HK Day 3/Day 4: Kowloon

Humidity! Ahh! These last few days we spent in the Kowloon side of Hong Kong (we're staying on the HK Island side).  We did a lot of random stuff including visiting my dad's old school & old house, eating tons of street food, and tons of shopping in markets and malls.  Here are some random highlights!

Transit
HK has THE best transit system ever!  SO much better than the TTC!  It's clean, fast, cheap, air conditioned, it has internet and phone service (as well as internet stations where you can go on the computers for free if you need to look up something) and it's so much more organized with something similar to a metropass called the octopus card!  The octopus card works kinda like what Montreal uses for their metro with a card that you scan on a pad.  You can top up the card with an amount and use it for the bus, streetcar, subway, and in some cases you can use it to buy things like water.  Transit itself is so cheap, one trip on the trolly/streetcar (which goes super far) is less than $0.50 Canadian!

Hong Kong Subway System!

The bus and streetcar are both double decker and run extremely frequently.  I should also mention the taxis are really cheap even though the traffic is a bit hectic.  Oh, and McDonalds delivers.  

Kowloon
We've spent most of the trip on the other side of HK, but the Kowloon side is incredibly vibrant.  Both by day and by night, it's more live and upbeat than I've ever seen Toronto.  During the day there was so much going on, between the street markets and the high class malls (one of them was a hundred times bigger and nicer than either Eaton or Sherway), and at night the city came to life.  For some reason Monster's Inc is a super big deal here.  At night, the city lit up with street performers and pedestrian only sections throughout majority of the downtown area. 

View of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon

-M

HK Day 2: Victoria Peak

Hong Kong is so hot.Yet somehow, all the locals here don't sweat, and I seem to be the only one getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.  Today we walked around the city in more or less a large circle from the hotel to the Soho area, over to Victoria Peak via tram and then we spent a bit of time at the Hong Kong University campus.  HK is really hilly...REALLY hilly, so since they're super smart, they decided to build a system of escalators outside which go for over 800m!  The surrounding buildings are trendy little boutiques and restaurants which are Western styled.  

One of the markets close to our hotel

Longest outdoor escalators in the world!

Tram going up to the Peak

The track going up was ridiculously steep

View from the top of the peak

HKU campus (they had free internet!)

-M

HK Day 1: Arrival

If I could fly first class for the rest of my life, I'd do it in an instant.  Our flight left this morning at 7am and got to Vancouver at 10am (Vancouver time).  We had a 5 hour layover in Vancouver, then took a flight straight to Hong Kong, arriving at 5pm HK time.  The flight was awesome, the maple leaf lounge had a load of food and comfy couches, plus pretty fast internet.  The first class seats on the flight also meant a ridiculous amount of edible food and we had individual little pods which reclined into a bed & the movies and tv shows available made it hard to force myself to sleep. 

Vancouver Maple Leaf Lounge

HK flight Menu

Random First Impressions of Hong Kong: 

• It's HOT. We arrived in the evening when it was cooler, but even then it was super humid
• Every store/building has their AC cranked up all the way, so crazy fluctuation of temperature 
• The streetcars and transit in general is a lot cleaner and nicer than the TTC
• It appears none of the men here wear shorts - they all wear long pants which is nuts as this place is legit ridiculously hot
• The bugs here must be on steroids, the cockroaches are MASSIVE
• There's a lot more westerners here than I expected which is kinda cool - I think there's actually more Westerners in HK than I'm used to seeing at school!
• Watching British TV is amusing

Random Streets

-M

A Musical Weekend

I wish my life was a musical.  I'd be satisfied just to have my weekend turn into a live musical...but anyways not quite what the title was implying.  This weekend I had the chance to see a small gig downtown, as well as a much larger show at the Rogers Center. 

Winchester Kitchen and Bar was hosting a three day "Folk Festival" which a couple of my awesome friends and I attended on day two.  It was a little bit disappointing at first as the place was pretty empty and the music didn't start until about an hour after advertised.  Nevertheless, I was really only there to see one person, and you can best bet she didn't disappoint whatsoever.  The one and only singer/songwriter Alanna Matty backed by Kel Bhatia played a 45 minute set and had the whole venue in silence (it was pretty loud and rowdy during the previous set).   It was fantastic - I think they're pretty much the only live performers I've seen who sound just as good, if not better, in person.  They performed a number of Alanna's originals (some of them I hadn't heard yet, so that was pretty exciting) as well as some covers.  Unfortunately I keep missing the shows Alanna does with her live band, so hopefully I'll get a chance to see them sometime soon!  I was lucky enough to be around when Alanna wrote her first song "Fly" back when we were....10 or some ridiculously young age so watching her perform now is always really exciting.   I attempted to record/take pictures but my crappy iPod obviously didn't do anything justice.  

