High Tea at the Peninsula & a Night at the Mansion

Last week was sort of a different week for us at school, because we had parent-teacher conferences. After school on Wednesday, we had conferences until 6:15pm and then Thursday was an extended day as well, 8:00-6:15. It was crazy busy, because I'd used my preps earlier in the week to prepare for the conferences so now I needed to use the breaks between conferences to plan lessons for the next week and copy/make things (and my assistant is off for 2 weeks because she's getting married). Unfortunately, I had a LOT of conferences (I have the biggest class at my campus) with only like 15-30 minute breaks in between to get things done. I would have had a lot more prep time, but our school stuck a big ol' meeting in the middle of the day sucking away even more planning time from us too. They have a habit of noticing any chance that you might have for some free time and they fill it with meetings and other crap that has nothing at all to do with your class or lesson planning. Time abuse!

Anyway, my conferences went well! My parents are really cool and were very complimentary. I even had two (TWO!) ask me to consider teaching second grade next year so their child could keep me as a teacher. That's what makes it worth it, y'all. So, because we worked extended days Wednesday and Thursday, we got Friday off. We figured this would be a good chance to do something that is normally too busy to do on a weekend, which is usually our only sightseeing time. Last month, on a Saturday, we'd tried to go to high tea at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel only to wait 90 minutes in a non-moving line before giving up. We decided to give it another shot today.

I used Wimdu, an apartment booking website, to get us a decent and cheapish place when Jason was here visiting, so I used them again to book us a place for Friday night. There wasn't as much to choose from this time, but I eventually settled on this place with bunkbeds for like $72. It's expensive to stay in HK! So, after I booked it, I emailed the host twice and there was no response. Totally different from my first Wimdu experience. On Friday morning, when I still hadn't heard from her, I called her long-distance via Skype and she answered. The directions she gave me were to a different address from the one we booked at (nearby, but different) which should have been a warning sign, but we agreed to meet there at 1:15 anyway because we needed a place to stay.

So we take the ferry over, and arrive at this place for 1:15. It looks sketchy as hell, but we're not that precious, so we knock on the door. No answer. We wait around. No one comes. Ring the bell again... no one. So, now we have to find a payphone to call this woman, and we eventually find one in the metro station. She says, "oh yeah, yeah, I'll be there in 5 minutes".

We go back to find this doofus hanging around outside the place; he's waiting for us. He immediately starts yelling at us. "Why you only book 1 day in advance? Double booked! No room!" The person who accepted our Wimdu request (the host must choose "accept" or "refuse" and THEY CHOSE ACCEPT), didn't contact us, didn't reply to emails, didn't even show up at the agreed time and now they're yelling at us? I yelled back. He says, maybe he can put us in a room on some other floor- a Korean hotel, he called it. I don't know why we followed him, but we did...

...into this elevator that had plywood walls and floor! And a foam ceiling! What the hell? Clearly, we were about to die.

So he leads us to this hallway, and says he has a room down here but has to go find the key.

While he's gone, we notice this scratched into the wall. The building we were in was super ghetto, like Harlem-the-projects-ghetto, and the guy was an ass so we decided to leave. We ran into him as we were getting into the plywood elevator and I made sure I told him off once more (this time in Korean, since he'd mentioned he was Korean) before leaving.

Hong Kong is annoying. And here's another reason why: our phones don't work. Yeah, we could buy a Hong Kong sim card for $20 and use it once, but why can't we just use our Chinese sims and pay roaming charges? In Hong Kong we can't get any reception on our phones. So, when we needed to call the Wimdu ho, it didn't work. We knew our friends were staying in a nearby guesthouse so we wanted to talk to them buttttt our phones don't work. My friend had invited us out for drinks that night, buttttt my phone didn't work. I brought my ipod, so I could at least use wifi to get in touch with people, but there's hardly any free wifi anywhere in HK. Plus, when we finally did find a wifi connection, facebook made my stupid ipod stupid crash every single time I tried to load it.

We'd already wasted so much time, so we decided to just get on with the day and head over to the Peninsula Hotel for tea. It's pretty fancy... I mean, I had to take off my backwards ballcap. There was a line again, but after about 20 minutes we got a table. AND they had wifi.

The high tea set comes on a 3-tiered tray. On the bottom, there's freshly baked raisin scones, in the middle are some finger sandwiches, tarts and salmon, and on the top there was an amazing assortment of raspberry things. All this with 2 cups of coffee for only $70. The place was pretty posh. They actually had hot dogs on the menu, for some reason, and they were $25.

