Mardi Gras has been on my party bucket list for a while, since it often comes up on largest-parties-in-the-world lists. I envisioned it as a southern purple-green-and-gold version of St. Patricks day, slutty bleached blondes flooding the crowded streets of a mythical land called “The French Quarter”. NOLA native buddy Matt got my crew the hookup this year: a floor to sleep on in downtown New Orleans and southern hospitality ample enough for seven San Franciscans to pop their Mardi Gras cherries (Hurricanes?)

Mardi Gras is more of a season than a holiday, but we happened to be there at its peak, the last weekend before Fat Tuesday, which is the day before Lent starts. Perhaps the strategy of the whole affair is to throw you into a 40-day long hangover that prevents you from sinning?

Just being in ~*~The South~*~ involved some culture shock for this northern city girl (accents, lactation rooms, and chapels, all in the airport, oh my!) but let’s stay focused on the Mardi Party and break it #down.

PARADES

The parades are a *Big Deal*, and they are all different.
I knew to expect parades, but I did not realize how huge they were going to be. First of all, there are a zillion parades and they are nonstop ALL DAY EVERY DAY for something like 5 days straight (plus the parades the previous weekends). They stretch all across the city, so you can walk for miles along a parade’s path. Basically everywhere we walked all weekend was along a parade path, so we were actually participating in parades like 6 hours a day. Different parades have different vibes — Endymion was extravagant with floats costing over a MILLION DOLLAR$$$ EACH, but it was incredibly crowded/packed to the point where you could barely see it, whereas Bacchus was animal themed, more low key, and involved a lot of glowing shit.

The parade will throw things at you.
Standard Mardi Parade Format: there is a float with a bunch of old ladies in slightly horrifying masks standing on top, and in between floats there are high school marching bands. The old ladies throw things from atop the float, usually the all-important Mardi Gras beads, but sometimes cups, toys, or glowing party accessories. Unfortunately for those of us with no hand-eye coordination, this means you constantly have to keep your arms up in self defense, lest a pack of beads land in your face.

Babies on ladders.
To watch the parade, you stake out a spot and put down some lawn chairs and your cooler maybe. But if you have a baby, you put it on a ladder! So that the babies can see what’s going on, plus for cute appeal so that the ladies-on-floats will throw goodies at your children (I think??) I’m #notclearon the ladder-baby Mardi Gras death rate, but I did witness a child hit in the head with some beads and the dad immediately rationalize, “Oh, that wasn’t so hard!” #southernparenting?

Zombiepocalypse
Especially after the parade, there’s trash everywhere, a heavy sense of abandonment, plus extreme humidity and grey skies, that culminate in a distinct zombiepocalypse vibe. Also, prisoners clean up the trash from the parades, hella creepy.

#mardigras #prisoners twitter.com/lewisisgood/st…

— Young Lew (@lewisisgood) February 9, 2013

BEADS – What is the deal?

You must really be wearing Mardi Gras beads at ALL TIMES. Otherwise you look like a moron.
We made the mistake of going out on Bourbon Street (the main shitshow area for tourists/sluts) without beads the first night, pretty awk. These kids are doin it right:

Once beads touch the ground, they are worthless.
Our local friends told us it was bad karma to pick up beads off of fences, etc. where people have hung them decoratively, and it’s bad karma to pick them off the street because someone probably peed on them. The city of New Orleans didn’t seem particularly urinated on to me, but then again I live in San Francisco, which is one giant urinal.

Trade economy of beads.
While at the parades, the float ladies throw beads at you pretty much as long as you make eye contact. Nevertheless, people in the crowd still wave and shout at the float ladies as if getting beads were extremely exciting and not the easiest thing in the world.

However, once you’re partying on Bourbon Street, there are no ladder babies and there are no old ladies, it’s the slutty St. Patricks Day-style street party scene of my Mardi dreams, and beads come at a price of flashing boobies. People stand on the second floor balconies of the bar/clubs and dangle beads over the heads of people wading through the street (wall-to-wall people). A girl makes eye contact with a balcony person, flashes, and receives beads. Sometimes, beads are thrown for not-quite-flashings, or to guys, though I didn’t discover any hard-and-fast rules on what level of exhibitionism is or isn’t bead-worthy.

By the end of every day, you probably will have collected roughly 3x as many beads as you actually want, and damn those things are heavy. Going on the balcony and tossing beads is a good way to reduce your bead supply, as is just dumping off all your beads at your host’s apartment at the end of the day.

FOOD

King Cake

King Cake is the most important Mardi Gras food. It’s basically a giant cinnamon roll with frosting on top decorated with purple, green, and yellow sugar. There is a plastic baby inside, and the tradition is that whoever gets the piece with the baby in it is responsible for buying the next king cake. FYI, every king cake seemed to cost $13.99.

Beignets
This is a year-round item, not just Mardi Gras season. It’s pronounced “BEN YAY” for those of you who are confused by the Frenchness going on here. Fried dough with a mountain of powdered sugar on it = extremely delicious. The canonical beignet way is to get these with some coffee at Cafe Du Monde around 3 or 4 AM on your way back from partying in the French Quarter. Warning: DO NOT WEAR DARK CLOTHING as you will be covered in this stuff by the time you’re through. Also don’t sneeze.

Things that don’t involve sugar
Even though New Orleans is literally made of sugar, there were a few New Orleans dishes that happened to not involve mountains of sugar on top:
- Jambalaya — rice + sausagey dish
- Gumbo — jambalaya in liquid form, but spicier and involving more seafood. The best one we had was street food, some window alongside one of the parades.
- Po-boys — fried shrimp inside an enormous piece of bread
- Fried chicken, or actually fried anything, including alligator — our locals were shocked I had never tried alligator or snake.

This list, plus the two items above, are an all inclusive list food in New Orleans. Will New Orleans discover vegetables? Stay tuned to find out. (I kid, I actually had some really delicious Brussel Sprouts at Butcher.)

Drank
Hurricanes and giant daiquiris were probably the drinks of choice, plus of course beer. Open containers were not only permitted but encouraged — bars gave you to-go cups (to avoid bringing glass bottles out). At Rite Aid, you had to set down your hurricane at the door and pick it up on the way out, but there were GUARDS watching over the drinks (!!) and low and behold nobody’s drink was stolen or roofied while we bought body wash.

The French Quarter

Most of the advice revolving around Mardi Gras seems to be either “Bourbon Street is where the party’s at, go there” or “Don’t even bother with Bourbon Street, it’s a shitshow and everywhere else is better.” In reality, Bourbon was a bit underwhelming, yes a shitshow but wasn’t super crowded compared to Bay to Breakers street danceparties, or a train at rush hour in Japan. But the second floor balcony bead-throwing component was unique and probably the most interesting part.

#mardigras vine.co/v/bvBZg0Mvxvd

— ʍ๏ ƙµȡƹƙɨ(@kudeki) February 9, 2013

I’d advise to try it, both as a walker and as a bead-thrower, and then just use Yelp and go to places that match your vibe, like dungeon bars if you are us.

Bourbon has hella downsides tho:
- Ladies be prudes (albeit sluttily dressed prudes). Flashing was surprisingly #rare — we were on a balcony for maybe an hour and saw max like 10 pairs of breasts. Mostly dudes just crowded below and yelled/shook their asses. #sausagefest #typical
- Not LGBT friendly — I couldn’t get ANY girls to flash me, or even really maintain eye contact for more than 2 seconds. Maybe I’m just an incompetent bead-thrower, but a Dorothy “you’re not in San Francisco anymore” situation. What about Big Freedia, y’all!??
- Bourbon street is DANGEROUS. People were shot there on Saturday night. Getting killed at Mardi Gras would be a major party foul.

