Hong Kong Day 2 Pt. 2 – Night Tour

It’s the Chinese New Year. Subang Jaya is blanketed with a silence I never imagined I’d revisit again during the two major festive seasons in Malaysia, namely Hari Raya and Chinese New Year – it was when I took out the trash earlier that I noticed how strangely quiet my neighbourhood was, there were these sounds that I couldn’t quite place what they are that didn’t come around for their daily attendance today. They must be somewhat important I’d imagine – the chatters of the kids from the nearby school, the splashes of water from someone’s garden hose – but for some reason I didn’t notice these daily soundtrack at all until their absence. Plus any sound that was made today seems oddly amplified.

It’s strange how we’ve taken for granted things that exist around us until their abrupt leave.

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Day 2 – Saturday, 17th January 2009, approximately after 4pm

We quickly left the restaurant in a huff after our late lunch, even more less in the mood to bid our tour guides goodbye as the few of us who were going for the night tour were shuffled off to another bus with a female tour guide. In fact, most of us couldn’t really concentrate on what our tour guide had to say about a certain place as we were too pre-occupied with the recent con job that transpired, and I was dreadfully tired as well by then.

I fervently prayed that this lady wouldn’t sell us useless things/services that we absolutely do not need at all. It turned out that she was from China as she asked us if she could use 普通话 (standard Chinese) to talk to us instead of Cantonese, and we told her 不行 (no) hahahaha. I actually wouldn’t have minded since my Mandarin is far stronger than my Canto any day, but my parents’ and the rest of our tour-mates’ understanding of 普通话 probably wasn’t that strong – so our tour guide spoke to us in an awful-sounding Cantonese, occasionally interspersed with Mandarin when she couldn’t find the right words to use haha.

After picking up a Malaysian couple prolly in their 40s from a hotel, we were sent to 女人街 (Canto: lui yan kai, aka Women’s Street), where we were given about an hour or so to walk around and shop..

..until we saw the crowd of people that thronged the streets that would bring the Chinese phrase 人山人海 (literal: people mountain people sea) literally to life.

I wasn’t very suitably impressed with the amount of people that would put Petaling Street’s crowd to shame – in fact, what was on sale seemed similar to our very own Petaling Street with the few additional odds and ends. And if you ever caught The Amazing Race Asia Season 3 last year, this was where the Roadblock was held whereby the contestant had to hunt for a lady holding on to a matching handbag amidst the sea of people – Bernie was lucky that she arrived probably before the peak hour. I spotted the exact same spot of the clue box where the other partners had to wait. (No didn’t snap a photo of said spot ‘cause there were just too many people and vehicles moving around that it wouldn’t be a very interesting photo.)

Just to show how really crowded it was.

We walked around a little more outside the Women’s Street, and peeped into a few stores only to notice that the prices didn’t differ much from Malaysia’s. I didn’t bother to ask for discounts or best offers when I went into the camera store as I wasn’t going to buy ‘em anyway.

In the end we just went back to the park where we were supposed to wait, and I was in need of a place to sit down and rest – lugging around a 6kg camera bag isn’t exactly fun. -___-

As I was snapping photos of my youngest brother and checking the picture from the LCD screen, I noticed the young Chinese man sitting on my left was peeping to see it, and then he started asking me in Mandarin about my camera, such as whether “this part” (pointing to my lens) was the most important part of the camera, etc.

Me deep in conversation with the Chinese dude.

It was definitely exceedingly satisfying to be able to hold a conversation very well with a Chinese person – all those night classes of about 2 years paid off very well, even those boring ones with topics that I thought were incredibly dull and wouldn’t come up in a normal conversation. But hey, looks like those particular vocabulary did: 污染 (pollute/pollution)， 发展 (develop/development)， 收入 (income), etc. But it wasn’t all smooth-sailing as I couldn’t understand some of his questions – he asked a lot about Malaysia and our lives here – and I couldn’t translate certain things (such as the word ‘finance’ or ‘engineering’). He had to simplify a lot of things for my understanding as I couldn’t get what his job really was (he has just graduated), until he just mentioned something about “repairing things”. It proved to be a real challenge to talk to him as I couldn’t use any English words at all (he doesn’t know what AirAsia is), so I had to rely on whatever Chinese vocab I had to to talk to him – there was once I just nodded and grunted in affirmation to whatever he said until I realised that he was actually asking me a question wtf.

I have an affinity to listening to Chinese accents – there is something with the specifics and the semantics of the original 普通话 (standard Chinese) from which our Malaysian Chinese is derived from that attracts me, even though I know a fair number of people who are irritated by it. And one of the startlingly different things about him, which I don’t know was only specific to him or to the majority of the Chinese people, was his usage of 您 (the polite form of “you”) with me – I barely hear any Malaysians use it, even with strangers – even after knowing my age as he was older than me (he’s 25).

He was alone there in Hong Kong as his girlfriend was supposed to come with him but couldn’t in the end (which explained the ring on his finger), and he was following a tour group as well.

So in the end we had our photos snapped together, and I promised to e-mail him said photos (after he wrote it down for me), and he even asked me for my phone number.. which I doubt we’d do anything after I got his number ‘cause international SMSes or calls would be ridiculously expensive. He also mentioned that in China, what’s more popular is QQ, the equivalent IM program of our MSN.

