Dragon Boat Carnival

Here are some photos of the Dragon Boat Carnival of last weekend. Hong Kong has reason to be festive this month as on July 1^st the passing of Hong Kong from the British Crown to China 15 years ago was celebrated. The Dragon Boat Carnival seemed to be a logical extension of these festivities starting on the 2^nd of July and lasting up to July 8^th in the picturesque Victoria Harbour.

Dragon Boats are important for Hong Kong. A festival of the same name (also called Tuen Ng) is celebrated each year on the fifth day of the fifth moon of the local moon calendar. This year it coincided with midsummer -St John’s eve of the Western calendar on June 23^rd. It is a huge celebration where crews of 20 peddlers race in elaborately decorated 10 meter long boats with dragon heads to the beat of the drum. All this is to commemorate the death of the statesman Qu Yuan who in the 3^rd century BC drowned himself in a river in the Hunan province in China, about 600 km north of Hong Kong, to protest against a corrupt government. The race takes place early in the morning in two locations, the Tai O traditional fishing village on Lantau island (where the big Buddha is) and in Stanley, southern side of Hong Kong island. Nowadays it is a hugely popular and colourful tourist spectacle.

Hell money

I live in a very authentic area of (otherwise so cosmopolitan) Hong Kong where no English is spoken on the streets, where signs are only in Cantonese and hardly any tourists find their way to.

It is also a neighbourhood of the funeral business. The streets around my house in this corner of Hung Hom are full of shops for funeral flowers, coffins and incense.

The flower shops business is thriving on weekends. This is the time when the streets are filled with a countless number of lavish bouquets ready to be sold or still in the making. The flowers used are mainly white (colour of mourning in Asia) and the bouquets are standing on a high platform made of bamboo stcks. I could try to take some photos of this, but I am sure that in a superstitous Hong Kong this is taboo and would bring me lots of bad luck…

Then there are the coffin and urn stores. These workshops don’t have any doors, maybe just a grid that will be pulled down for the night, so the coffins stacked one on top of the other are there for every bypasser to admire. They are actually different from what I have seen in Europe. Shiny hazelnut brown in colour, their shape is not that of a rectangular box. Rather, the coffins have the shape of a lotus flower with round petals at the top and bottom sides.

But the true cultural eye openers are the incense shops. In addition to incense, they sell everything that you would like your deceased loved ones to have and enjoy – made of paper! The local culture has it that a family gather around a grave and burn these paper products that they have bought for their ancestors. As the smoke goes up to the sky, so do the products. Or at least the thoughts that the family would like you, deceased soul, to enjoy them.

Therefore, in an incense shop you can find the most incredible full life size paper items –  i-pads, i-phones, sets of rolex wathces, toy size sports cars, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent shoes and designer bags, packs of hell money, whether it is US dollars or chinese tenders, shirts and ties – neatly packed just as you would find them in a department store, cans of beer, sets of ready-to-eat lobster meals with a shiny silver paper fork and knife included, blankets, dresses, footballs, basketballs…. The list is just endless. They have anything you could probably think of. Actually, it feels just like getting something from a  Hong Kong market. The resemblance and truthfulness of the paper products is remarkable. The souls must be pleased!

Tea Time

I was a tourist today. The Hong Kong Tourism Board offers a wide range of free courses to visitors who stay in Hong Kong for less than 3 months. The lessons range from Kung Fu to Cantonese opera to Chinese tea appreciation. And I decided to visit the latter today.

The class took place in the Lock Cha Tea Shop in Hong Kong park, just next to the Flagstaff Museum of Teaware. The host, a timidish and gentle girl who was our guide to the magnificent world of thousands of sorts of teas, made it quite simple. ‘There are 6 kinds of teas and the way to remember them is the following: there is a traffic light – red, yellow and green and by the traffic lights you see a panda (black and white) eating bamboo (greenish)’. To be more scientific, green is the fresh tea that has not been fermented and white, yellow, greenish, red and black teas are just the gradually more fermented versions of tea.

It came as a surprise to me, a devout tea drinker, that all these six different kind of teas can be made out of one plant and it is just the process of fermentation that changes their colour, acidity and taste. Therefore all teas start off as green.

This tea appreciation session was also about trying out different teas, so the group of tourists that had gathered in this tea house today could try a green, a red and a kung fu oolong (greenish) tea. My favourite was the last one. Although I am not quite familiar with the different shades of meaning that the term kung fu has, I think I understood that the tea’s name in this case does not refer to martial arts, but the skill and diligence that goes into making this tea. It is the manpower including drying the leaves, fermenting them, checking the process etc. that requires kung fu, as well as the ceremony and art of preparing it.

