a welcome break

after spending almost four consecutive weeks without having a real conversation in english with another person or being able to successfully order and consume food, the expiration of my chinese visa was the most welcome pain in the neck i could have come up with. this meant that i had to leave the country for a period of time to have the visa renewed and now here i sit in a swanky hotel in hong kong enjoying my break from the monotony of shunde. monotony is an understatement of the highest degree.

hong kong is what you would get if you put new york and london in a blender and then poured out the mix onto a series of islands in asia. it is a truly wonderful city, architecturally reminiscent of vancouver. i guess i should now reword that thought and say that vancouver is architecturally reminiscent of hong kong. the throngs of people are everywhere, in crosswalks, on the mtr, in restaurants, and for the first time in my experiences in big cities, i truly enjoyed it. there is something very different about this city that is quite difficult to verbalize. whatever that x-factor is, it certainly is a great one.

i made my way around the city today to the best of my abilities. traveling via mtr to all of the must see markets and massive edifices, photographic opportunities were ample and duly observed. regretfully my lack of unadulterated internet access prevents me from putting them online at present. the street in which nothing is sold except live fish is quite the treat, especially when the people kill, scale and clean the fish on the spot before they are wrapped and dispensed to the patrons. the first few instances of this aren't exactly pleasant, but once the initial issues with fish that are still moving while they are being cleaned are overcome, the workmanship with which the fish peddlers operate is quite impressive. omnipresent on this street were the feral cats for obvious reasons.

also made it through a massive outdoor market of any sort of "engrish" t-shirt you could find. things with slogans such as "death is egzalent" abound and it seems that those who purchase the shirts either don't know what they say or are trying to make some attempt at irony, as almost everyone in hong kong speaks english fairly well. it was quite interesting for me to observe all of these traditional markets stuck in between the alleys of one of the major financial centers in the world. in the shadow of the aig, bank of america and hsbc buildings, you can get a fish scaled and gutted for 35 hong kong dollars.

i think i could live here for some time.

shunde, not shenzhen

whoops! when the man who i am working for told me over the phone that i would be going to shenzhen, i was very excited, especially after doing a little research online about the city. suspicions were raised when i stepped off of a plane in guangzhou, but i figured i was just going to be driven to shenzhen and that they had gotten a deal on a flight from bangkok or something of that nature. when the driver stopped in shunde, i was a little frightened but have learned to go with the flow while in asia. shunde is a relatively small and very quiet city where i have yet to find a bar and all the restaurants shut around eight in the evening - not really my scene, but it will be good for me.

i arrived at the office where i am working, a very nice construction company here in shunde and waited for a couple of hours to be taken to a restaurant by the brother of my boss who owns "the clubhouse." he was extremely proud of himself for having produced a bottle of budweiser for me. he went on to order some food and i knew getting into the adventure that is china that this would probably be the worst part, but the apartment they put me in made the food look like prime rib. the first plate of food that arrive was full of really nice stir fried vegetables and squid. ok, i can handle that - except the squid was still moving. the next plate that came was a small bird that i would have pegged as some kind of pheasant and i am still hoping that it was because the head on the plate looked remarkably like that of a pigeon. next came a really nice stew with what looked like beef and some water chestnuts. it was very good until halfway through eating the entire plate, my boss, who speaks english, sat down at the table and said, you like cow stomach lining? he then ordered some really nice friend noodles and dumplings and spring rolls. i was conveniently too full of cow stomach to enjoy the nice stuff.

after the food adventure came the apartment adventure. up four flights of stairs and into what looked like an average american apartment. i met my chinese housemate, a man in his fifties who works for the company where i work. spoke no english but seemed nice enough. i then saw my "room," literally six feet square, which means i am unable to lay down. the bed had a "mattress" that might as well have been a sheet of plywood. i can deal with all of this, but when i saw the "bathroom," i almost came unglued. i had to restrain myself from screaming as to avoid insulting my hosts. the toilet is a hole in the ground, which is fine, but the hole leads to nowhere - what a convenience - an inhouse outhouse! upon further inspection i realized that this hole also doubles as the shower drain, which means that yes, when you take a shower you are standing in, well, you get the picture.

i went to see a new apartment today which i will be moving into tomorrow.