Visa Run, Part II: 深圳 Shēnzhèn and 香港 (xiānggăng、 Hong Kong)

Shenzhen is very expensive compared to home - taxis start at 12.50 compared to 5.00 and the prices in restaurants are higher too. Getting from my hotel at the Shenzhen railway station to the visa office takes me a total of two hours including going through customs, getting money, getting lost in one place, and getting on a train in the wrong direction once.

My first impression of Hong Kong is the MTR, the cleanest and most convenient and efficient subway I have ever ridden. Subway designers everywhere in the world should come here and study. It is air conditioned and smooth, unlike the tube in London (though they do say 'mind the gap'). No salespeople or panhandlers like Seoul. No unexpectly broken down lines like Paris. Much cleaner than BART in San Francisco. Signs telling you how many minutes to the next train, with maps in each station showing the area and tourist attractions marked. Trains timed for transfers between lines with almost musical precision, and announcements in Mandarin, Cantonese, and real English. Signs telling you to advise customer service at the next station if you feel ill.



Above ground, I get a hostel one MTR stop away from the visa office and am in a room seven feet wide. The elevator in the building feels like a closet, and the high buildings with signs extending into the street keep you from seeing much beyond your immediate area so it feels very closed in. However, streets are beautifully clean and best of all, people are not spitting everywhere. (I'm told this was a recent, SARS-related development.) I only have a half day free so spend it shopping in the Causeway Bay and Mongkok areas and then take the MTR down to Tsim Sha Tsui where you can walk along the harbour.

The Walk of Stars has handprints of several famous people, including Maggie Cheung. Her gorgeous face adorns the Olay ads here.



I take lots of blurry pictures of the world's most famous skyline:

Visa run, Part I - CTU

Many who enter China on a tourist visa and want to stay longer need to do the Hong Kong visa run - train or fly to Shenzhen, and then walk through Lowu customs and take the train to the visa office in Hong Kong. To check airfares and book tickets, elong.com is the way to go. Other online travel booking websites are not in English or crash during the booking steps, and a couple others I phoned didn't have better deals.

There is a ten kuai shuttle from downtown to the airport, or a taxi would be fifty. (Note to self - next time, learn the word for 'airport' before you go on a plane trip so you don't have to call it 飞机的地方(fēijī de dìfang, airplane place) everwhere.) This is my first encounter with the local airport, and I really like it - clean, well laid out, announcements in English and Mandarin even for domestic flights, and electronic check in kiosks that work.

Air Ch*na is famous for two things: young and lovely flight attendants and terrible, terrible food. Perhaps the former is supposed to compensate for the latter.

Camera shopping

A friend recently snagged an Aigo camera for 800 kuai - 5.1 Mpx, movies, many settings, everything my old camera could do and more. I went to the same place but the stalls that sold that model were closed and most of the cameras cost between 1400 and 2000. I only ever take one Mpx pictures so I was getting a little frustrated that most available were expensive and between six and ten. It is possible to get a lower resolution digital camera for 200 kuai here, but they are very limited models with tiny viewing screens and I ended up with a BenQ DC 540 for 999. This was at @世界 (@shìjiè、@World) on 电脑城(diànnăo chéng, Computer Street) which is basically the second south section of the first ring road.

This scene is about ten minutes' walk from where I stay.

网吧 (wăng bā, internet cafe)

This is one of the more recognizeable signs - the 网(wăng) part means network and 吧 (bā) is bar. (There are lots of 咖啡吧 (kāfēi bā、coffee bars) as well.) Foreigners may be asked for their passports to sign in. The counter person will not usually speak english but you give them a ten kuai note, then they will give you a card with a password, and then when you leave you get your change from the ten. I've never been charged more than one kuai for a session.

Though it is 比较贵 (bĭjiào guì、 comparatively expensive) because you need to buy a drink or something I am more often connected via a wireless signal from 星巴克(xīng bā kè、 Starbucks). Except for the Tianfu Square branch, which is crazy busy right now because people are still on holidays, Starbucks is such a nice familiar feeling place complete with clean western style washrooms. A small tea is twelve kuai.

Holiday week and site updates

The Chun Jie fireworks started at nine on Saturday night and continued way past one in the morning, sounding like a war. I was going to go outside to watch, but then realized that people were setting them off from the balconies in my apartment complex. The fireworks continued on Sunday night and even on Monday. This week most people have a off so many stores are closed and the public places are really crowded with people. I've added a link to Chinese Pod, which is my favourite site for learning Chinese at the moment, and the feed for Frugal Cuisine since most food related content will be posted there from now on.

葡萄酒 (pútáojiŭ、wine)

One thing I expected to really miss about home is 葡萄酒(pútáojiŭ; wine from grapes). On coming here I discovered tons of Chinese wine sold in the stores, most of it being Great Wall variety. Some of it is drinkable, even verging on pleasant, but none I’ve had so far is very good. Stores like Metro and Carrefour do have limited selections of wine from other countries, at a comparable price to home.

