January 29th: What do Cold, housing, and a giant Buddha have to do with each other?

Day 13, 9AM: It began like most other mornings so far. I woke up in one of those half awake, half asleep modes where you sort of lie in bed trying to stay asleep. Tossing and turning, I fought off the desire to sleep enough to finally wake up and strolled over to my computer. The only expectation I had was to confirm that the lease for our apartment next year had been signed now that I had emailed the office and gotten that mess sorted out. If you’ve had a chance to read my other posts, you would know by now that whenever I start something this way explaining my expectations or I know something will happen that it never actually works out that way. Due to my busyness I never emailed the office to tell them exactly what was going to happen, so when my six roommates for next year showed up asking to sign the lease they had no idea what was happening. So, to fix this I emailed the manager there and explained the situation to them and also had the other people who are currently in the apartment (my awesome roommates from last semester) email them as well. So, with housing taken care of (as far as I know) I continued about my business.

Today I was going to go to Lantau Island to see the giant Buddha. The cool thing about it is that you can take the MTR directly to the gondola ride that takes you to the monastery. So Ri Huang, Chang Sheng, Deborah, and I all get on the MTR on our adventure. It was a little chilly on the way there, and I was wearing my new jacket I had bought at Mon Kok yesterday (which is a running jacket and therefore allows the air to vent) so I was a bit cold. We arrive at a mall and do a bit of shopping before we go to the Buddha via the gondola. After an hour or so we go over and purchase our tickets for the gondola ride and two shows and begin our adventure.

From left to right: Deborah, Ri Huang, Me, Chang Sheng

As we start our ride the first thing I notice is how cold it is. It was already very cold at the mall, but just barely in the tolerable category if I shiver a lot. Once we’re in the gondola though, the vents inside allow that cold air to blow past us, creating a cold wind inside. I’m sure the vents are pleasant in the summer time, but when I say it was cold in there, I mean it was COLD!

The trip begins on land and then shortly turns and crosses a large river at which point it goes up into the mountains. This in itself is a good thing. However, the further up in elevation we got the colder it was. To make it even worse, as we began our ascent we discovered that there was low and very thick fog for the duration of our trip. The pictures here show just how thick the fog was, and you can probably guess that the fog made it even colder. You can imagine how happy I was at this point.

Ri Huang, me, and Chang Sheng freezing in the cabin.

So after about 25 minutes we arrive at the monastery and guess what, it’s even colder up there! The astute observer might notice how many times I have used the word cold so far and deduce that at this point I’m freezing – literally.

Me freezing!

You can see that even inside the fog obscures these plants that are right next to me.

So we’re all freezing now (notice how I’ve gone from using ‘cold’ to using the word ‘freezing’) and make our way around the shops and restaurants there. What I mean to say is that we’re going from shop to shop and running into each one to try and get warm. One of the shops we stopped in served a large variety of food so Ri Huang and myself both bought hot chocolate to warm ourselves. Shortly thereafter we began the long, steep, three mile climb up the mountain in the freezing fog. Ok, I lied, it was more like a half mile flat walk to the base of the stairs. Once we reached the stairs we climbed up, and up, and up, and up some more, made all the more difficult because the fog was so thick we could only see a short ways up the mountain. After many flights of stairs (probably around 15) the stairs suddenly stopped. At this point I was confused because we still couldn’t see the Buddha and we had reached the top of the stairs. I walked about two meters more and realized I was indeed at the base, but the fog was so thick I could only see the outline of the bottom of the statue.

You clearly (or not so clearly) can see that we have no idea how long the stairs are.

This is how well we could see

More statues at the top.

We walked around the top for a while, and also visited a museum of sorts underneath the statue. Now, in addition to being freezing it was also incredibly windy at the top, which only made it colder. By now I’m beyond frozen. We stayed up there for about 45 minutes before returning to the tourist area to watch the shows. When we got back down we went into a dessert shop to warm up and Ri Huang and Chang Sheng grabbed some food. We then went to the first show about a monkey. It turned out to be about a 10 minute movie with those cheesy “4D” effects where they blow water on you and have surround sound so it seems like the characters are actually running around you and was quite disappointing. Next, we went to the other movie and I must say that my expectations were quite low after the monkey one. It turned out to be an animated story about the life of the Buddha and was actually quite interesting and informative.

When we got out we went back to grab more food at a shop and discovered that it was actually about 3 degrees Celsius. Combine this with the fog and high winds and my description that it was freezing is no longer just figurative. After a quick lunch sort of meal we headed back down the mountain. I think I have already emphasized the cold aspect of our journey enough to spare you the description of the ride down, but suffice it to say that it was FREEZING!!!

Once back down we went to Mon Kok so Chang Sheng could pick up a suit he ordered and we grabbed some Japanese food. The shopping experience was again unlike anything I’ve ever done before because we weren’t in a shopping mall per say, nor were we walking around street vendors, but rather imagine a shopping mall where the stores are only 4x7 foot stalls. It was most interesting to think that people can make enough of a living selling things in such a small space. When I returned to UST I wrote up another blog entry and went to sleep.

My dinner.