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Life Arts    H3'ed 7/15/09

An American Griswold In China, Days 1-3: The Gateway to the Mainland

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There is every designer shop imagineable here as well as a "City Super," which is a Hong Kong version of a Whole Foods. We stuffed our faces in the AC, and it was good.

Desperately tired from walking/hiking for two and a half days straight, we called an audible, and decided not to hit museums and instead take the orange line out to its last stop, Tung Chung.

Tung Chung is on another "outer island" called Lantau - the island that is also the home of the airport. It features a huge outlet mall, and more importantly, a 25-minute cable car over to a small village called Ngong Ping. The town is Epcot-ish, in that it is new and designed for tourists who are visiting the Po Lin Monastery, and more specifically, the monastery's Giant Buddah - an at least 100-foot tall buddah that you can see far in the distance.

We went there, though, not for the buddah, but for the Oriental Massage Center, which was recommended by our guidebook. There we paid about $35 american each for a full reflexology treatment of our feet and an accu-pressure back massage.

During my reflexology treatment, the masseuse hit a very painful spot on my inner arch, which I was told corresponds to weakness in the stomach. And as people who know me know, I really do have a pretty weak stomach.

After the massage, we felt much better. We walked to the foot of the Buddah, then to the Po Lin Monastery itself, then got back on the cable car, then hit the outlet mall's grocery store (and ate three gross pastries, including a really wretch-inducing "sweet potato roll"), then took the subway back and found a chinese noodle shop in the IFC mall where we ate two mountains of fried noodles, then cabbed back to our hotel and passed out at 8:30pm.

Now it is Monday, our fourth day here, and we spent the morning walking in the pouring rain through Hong Kong's "Western district," which is known for its antiques and medicinal shops. We are back at the hotel, packing up and getting ready to head for the airport and for our 4:45pm flight from Hong Kong to meet Mike in Guiyang, - the capital of Guizhou - mainland China's poorest province.

So far, it has been an amazing trip - exciting, exhausting and entirely stimulating (and often, overstimulating). Physically, it has already been challenging both in terms of the time change and in terms of the walking/hiking around this extremely hilly metropolis. But it has been very, very fun.


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David Sirota is a full-time political journalist, best-selling author and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist living in Denver, Colorado. He blogs for Working Assets and the Denver Post's PoliticsWest website. He is a Senior Editor at In These Times magazine, which in 2006 received the Utne Independent Press Award for political coverage. His 2006 book, Hostile Takeover, was a New York Times bestseller, and is now out in paperback. He has been a guest on, among others, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and NPR. His writing, which draws on his (more...)
 

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