The infamous 白酒(báijiŭ; white grain liquor) is everywhere and astoundingly cheap, at an alcohol level into the fifties which I think would be illegal in Canada. I poured a shot of what I thought was 白酒(báijiŭ) from a bottle in our cupboard and ended up with a mouthful of 白醋(báicù, white vinegar)。 The characters really do look similar, no? Anyway, the real 白酒(báijiŭ) that I tasted later was even harsher. I thought I could borrow an idea from a friend and use the stuff as hand sanitizer, but it smelled too bad.

Lost camera, Spring Festival

The blog will lack visuals for a while because I stupidly left my camera on a taxi and need to get a new one.

Basic life interactions can all be fraught with misunderstanding if you don’t have much language in common – getting your hair cut, getting curtains and hooks for your windows, getting someone to come and fix the ADSL, explaining to the security guard that you live in your building (though you, um, don’t know your address). Things get done, kind of, but it gets tiring.

The stores are really busy, with signs like 只有三天 (zhĭyoŭ sān tiān; only three days left) and bouncy music is playing with 50% of the lyrics being 恭喜 恭喜 恭喜(gōngxĭ gōngxĭ gōngxĭ; congratulations, congratulations). 春节(chūnjié; Chinese new year) is upon us, which will basically be a long weekend. Local people tell me about their plans to visit temples and do things for good luck in the new year. I am surprised by the amount of superstition since my former impression of China was highly secular.

宜家 (yí jiā) IKEA

Ikea feels so familiar it is almost eerie. Same products, same layout. One small difference is that there are free shuttles from the store to central areas of town, with this guy handing out little measuring tapes on the bus.

Settling In

Just moved from a place where I was staying temporarily to an apartment where I will be for the next several months, and am running around getting household things and groceries so I can cook at home and start posting food-related things to my other blog. I was a bit alarmed at the end of January to note that in two weeks I had already burned through the 2100 kuai that I got at the airport. That included 1283 for my train ticket and phone, but was still more than I expected to spend while I was here. A lot of foreigners who come here to teach have the idea that they can save a lot of money by maintaining an average native person's standard of living. Most end up saving less than expected because expats are charged lots more for things like housing. On the other hand, many nonessentials cost far less money here, so spending is very easy. Something to watch over the next month.

Cooking here is taking some adapting. The stoves are gas, which heat more of the pot surface far more quickly than I am used to. I managed to make a toaster oven sized batch of sweet but very good granola. I had less success with chicken stock; the grocery in my neighborhood sells chicken carcasses - basically, the tail, back, and rib cage with the neck and head attached - which I thought would be perfect for soup. I browned the thing in the oven and boiled it, the head swelling up and bobbing disturbingly on the surface. The stock didn't smell right afterwards, so I ended up throwing it out and trying again with some wing sections, washing them well beforehand. Still not great stock. Think I need to find a better place to buy the chicken.

International Food Festival

Reader discretion advised; this post is all about food! I like this sculpture which is near the entrance of the main venue - the strength of the hand, the poised chopsticks - hopeful, open minded, hungry....

Street food is some of the most accessible when there is a language barrier - you can see what is available without having to puzzle through a menu and you can order and pay with hand signals. I like being able to watch the food being prepared - you can observe how clean it is, and more importantly you can gauge if the cook cares about what they are doing or not. A good cook has been recognizeable in any country I have been in so far - they should move with a kind of attentive confidence, even when working very quickly.

Some of the street food in this city can be identified by foreign eyesight (corn, fruit, chou dofu , the lamb skewers) but most of it can't and the only way I am going to figure out what these things are is to bite into them.



These steamed rice dumplings were all very good. The fluffy white one was sweet and tasted like the dough had been fermented a bit; the smaller ones had seasoned meat fillings.



These little round sandwiches are sold everywhere and have a variety of fillings. This was the first one I tried and I didn't like it very much - the meat slices and bread were far too chewy and there was a lot of very oily sauce. Interesting flavours, but I will not try again for a while.



Noodles with sauces, crunchy soybeans, green onions, and some kind of pickle; stir with chopsticks and slurp up. Pretty good and tingly with Sichuan pepper.



Beijing duck wrapped up for a customer.


Rabbit heads. These are enormously popular; most grocery stores have piles of these beside the cooked chickens and ducks. I watched several people enjoying them and am starting to wonder what they do with the rest of the rabbit. Someday I will try one; not today.



Quail eggs cooked in little pans, skewered and seasoned. This girl displayed the 'good cook' concentration so I got some. They were really good.



Dessert - rice cakes with soybean powder, a sweet syrup that tasted a little burned, and sesame seeds. Nice job making the rice cakes chewy and crunchy at the same time; the syrup I could have done without.



The mid afternoon food festival crowd. Today is the second last day; I am glad I didn't come on the first weekend.