TECHNOLOGY

Aside from falling outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, New Orleans is also inhabited by old people and ladder babies, so I wasn’t expecting much technology or app-tivity (Yelp reviews, etc.) Our friend’s apartment didn’t even have its own Foursquare checkin before we arrived (come ON people!!!)

However, New Orleans did feature a GIANT TWEET WALL at a funk show, which I have not seen in San Francisco (aside from at @veroz’s birthday party, of course).

Tweet with the hashtag #wolfgras and it’ll be projected for all to see (unless you use textbook profanity, in which case it was censored). Very quickly it devolved into a very large and inappropriate conversation about Brian’s mom. Public commentary at its finest, I was very #proud.

IN CONCLUSION

I was a bit underwhelmed by the actual partying going on at Mardi Gras — not quite up to the RIDICULOUSITY I’m used to. San Francisco parties/festivals often have a high WTF factor, whereas Mardi Gras was a bit more party in a family-values-meets-jello-shots kind of way. Certainly a new thing for me.

Maybe there just wasn’t as much nudity or crossdressing in San Francisco? Something absurd was missing, anyhow.

However, we did pick up a lot of loot perfect for any San Franciscan’s party box (you know, the box in your living room or closet full of costume accessories and brightly colored sunglasses?) My fave was a glowing plastic cup. When @lewisisgood caught it for me I pretty much felt like I had WON MARDI GRAS.

And, I do have to hand it to NOLA for being a city willing to just go into parade mode for 3 weeks a year. Like, dang.

If you do decide to attend Mardi Gras, I suggest you simply remember the 3 basic rules:

1. Always wear your beads.

2. Babies in cakes and on ladders.

3. Zombiepocalypse.
(Badass photo courtesy of @veroz)

And a big shoutout to @schouest for making this trip happen and to his friends for putting up with us for an entire weekend!

Also, life goal accomplished, got to use the word “︻╦╤─ ƱZ ─╤╦︻” in an internal email.

#seekdiversetrap

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The slowest race you’ll ever run and the fastest party you’ll ever go to.
Tens of thousands of people partying their way across the entire city, in the morning, in ridiculous outfits. Would you expect anything less from San Francisco?

Assembling the Crew

Having a good crew is essential. 5-15 people seem manageable. Make sure they’re swaggin’. Organize them somehow — I recommend the internet. And if they’ve never done Bay 2 Breakers before, you are gonna have to give them the rundown, which is partially the reason I’m writing this guide… I wish I’d had one! (Seriously, people in this city will NOT believe you when you say they need to wake up before noon for something).

Costumes

People overthink this part. Yes, people wear crazy costumes (or nothing at all) on Bay2Breakers, but you don’t HAVE to dress up as a tetris piece or a mob of gay dinosaurs, as long as you look a little bit strange. Most of my crew polished off their outfits with random items from my closet — a pirate hat here, a pink apron there, a skirt used to affix a broccoli to a head, and a gay @ facebook shirt. Just everyday items that can be found in any wardrobe, really!

Anyway, Bay 2 Breakers is a good opportunity to get some use out that item of clothing you can ONLY wear at Halloween…or Pride… or Coachella… or Dolores Park… OKAY, there’s a lot of opportunity in San Francisco to wear ridiculous clothing ALWAYS, but whatever. Go wild.

Do: Wear comfy socks and shoes. Remember, you’re not only walking 7 miles, you’re DANCING 7 miles.
Don’t: Wear anything warm. Seriously, you will be burnin’ up in that crowd of 70k party-people.

Booze Purchase & Transportation

Do:
- Stick mostly to wine and mixed drinks. A little beer is okay, but it’s sort of heavier than it’s worth.
- Use Nalgene bottles, flasks, etc. because you can potentially get glass bottles confiscated and that’s just tragic. Personal recommendation: use Voss water bottles, mostly so you can run around the city saying “LIKE A VOSS” all day.
- Bring your own bag. It’s way easier if every person just carries all their stuff and is self-sufficient. A Camelback or one of those drawstring bags should do the trick.
Don’t:
- Make any dairy-based drinks because it’s going to be hot, and ew.

Other things to pack:
- phone, keys, wallet
- camera
- SUNBLOCK (please please please. Oh, and use it.)
- sunglasses

The Night Before

Do: Assemble everyone at a single apartment, or a couple of close-by apartments. This is to make sure you avoid:
- people oversleeping
- attempting to meet up with people at the event itself, which is way too chaotic, crowded, hard to coordinate, and your phone will stop working due to the crowds. It’s just really best if everyone starts out together.
Mix your drinks and refrigerate as necessary, put everything else in your bag
Don’t: Party too hard or too late. Pre-festing is encouraged, but seriously, go to bed people.

How early do I have to wake up?

If your friends are at all sane, they will be initially appalled at the idea of waking up before noon on a SUNDAY. However, it needs to be done. Or, as @iamnirav so eloquently put it:

As far as I can tell, there are several reasonable options of when/where to start, depending on how hard you want to go and how early your’e willing to wake up:

7 AM @ Embarcadero (Howard & Beale)
This is when the actual race starts, so the runners will go at the front and the partiers will start to trail along behind. Some people even pre-party this, but like, WHY.

9 AM @ Civic Center
This is what we ended up doing — after initially going to an abandoned Embarcadero, we backtracked and found ourselves towards the middle of the party @ Civic Center at 9. Totes reasonable! And unless my crew wants to go harder in the paint next year, I’d be willing to do this again.

11 AM @ Alamo Square or Noon @ NoPa
For the peeps who aren’t going to alter their schedule drastically for this holiday, meet up halfway. Warning: halfway here means everyone will be thoroughly trashed, NoPa is pretty much a shitshow. But if you’re down, join right in.

I have no idea after that, but why would you want to join like, midway through the park? Street partying is the best part — you can party in a park in the afternoon EVERY WEEKEND if you want.

The Morning of:

Do:
- Wake up the crew and finish up any last-minute drink/costume setup
- Figure out what to do about breakfast. Eat at home, bring food with, or stop somewhere along the way are all fine options, but all the Starbucks’ etc. in the financial district probably will be closed.
Don’t:
- Shower, if you can avoid it. Cuz you’re sure as hell gonna need a shower afterwards
- Hold up the crew by being slow. Get your shit together, kid!
- Stress! Enough logistics, it’s time to start having fun!!!

BREAKING THE BAY, a story in pictures and times (and some more do’s and don’ts):

9:30 AM
Do: Find yourself amongst these haps, on Hayes, after your trek from Civic Center

10 AM
Do: Take a breakfast stop @ Cafe International for some fancy schmancy bagels and cream cheese. The back patio can be yours!


11 AM
Do: Stop and dance in the street at the parties along the way.  This one was defs the raddest!

Do: Say hi to your coworkers when you run into them!  Its only polite!


Do: Toss your coworkers a broccoli, when appropriate.


Don’t: Lose members of your group at this point, since your phones will be the most useless they have ever been. Note Bodski doing some serious logistics with Polly here as we pass by Alamo Square.

If your group is anything like ours, it’s time to take a break and chill out for a while. Also, a good point to have the noon-risers to meet up. We obvs stopped at the incredibly conveniently located BharKrall Motel.

Do: Hang out on the roof.  Wave to Sutro tower.

Don’t: Fall off the roof. #awk


1 PM
Do: Have a daytime dance party in the living room. Recommended playlist.

Don’t: you stop the music.


Do: Discover hidden acrobatic and Jedi talents of your friends.

2 PM
Do: Embark on the second half of the journey and make your way into Golden Gate Park. Now is the time to throw on that long-sleeved shirt you picked up at your pit stop.
Don’t: Force it. If it’s time to stop, you’d best be stopping. Also, don’t get separated from the group.

