Kickin’ Around Kowloon.

After Mark and I finished our test, we decided to head to Kowloon to celebrate our success and Allison’s birthday. Hong Kong island, to me at least, is very much like New York. It’s modern, tall, and Western-feeling.

Kowloon on the other hand is everything I had hoped Hong Kong would be. As glib as it sounds, it’s like Chinatown on a much larger scale. Kowloon felt more like Asia to me.

Welcome to Kowloon:

After some wandering around the area around the Jordan Street subway station, and much debate, we settled on a second-story restaurant that looked relatively posh from the ground. Turns out that it was a hot pot restaurant.

I’d never heard of/had hot pot before, but it was great. From Wikipedia:

Hot pot refers to several Chinese varieties of steamboat stew. It consists of a simmering metal pot of stock at the center of the dining table. While the hot pot is kept simmering, ingredients are placed into the pot and are cooked at the table. Typical hot pot dishes include thinly sliced meat, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, wontons, egg dumplings, and seafood. The cooked food is usually eaten with a dipping sauce.

Yep, we ordered beef, crab, “assorted balls-of-meat”, and a few other things, and cooked them in a huge pot of simmering coconut seafood soup in the middle of the table – delicious!

The feast:

The birthday girl after dinner:

We wandered around for awhile after dinner, working off some of the many mysterious meats we had eaten. There were neon signs everywhere. In Indonesia, the writing uses the same alphabet as English, so I can still read (if not understand) the signs. There’s something about being in a place where I can’t understand the language at all that feels exciting and adventurous.

Kowloon at night:

Mark’s friend Betina:

Eventually, we made our way to the Temple Street Night Market. I’ve been to Patpong in Bangkok and to Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur, so my expectations were pretty high for this one (I do know that I’ve only been to the “touristy” markets, so I was ready for more of that).

Temple Street Night Market:

There was a lot of stuff for sale, but strangely, most of it was more along the lines of “mitations rather than real fakes. In Patpong and Petaling, there were “Coach” purses, “Rolex” watches, and “Samsonite” luggage. At Temple Street, I saw “Swiss Navy” watches, “ProSport” bags (LeSportsac copies), and other renamed goods. To be fair, there were guys sitting near the stalls with catalogs that had pages and pages of brandname luxury goods, and I’m sure I could have bought some real fakes if I had really wanted to.

For sale by owner:

On my first visit to the market, I didn’t buy anything. The stuff was generally overpriced and poorly made (what you get for going to a “tourist” market). I did see some paintings I liked, and ended up going back for one the next day. Allison, Mark, and Betina spent a lot of time trying on sunglasses, but I don’t remember anyone actually buying any:

One last thing I’ll say from the Temple Street market was that the prices were not (for me at least) as flexible as those in Thailand and Malaysia. In Malaysia, if the first asking price for a watch was around 1200 ringgit ($400+), the final price was around 120 ringgit or under (~$40). For the painting I got, the opening price was HKD 120 (~$20). I tried the normal trick of asking for a discount, and the price dropped to HKD 100 (~$16). This was as low as I could get the guy to go, even after I teamed up with an Australian tourist who was after a painting in the same stall: we offered HKD 180 for both paintings, but the guy didn’t budge. Its strange that after living in Southeast Asia for awhile, paying $16 for a painting can feel expensive if you think you can get it for less, even if it would be far more expensive at home.

That’s all for today, more to come soon on Macau and bungy!

-Ryan

More photos on Flickr.

Into Hong Kong.

When my work decided to send me to Hong Kong to write a test, and offered to pay my flights and two nights in hotel, I jumped at the chance to extend my trip and see some of what Hong Kong and Macau had to offer. Luckily for me, I have a friend who works at the Consulate there: she let me crash at her place, saving me the biggest cost of my trip (hotels on Hong Kong island are insanely expensive).

My flight from Jakarta to Hong Kong was my first with Cathay Pacific. I think I can safely say that it won’t be my last. The service, food, and entertainment were all great, and I really felt safe on the plane, which is saying something.

I took the Airport Express train from the airport to Hong Kong island – it was a fast, easy way to get downtown. Once I got checked in to my hotel, I headed down to the harbor to take a look around. Hong Kong was a lot cleaner and more orderly than Jakarta – it was a nice break to be in a place where everything works, but I still enjoy the chaos of Indonesia.

The tallest building in Hong Kong, the IFC 2 (featured in the Dark Knight):

The one thing that defined my visit to Hong Kong was the hilly landscape. When I visit a city, my favorite thing to do is walk around and sightsee that way. I’m not one to take a lot of cabs. So while I enjoyed seeing the city, the hills were pretty killer. There isn’t a lot of walking to be done in Jakarta, so suffice to say that my legs and feet were not happy with me by the end of my visit.

Hilly Hong Kong:

After I was done wandering the city, I met up with a friend from the Canadian embassy in Manila who was also in town for the test. We caught up in Lan Kwai Fong, a bar area on Hong Kong Island popular with expats.

Mark, Allison, and Betina at La Bodega:

Out for ice cream:

It was an early night, as Mark and I had to write the test the next day. Not bad for a first day, but there was a lot more to do in Kowloon and Macau before flying home. More to come in the next few days…including jumping off the Macau Tower!

