After an insane night of partying with our sleeping toddler and half pint of Ginseng Wine and pressing our faces against the hotel window so that we could see a few spritzes of fireworks in the sliver of atmosphere between the two nearby giant skyscrapers, we slept soundly until Eli realized it was daytime at the late hour of 620am. One great thing about having a kiddo is that no matter how late you stay up enjoying your fleeting adult time, you're always sure to get an early start the next day. Maybe you can sleep through an alarm, but it's unlikely that you can sleep through a 21 month old laying sideways in the bed kicking his legs as though he's riding a bicycle. On your face.
We thoroughly enjoyed Hong Kong over the next couple days, and equally enjoyed trying out their various modes of mass transit, moving beyond the tram to now include the subway system. We happily found it to be one of the easiest to understand, cleanest and most efficient either of us had ever seen. We haven't seen all of the other subways on Earth, so we based our comparison on our combined experiences underground with the subways found in Paris, London, New York, Milan, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo and some other ones that we don't remember. Bottom line: Hong Kong's subway system is really good.
The only downside to the subway is that some of the stops are in the lower floors of shopping centers, and you may well have to walk past a bunch of shops to get to another platform to catch a connecting train. I've never seen so many high end stores together anywhere. They have Prada and Pierre Cardin and Tag Heuer and Zegna and Hugo Boss and Armani and Chanel and Luis Vitton and all kinds of other fancy places I don't frequent. Not in just one location – these shops are in big malls all over the place. Couple this with frequent sightings of Maseratis, Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, Rovers and every other kind of European luxury car known and you'll really get an idea that Hong Kong is really not the same as China.
The majority of private cars we saw were the kind you shop for when you have more than $50K to spend on a car. Many – a quarter, it seemed - were the kind you shop for when you're looking in the $150K and higher range. I've never seen such a high concentration of expensive cars.
We also tried out the Star Ferry, which gave us both a fun experience as well as some really sweet views of the city from the water. The ferry was terrific (I do love boats!) and the views were pretty good... but one has to remember that on a sunny day visibility in Hong Kong is kind of crappy with all the smog they have there. You can see the buildings on the other side of the water, but you're looking through thick smog in all directions. Based on the continual air travel demonstrated by the planes overhead, it must not be as thick as the infamous Dubai Fog, I don't think. Or maybe they're just more accustomed to it. Way more smog than LA. Way.
The smog turns
Like I mentioned earlier, the trams are really fun also. Probably not much fun for the people who use them to commute every day, but we enjoyed riding them up and down the streets. For one thing, many of them are really old and charming in the way that only really old machines can be. They don't go terribly fast, and the seats are pretty high up (plus they're double deckers), so if you want a perfect view of the streets and shops and human activity, the tram is a perfect and affordable way to go about it. We visited a variety of shops, walked through lots and lots of different open air markets, tried out a playground or two and spent some time in a very well attended Buddhist temple. Took zillions of photos of the graffiti and wall art (we do that a lot) and really, thoroughly enjoyed out time there.
On our last night, we stayed in a hotel that offers a walkway that takes you directly into the airport, thinking this would be a lot easier than getting up at 330am and trying to find a taxi (remember that thing about why we hire a Town Car in Portland? That's why. Also we preferred to be terrified in the afternoon rather than first thing in the morning.) The hotel thing was one of the smartest decisions so far. We awoke without alarms at 415 (I love my son!), walked to the terminal, checked in and went through security. The security checkpoint has a lane there that says “Family Lane” in English (all the signs in Hong Kong are in English) with a nice picture of a nuclear family – like ours – so we got into that line and were promptly and sternly told by the Hong Kong TSA lady to get back into the normal line with the non-nuclear passengers. Being that this was still sort of China and not wanting to get into trouble there, we got back into line with everyone else.
Eli had awoken with a pretty good fever and was more fussy than usual. We tried to not think about what kind of sickness a toddler might pick up while visiting Hong Kong. We also tried to not be kind of pissed that he'd been sick more times in the last month than he'd been in the prior year. Daria and I each pretended we weren't as worried as we really were and only fessed up after he was better. More on that later.
When we got to the front of the security line, Daria put her bag into the tub at the top of the stack to ready her things to go through the x-ray machine while balancing Eli on her hip and holding him with one arm. Then she got a big dose of Nasty from a flight attendant who had come in through the 'flight crew only' entry. The attendant didn't have to stand in a line, as she was the only crewmember in the whole room, but she must have been running really late, because she started yelling at Daria and trying to take the tub from below while elbowing Daria out of the way. Apparently waiting another 4 or 5 seconds for Daria to pick up the full tub with her free hand was unbearable. She shouted into Daria's face while yanking the lower tub, and then shoved Daria out of her way. This all happened very quickly, which is a good thing...
… suddenly, yet only for a short moment, I weighed the scariness of incarceration in Hong Kong against the sudden and powerful urge to permanently harm the woman who'd sent my bride (and son) stumbling to keep her (their) balance. But she was gone so fast I didn't really have the chance to break her knees. Maybe next time. I wondered if we'd all be on the same flight. We weren't.