Green tea is a light summery drink and is prepared with colder, definitely not boiling water (70-85 C). It can even be made with room temperature water. We tried both versions and needless to say, none of the westerners had tried a room temperature version of green tea before. It was fabulous! Apparently the green tea season is in April and May when there is lots of it in the market. By the end of the summer its taste has already changed considerably.

Our host prepared the red (known in the West as black) tea with hot (95-100C) water and added that in Asia this is definitely a winter drink. Also the teapot she had was different from the tall glass cup used for preparing green tea. It was a really mini one made of brown clay. Teapots have different shapes, sizes, thicknesses and materials depending on what kind of tea is prepared. As far as the material goes, everything is fine except for metal or plastic as those would interfere with the tea’s taste. Since red tea is prepared with very hot water, the host also heated the teapot and little cups first, pouring them over with hot water and the first steep of tea. (Similarly to an Argentine mate, Asian teas can be poured over with water several times and  each time the tea will have a different taste). And to get the dried tea leaves into the pot she used a bamboo stick. Using your fingers the tea would come into contact with oils and the chemical processes would change once again.

We were also offered a transparent looking jellyish cake to finish off the tasting session. Apparently it is not a good idea to drink tea without a pastry or some food. I was also offered an explanation as to why Chinese cakes seem to have hardly no taste at all and completely fail to provide a sugary kick. Namely, it is the taste of the tea that has to prevail and the cake should not overplay it.

Our host finished the tea appreciation session by saying that tea preparation and drinking  is a very meditative process, where you take time to be ceremonial (with all the cups and different pots, temperatures, quantities and pouring techniques) as well as to be with yourself. And out of all the varieties of tea the best one is the one you just like most and that makes you happy.

To sum up about all the colours (with the help of Lock Cha Tea Shop leaflet):

Green tea – fresh leaves are picked and quickly pan-fried or steamed to prevent fermentation. The taste is delicate and full of healthy antioxidants. Green tea is best prepared with low temperature water in a glass.

White tea – minimally processed. Picked and air-dried, therefore slightly fermented.

Yellow tea – a green tea with a prolonged drying process that gives it a yellowish colour. Yellow tea is rare nowadays but used to be a popular drink in the past.

Greenish tea (or oolong) – leaves are rolled and oxidized after picking. The reaction to air makes the leaves turn to darker so that the result can range between green (green colour leaves) and red (black colour leaves) tea.

Red tea – what we call black tea in the West. Leaves have been completely oxidated.

Chinese black tea (pu-er) – aged and twice fermented, usually compressed into cakes or bricks. Its taste matures with time and bricks over 50 years can already be collection items. This tea liberates from all kinds of worries like digestion problems, high cholesterol or hangovers!

Swim across Hong Kong

A couple of weeks ago in the top floor bar of the Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong, overlooking Victoria Harbour and Hong Kong Island, I got into a conversation about how long the channel might be. Whether it would be possible to swim across it. I was pretty confident I could make it swimming. Now I know I could and there is even a race coming up for it!

The Hong Kong Amateur Swimming Association is organizing the ‘New World Harbour Race’ on October 21^st (yes, that would mean the water is still warm enough and they typhoon season is over) this year. The tradition of swimming across the harbour was started in 1906 and carried on until the seventies when water quality became too low to continue. The contest was revived last year with great cheer, when about 1000 swimmers decided to compete and swim across the 1,8 km stretch of water. The winner in the women’s category, bless her, was able to do it in 22 minutes!

This year the distance has been cut down from 1,8 km to 1,5 and participants are expected to swim it in 1,5 hours.  In order to be allowed to jump in, all candidates need to do a speed test in a local swimming pool in early September and be able to swim 1,5 km in 45 minutes.

I don’t have the facts, but I am pretty sure that back in the early 20^th century this cross harbor race was started by the Brits, who are very passionate about swimming across their English channel, too. (The first recorded attempt dates back to 1875). Only that there the temperatures can be as low as 15C, mixed with currents and jellyfish that sting you. Compared to the 35km distance of the English Channel, that many people cross every year (according to the Channel Swimming Association this year’s record holder in the ladies section has crossed the channel 39 times in 2011!), crossing the Victoria harbor seems like a nice little pastime.

Typhoon!

On Friday evening everybody in Hong Kong was rushing to their homes to find shelter from the approaching tropical storm Doksuri.  In Hong Kong the typhoon season runs from May to September and there are four signals that are hoisted for windy storms arriving from the Pacific Ocen, bringing a lot of rain with them. They are classified as Grade 1, 3, 8 and 10. There other numbers are omitted.