-Ryan

More photos on the Flickr stream.

Pramuka Island.

As I am waiting until I get back from Sarah’s wedding in Vegas to look for a job, I decided to volunteer with the Jakarta Animal Aid Network (JAAN).  JAAN is a non-governmental, non-profit organization that helps protect Indonesian wildlife and improve the welfare of Jakarta’s stray dogs and cats. JAAN organized a sterilization project on Pramuka Island, to help keep the cat population under control. Pramuka Island is located in the Bay of Jakarta, and is part of the “Thousand Islands” (Pulau Seribu in Indonesian). Pramuka is not really a resort island, unlike many of the other islands in the chain. Its actually a village island and is home to approximately 400 families and lots of furry felines.

On Oct 19th, I met up with two Dutch vets and four other people from the group, and we took the 3 hour trip to the island in a public boat.  Femke, our team leader and co-founder of JAAN, told us that it costs 3000 rupiah to take the public boat (about 50 cents). The public boats have a storage level, mostly for food supplies being transported to the island, and every other available surface was crammed full of locals heading to the islands. I made the mistake of using the washroom onboard – it was a squat toilet open to the sea water below. For the trip home, I took the more expat-friendly speedboat (200,000 rupiah!) and was back in Jakarta in an hour.

When we reached the island, we were escorted to our guesthouse, courtesy of the JAAN. The guesthouses are used for students who visit the island to learn about conservation. The guesthouse was a large room, with small dingy mattresses on the floor. The bathroom had typical Indonesian amenities – a squat toilet and a mandi. A mandi is a large rectangular tile-lined bath, filled with cold clean water, with a plastic scoop floating in it. The Indonesian way of bathing is to stand in the middle of the bathroom, and pour water from the mandi over yourself using the scoop. I was really hoping to make a mini-vacation out of this trip, despite the work we had planned, and quickly opted to stay at the hotel nearby, (soon to be followed by all of the Dutch volunteers!).

There were 7 people on our team: two retired Dutch veternarians (husband and wife), two Dutch veterinary nurses who are graduating this year, Femke and Gabrielle (volunteers for JAAN), and me. We set up our “clinic” in a building by the beach with our donated supplies.

Femke, her husband, and Gabrielle spent their days playing “kitty rancher”, rounding up unsuspecting cats for us to sterilize. The veterinary team and I got to deal with the business end of the deal, spaying and castrating a never-ending supply of cats. After 6 years working in clean, orderly Western clinics, I found the working conditions pretty basic. We didn’t have gas anesthetic, oxygen, or an autoclave to sterilize our instruments.  Our surgery drapes were black garbage bags soaked in alcohol. The building we worked in didn’t have air-conditioning, and it was +30 outside most days.  The one tiny fan we had made a valiant effort, but didn’t help very much in cooling us off.

Once the people in the village found out about us being on their island, we suddenly became local celebrities, with our new fans peeking in the doorway, hanging in the window, and generally watching our every move. As I mentioned before, this isn’t a resort island, so they don’t see too many white people (bules in Indonesian). The kids on the island were so cute and helpful. The funniest part were the little parades we would see coming towards the clinic, the first kid triumphantly carrying a sack with a terrified cat inside.

After one week on the island, we had sterilized 180 cats. After each surgery, we marked the cat with green food colouring inside their ear, and on a spot on their backs. This helped us identify them if they were caught again.  During our evenings on the island, I took walks through the village. Everywhere I walked, people would point to me and say “kucing”, which means cat in Indonesian.  It was great to see green dotted cats all over the place.  It made me feel that we were actually making a difference.

We did take an afternoon to go snorkeling and relax.  Femke took us out to sea on a rickety catamaran, along with an Indonesian guide who knew the reef really well.  We spent about 1hour lazily swimming over the reef, checking out the coral and fish. The guide pointed out a sting ray that was hiding under some coral – first time I’ve seen one of those. On our swim back to the boat, I noticed that my legs and arms felt prickly and were starting to itch. I shrugged it off and swam as fast as I could to get out of the water.  Back on the catamaran, Femke told me that it was stings from tiny jellyfish. Yikes!

We ate our meals at the hotel.  After a long day working in the heat, it was great to have food ready and waiting for us.  We were served typical Indonesian cuisine – nasi goreng (fried spicy rice), tempe (fermented soybean cakes), and tofu.  Indonesians eat this for breakfast, and sometimes for lunch and dinner.  I wasn’t surprised when we sat down to rice and tofu for breakfast, complete with sambal (spicy pepper) sauce.  Indonesians eat sambal with everything.  The Dutch team members weren’t really comfortable with the food, and found everything too spicy (I on the other hand happily ate my tofu).  Each Dutch volunteer enjoyed a bout of gastrointestinal “issues” during our stay on the island.  Each morning, they would ask me “Jen, are you still ok?”.  Of course!  I live in Jakarta now!

Pramuka Island was a great experiance, and I hope to help out with JAAN in the future.

-Jen

As always, more photos on the Flickr stream.