What better place to be a refugee than Hong Kong? A delicious remnant of colonialism, the city is nestled between the hills of a few islands and the Chinese mainland. Luckily for us we had friends with places for us to stay on the beach and in a town called Stanley. Hong Kong is a very cool place and very different from other parts of SouthEast Asia. We spent several days exploring islands, beaches and the urban core.
A highlight was the bun festival, which on initial appearences consists of all 7 million of residents cramming onto an island that normally has a population of 10,000 in one of those wierd 'how many people can you fit in a phonebooth' types of stunts. What the festival is actually about is eating those chinese buns filled with red bean, or sesame, or something else you don't want to know about. The highlight of the festival is when several young men climb up a large pole covered in buns, gathering as many as they can into a bag. We came for the crowds, but didn't stick around until the middle of the night to witness the scaling of the bun phallus (see slideshow for pictures). One day we did a daytrip to Macau, a former Portuguese city that has a very funny dynamic with European influences. The food was fabulous- we had some delicious egg tarts and a great steak and seafood dinner prepared in Portuguese style. I particularly enjoyed the greyhound race track, which was a depressing collection of gambling junkies and a few tourists stuck in a several thousand person stadium. (We did not go to the Macau casinos, which are the main source of revenue for the tiny island state). Dog Racing is quite funny, and we lost a few dollars placing bets on losing contenders as we were unaware of what we should be looking for. The dogs are paraded around the track once so that everyone can get a good look at them and then place their bets (each race had tens of thousands of dollars riding on it, not bad for a group of ~100 people). What is funny to me is that all the dogs appear to be trained to relieve themselves on this display lap. I didn’t know this the first time and thus put my $0.50 bet on the first dog I saw break out of line with its handler to fertilize the track. I ran to the bookies and placed my bet. Only on the next race did I note that ALL of the dogs do this. As you can see from the pictures, this was an amusing venue and makes me question what greyhound racing elsewhere might look like (this was billed as “world class greyhound racing”).
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