On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, patrick matte wrote:
quoted 5 lines experiences about Hong Kong and China, I would greatly appreciate it. Its
> experiences about Hong Kong and China, I would greatly appreciate it. Its
> nice to get ideas from people in the same frame of mind. So I'll be
> travelling there with my girlfriend in the next few weeks. We'll be landing
> in Hong Kong and later we'll head north to Beijing where we'll be staying at
> a friends house. I'd also like to see the streets of Shanghai. From what I
Hi Patrick,
My wife and I went through China and Tibet for six weeks last year as part
of our honeymoon ...I visited HK right before the handover too. You
should have a great time!
Advice #1 ~ take a recording device and decent mike!!! That's my thing,
so I'm biased, but you will never regret it, I assure. Heck, you could
buy a cheap MD recorder there -- but I'd bring mics up front. I just
posted a short recording made in Shanghai on my 'one minute vacation'
page yesterday:
http://www.quietamerican.org/vacation.html
Don't worry about the language barrier -- it's definitely a bit steeper
than other parts of SE Asia (e.g. Thailand) but if you can get the hang of
the tones and practice on your interminable bus/train rides you'll do
fine. The up-side of Mandarin (which won't help as much in HK...) is that
the grammer is VERY straightforward -- there's no declination, agreement,
or tense to speak of.. ie. you end up saything likes "train beijing go
tommorow yes/no?" and getting answers like "train go!". We found the
problem was it was TOO easy to learn some basic vocabulary -- and when we
cranked it out people would happily launch into full-on replies assuming
we could follow them... ! As always it's easier I think to speak than
understand.
Anyway. Food. If you're a vegetarian it'll be a bit tougher (it was for
us) but we ended up thriving on what we called "point-and-chew" places,
tables set up on the street with all the ingredients laid out -- we'd just
point at a bunch of stuff we wanted and watch it get stir-fried up. Tofu
and pepper and chile and peanuts and veg etc... mmmmmm. And that's a good
cheap way to eat too. You can get chilled fruity drinks everywhere too,
we put half a dozen away an afternoon walking around in the heat.
Most of all -- wander at random. If you have time and inclination I like
nothing better than to just pick random less-visited spots on the map --
and just go. And then keep going. The less "destinations" the better ...
the best parts are always the random, serendipitous encounters in the
middle of nowhere, the chance whim based on someone's anecdote that lands
in you in the most amazing, awful, odd, sublime situations.
But at least, wander around the cities you're in with only vague
destinations. Even if it's hot and you're tired...
We found public transport fairly easy to figure out, at least the bus
numbers where in roman characters. Maps are easy to come by if rapidly
outdated in urban areas (e.g. Shanghai!).
Oh yeah, if you have time read 'soul mountain' and 'wild swans' before you
go to get some perspective...
Basics... Take traveler's checks, denominated in US dollars if possible.
Keep some emergency cash. Make sure you have the right immunizations.
Wear a 'pouch' or something to keep your passport in.
We didn't make it to Beijing but you MUST go to the hutong areas -- the
old alleyways that are being torn down rapidly. You will probably be
interested in an interview I did with the experimental sound artist Dajuin
Yao available on my website, in which he talks about his experiences
doing field recording in China:
http://www.quietamerican.org/related.html
There are also some of his recordings from Beijing in that interview...
Anyway... if you have specific questions feel free to write me off-list,
I'm quite enthusiastic about such (ad)ventures!
Best regards,
aaron
ghede@well.com
http://www.quietamerican.org
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