We found the most random bridge on the way there

And a random passage way that probably goes to Narnia

My personal opinion: don't bother going for the food, go for the music

You should definitely check out her stuff!

:)

-- 
I also went to the Taylor Swift Concert this weekend at the Rogers Center, and I have to say, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be (well...mainly I was scared of the screaming teenie boppers, and admittedly they were still pretty frightening).  I'm not much of a Taylor Swift fan myself, but my sister is, so I got her the tickets for Christmas.  We were sitting pretty high in the 500 section on the right side of the stage, but I kinda liked it.  It was neat being able to see how big the venue was, and the screens were more than enough to get the full impact of the show. 

Tswift concert ticket	Full house at the Tswift Concert

The show opened with two artists, the first was a country singer and the second one was a pop singer but skipping towards the exciting part: Ed Sheeran. Oh my goodness....I want to marry that man :P.  Ed Sheeran is an amazing British singer/songwriter & anyone who knows me, knows I'm all about the Brits and anything UK related.  I actually discovered him when his first single was released in the UK, so hearing him live was pretty flipping exciting. He was....abso-frekin-lutely ASTOUNDING. It was beyond words, honestly.  So first of all, Ed is all about music - quality of music, conveying his message and just a bare bone honest performance.  Best of all, Ed is a one man band, he doesn't have any backing tracks or live band with him, instead its just him, his guitar and a loop pedal.  Basically he played all the extra accompaniment for his song, and he recorded it on his loop machine right in front of us.  He continued to add layers including some beatboxing, some drum sounds (hitting his guitar) and some insane guitaring.  He got the audience involved as well getting us to sing harmony with him in some sections, and he encouraged us to sing along and have a good time.  Besides playing some of his singles, he played a couple covers and songs off his album including an 11 minute performance/mashup of "You Need me, I don't Need You" which was super intense. I'm going to stop myself here, because I could fan girl forever, but Ed Sheeran live is something worth seeing! 

Rogers Center

ED SHEERAN!

Taylor Swift was a very very good vocalist and a dramatic performer (in a good way).  I was a bit iffy when she started talking about the colour red, and so on inbetween songs; I mean for people who were interested in why she writes what she writes, what her album is about and such I guess that's great but - I found it a bit corny, and her persona was a little over the top for me.  But as someone familiar with all her albums, watching her perform, and listening to her live, was really fun and enjoyable. Her staging, dancing, performing, props and set really added to the whole effect, and she really is a very good singer. 

 

There were a number of neat costume & set changes through the night - she changes ridiculously fast!

 Overall, this was actually the first concert I went to where all three opening acts were really good.  I also discovered my camera is even crappier than I originally though.  In the end I had a really good evening enjoying some fantastic music.  The fans weren't completely insane like at the One Direction concert I went to last year, but the energy was still electric, which made it really fun to be there.  On top of that, I got to hang out with my cousin and sister who had a blast singing along so all in all: epic weekend.

-M

Summer Travel Plans

So this summer I'm going on two and a half big trips which is extremely exciting as the last (and only) time I remember being outside of North America was five years ago when my choir went to Germany.  My parents took me around Canada as a child, but I don't remember a single thing. 

After catching a bit of the travel bug, my family has decided to go on a trip to China and I decided to apply last minute to an exchange program at my University.  I'll be heading over to Hong Kong for a bit before joining up a tour in Beijing and Shanghai.  Then later in the summer I'll be doing an exchange for two weeks in Sackville New Brunswick, and two weeks in Osaka Japan. 

Pirates of Penzance

Any Gilbert and Sullivan fans around? 

In March 2013 I took part in Vic Chorus' production of The Pirates of Penzance.  For the past four years, the chorus has put together a Gilbert and Sullivan show in commemoration of the fact the Chorus used to be "The Gilbert and Sullivan Society" back in the day.  This year I acted as one of the Co - Producers as well as a last minute Assistant Stage Manager; two roles I never thought I'd ever experience.  It was an incredibly stressful process as I (along with my wonderful partner in crime aka my other half) was forced to deal with one insane crisis after another.  Thankfully it all came together in the end, and it was overall a pretty rewarding experience.  The photos in this post were taken by a couple students from the photography club who came in during our dress rehearsal.  

Most of the actors had been a part of our productions in previous years, so there were many familiar faces in the cast.  At the same time, we had a handful of new members and we were extremely lucky to find our male actors both within the University and outside of the University community. 

For the first time in Vic Chorus history, we had a two night run of the production and it went extremely well with only a couple minor costume malfunctions.

One of the actor's father filmed the entire performance and it's been uploaded onto YouTube.  If you're really bored on a rainy day feel free to check it out! :) -M