T1. In the morning T1 or the so-called standby signals were hoisted in office buildings and tube stations.  A T1 signal simply means that a typhoon has been spotted somewhere and might or might not hit Hong Kong.

T3. By the late afternoon the signal had developed into a strong wind signal no. 3. This means that there is a probability of winds reaching a speed of up to 110km in Victoria Harbor. Being outside or on the beaches is not very safe anymore. A T3 can quickly develop into a T8 when the whole city practically shuts down.

T8. At around 11 pm the Hong Kong observatory hoisted a T8 signal.  In order not to create a logistic chaos in a city big as Hong Kong, there is also a warning signal two hours before the actual T8 status, so that people could get home.  This is because most of public transport is cancelled once the T8 signal is on and the city closes down. Winds in Victoria Harbor may reach over 180km, rain showers fall horizontically and the winds howl. Flights are cancelled or diverted. The home is considered the safest place to be. Since it was my first tropical storm/typhoon experience, (in a country as tranquil as Estonia, it never gets so serious), I even learnt the concept of a “to go” bag. My flat mate who has lots of experience with New York hurricanes advised me to prepare a bag with some food, water, documents and a map to be ready to run out of the house, if anything should happen to the building.

T10. Fortunately, it never got so bad. The Doksuri did not reach the “direct hit” status of signal T10, when the eye of the storm is directly over Hong Kong. There has not been a direct hit for a number of years, however when this happens, the damage is usually devastating, and a number of people are killed.

Hong Kong has a history of mighty T10 typhoons that have swept over the city in their gracious female names, leaving a lot of damage behind. The most famous one of the last decades in Hong Kong have been:

(Bloody) Mary in 1960, causing 1600 fatalities.

Wanda in 1962, killing 130 people and leaving thousands homeless.

Ellen in 1983

Ruby in early September of 1964 delayed the transport of the Olympic flame from Hong Kong to China by one day, for the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Doksuri caused huge traffic jams and chaos in transport on Friday, howling winds and rainfalls on Friday and Saturday, but other than that, Hong Kong is still standing strong.

Typhoon signal No. 1

Signal No. 3

The approaching Doksuri

Doksuri from above

What typhoons usually look like

Venus Transit

June 6th was the day of the Venus transit. A very special astronomic event that can be observed again only in the year 2125. What made it amazing for me was the fact that I was actually able to see it and not only read about it. Usually eclipses, transits and special flickering stars are seen best in some exotic places, islands or the desert. Hong Kong certainly is exotic and yes, the transit could be seen. In Estonia, even if the time would be appropriate (this year it happened during the night, so difficult to observe), there would always be clouds. And the need to go to some special observatory to have the equipment to see the heavenly events.

In Hong Kong I stumbled over information that a “temporary observing station” was opened to the public on Avenue of the Stars. This is a chic promenade on the southern tip of Kowloon (mainland Hong Kong) overlooking the skyscrapers on the Hong Kong island on the other side of Victoria Bay. Local film industry stars like Jackie Chan have left their “mark” (handprints) there just like in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

My eagerness to see Venus pass in front of the sun as a black little dot was so great that I forgot to bring my camera. So I have found some pictures from the internet to illustrate the event. What I did get, however, as a proof of having been there, were two stamps about the transit of Venus as well as two about past solar eclipses in Hong Kong.

The observation center had been open and running since 6 am with information booths, video cameras and an array of telescopes in different sizes to follow the event. Special solar viewers were handed to people to be able to look directly into the sun in a safe way. The history of the Venus transit was explained as well as how to measure the sun’s distance from earth by photographing the transit in different locations of the earth, for example. There were models showing the planets in the solar system and once again, many many telescopes to see Venus moving from around 11 o’ clock to 2 pm on the solar blade.

June 4th in Hong Kong

June 4^th marks the day of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 when pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by Chinese government forces in Beijing.

Nowadays Hong Kong is the only city in China where this day can be commemorated and wanting to experience it, I headed to the central Victoria Park on Monday evening, too.

My Hong-Kong-native colleague from work Winnie, who kindly asked me to join her in this adventure and led me the way on my second day in this immense city said, that the celebration is not what it used to be. It is quietly fading, as is the memory of the people. This year it is the 23^rd anniversary of the massacre, therefore not a round one, she said. It also falls on a Monday and not the weekend, which might make it less popular. But to our surprise the streets leading to the Park were so packed that it took us about an hour in a slow and cramped procession to get there. Because of the heat and the crowd there was hardly any air to breathe. Winnie’s suggestion to turn my face towards the sky to get some air from higher up proved very necessary and helpful.