(If you have to know, I did e-mail him those pics and compose what I thought would be a good polite e-mail in Chinese with Kai Tzin’s help, but nearly a week later there wasn’t any reply. <_< I’m just a little disheartened by the fact that I couldn’t keep in touch with people I met from my travels – Ting is the notable, and only, exception :D – simply because they don’t bother to reply despite all the empty promises they make.)

Me and Mao Xiong YUE, who told me he lived somewhere near Shanghai and Hangzhou after I couldn’t recognise the name of the place that he told me.

My family and I had to leave at 5.45pm (my new friend was supposed to leave at 6pm with his tour group), the appointed time, so both Mao Xiong and I had to bid goodbye, the only time where he uttered an English word – “bye”.

Our female tour guide explaining to us in the bus. After realising that I can actually speak 普通话 (after learning about me making a new Chinese friend randomly in a park wtf), she started talking to us in Mandarin all the way.

We were ushered to Madame Tussauds, the famous wax museum at several countries worldwide, located at The Peak. Sadly, she was rushing us through the museum as she didn’t want us to miss some spectacular show of light display or something, so we couldn’t really stop to enjoy but merely take about 1 minute for each possible figure that wasn’t too crowded with people (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the first few wax figures, had way too many people waiting to take pics for it that we had to skip them sigh).

So the bulk of pics from this entry will come from this museum (especially that of my brother’s):

Brandon and dad with our very own Datuk Michelle Yeoh.

Me with German supermodel Claudia Schiffer *excited, too bad it wasn’t particularly sharp. =(

Me and Brandon with the ugliest Jay Chou I’ve ever seen. Seriously, the hair kinda sucked.

With Meryl Streep!

Brandon with Kelly Chen. If I’m not mistaken, you can actually rotate her like a musical box – or was it another wax figure.

Parents with some Korean actor whose name escapes me.

Mum with the late Princess Diana. =/

Dad the US President, with aides George W. Bush and Bill Clinton wtf.

Mum with.. someone. Shit forgot his name already, can it be Nelson Mendela?

Me with China’s taikonaut.

Eugene and Hitler.

Dad and bro with god-knows-who, China president kah? (Tell me if anyone knows.)

Bro with Albert Einstein.

Brandon with Andy Lau, where you can actually feel his beating “heart”, hence my bro’s hand on his chest.

Dad with Marilyn Monroe, where there was supposed to be a fan below her that would blow her skirt upwards wtf (at that time the fan wasn’t working).

Brandon with someone I don’t recognise.

Me with Johnny Depp.

Brandon emulating someone I don’t know (again).

Brandon looking tremendously excited to ride a bicycle with Lai Meng.

With Ronaldinho.

Me with Beckham wtf.

Golfing with Tiger Woods.

With some sumo wrestler.

Me with The Beatles!

Singing with Michael Jackson.

Brandon with the now-defunct Twins.

With Sammi Cheng Miriam Yeung.

We could’ve easily spent at least two hours there going through every single wax figure slowly, but nooo we were rushed and hurried that we spent only about 40 minutes there. =( What a waste – considering that the tickets cost HKD$120 per person (~RM60), but we didn’t have to pay for it since it was already included in the tour, probably at a discount. Bah, the caveats of a tour.

We were then shown to the lookout point or something where we could see the view of the city of Hong Kong from above.

We were then quickly ushered to our usual tour van and made it just in time before 8pm strikes – where the Symphony of Lights was to begin – to the Avenue of Stars (located at Tsim Sha Tsui), similar to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, except there in HK you have Hong Kong’s celebrities’ stars instead. The Symphony of Lights is this play of dancing lights across the channel where buildings will light up accordingly as music and commentary accompany it.

Tried to snap pics in the dark but there wasn’t a place for me to attach my Gorillapod on as there were quite a lot of people there by then when we arrived – thought this pic gives a good idea of how it was.

After I got the idea to carry my heavy camera bag in front of me and place my camera on top of it to snap a picture that resulted in a fairly okay-quality photo – you can see the aforementioned dancing lights of the building at the horizon.

Lighted up buildings across the channel at Hong Kong island.

Brandon with someone’s handprint and star.

Brandon with our tour guide.

The entire Symphony of Lights lasted for only about 15 minutes, and so we began our leisurely stroll around the Avenue of Stars before walking back towards our van – it was quite an interesting place if we had more time with us and not rush haphazardly from one place to another without truly exploring it. There at the Avenue of Stars, there were interesting figurines of various film-making activities (such as that.. box thingy that people use when using it for Acts or screaming “Cut!” wtf), people singing by the sidelines, and there was one where Down Syndrome kids were dancing together to the live music being played.

At nearly 9pm we were then brought to our final restaurant for the night, another fairly expensive-looking place with the usual great assortment of food – too great, in fact, I can’t be bothered to elaborate on the dishes ‘cause we’ve been eating that kind of food that whole day already wtf.

By the time we reached our hotel, where our tour guide was dropped off too as well as she wanted to take the MTR to go back home (reportedly would take her an hour), I was so exhausted from the entire day’s non-stop proceedings that all I wanted to do was to soak up in the bathtub with the warm water that gradually relaxed me. Which was what I did.

So we indeed managed to get to a variety of places within a single day as opposed to doing them ourselves (transportation for the entire family would’ve been tremendously expensive), but it was highly superficial as we merely glazed through the places without truly exploring them at our own pace and liking (Madame Toussads comes to mind). That is city tour for you I suppose, and something that I’d urge my parents strongly to never go for one ever again.

Slept at probably around 12 or 1am.