We found our gate and I learned that we were flying on “Scoot Airlines.” Given that I like scooters, I thought this was probably going to be pretty cool. Maybe not as cool as Emirates [cough] but probably still cool. I didn't give much thought to the fact that they don't actually announce that they're boarding and that the only way to know what's going on is to wait until all the people waiting rush the gate (especially fun when Daria and Eli are 100 meters away riding on the moving sidewalk thing) but I did think it was a little weird that on an international flight that they didn't want to see our ID and that nobody actually looked at our boarding passes. Normally there's a boarding pass scanner that does that, but their scanner wasn't working, so we just handed our boarding passes to the woman at the gate and she put them into a pile on the counter without even confirming that they matched the flight or gate numbers, or whether or not the names on the boarding passes were our names.
Once on the flight, we learned that though we'd seen several posters boasting “unlimited in flight movies” while we'd been waiting to stampede the gangway, that this service costs $20 and you have to use your own wireless device (laptop, tablet, phone) and that you can only access the movies if you've downloaded the app before you went to the airport in the first place. I think it would be smart for them to let people download the app once they were seated on the plane so that they could sell more “unlimited in flight movies” but we weren't about to pay $20 to watch 4 hours worth of movies, so this was a non-issue for us.
When the meal was to be served, the nice stewardess announced that everyone who'd ordered a meal on the Scoot Airlines website prior to boarding would soon receive their order. Those of us who hadn't would be able to purchase items from the menu. Based on what I saw the stewardesses carrying back and forth the most, it appears that Lipton's Cup-O-Noodles is the most popular item. I like noodles, but not when they're served up in a styrofoam cup and sprinkled with brown MSG powder. Also, I think Lipton stopped making those noodles twenty years ago. Is Lipton even in business anymore?
They're serving decades old surplus noodles.
We figured we could make a 4 ½ hour flight without an $8 Cup-O-Noodles nor $20 worth of second rate movies, and looked forward to a little something to drink. We figured it'd be water, unless someone at Scoot had come up with a nice wine pairing to go along with the Noodles. Water sounded just fine.
They don't give you anything to drink. No one comes by with water. You can make your way to the back of the plane and request it. Probably. Daria's pretty sure that it's an international law or at the very least an airline regulation that they have to give you water, so I guess the law or the regulation doesn't exactly state that they have to ever stop by and actually offer it to you. Maybe they just have to keep some around in case some poor dehydrated fool gets parched enough to go begging for it. Or maybe the only water they have is that meteor-hot stuff typically used to re-hydrate noodles that were boxed up prior to the Cold War. I don't want to drink any of that.
In fact, the only time anyone came by to visit us was to tell us that we weren't allowed to lift the armrest that's between the seats up and out of the way. We're married, so we don't mind sharing a seat, and Eli fits nicely across both our laps as long as there isn't an armrest bisecting his spine. Armrests down = not allowed. I thought this was a 'during takeoff' thing after the first warning, then figured it was a 'during turbulence' thing after the second, and finally gave up trying to make sense of it after the third. We're lucky they didn't turn the plane around. It occurred to me later that these were my best opportunities to ask for water, and I'd missed my chances.
We had a layover in Singapore, which has an amazing airport. Really very nice. They have a whole garden with water features and flowers that are all made of handblown glass, and there's a swimming pool on the roof, and you can get a massage. We just had time to scurry for a quick nosh, then (not wanting to be stuck with Cup-O-Noodles and nothing to drink) we bought some pastries and a bottled juice to take with us on the next plane. On arriving at the gate, we found out that we had to go through a security checkpoint – kind of like in Dubai, where we'd never left the secure area and everyone getting onto the plane had already been through security but had to go through security again. Apparently, this kind of redundancy makes for safer flying. Walking through a metal detector twice provides far greater scrutiny than walking through it only once. Duh.
We got busted. The unopened and still sealed juice we'd gotten for Eli was (gasp!) in a container that held in excess of 100ml. The one we bought a couple minutes prior, inside the airport, in the part of the airport you can't get to until after you pass through security. They didn't care where we got it and the fact that it was factory sealed with a tamper-resistant plastic band around the cap was irrelevant. We had to drink it on the spot or abandon it. I was thinking that the best thing would be to accidentally spill it on the carpet but then started wondering about prisons in Singapore and changed my mind. As Daria stood right in everyone's way and drank it down (I refused to have any, being the obstinate fellow I am) we agreed that a sign or two somewhere in the airport warning people about this might be sensible. Like maybe at the place that sells juice, or maybe before you go through the security at the gate.
Once the offending juice had been properly dispatched, we went and sat in the waiting area. We found empty seats next to a couple who'd just brought 4 full liter sized bottles of hard alcohol that they'd purchased in the duty free shop through security. I thought it was really unfair that they didn't have to drink all of that before being allowed past security. It would have been a more consistent application of the rules, and it would certainly have made the flight a lot more entertaining.
Then we opened one of the two reusable water bottles that we carry when traveling and had a drink of the unidentified liquid we'd effortlessly smuggled through the x-ray machines right before getting busted for the sealed juice container a few minutes prior. Right. Apple Juice = serious threat. More than a gallon of hooch = no problem. And two pints of mystery liquid in unmarked and unsealed containers go completely unnoticed despite being in plain view, strapped to the outside of a backpack which is handled by two security agents and viewed through an x-ray monitor by another. After long and hard consideration, I've determined that the security system that is in place in the Shanghai airport is run by clowns. Doing a crappy job twice doesn't make it a good job.
The second flight was just like the first. No food, no water. Flying Scoot makes a cooler noun than verb.
We landed in Perth and made it through immigration without incident. Then we went to pick up our rental car...
… stay tuned...
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