4 PM
REJOICE, YOU JUST WON BAY 2 BREAKERS, POLLY!!!!!
Do: A victory dance in the ocean

Do: Hug yo friends
Don’t: Worry about where Nathan went (you’ll find him on your doorstep when you make it home), or worry about all the freezing water and sand up in your clothes. WORTH IT.

When you’re ready, peel yourselves off the beach and hop on a bus (the 5 worked out well for us) and go take a nap and make some tacos. <3

What is spinning? Some people describe it (incorrectly) as a fitness activity that involves biking in a gym. However, in actuality, it’s clubbing, in bike form:
- You’re in a dark room.
- House music is blasting, turned up to 11.
- Your super-fab instructor is bopping up and down in front of you and occasionally yelling things at you. His shoulders are enorm.
- There’s a disco ball.

So far so clubbing.

Yes, okay, technically you are on top of a stationery bike. However, you are rarely — you’re standing, moving your arms, and always bouncing your pedals to the beat, making it feel like you’re actually floating, since you’re dancing in midair.

This is the closest YouTube representation I could find — my gym is like this except more of the instructor yelling “OHYEAHHH” in the best way possible every 27 seconds.

Normally, I go clubbing in the Castro every couple of weeks, as I have a fairly strict queer dancing quota (this *is* San Francisco, guys). However, the other week, after a Saturday night party at which it was tragically difficult to convince anyone to go Castro out with me, I was bummed and feeling antsy.

How would I tide myself over for a whole WEEK, Castro-free??!?

But I tried spinning that Tuesday for the first time (as per @lewisisgood‘s recommendation), and let’s just say, QUOTA FULFILLED.

But you don’t have to take MY word for it:

“Carl’s spinning classes are better than a Barcelona discoteca while on stimulants.”

TL;DR: come spinning with me.

P.S. Of COURSE Carl/Karl is both the name of a spinning instructor in San Francisco AND the entirety of San Francisco’s fog. #duh

Thought #1: The gargoyles here are all hipsters.

I feel like I’m inside one of those dreams featuring you and all your friends in some magical definitely-not-real-yet-oddly-familiar location (partially constructed from somewhere you once lived, and partially constructed from Monterey Pop videos and partially from watching the Shit Silicon Valley Says videos 9 times before bed. One of those dreams where you keep running around doing things and seeing these people over and over, but if you were to wake up, you’d realize that it really doesn’t make sense for all of those people to be in the same place at the same time because they are from totally disjoint parts of your life and oh my god why is any of this happening.

But mostly I don’t live in the real world anymore because I actually live in the Internet.

Here’s how to move to San Francisco, Mo-style:

1 week before pre-move - start to think about facebook messaging your friends asking them if you can sleep on their couch while you look for an apartment. Instead, your friend Bhargav (who just moved out there and is in the couch-sleeping phase as well) asks you to move in with a third guy you’ve never met but is allegedly cool and Good Roommate Material. At this point it’s only been roughly five days since you were hanging out with Bhargav in Hong Kong and Singapore together, duh.

Crawl Padmapper for about 3 hours together, and have your on-location roomies check out the place, make you a FB album and take video. Beat out the other potential tenants and just fucking sign already, because you snagged an enormous sweet-ass place a couple doors down from Janis Joplin.

Pack your bags, er, boxes, and take them to the post office. Feel really good about this distributed-computing approach to moving across the country, fire up a fb event and throw yourself a going away barcrawl and party with everyone, except for the 50% of everyone from UIUC Computer Science who has already moved to San Francisco in the past year.

Farewell of #Champs

Day of move – Hop in a plane, feel weird that this is the first time you’re doing a permanent move in the 23 years of your life, despite having lived in every continental time zone in the US and a country each in Europe and Asia. While drinking tea in O’Hare, receive the first of many future texts that go like:

“Hey Mo, I’m flying in to SF from Philly with a couple friends this weekend. Wanna hang/show us around?”

Consider the ridiculousness of “showing someone around” a city you’ve been a resident of for under 24 hours, but of course accept enthusiastically and hop on your next flight.

Arrive at the airport and meet your new roommate for the first time IRL. Go home and dump your suitcase in a completely empty room and roll out the sleeping bag for later. See the 4 friends you have who are living within a 15-minute walk of you and give them the grand tour of your apartment, once you practice and work out which way is the kitchen and which way is the living room.

Barhop to half the places within a 5-minute walk of your place and witness more and more people show up throughout the evening. Meet some more internet friends IRL for the first time and talk to your friends about the web-tech companies they work at and the crazy and/or gorgeous people they have recently been talking to on OKCupid.

Coin the term #IPOIPA, and tweet it.

Friday

Wake up to find your roomies have already gone to work. Wander around the various empty large rooms of the apartment, playing music and wondering what to do with yourself. Tweet something about the Haight and make brunch plans with an internet friend who apparently lives in the neighborhood. Again, brunch spot is a 5 minute walk away. Wonder why all the other people at brunch don’t have jobs.

Post-brunch, wander around the neighborhood for a while and find out that yes actually EVERYTHING is a five minute walk away, and learn which street to walk on to avoid the hills. Shop your way around Haight Ashbury and see tourists taking pictures by Ben & Jerry’s and hear street performers and the Beatles kind of everywhere.

Go home and find the roof.

Receive a phone call from your new roommate at 4:26 PM. “Yelp IPO party. Get downtown now. Harlot. 2nd and Mission. I have a wristband for you. I can’t hear you, bye.”

Run for the nearest MUNI stop and get your ass to SoMa. Talk to the friendliest bouncer ever and walk in and instantly see Evan in the sea of 500 people at this bar. Talk to everyone and realize you recognize at least 10 people at this party. Congratulate them all on their IPO and confuse them by not being a Yelp employee, and then score mad points when you mention who your roommates are.

Follow a crowd of 20 people back to Yelp HQ so they can drop off / pick up their stuff. Start barcrawling your way around SoMa and wait way too long at Eat Box for 3 orders of window bar-food, that take at least 40 minutes longer to arrive than you were promised. Wonder if this could potentially result in some bad Yelp reviews (apparently, it didn’t). Hang out in Tempest for an hour and then follow some French dudes to The Mission.

Notice Yelp people peel off as you head around the Mission to random bars, meeting up with more new and old friends from school and previous internships and the internet using your roommate’s phone once yours has died.

Realize everything is working out FLAWLESSLY.
Realize via bathroom graffiti you’ve been hanging out at some classy venues this evening.
Decide IPOs are fun and clearly a normal part of life.

Saturday

Walk around the Haights, smell lots of weed when you walk by Buena Vista Park.

Meet up with people in Dolores Park and watch the hipsters. Check Instagram occasionally and realize everyone else you know in the entire city is also somewhere in this hipster swarm beach. Don’t try to meet up with them though because that would be impossible.

Wait for your south bay friends to arrive on your doorstep. Spend a while naming the Facebook group for this friend group. Try to get Ramen at Izakaya Sozai but fail because people take forever to eat ramen, apparently. Go to a nearby chinese place and call it done.

Go back to your place and sit on the floor because there is no furniture yet and make drinks and call cabs.

Realize getting out of the Haight on a Saturday night is an incredible challenge (but don’t learn from this anytime soon). Finally find a couple of cabs to take you club-wards and go hang out in Butter and receive a text along the lines of “be right there I just need to take four shots.” Meet internet friends and go to Bootie across the street. Dance your ass off for many hours and tweet about it mid-dancefloor. Hope your friend does not sustain injuries from falling off one of the dancing blocks.