The streets leading to Victoria Park were also stages for political activity and advertisement. Posters of several candidates, people shouting slogans into microphones (photo below) as well as donation boxes embellished this pilgrimage road to the park. As I do not understand Cantonese I cannot judge what the shouted promises were. The donation boxes, however, were to support the political endeavours of these candidates, the newly opened  Hong Kong 4^th of June museum and the soon to come July 1^st protest. (Both the June 4^th commemoration and July 1^st protests are annual pro-democracy events. The latter has been a channel for fighting against the Basic Law Article 23, which threatened Hong Kong’s independent legal system, different from that of mainland China).

The commemoration service was to last from 8 -10 pm. As we got there by 8.20, the huge baseball court where the event took place was already packed with people and there was no possibility to enter. We could find a place to sit down in the adjacent field, where a screen was set up and which was also practically full by then.

Everybody was given a white candle. I noticed some amazingly creative ways of preventing the candle wax to drop on people’ s hands during the two hour ceremony. There were candles melted to stick on top of turned-around plastic soda bottles. Many people had folded paper around the candle in a conic shape.  I was a able to catch a photo of  a candle stuck through a little McDonalds French fries box (below). Very imaginative!

The commemoration itself included ceremonial drumming, many speeches, songs, stories by victims and survivors. And a minute of silence that was penetrated by the powerful chirring of the cicadas in the trees surrounding the park. There was a speech by a woman from the association of Tiananmen Mothers who had lost her son in the massacre. Tiananmen Mothers echoes the Abuelas and Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers and Mothers of May Square) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who have equally joined to share and express their pain for their disappeared children and grandchildren during the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-83.

There was also a teleconference greeting by Wang Dan, a Chinese democracy activist and one of the main student leaders of the Tiananmen protest in 1989. Now he lives in exile in the US and his greeting came from Harvard.

The event finished with a speech by the organizer of the ceremony who stated that the number of people present in the park this night had been 180 000. Also the donation boxes had been filled, helping to make the newly opened 4^th July museum a permanent one. Finally, lists filled with people’s names, who had signed them while visiting the museum and showing solidarity for the 4^th July commemoration, were burnt in a ceremonial way. (Apparently in Hong Kong there are shops full of beautiful paper items to burn in memory of the dead, so doing some nice burning in the end of an event like this makes very much sense).

Hong Kong parks have free wi-fy and. Half way through the ceremony, however, with photos of the event going all around the world through people posting them on Facebook, internet was disabled…

For some professional photos of the spell-bounding sea of candles in the Hong Kong night have a look at the photo gallery from the Spanish newspaper El Pais. What my loyal telephone is capable of can be seen below.

Food – beware!

Now this is interesting! I came home with a beautiful yellow dessert (Pudding with Nata de Coco) from my first trip to a Hong Kong supermarket. To my surprise I discovered the following text on the label (it cannot be discerned from the photo so I will write it out):

“Caution: Little children and elderly should not be left alone when eating the product. The product should be cut into small pieces before eating.”

Can it really be that dangerous? Does eating it make one feel lonely? Can children and elderly eat only a little bit of it (since it tasted pretty artificial)? At leats that´s how I understood it.

Maybe something just got lost in translation.

Hong Kong apartments

TheTravellingMe was on holiday for three weeks that turned out the be such a busy time that I had no time to write. But tonight I would like to share something as for the first time I have landed in Asia,  in a place called Fragrant Harbour (translation for Hong Kong).

I had read in books on cultural differences that houses are very small in most Asian countries. Therefore hosting guests in one´s home is not so popular for example as in the big-house-countries like the US or Australia. But I had never imagined that Asian homes could be SO small. Even a one-room (not one bedroom!) flat in a Soviet tower block in Tallinn or St Petersburg is a giant compared to this one where I am staying now. My room in the central Hong Kong district of Kowloon (overlooking the Hong Kong island) is about 4 square meters big, making it the smallest room where I have ever stayed. And even this comes with a price. A two-bedroom apartment like that costs 2000 euros per month which makes me think that Lonely Planet is right once again. Accommodation is the most expensive and problematic topic in this city as room is very scarce. And sizes differ. Beds are also tiny as are the rooms, due to the physical differences of people on this part of the planet.

What I also find interesting in this new home of mine is the fact that almost all spaces (walls, cupboards, the fridge, the air conditioner and even the ceiling) are covered with stickers ranging from Hello Kitty to Disney  and local cartoon heroes. Lots of pink and kitch to ponder upon. Maybe by the end of my two month stay I will understand what makes them so attractive to Asian girls. I also found my favourite which is Hello Kitty (or rabbit) flying around on a spoon as seen below: