Pure Concentrated Hassam - And Lots of it!!!

Days #2-4
Funds: $7400ish
Location:

Osaka Guesthouse, Chungking Mansions, Nathan Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Michael is aching considerably all over. In mostly good ways.

Oh FYI guys some of you probably know this already but for the some of you who don't, the maps on my blog aren't pictures, they're linked to the multimap website, which means you can zoom in/out and move around them and stuff, thought that might be handy to know considering how close and far away the frames I use are. Have a fiddle, Mum and Dad. [And if I never utter that phrase again it'll be far too soon!]

Guess I'll start from the start again. Had an excellent plane ride this time round, I was at the back with nobody next to or behind me, so I reclined both my seats and lay down to sleep most of the time hehehe. Once off the airplane and outta customs, I had a pretty straightforward plan based on a handful of numbers and names I'd either memorised or written down such as street names, 'reasonable' room rates, bus routes and Debbie's mobile number - the last of which would do me no good until I got a SIM. She told me before I left to ring her at 12:30 cos her classes finished then. At the time I'd figured well what with showing up at 6 surely I'll have a place by then easy!
Heh. We all know what happens when Mykal says stuff like that, right?
So I go to an ATM only to discover that the $AUS500 hasn't gone through to my international Travelex account thingy yet. Fortunately I'd put nearly $AUS60 through over the weeks leading up to this just to make sure it all worked. Unfortunately I couldn't touch all of it, because HK ATMs only give $HK100 notes as their smallest bit of paper and my total only JUST fell short of $HK300. I vaguely remembered at this point that I'd decided to settle for no less than $HK150 a night (although given the still-declining exchange rate I thought realistically I shouldn't go higher than $HK120), and, having blown $HK30ish on a bus ticket to Tsim Sha Tsui, the place where the infamous Chungking and Mirador Mansions are located, promptly shat myself. Oh well, guess I could survive without food for a day ...
Then I took some nice photos of scenery and such and that was very soothing, then I remembered that I still had $AUS40 in cash in my little belt pocket thingy from my very last paper round haha, and the emergency Chinese RMB I have stashed in my bag that I got from Tian on my bday. So as long as my money was coming in the next day (which it ultimately did), I'd be okay. Hooray for my elaborate network of backup plans!!!
I think to get the full effect of what I accomplished with my accomodation, you really do need to check out a site like hostels.com or whatever and look up any available dorms in Hong Kong. About 75% of them are in either Mirador Mansion or Chung King Mansion, which are pretty much half a block apart. What they're famous for is being quite affordable in an extreme-to-the-max sort of you-REALLY-get-what-you-paid-for-if-you-didn't-get-ripped-off kinda way. Read some of the backpacker's reviews, it sounds horrible. But I'd resigned myself to the idea that I would be sharing my room with strangers, which begged the question of how I was gonna hide all my stuff.
Spent nearly 2 hours walking down the stairs from Mirador Mansion, checking with every place that looked like they had rooms what they charged and offered, and each one was pretty much a rip-off. After reading online and chatting with Bobbi a few nights before I left I was under the impression I could bargain a price down, but I'm not the best at that anyway, and besides that:

1. The people at the top know that they're the first people you're gonna see, and know that if you're doing the top-down thing, you're probably just trying to figure out what you can get away with and therefore don't KNOW anything, so they don't let you get away with anything and charge as much as they like.
   
2. People below the people at the top can SEE you as you walk around in a circle before the next flight of stairs (the building is like a square with the middle cut out, and you can see all the way down), so they know you haven't found a place yet and that you're getting ripped off, so they think they can rip you off too.
3. Because of this, nobody bought my completely made-up story that I was looking to beat $HK120/night at this other place I'd found.
   

So I memorised the best deal, which involved sharing a dorm with 3 others and having no internet or place to keep my stuff, at $HK80/night, and decided to check out Chung King Mansion, which I thought was the more notorious of the two. A lady caught my eye at the door and I was going to tell her to leave me alone (since I'd had bad hawker experiences in Shanghai) but she smelled like my Aunty Helen and looked kind of like a random auntie from my temple, so I ignored the gut instinct that told me not to trust anybody in favour of the gut instinct that said "My Aunty Helen's nice!!!" I tried to do the whole acting disinterested/aloof thing that you're supposed to do at the market, but she kept engaging in friendly conversation. Turns out her son studies accounting at melbourne uni and she's Shanghainese, so there were a few odd coincidences (of course I told myself, she could just be making it up to build a rapport, it's so much harder to argue with a sweet little old lady who's acting all nice and stuff).
Anyway she wanted $HK200/night for this single room, and it looked sort of like one I'd actually seen on some guy's blog online who paid $100, so I thought I'd tell her that hehe. Suddenly she dropped the price to $HK130, and pretty much said that she didn't wanna stuff around, that was the lowest she'd go and I could take it or leave it. At first I thought, "oooh so close maybe I can get it to my happy $HK120!" but then I saw that they had an internet cable that would work in my laptop - every single other place had insisted only Wifi was possible, and mines too old and can't hack wifi for some reason. Also the net would be free, compared to me having to pay about 3 or 4 bucks an hour if I was lucky. Factoring this in, I considered myself very lucky. Later, other people assured me that this is a very good deal. Shall I give you a guided tour? =P
