Wind up under the golden gate at 4:30 AM and decide it’s probably time to go home, though nothing is particularly stopping you at this point.

Sunday

Wake up the forces. Go get some crepes.

Use your party people for good, not evil, and move the entire contents of Evan’s U-Haul into the apartment. Get it done in under an hour. High five and enjoy the breakfast nook.

Go to Sleep Train and buy beds and feel like the Princess and the Pea. Go to IKEA and feel like Zooey Deschanel. Pick out a rug whose color is optimal for spilling a variety of everything on it (red).

Meet up with Yelpers at night at the local brewpub and listen to their startup idea and call them out on it being Silicon Valley Bullshit.

(But still tell them to make the app because you would use it).

Discuss the Foursquare names for each of your respective apartments.

Hang out in your brand new living room and spill drinks on your new rug, just as promised. HOME.

The weekend is over, but don’t let the internetyness stop there. Get San Francisco blog recommendations from your barista on an iPad in a cafe where each and every patron is on an Apple device. Make Friday night plans on Path and in reaction to Foursquare notifications. Don’t hit up the club for your favorite swedish DJs until 11:30 PM because they tweeted they wouldn’t be going on until midnight. Sit in your friend’s living room with her cat and troll OKCupid and have the cat Skype your friend who lives a mile away. Sit in Mission bars and bitch about particularly pretentious Instagram feeds.

HOME SWEET HOME, INTERNETS.

Singapore is run by a benevolent dictator who has spent the past couple of decades turning this country into a well-oiled socialist machine, that people seem legit happy with because it’s working out pretty well for everyone.

Yeah yeah don’t spit your gum, but loiter outside 7-11 and mix your cocktails.

One thing about traveling is that you learn your own countrymen’s stereotypes about the places you’re visiting. Just tell people, “Oh I’m about to travel to ______.” and let the stereotypes spout forth. For Singapore, the first thing any American tells you is that you can be thrown in jail for spitting out your gum on the sidewalk. I suppose this is meant to indicate they’re really strict in Singapore?

However, upon arrival, we immediately realized that this was the ONLY information we knew about Singapore, and that it was effectively useless. First of all, WHO SPITS THEIR GUM ON THE STREET, that’s just a jerk move. Alright, some people must, but I have never done this before and wasn’t about to start. Second of all, this is useless info because it doesn’t give you a sense of ANY OTHER LAWS in Singapore. We saw people jaywalking everywhere, which doesn’t seem to jive with the crazy-strict vibe of the no gum rule, so we were like, are all these people risking their lives jaywalking? Or is it just like any other place in the world? Hmmmm. (We jaywalked.)

Turns out, the gum rule was instated after they started construction of the MRT (subway system) and people vandalized it by putting gum in the doors, causing them to stick closed. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH GUYS, no more gum.

Here’s a more practical list of subway rules. Try really hard to remember not to bring durian, because it smells bad (though, there doesn’t seem to be any fine…?)

Okay, so don’t spit your gum, but you can drink and smoke in public (no open container laws, plenty of smokers), and you can apparently also loiter in front of 7-11 mixing cocktails. We wandered into a 7-11 around 12:30 AM one night and sitting outside on the curb was a group of three or four teenagers (definitely looked really young). They had an impressive array of supplies: plastic cups and bottles of liquor and mixers, and were actually sitting there making drinks.

KEEP IT CLASSY, SINGAPOREAN YOUTH.

Culture and Language Mishmash

There are four official languages in Singapore: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. So there’s a huge mix of different people and each minority group is really huge. According to my friend Yan, kids growing up are required to learn the language of their ethnic background — so Chinese kids study Mandarin, etc. It’s not clear to me how many of these people are speaking the language at home as well, but school is normally taught in English. According to Wikipedia, the second language taught is determined by the father’s ethnicity. Interesting.

It was pretty common to be surrounded by 3-4 different languages at a time, and signage could be really lengthy/complicated since everything had to be translated into the FOUR different languages.

There is some geographical segregation of the different ethnic groups — Little India, and Chinatown for example, but I felt like it could have been way more segregated than it was.

Staying in Chinatown

We stayed at Winkhostel, a brand new hostel in Chinatown and apparently the best hostel in Singapore. It was really nicely designed and well-located for foodie adventures. The security was better than any other hostel I’ve been to — you got swipe cards for the rooms and your own personal lockers, also with key cards. The beds were pod-style and had nice green lights.

Winkhostel was a little less social than other hostels I’ve been to. I think this is partially because the only air-conditioned rooms were the bedrooms, where people tend to avoid talking if there’s sleepers, and not everyone was as excited as I was to hang out in un-airconditioned sweat-inducing temperatures. Also as my travel buddies suggested, not everyone’s English was as good as travelers in say, European hostels. I did talk to a couple of people, who seemed cool, and ended up having a very bizarre relationship with the dude at the front desk, who would give me useful tips (like to check out the parade going on a block away) but also question my travel habits, e.g. why are you not napping before your 5:30 AM flight???? No seriously, your friends are napping, you should too!!

The answer to this (and all questions, of why I might not be doing something, ever) was of course: Dude, I’ll get to it MAYBE, I’m busy reading the internet.

Aforementioned parade, with master photobomber

Places to Go

Merlion – Singapore’s weird-ass mascot. “Singapura” means lion and fish is fish, so clearly. It’s out by the bay where you should be going anyway, for good views of the city and to check out the Marina Bay Sands.

Marina Bay Sands – Kind of the most amazing hotel ever. How’d they get a boat on it!?

The most important thing about this hotel is that there is an infinity pool on the ROOF. The problem is, only hotel guests are allowed to swim, so you’d best be booking a night there. We made the mistake of not doing that and were full of tears and regrets.

I mean, this hotel is cool enough to basically be the subject of an entire Martin Solveig video.

We did manage to spend an evening on the roof though (tragically outside the pool) by going to the Chocolate Bar on top of the Marina Bay Sands. At the very least, do this. Go forth and be decadent.

Stand on the balcony on the opposite side from the pool, cuz hey, boats! (I like boats!)

Okay I swear I’m shutting up about Marina Bay Sands now.

Orchard Road – Mall country. You cannot cross a street without being sucked into a 4-5 story underground mall.

This is how it works: “Oh hey, there’s a big road and no crosswalk, but looks like we just have to enter that glass bubble thing to cross the street…

…oops.

15 minutes later, $15 at MUJI and a takoyaki snack later, you have re-emerged on the other side of the street. Why were we crossing the street again? I’ve already forgot. Let’s go back to MUJI instead. Or maybe let’s explore one of the 29 other malls.

Siloso Beach

Take the MRT from HarbourFront and get off at the beach stop. Lie down on the beach and be really happy because you are on the beach and it’s February out. Go in the water and it will be warm and the seaweed is cute instead of disgusting. Also, Siloso Beach appears to be the beach with the fewest children, which is probably the most important beach-selection criterion. Party tunes emanate from the bars behind us.

This is how each of us felt about being on the beach, and also how I felt when Boyce spilled his smoothie on me. Verdict: his smoothie was yummy! But smoothie bodyshots, probably not for me.

Wander over and find some rocks when it’s time to go think on rocks.

Haw Par Villa / Tiger Balm Gardens – A strange park where you get a tour of the Ten Courts of Hell, and you learn which sins on Earth result in which punishments in Hell, and illustrate said punishments it through creepy sculptures. Here’s a helpful sample of the crime/punishment menu:

Other fun part about visiting, you can legit tell your travel buddies to go to Hell.

Also, there are some animals with guns. Might also has something to do with Hell.

That’s pretty much all we did that didn’t have to do with food or partying, so stay tuned for the next two posts!

