There are dozens of restaurants within that same walking radius, and among them I have sampled many typical Hong Kong "tea restaurants," congee restaurants, dim sum, Thai, Shanghainese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese as well as McDonald's (which I go to here but never in the states). The average dinner at many of them will be under $40. That's the thing about prosperous cities in formerly developing countries - you have really expensive areas and really inexpensive areas. In the states, the range is much narrower and the cheapest places are often immigrant areas. There's a large recreation ground near me where we happen to play frisbee, with fields and a small playground. Lots of elderly people walk around on the fields, sometimes doing slow motion tai chi, sometimes using the strange exercise machines in the playground.
There's a strip of bars in the neighborhood, which may have influenced my decision to settle here, but they are so far removed from any bar experience I had previously had. These are true local bars frequented almost exclusively by local Kowloon dwellers, most of them are smoky rooms with multiple karaoke TVs (featuring a random smodgepodge of English songs), dart boards and dice games. Few places allow you to just sit down and order a beer - you usually get a bucket of beers and "nuts", a small plate of tasteless fries that usurps away $25. There might be some bars that will have TVs occasionally on sports, and some places qualify as lounges where you can sit and chill, but for the most part a Westerner would have no idea what to do inside one of these establishments. Western bars exist in Wan Chai, Tsim Sha Tsui and of course, Soho and Lan Kwai Fong.
4) Living
Life was super exciting for my first two months here. I was living my dream in one of my favorite cities I'd ever been to, speaking multiple languages, meeting lots of new people from many countries. The novelty has been slowly dying down since then and now I no longer see new places, eat new food or meet new people on a weekly basis. Instead I'm doing laundry, buying groceries, spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning a perpetually dirty apartment and generally being exhausted. Hong Kong is a lightning fast city with perhaps the world's most efficient transportation, and as a result it doesn't waste time. It's gotten to the point where even though my commute is 15 minutes long, I rarely go 3 minutes out of my way to the ATM.This is by far the longest I've ever lived abroad. It's the first time I've been gone so long I've needed to find a local dentist and doctor. I've needed to figure out the right way to do things instead of putting up with an imperfect solution because I'll be going home in a few months. While I speak a lot of Cantonese in my Kowloon neighborhood and use a lot of local businesses, my life is still far from local. Above is an example of a minibus route that took me a while to get over. Minibuses are buses that follow a route but stop only when you tell them to, and have routes written only in Chinese. It's hard to adjust to a busing system in any new city, but the challenge in Hong Kong is particularly intimidating. As a result I stuck a lot to the quite legible map of the MTR, which may be the best subway system in the world
I don't cook quite as much here as I would in the states. It was a large part of my life in DC, between finding Chinese groceries, experimenting with various dishes, and inviting friends over for dinner parties. Cooking was once a three or four time a week occasion - now it's a once a week occasion, not counting ramen. Though I know longer have to struggle to find my Chinese sauces and ingredients, I rarely have the time or even the kitchen space to make use of them. When you get back from work tired at 7:30, you're rarely in the mood to cook and eat at 8:30. What more, cooking is a significant cost saver in the US, but it actually costs money here! Eating out is so cheap and none of the meals I make are simple enough to be that inexpensive. The real reason to cook at home is to avoid the unhealthy oils that you'll find at just about any roadside restaurant. That said, I do eat plenty of ramen here and it is oh so good.
Finding cool places to go is often an issue. In DC, I would pass by restaurants or bars and notice they seemed interesting, or hear by word of mouth of a place, or through Yelp. I could easily sit on a bus and spot a cool restaurant, and then gather with friends later that week to try it out. There's none of that here. So many of the cool places in Hong Kong are not at the street level, because this is such a vertical city. There could be this an amazing hot pot restaurant located at the 15th floor of an abandoned-looking building in Yau Ma Dei, and you'd have no way of finding out just by walking by. It's all word of mouth or OpenRice, Hong Kong's amazing restaurant app. In addition, my feeling has been that Hong Kong is not a place of distinguishable establishments. There are great restaurants all over the place, but few of them have captured me with a sense of uniqueness and the feeling that I couldn't get the same stuff right across the street. Perhaps this will change as I get more familiar with all the restaurants - I still go to chain restaurants without realizing they're a chain. However, I do know that whenever ex-pats bump into each other and realize that they've both spent time in Beijing, they will inevitably start listing off bars and clubs from the city. Beijing is full of memorable bars with quirky character. Hong Kong? There's little room for character in a glossy packed night club charging $500 for cover in LKF, and the places in Wan Chai have all the ingredients of lower class seediness without any blue collar charm. The whole feel of the place is actually quite cool, and on a whole the nightlife in the city is great. Somehow though, it fails to produce any defining establishments for me.
5) Traveling
So far, all my trips since I've arrived here (which is a trip in itself) including - Kaohsiung, Singapore, Bangkok, Guiyang, Beijing, Shanghai and Osaka - have been for either ultimate tournaments or to see friends. That's a fair amount of traveling, but it's been actually surprisingly easy and affordable. Hong Kong is well situated for exploring Southeast Asia and East Asia. Lots of flights go in and out of Hong Kong, and most of them are short. The longest flight of all these trips was to Singapore, a mere four hours. There is simply so much to see in this part of the world, and I've actually only been to two new countries since I've arrived (Taiwan, Japan). Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia are all nearby and unexplored wonders for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment