These are a few of my favorite things...HK style

For winter vacation this past year, I got to spend time in Hong Kong and mainland China with my sister, brother-in-law, and our parents. It was absolutely a blast.

As I jetted around Hong Kong, I took note of the things that made the city fantastic. Though these photos are not mine, I feel they successfully help express 5 of my favorite things...HK style:


1. PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. Clean. Reliable. Easy to manage. Everything I want in a boyfriend minus the lack of conversation.


2. THE YAM LADY on Nathan Road. She stood there cooking purple and yellow yams over a large steel dome basin on the sidewalk, dishing out the real Hong Kong street food to passersby. There are some of the CUTEST old people in HK. Their faces are fixed in a permanent frown, furrow, or smirk, telling the long, hard story of their life.






3. BABY BUNDLES. Hong Kong baby-mamas and daddies take their role of parenting seriously. It drops below 80 degrees: wear a sweater. It drops below 60, and it's time for the parka. There are tons of babies rolling around HK bundled up like it's blizzarding in their stroller. These sprouts resemble the Michelin Man, which keeps their uncontrollable limbs safely immobile.































4. EGG WAFFLES: another classic street food in Hong Kong. As a quick, on-the-go snack, we got two of these treats while on our way to the Christmas Eve service. The taste and texture could be likened to a cross between a funnel cake and an ice cream cone (minus the ice cream)?? Something like that. Read more about the egg waffle.
 

5. Getting my haircut at the "THE HAIR INN." The way HK and other cities like to structure their community living arrangements is unsurprisingly efficient (HK to me seems to be the trailblazer of all efficiency, or at least in comparison to India). Below the 30+ floor apartment highrises are the shops and services residents patronize. At the bottom of my sister's apartment is a salon called "The Hair Inn." Naturally, I was charmed by the shop's hilarious name and kind of...no, really wanted to check the place out.

The salon atmosphere was taken straight from a scene in South Pacific, complete with tiki huts and hair washing. What blew its cover were the super-mod Asian hipsters slicing and dicing in the trendiest of hair-cutting form. The man who cut my hair was named Joey (a good choice for an easy-to-pronounce English name, and probably not his real one), and Joey meant business. Looking out from behind his black square thick-rimmed glasses, he was the John Wayne of the Asian West. Joey wore a legitimate holster to carry his tools and handled them like a pro. Not only that, but he wore his expertise on his head in what's called the bowl cut undercut (it's back!). What completed Joey's badass persona was the scar that started at the corner of his mouth and led up the side of his cheek, like the Joker from Batman. This place couldn't get any cooler.

After surrendering each hair on my head to the special attention of Joey's meticulous snip, I left my home-away-from-Hawaii ready to reconnect with the city on the cutting edge.

What goes around comes back around the mulberry bush

All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey thought 'twas all in fun
Pop! goes the weasel


Over the course of first semester 2011, I had about 4-5 (it's hard to know for sure) monkey breaking-and-enterings into my classroom. Each was unique in it's own special way--boys screaming, monkeys stealing and saws flying for a few anecdotes. You really cannot do much in their aftermaths except squeeze the only drops of sanity out of the experiences: their hilarity. And like much of life, the semester ended ironically by coming full-circle in monkey stories.

Once upon an early November afternoon, four boys were working on their art projects diligently after school while their teacher was out. Nothing in the day was out of the ordinary, and there was nothing foreseen to the contrary.

Until a monkey entered the room.

One of the boys saw the monkey peak its head in the room, apparently scoping out the scene. Since it left shortly upon coming, this student thought nothing of it and continued working. What he did not know was that the solo monkey was going back to get his gangbuster buddies to stage a surprise attack on the art room.

All of a sudden the four boys found themselves screaming in the corner of my classroom while monkeys went wild on my desk, the sinks, and my teacher chair.





They stomped prints on my papers. They scattered trashed all over my floor. They even had the gall to open my tuperware container and munch down the few remaining crackers.


As you can imagine, I returned to my classroom in a stew with four traumatized boys trying to mend their unraveled wits.

Perhaps the most intriguing piece of evidence denoting my students had not been hallucinating (besides the fact that we were in the Indian Himalaya) was the styrofoam pumpkin that once perched happily on my desk. As we cleaned up the mess, we found this decoration lying maimed on the floor. Not one, but two chomps had been taken out of the pumpkin: the first greedily devoured while the second was left intact for good reason. A monkey had tried to eat my styrofoam pumpkin, and I was pissed.

Days passed from the roaring upheaval like styrofoam through a monkey's innards. The only memory of the event remained as a trophy to survival in a world as intense as Indian spices. The pumpkin rested peacefully on my desk.




All seemed to fare well until a group of brutes planned and perpetrated the final ambush of Ms. E's art room.

Once again I was absent from the room while only one lonely art student quietly worked. The photo below of my whiteboard tells it all.



 

What goes around comes back around the mulberry bush.