After extensive googling and asking friends, it became clear that the two party places to check out in Hong Kong are Wan Chai and Lan Kwai Fong. Wan Chai is semi-chill and LKF is very dance/clubby, so it makes sense to hang out in Wan Chai on the weekdays and LKF on the weekends (it is slightly RIDICULOUS on weekends). Also stay tuned for a romantic picnic spot and some incoherent sentences about the highest bar in the world.

Wan Chai – just go to Carnegie’s and dance on the bar

Children, gather round, it’s time for your lesson on Wan Chai!

Wan Chai is kinda old, grungy in a good way, and full of ex-pat bars and topless bars — it’s got a red-lighty history but seems tame these days. There are people out and about any night of the week, up and down Lockhart Road, but it can be sort of a weird crowd. Lots of older ex-pat dudes in groups, sometimes accompanied by local and/or southeast asian ladies (prostitutes? probs). Outside each nude bar was always a little old asian lady sitting there, but she didn’t do much to try and solicit us in. Not really our scene, old white dudes and hookers.

For a more student-aged crowd, follow the internet’s advice and go to Carnegie’s on a Tuesday or Wednesday (why YES, they DO have an angelfire website!)

But be warned: as soon as you step inside Carnegie’s, you will no longer be in Hong Kong, but in total ex-pat/exchange-student/traveler’s Narnia. White people THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.

For my Lund friends, Carnegie’s is just like stepping inside of VGs on Wednesdays / Kalmars on Tuesdays (all exchange students all the time!) Seriously, the resemblance was eerie…
Same playlist /waka waka.
Same demographics (Australians, New Zealanders, and Germans, I swear you’re EVERYWHERE.)
Same “It’s Tuesday And Therefore We Must Party” attitude.

Also, Carnegie’s is apparently THE ONLY PLACE.

I went there both Tuesdays, and then after the horse races in Wan Chai (a Wednesday), the exchange students we had just met and were hanging with were like,
“We’re going out in Wan Chai, want to come?”
“Maybe, where to?”
“Carnegie’s, where else?!”
SERIOUSLY??? I have been in this country for seven days and already know to be affectionately annoyed that we always go to that place. (Like I said, it’s Hong Kong VGs.)

So the deal with Tuesdays is that vodka-based drinks cost 10 HKD = $1.25, so yes, people are ordering (and consuming) in bulk. I wouldn’t wear my favorite shoes.

The other deal with Carnegie’s is that when the clock strikes midnight, you are GETTING ON THAT BAR and doing it Katy Perry style.

11:59 PM…

MIDNIGHT. And life is like this.

When you’re done getting your Sexy And You Know It on, go get keBABs at Ebeneezer’s with everyone and scream and shout, then hop in a cab and go home. Good job, you’ve just Wan Chai’d.

Lan Kwai Fong – Let’s cram all the party of Hong Kong into a two block radius.

I have never seen a more densely-packed party district. You sort of wonder what the point of having streets is, and then you remember that if there were no streets there wouldn’t be enough room for people to stand. This place is INFESTED with partiers on Fridays and Saturdays.

When you see this mural, you know you’re basically in the right place. (It’s not that hard though, go to Central and follow the exits to Lan Kwai Fong).

If it’s a weekday, you can chill at any of the numerous bars and sit outside people-watching. No bars really seem to have doors/very many walls, everything is very open and inside/outside run together. It’s seriously tiny, but everything is a bar or a club. Illustrated by this really wonky map of LKF.

If it’s Friday or Saturday though, not a lot of sitting will be going on because this will be happening:

I think it would be physically impossible to go to LKF and go to *a* bar. First of all, it’s totally unclear sometimes where one bar starts and another one ends, due to the general lack of storefronts/walls, and second of all, it’s a party tidal wave and you’d best just ride it out, wherever the current takes you.

Case in point, we stopped into one bar, Stormies, because we were mildly overwhelmed and this place looked relatively empty/calm. Then:

Me: “This looks like a chill place. Let’s just stop here and get a beer.”DJ: “EVERYONE IN THE BAR GETS FREE SHOTS”Cue “Shots” by LMFAO.

— Robert Boyce (@rboyce) February 10, 2012

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen bartenders pouring shots DIRECTLY into PEOPLE’S MOUTHS from the liqueur bottles before. Like, ALL CASUAL and stuff too. We spent a lot of time on this trip trying to identify precisely where the Zombie epidemic would start in Hong Kong, and in retrospect I think Lan Kwai Fong is a likely candidate. Zombies take note: start the apocalypse on a Saturday night.

So, clubbing.

I was told by an internet friend to go to Beijing Club, but when Boyce and I got in line there, we were shuffled by a bouncer to a different line a block away, for Magnum Club. Turns out this is a new place (looks like it opened in the past few months), so maybe that’s why they herded us that way.

Although the streets of Lan Kwai Fong were filled with trashy, trashed white people (the young ex-pats strike again), once we got into the club it was suddenly 100% well-dressed Chinese twentysomethings. We were literally the only non-Chinese people we saw for the next three hours. But if these people were never in the LKF street crowd, WHERE WERE THEY? And how did they even get to the club?!?!

Entering the club was as Twilight Zone-y as entering Carnegies in Wan Chai was, but in reverse: going from ex-pat zombie crowd -> Chinese mob.

The club itself was a well-executed, definition-of-club type club: club music, club lights, club outfits, club djs. I was really excited when they played Knife Party because that song is a) ridiculous, b) involves The Internet and blocking people on Facebook, c) Zombie-apocalypse appropriate, and d) danceable in a cray way.

Knife Party – Internet Friends by Knife Party

Queue the several hours of dancing. I wasn’t sure how into dancing Hong Kong peeps would be, but this crowd did not disappoint. They seemed like young professionals (lots of suits) rather than students, which isn’t surprising considering the outrageous cover, but also mostly guys, which is REALLY surprising, considering the outrageous cover…

The Outrageous Cover:
For girls – free.
For dudes – $400 HKD = $50 USD WHAAAAAAAT (okay, not as bad since mine was free, so we split it, but STILL.)

And yet, the club was somehow FULL of dudes. Boyce didn’t feel like it was super sausage-festy, meaning there were probably girls around there somewhere who I never actually saw because I was too busy being literally swarmed by dudes. Who were unexpectedly aggressive. Not in a scary way, or anything…but just, AGGRESSIVE. One guy who I had not yet seen, talked to, or danced with, who was standing a few people away from me, shoved his phone past 3 innocent bystanders and into my face, asking for my number. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT’S WITH THE LONG-RANGE NUMBER-GRAB ATTEMPT? Perhaps swarmy tendencies were further aggravated by me being the only foreign female in the establishment? Or maybe they were extra ragin’ because of whole $400 cover situation, who knows. Maybe this is just how things work in Hong Kong.

But so, so strange.

Eventually we left the club because it was 3:30 AM, and we hadn’t finished our LKF tour yet. We wandered into Club 97, which was a more Wan Chai style club, with a bunch of 19-year old looking dudes jumping and hitting this low-hanging vent at the back of the club for some unbeknownst reason. But it was annoying and we left, heading for old faithful 7-11, and then sat on the curb people-watching as the zombie-mob walked down the hill when 4 AM rolled around and the bars and clubs began to close.

We watched, entertained, as some dude puked down the street from us. We knew it was time to leave when a dude with a bleeding head (bottle smashed on it, perhaps?) sat down next to us to chill for a sec, with his friends. They looked harmless, but, come on, bleeding head? Cab time, BYE.

In conclusion…
Lan Kwai Fong probably had as much party mojo as the entire city of Lund, except that it was all packed into a 2 block radius instead of distributed evenly across town. I hereby challenge all future travel destinations to outdo LKF’s ridiculousity. Best of luck.