There was an orchestra playing on the balcony. They played the Flinstones theme at one point, which was to my liking.

Being a fancy bitch.

The only thing that didn't get eaten: the cucumber sandwich.

We tried to enjoy ourselves, but the fact that we had nowhere to stay for the night did loom over us while we ate. Also, it started pouring and we hadn't brought an umbrella so we were all, "GREAT". I used the Peninsula's wifi to try and find another place, and I noticed that there were a lot of guesthouses very close to the Peninsula at a place called "Chungking Mansion". It's a nice area, the place is a mansion, what can be wrong?

 

The rain stopped, and we headed over to Chungking Mansion. It's the type of place that, when you walk in, every instinct in your body says LEAVE. So, naturally, we went in. The place is swarming with shady looking Indian touts out front trying to sell you a watch, a bag, tailor services or a room. We knew where our friends were staying, so we decided to just press ahead and check out their guesthouse. Maybe we could meet up.

The first floor of the place is a maze of shops selling Indian food, cell phones, and cheap crap. There are lines for every elevator, and while we waited in one line a guy approached us and offered to show us a room he had for rent. I don't even know why we bothered, but we looked at it. Actually, another couple looked at it before us and left quickly, and then we looked at it. He wanted like $80 a night for this dump of a room, and while we were talking about it he interrupted us to tell us to hurry up, he doesn't have time for this. Sooooo, I said we don't have time for this either and we left.

We found our friends' guesthouse, but a note out front said "no rooms", so we checked out the place next door (this entire like 15 story building is full of guesthouses. every floor has 2 or 3 different ones, all basically identical aside from their level of cleanliness). The spot next door had a room but it was in block C of the mansions and we were in block A. We looked at the room, it was basic as we've ever stayed in, but it was $50 and we were tired of looking.

So, this is where we stayed. What you see in the picture is the entire room, aside from a small bathroom in front of one of the beds. It's the smallest place I've ever stayed in, but I will say that it was very clean and the old lady running the place was very sweet. BUT, for $50 a night in Korea you get a jacuzzi. Just sayin'.

The view from our room.

We decided to go to Taikoo Station to shop at Cityplaza, which we'd read online is a decent mall. It's just okay. There was an H&M where I bought a cool winter jacket that I can't wait to wear in a few years, and there was a Marks & Spencer with a drool-worthy grocery section. The mall also had a Hello Kitty store and a skating rink.

Mel wanted to go to Forever 21, so we went over to the Causeway Bay area and shopped there.

Across from Forever 21 is a mall called Hysun Place. We saw signs for Jason's Supermarket in the basement there, and we used to love shopping at Jason's in Taiwan, so we went in to check it out. It was awesome! Definitely the best place we've found so far to pick up imported groceries in Hong Kong. The prices were good (a lot of stuff was cheaper than at home) and it's a clean, very swank grocery store. We made a mental note to go back there tomorrow on our way home so we could bring some goodies back to China.

We decided to get a bite to eat at a little Chinese hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Glee Cafe. We were looking for something cheap, since the high tea had been so expensive. The menu was... interesting. Anyone want a refreshing glass of boiled water with egg to drink?

I got a BBQ chicken and pork belly combo which came with a side of soup and some rice. It was only like $7.

Unfortunately, it was cold and the chicken was bloody.

We needed something new to read, so we walked over to Times Square and got three new books at Page One. Mel picked up a book called "Ghetto at the Center of the World", the story of Chungking Mansion! From the back cover:

"There is nowhere else in the world quite like Chungking Mansions, a dilapidated seventeen-story commercial and residential structure in the heart of Hong Kong's tourist district. A remarkably motley group of people call the building home; Pakistani phone stall operators, Chinese guesthouse workers, Nepalese heroin addicts, Indonesian sex workers, and traders and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there - even backpacking tourists rent rooms."

This was where we were spending the night?? Of course, we had to buy the book.

We finished off the night with a little luxury, even if it doesn't look so great in the above photo: we got foot massages, and read our new books while our feetsies were rubbed. Every now and then Mel would read me a disturbing fact about Chungking. It was definitely a day of ups and downs, as I'm finding Hong Kong usually is. We were frustrated by our Wimdu booking and finding a new place to stay, and dinner sucked. But, shopping was fun, we got massages and we were able to pretend to be fancy at The Peninsula. Hey, you can't live large all of the time, and we had another full day of exploring to look forward to in the morning.