Health & Wellness
From the editor
January 31, 2008
Several people have asked me to comment on our experiences in Hong Kong over the holidays. Here are some of our impressions. It is a great place to be at Christmas as the decorations are amazing and everything is lit up (well, that is true much of the time but even more at Christmas). So if you want to get into the spirit, Hong Kong is the place to be.
It is a very vertical environment so you have to like steps and climbing up hills. Needless to say, that contributes to its attractiveness.
The smog does not! The ferries in the harbour are wonderful. Great way to get between Kowloon and Hong Kong and all the other islands; also quite inexpensive. We found one that was free for seniors which became our personal favorite.
The people are welcoming and so ready to help you understand the place and the culture. We had some amazing conversations in places like the museum at an exhibit of portraits of people who live in low income housing. The portraits captured the character of the individual residents being photographed. As we looked at them, a local gentleman asked if we found this exhibit interesting. Thus began a long conversation about the meaning of some of the things we noticed (ex. piles of filled plastic bags surrounding an old woman were the “products” she attempted to sell on the street, not uncollected trash), how you live in a small room with a family using the community kitchen and bath/toilet facilities (our informant lived in one of these rooms for many years with 2 children and a wife), how happy people were to have these homes. It is hard to describe the joy and learning that took place in this conversation. Unfortunately, there was no catalog! The food, variety and quality, is excellent. We ate in several restaurants where only locals were eating and discovered some rather interesting dishes–some we tried and some we decided were for very discriminating tastes that we did not have.
The harbour is the busiest I have ever seen. We lived and I worked on a ship for one week; Lew ran back and forth to land on a tender. Getting on and off was a trick! I did it once! We felt as if we were part of a huge neighborhood on water although you did not interact with your neighbors. We also visited an area where fishing families live on their boats and a whole village of support services exists.
Temples were fascinating and we saw as many as possible. There are big coils of incense hanging and burning all around and you have to be open to having ash on your shoulders….and to being overwhelmed by sweet smoke. It became quickly apparent that I could not stay long and would leave with eyes streaming. The temple here is located in the New Territories where we also visited the walled cities.
That is a quick take on Hong Kong at Christmas and at the beginning of 2008…Chinese New Year (Feb. 7) will be much more exciting, I am told, but that is hard to imagine. Happy Year of the Rat.Peggy Pusch
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Health & Wellness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Peggy Pusch travels for work so she is less often found at the Meriwether, where she “lives,” than someplace else in the world. However, when she is here, she enjoys what Portland has to offer, going to the symphony, the ballet, museums and galleries, and the theater. She is Associate Director of the Intercultural Communication Institute and Executive Director of a professional organization for interculturalists. And she has a brand new bike!
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