For a Super-Romantic Evening, Head to the IFC Mall Rooftop

Okay, you’re totally overwhelmed by Carnegie’s and LKF, and it’s time for a relaxed, romantic evening. Go to the IFC Mall Rooftop and have a picnic! Stare at the view of Kowloon, and ask someone to marry you.

The chairs/tables on the roof are for the public, but there’s a real bar here too. Also, lots of color-changing lights.

Then, take pictures with the pretty lights, and call it a successful evening. The mall is open until 1 AM so you have plenty of time, and on the way out be sure to stop by the bathrooms in the mall, because they are super-nice and you can get your shoes shined in the men’s room, as reported by Bhargav.

Ozone – Highest Bar in the World

I have no more energy to write anything even partially coherent here, but it’s on the friggin’ 118th floor. Drinks cost infinity dollars, and it’s ritztastic.

Don’t go on a foggy day like we did (oops) and get no view. It could have been 118 floors underground for all we know.

Which might actually have been MORE AWESOME.

Do bring your friends to Ozone, unless you want to hang out with groups of old asian businessmen, who are the only people who can afford this place and want to be at a bar 118 floors in the sky in a district where there is nothing else going on.

So, there is fun to be had in Hong Kong. QED.

How to Find Food

The only internet tool you need to aid in restaurant selection is OpenRice, Hong Kong’s Yelp equivalent. I recommend filtering by the location and then by dish or restaurant style – there is so much good food around that you shouldn’t really bother crossing town for something. Pay attention to prices and photos on OpenRice, and even if you can’t read chinese, it’s sometimes worth clicking on those reviews for the pictures.

Option B is to wander the streets, and though I did this if I was out shopping (okay, actually I would just go to the SOGO basement and buy takoyaki) it’s too easy to become paralyzed by choice. Just OpenRice it.

Dim Sum

Why hello Hong Kong. We come in peace, and in search of Dim Sum.

I mean, who doesn’t? Dim sum isn’t difficult to find in major US cities, but between the trek over to your local Chinatown and the social barrier to choosing dim sum over traditional (read: pancakes, omelets, and mimosas) brunch, the dim sum stars align less frequently than I would hope back home, particularly in large groups.

But with a dim-sum-ready team of travelers and readily available goods on nearly every block, all obstacles were vanquished. We sleep in, we wake up, and we DIM SUM IT!! to our hearts’ content.

The dim sum report is that actually, much of the available dishes were pretty similar to ones that exist in the US. Typically there was a bit more variety, but we didn’t see anything incredibly surprising on the menu or on other peoples’ tables.

The big difference though, was that every item had approximately 170% the flavor of the dim sum I’m accustomed to. This is your tongue on drugs? No, this is your tongue on Hong Kong dim sum.

If you’re ready to get militant about dim sum, apparently the place to go is Tim Ho Wan, a Michelin one-star restaurant. I’m sure it’s lovely, but we stopped by one day and the queueing was of the variety I normally reserve for Swedish clubs. In light of me being in the final stages of recovery from Post-Traumatic Queue Exhaustion after a semester in Scandinavia, we passed. And still ate plenty of good dim sum, elsewhere.

The hardest part about dim sum blogging is that since your food comes out one dish at a time, you will have the urge to just dig in, and may forget to photograph it…so I don’t even have pictures of some of the best things we ate. Alas.

One other tip: what are dim sum restaurants by day are often hot pot restaurants by night (dim sum is more of a lunch thing, hot pot a dinner affair). Which brings us to…

Hot Pot

A wintertime classic, hot pot is a mandatory experience in Hong Kong, as well as an exercise in teamwork. Bring four or five of your best friends to Tao Heung in Tsim Sha Tsui and put your name down on the list. While you wait, play in the electronics store downstairs, Fortress. Then head to 7-11, and loiter in a staircase for 15 minutes before heading back up to the restaurant.

When you finally get a seat, begin Challenge 1: Battle the Cantonese-only menu and order based on pictures (roughly 1/4 of the menu), color-coded lists of Cantonese words (the rest of the menu), using a combination of luck and basic kanji mastery.

Our results: We ordered WAY too much food.

After you order, they bring out a bunch of things and you make your own sauce. SO many things. Jane’s expert strategy was to just dump everything in in large quantities, and hers at least appeared to be the most delicious, so that’s the algorithm I’d advise.

Challenge 2: Order the dish pictured below.

We pulled this off successfully by pointing at the table next to us (who had received this before us), making hand gestures, and using the words “rice” and “leaf”. Not sure which of those steps were essential, YMMV.

Finally, our hot pot arrived, along with 20 plates of our mystery-order food (the waitresses were sort of giving us weird looks). Throw it in!

Hot pot is very similar to Japanese nabemono, although the dipping sauce is different and the Hong Kong version seems to involve more fish balls. (Either that, or we just ordered too many fish balls.) We also ordered this tube of fishball paste, where you squeeze it out of a tube (like icing a cake!) and it makes sort of a fishball noodle in the hotpot. Pro tip: cut the fish-noodle before squeezing the entire tube into the pot in one, long string.

The tofu rolls in the next photo (bottom right corner and just above the plate of meat) were fun — submerge them in the water with your chopsticks for ~30 seconds, sauce them up real good, and enjoy.

If anyone can identify the white stuff in the bottom left corner (yes, that’s what she said) please tell me what it is, because it tasted good but none of us could figure it out. Mushroom? Fish-based? Alien intestines?

In Japanese families doing nabe, there’s typically one family member who completely dominates all things nabe – temperature, when to put in what, when to take it out. I believe the technical term for this control freak is a nabe-bugyou in Japanese, a bugyou being a certain feudal-period shogun administrator. I’m not sure if there are nabe-bugyou in Hong Kong style hot pot, but none of us were particularly domineering, so after about an hour of hot pot our pace dropped off considerably, yet we kept slowly trying to push forward and consume most of what we’d ordered.

After people started dropping off like flies, we gave up, got the bill (surprisingly low), and headed back to HK Island, only partially defeated by the hot pot experience.

By far our most intense and epic meal. (For locals, this was probably just Regular Ordinary Cantonese Meal Time).

Cha Chaan Teng

Think Hong Kong-style diner. A wide range of comfort food, including pastries and omelets, but also sandwiches and meat, so you can choose whether you’re feeling more breakfast, more lunch, or both. This NYTimes Travel article explains cha chaan tengs pretty well.

We went to Honolulu Coffee Shop in Wan Chai one day for our usual 2 PM brunchtime. Went both breakfast and lunch, ordering egg tarts, an egg & pork with rice dish, and sandwiches (not pictured).

See, kinda dinery? I drank some yuanyang, a mixture of coffee and milk tea, making it taste like a cantonese bizarro chai bomb.

Friggin’ amazing. Huge fan of egg tarts and how they’re just slightly sweet. And flaky.

Props to Bhargav for capturing ALL THE YUMMY of this dish in one fabulous photo

Char Siu at Joy Hing

Here’s one where we were Doing It Right, thanks to Bhargav’s local resident friend, YinTing, who helped us follow in the footsteps of Anthony Bourdain. She brought us to Joy Hing, a char siu (bbq pork/other meat) restaurant deserving of its own Wikipedia page, and totally took charge. Like a boss.

Basically, all I can say is MEAT. Go there. Order some stuff. Eat it.

The green stuff is full of garlic and incredible.

Tan Tan Noodles

This was purely an OpenRice discovery — the best Hong Kong style food in our immediate vicinity while staying in Tin Hau was a restaurant called Sister Wah, a tiny hole-in-the-wall place like Joy Hing, serving Tan Tan noodles, which we discovered were incredible. The broth was very peanuty, and the dumplings were probably the best dumplings in a soup I’ve ever had. The only problem was that I could only eat approximately 1/3 of the noodles. Luckily, my travel buddies left a less embarrassing amount of noodles in their bowls.