Seriously, that's it, behind me is the door to get out =P In theory I could shower while I go to the toilet, how efficient!!! Aaaaand all my stuff is under the bed. The lady even changes my sheets and replaces the toilet paper every day, I know that sounds like nothing to some of you but compared to what I heard about this place that's nuts!

Sorry to dump all of this on you all at once, I've been far too tired recently to type all this up into bite-sized portions. I imagine I'll be less rushed in Shanghai considering I'll have heaps more time but bear with me while I'm here, yeah? So I was thinking maybe you could like, go have a cup of tea, or do whatever else it was you had planned, and then you can come back and read the rest whenever you feel ready. No pressure =]

***

Oh, I'm glad you could make it back! Yeah so if you've been following my photos you know I really haven't stopped moving since I got here. As soon as I'd booked the place, I used the shower and immediately bought a SIM, called Debbie, arranged to meet her somewhere, then hung out until midnight. Pretty stupid really considering how much sleep I needed but hey I haven't seen Debbie for about 14 months and who knows when we'll catch up again? She's got a bunch of international friends from uni so over the night I hung out with an Austrian a French guy and a Canadian, all awesome, and all with awesome accents. I saw a bit of a night market (but had no room left in my camera to do anything about it) and went to a couple little restaurants for lunch and dinner (and dinner the next day). Eating out is pretty much my only option, and I've been having curry for breakfast! Yay!!! The next day, Debbie had class so I went exploring myself, got lost, didn't get the nap I planned to have, then went to some arcades with Debbie and her friends. I estimate half the machines were bishi-bashi mini-games. Those of you who know bishi-bashi know that this is awesome. One might even say ... neat.
Yeah, so the exploring. It's crazy here. Basically I just get lost and take photos until it's getting late and find the nearest train station to get me home. The way it works is just looking in any direction here is like tugging at a thread on a shirt or whatever, only each tug brings out at least 3 other threads, each of which you wanna tug until finally you've completely mutilated your shirt into a ball of yarn. For example:
Yesterday, I got up and thought, 'hey maybe I'll go to Resistance Bay and check that out', so I got on the train to Central (which is on the actual Hong Kong island) where I was supposed to swap to a bus. Then I was distracted by a sign for some shops, then I got distracted by a sign for this ferry which I thought might be fun to have a look at, only I never got there because I'd found something else which excited me just as much, until finally I had walked to the top-left corner of the island (completely the OPPOSITE direction I'd originally intended to head) and checked out a temple that had just popped out from nowhere. And I had no way to get back by foot because I'd turned that many corners based on shiny things that I'd lost all sense of direction. Landmarks didn't help because my brain can only hold so much information and every time I walk back up the same street I see so many new things I hadn't noticed before, so I forget all the other stuff I'd tried to remember when I'd first been there and then I would swear under oath that I'd never actually been there before. Since they're always building building building around here I can't imagine ever knowing the same amount of area as I do in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne in any amount of time. So those of you who heard I wanted to put a whole day aside to try and make it around the circumference of HK island, or at least go from one end to the other, sorry to disappoint. It's not that I couldn't cover the distance, it's that I just can't focus enough around here to walk a straight line without stopping to gawp at stuff. Gawp, I'm such a tourist.
I think this pretty much puts it into perspective:
Debbie's hongkie friend KK was the first local not to laugh when she heard I was staying at Chung King Mansions, and I commented on that - "Do you live very far away? It seemed like everybody knew about that place!" she goes: "yes, I'm pretty far away. It takes at least 10 minutes from here." There was no trace of irony there, either. The density of this place is just insane. They just pack so much more per square metre. I would definitely need more than a week just to get used to it, so I'm glad I don't have anything important to actually do here.

Oh and FYI I bought my train ticket to Shanghai, conducted the whole conversation in Mandarin, proud of myself =P And it only cost $AUS100! Hooray! Speaking of Mandarin, there's a whole language situation here that I haven't totally figured out yet but more on that in the next entry, you're probably all sick of me by now hehe