Other Asian Food

Just because you’re in Hong Kong, don’t feel pressure to eat chinese food for every meal, as they have delicious eats from all around asia. The thai food we had in SoHo was very interesting (no pics, sorry) and didn’t taste anything like thai food I’ve had in the US. Having not been to Thailand I can’t comment on authenticity. That restaurant was where I discovered that my maximum mango enjoyment comes in the form of mango + sticky rice.

Time for a whirlwind tour of our non-chinese asian eats.

Indian Food at ChungKing Mansions – a giant apartment complex full of apartments-turned-Indian-restaurants. At the bottom, you’ll be hassled with flyers from each of the restaurants, so find the one you want and you’ll be led up some sketch-ass stairs to your restaurant. Ours was called Taj Mahal and pretty yummy, but not super spicy. Here’s the fish masala, my favorite of our selections.

Korean food at Arisu – where they start with completely the appropriate amount of kim chee. Do Korean bbq, and try the seafood pancake, which seems to be Korean okonomiyaki. It’s sort of like hot pot, but less of an Event and more like dinner.

Japanese Ramen at Ippudo – a Japanese chain that has come to Hong Kong in the last couple of years. I’ve had better ramen, but it was still quite yummy, and who doesn’t love some spoon decor?

Japanese snacks from 7-11 – I told you we were addicted. Let’s get Crunky and Meltykiss! This is what Katy Perry would do at 7-11 if she ended up there on a Friday Night.

Don’t forget your shanghai food

When you’re exhausted thinking about all your food options, don’t forget about your garden variety chinese restaurants. Our favorite was Shanghai 3.6.9, down the street from our Wan Chai crib. It was the very first place we ate in Hong Kong, around midnight after the 13 hour flight.

Tired and jetlagged, this is when we realized: well-chosen vacation destination, team.

If you’re still hungry, check out CNNGo’s 40 Hong Kong foods we can’t live without.

6 Reasons Hong Kong feels like being in Blade Runner:

1. Hong Kong looks like Blade Runner. Duh.
2. It never seems to sleep (e.g. everything happens at night).
3. Similar mixture of Asian people/food/languages with western ones
4. Both have pretty reasonable technological advancement. I think HK has fewer replicants, but at least they have full cell connectivity EVERYWHERE in the metro, even in tunnels. Good job making progress towards the expected tech accomplishments by 2019, HK.
5. In both places people mostly seem to mind their own business, and not stare at you or care what you’re doing. Unless you’re Harrison Ford, in a bar. That man cannot seem to stay out of trouble in bars.
6. Blade Runner would’ve been filmed in Hong Kong if it could’ve. (Thanks Marquis!)

Looks like Blade Runner

City. Mountains. Water. Three of my favorite things, together. In fact, I think this should be a requirement for any city (I suppose it sorta was back in the day, when boats were the only thing going on.)

As far as cities go, Hong Kong is GOOD-LOOKING. First of all, it has some sexy topology. Flying into Hong Kong is a definitively 3D experience. You feel like you’re docking your spaceship in Coruscant rather than landing on a 2D map.

But like human beings, Hong Kong is prettier at night. Suddenly you’re at the top of Victoria Peak and you are looking over all the skyscrapers like you’re Batman.

The Peak Tram is probably the most touristy thing I’ve done in my LIFE, but one way or another you MUST get yourself up to Victoria Peak. Non-negotiable.

Or you can cross over to the peninsula (the Kowloon side) and you get a crazy-nice view of HK Island. The nightly light show starts at 8 PM, which will make you wonder if the entire city is actually a TV screen. Cue a creepy-crawly feeling about consumerist modern society, slight existential questioning, and cheesy light-show music.

So take your pick. Blade Runner, Coruscant, Batman, Ghost in the Shell, or pretty much any other vertical city with flying spaceships that seems only to operate at night, and you’ve got the city layout down.

English and Cantonese

British rule technically ended in Hong Kong in 1997, and Catonese and English are the two official languages, yet I was surprised to see how much English there was around. Every sign, most menus, even our elevator signage (see previous post). Having never been in Asia outside of Japan before, where I could speak the language, this felt very weird at first due to the high crossover between written Chinese and written Japanese. I could ~read the signs, but they all were translated into English anyway, and I couldn’t understand what anyone around me was saying.

It felt like I was in Tokyo, except someone had removed the part of my brain that knows Japanese (a perennial fear/nightmare of mine) and simultaneously subtitled the ENTIRE COUNTRY. Gahhhh.

No resting!!!

Before embarking, I learned a tiny, tiny amount of Cantonese (via Pimsleur) which was almost entirely useless, except for of course, the two things Pimsleur is ALWAYS good for:

1) Knowing what the cab driver was talking about when you hop in and he’s like, “Bindouh wa?” (SHOCKER, it means, “where to?”) Sidenote: cabs are really cheap there. You can effectively cross the city for about $9 USD and there’s no tipping. There are cabs everywhere. Never feel stranded after 1 AM when the MTR stops).

2) Flirting in clubs when locals ask if you can speak any Cantonese, and then blurting out the one or two sentences you can actually say (but at least you can say them WELL, thanks to the Pimsleur repetition strategy). Seriously, this is the main application of Pimsleur and I think they know it. They teach you “I can’t speak [language you're learning]“, “beer”, “wine”, and “your place or my place?” with a few other things thrown in on the side. I see where all this is going, 1960s-era language method).

Mostly, getting by on English was very doable, though we didn’t go anywhere particularly remote. Most people at stores and restaurants aren’t going to speak English to you like at all, but they will ~understand what you say and do the right thing. They just won’t really speak in sentences to you. If you ask for something, they sort of look at you and often spew something off in Cantonese to another restaurant worker, etc. It was disconcerting enough that if I lived there, I would definitely want to pick up more Cantonese, though I imagine it would be hard to get practice since you’re not fully immersed in it often.

The only total Failure to Communicate situation happened when I was trying to buy laundry detergent. From 7-11. Then a drugstore. Then a grocery. Then finding it in the grocery. Each time, I struggled greatly with what the appropriate charade for “laundry detergent” is. It’s really hard to point at your own clothing in a meaningful way, without pointing at yourself. I eventually did find laundry detergent, no tears involved, but in the future I would have looked up the word before setting out for something that you don’t know is FOR SURE at 7-11.

Where the Fuck Do You Walk?

HK has a population density that’s allegedly the same as Manhattan (70k per square mile in the developed parts) but it feels roughly 4x as crowded. Seriously, PEOPLE, they’re everywhere. Japan sort of immunized me to crowded asian cities (Osaka Loop line before a concert, anyone? Tokyo at rush hour?) but there were two very weird things about Hong Kong and crowds:

1) The subways are not that crowded. In fact, even at rush hour, I don’t think my body ever touched strangers’ bodies inside the trains. The train *stations* were incredibly crowded — hordes of people on the escalators, going through the turnstiles… the throughput of the MTR was highly impressive, but each individual train car was still comfortable. Rush hour in Tokyo, you are being sardined into the train car by the 7 people you’re effectively spooning with, and you’d better hope your hands and your phone were already at eye level, because you won’t have room to move your arms. But in Hong Kong, I saw people actually WAIT FOR THE NEXT TRAIN instead of cramming in. No one touched each other — perhaps they have a more British sense of personal space?

The station is sorta crowded…why not the trains?

2) There is no correct side to walk on. UMMM!??!?! This is my first encounter with a culture that has not figured it out. In the US (and most of Europe I’ve been to), walk on the right. In Japan, walk on the left. And on escalators, there’s a standing side and a waiting side (in Japan which side is which depends on whether you’re in Kansai or Kanto, but in each place it’s at least CONSISTENT).

But no, in Hong Kong, just… MADNESS. CLOWNTOWN. Escalators were (generally) stand-right walk-left, but once you got off the escalator, the staircase might be the opposite way, and once you’re on the street GOOD LUCK, KIDS. The worst part is that in train stations, there are often arrows on the floor/walls to direct traffic, and from station to station, which side the arrows are on varies. Is that *really* necessary?

In light of this, I advise against walking-and-texting in Hong Kong.

I think the ambivalence about which side to walk on contributes to the overcrowdedness and mass chaos. Team Ramen also felt it might be indicative of a culture that was sort of refusing to make up its mind about some things.

Navigating this is your warmup.

Simple solution: spaceships and flying cars.

HECTIC!!! Hong Kong: 5 Places

1) Tsim Sha Tsui, for the food. Kowloon side, first MTR station. Come here 7 PM or later and it will just be madness. It’s also where some amazing food goes on. In this particular picture, where we got spicy crab and ate on the street (around Temple Street, probs), but Tsim Sha Tsui is also where we got Hot Pot, Korean food, Indian food, etc. Just be prepared for dinner to take a while, and that you probably will have to wait. The locals don’t seem to have a huge drinking culture, instead food culture is central, and people seem to spend all evening at dinner. Restaurants will be just as busy at 7 PM as 11 PM, and I never saw one closed before like, midnight (San Francisco can we do this, pretty please?)

I think too much spice/garlic to the crab ratio at this place, but spicy crab is theoretically a good idea

2) Ladies’ Market – I bought an excellent purse here. You’ll have to bargain for stuff; start with ~half the asking price. Also, do Temple Street at night.

3) Filipino nannies/maids all over Statue Square on Sunday afternoons. It’s a thing.

4) Causeway Bay if you want to shop like you’re a teenage girl in Osaka (which I do). Go to SOGO in the morning, Island Beverly Centre after 1 or 2 PM (they only open in the afternoon, presumably for the schoolgirls), and visit all the shoe/clothing stores along Lockhart Road just north of SOGO. World Trade Centre (another block north) for your Uniqlo and MUJI fix. Takoyaki is in the basement of SOGO, as expected. Also, go to Retrostone for vintage stuff.

Two of my fave stores: Apostrophe, where I walked in and asked to buy the jacket the shopkeeper was wearing. She said “Okay but you should wear it in brown.” (hers was black). I tried on both colors and she was right (They always are. Ugh, I love shopping in Asia.) Second store, BESS, felt like an Anthro for slightly more edgy but equally rich girls. I purchased the only jacket I could afford.

Like, a third of the stuff I picked up. And Causeway Bay is just ONE good shopping district of HK.

5) Happy Valley horse races in Wan Chai on Wednesday Nights. Full of old ex-pats gambling on horses and drinking beer. Starts at 7, last race happens around 11 PM so you have a nice wide window in which to get dinner in Tsim Sha Tsui and then head to Wan Chai.

Now that you think you’re going to explode, time to chill out.

Calm Hong Kong: 5 Places

1) Kowloon Walled City Park – This used to be a super-dense mishmash of apartments built on top of each other, and very slummy, back in the day. Sounded pretty creepy and horrible, but it was demolished in the 90s and now there’s a nice park there instead. There’s bonsai! We went at dusk and it was peaceful though maybe a bit eerie.

A gate and some old stones are the only thing left, and we did many a photoshoot there. Here’s Boyce swaggin’ it by the ruins.

2) Hong Kong Park

There’s an excellent tower, from which I took the first picture in this post. Also, we were pretty big fans of the Tai Chi garden and its many statues we abused.

3) Place on the way down from the central mid-level escalators

The Central Mid-level escalators is the longest set of covered, outdoor escalators in the world (FUN FACT!) and riding them takes you on a walking tour of SoHo (lots of nice-looking restaurants) but without the walking. Eventually if you ride ALL the escalators (this takes a while) you end up alone at the end, the tourists mysteriously having disappeared from your side (how did they all know when to get off, anyway?) You’re standing on a road in super-residential Hong Kong. So what now? Luckily, I have the answer for you.

Turn left, and walk down Conduit Road for a while, until you see this staircase. Then take it, and you’ll be in a magical world under the roads, and the coolest place we found in Hong Kong.

I like it because it’s quiet, peaceful, and green, but you’re still reminded that you’re in Hong Kong since there are literally cars driving over your head. Real jungle meets concrete jungle. I also found a good spot to perch.

Photo by Jane Dinh

After you pass by this point, you will wander into the Botanical Gardens/Zoo, which had a very Jurassic Park feel to it.

4) Cyberport – It’s not really near anything, but I befriended some Australians who lived out here and this is the view they wake up to. Daily. UMMM??? The only thing better than finding awesome views while on hikes is finding them in your living room. So either go befriend some randos who live here too, or else try to get similar views from HKU.

I learned in HK and Singapore that I have a thing for views with lots of cargo ships and islands in the distance.

5) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – More crazy views and an entirely vertical school.

This is where Nelson is studying abroad (so jelly that he’s still in HK) and the layout of this school is ridiculous.

All the classes are in a single building and then you take a 10-story elevator down to the dorm (no floors in between, it’s pretty much a vertical tube), and then take another 10-story elevator down and you’re ON THE BEACH.

A few last tips about places

- If you like running, try Happy Valley (awesome view, you get to feel like a horse) and Victoria Park (nice running track, workout equipment scattered around it).
- Go to 7-11 religiously. It is your Japanese snack food haven, source of hydration, entertainment while waiting, and cell phone minute replenishment. They are everywhere.
- Stay somewhere convenient. We Airbnb‘d places in Wan Chai and Tin Hau for 5 days each, and these were crazy convenient and almost as cheap as hostels. Tin Hau was also next door to Victoria Park and Causeway Bay, so a good base for shopaholics. Beware though that your place may be so nice that you just stay in all day, watching Breaking Bad and reading metafilter. There’s no shame in that though, as you have all night to go eat dinner, watch horses race, and experience the Cantonese magic that is Hong Kong.

Wondering where’s the dim sum? Worry not. Posts on HK food and partying, plus all the Singapore stuff, coming up!

Despite Team Ramen picking Hong Kong and Singapore for our post-graduation travels, 95% for the dim sum and other asian cuisine, we also figured focusing on post-British-colonial-megaurban-Asia might uncover some interesting cultural mishmashyness.

So here we have it, episode 1, our elevator. Here’s the photo (from right outside our apartment), and let’s deconstruct below!

So the strange thing going on here (and props to Boyce for noticing this first) is that the numbers in Chinese and English DO NOT MATCH. It says “13th floor” in English, but the numerals in Chinese are for the number “14″. Um. Kind of strange that those do not say the same thing, right??

Except then we realized that we are “really” on floor 14, because looking at the buttons inside the elevator, there’s a G floor (where we enter/exit) and the next one up is 1, British-style. Apparently in Chinese it’s the same way we do it in America, where the ground floor is 1 and the next one up is 2?

So the answer to the question of “What floor we live on” would be:

14 – in Chinese
13 – in British
14 – in American, confusingly (for us) not listed on the signage, because this is a former BRITISH colony, yo. (So is America, but I’m pretty sure the Brits left before they could imperialize their elevator systems on us). Of course, in American we would also have to be on the 14th floor because there IS NO 13th STORY, DUH!! Did no one here read Sideways Stories from Wayside School?