Hong Kong: 15 Years Ago

HK+Macau Week: 4 Days To Go

So my Countdown to Hong Kong posts starts here. Should have started earlier but I would be risking sounding too excited. You know, like, Little Kid Excited. Which I'm not. Really. No, seriously, I'm not.

For everybody's information in case you're wondering what this is all about, we're going on a 4 days 3 nights vacation to Hong Kong and stopping by Macau for a day. So it's like hitting two birds in one stone. One very expensive stone but after 15 years of not ever stepping out of this country, I don't think price really matters.

I kind of wondered a bit why we're going to a country we've already visited, but since 15 years ago, there was no Disneyland there, no Mickey Mouse to visit and the whole Cinderella-ish castle to take pictures off, and no detailed memory of what had happened because I was only, like, 5 or 6 years old back then, this time, I'm going back as a sponge.

Yes, a sponge. I'm going to absorb everything and anything that gets in my line of vision and other senses. I'm going to make technology my partner and bring every digital camera we have in this household. They will work for me as slaves and capture incredible pictures that I will post in the internet for everyone to see. So they better do their job well.

Anyhow, semi-preparing for the trip brought back fuzzy memories from my childhood experience there. It's true that I don't have concrete memories of the time we spent there (4 days 3 nights also if I remember correctly), but I do have retrograde flashes of what it was like.



One flash reminded me of how I almost lost my best friend "Beary Bear the Stuffed Bear" at the airport counter. Teary eyed I went back for it preparing for the worst. But it was still there and the Flight Clerk lady gave me an amused smile as she handed back to me my faithful friend. He was my only stuffed toy who got to travel to another country. He is now in my cabinet with my books probably bragging about how he went to Ocean Park and saw all the fishes or something.

There was also the experience of riding an airplane for the very first time. I was far from nervous actually. I was so mesmerized by looking at things go from big to small to a tiny speck through the window that when the airplane got high enough, I was disappointed that all I could see were blurry clouds. I thought we'll have that spectuacular view for the whole trip.

Another, takes me back on our first night in the foreign city, where we were walking through the busy streets of Kowloon, desperately looking for a place to sleep because my mom's "friend" abandoned us at the airport, hence we had nowhere to stay the night in. I remember feeling lethargically sleepy and seeing a lady give an irritated "No space, no space" reply with matching shaky hand movement to my mom's inquiry if there were vacant rooms available. Next thing I knew, I woke up on the bottom bunk of a double deck bed with my mom gone and 3 ladies greeting me hello. I cried.

Turns out, those 3 Filipino ladies let us stay at their place for the night. I cried 'till I saw my mom return from wherever she went to. Nobody could console me. After confusions and some more crying, the memory became fuzzy again and I remember transferring to a hotel where I got to watch HongKong shows I didn't understand a word of.

Of course I also remembered parts of the main reason why we were there. To tour and to shop. We did lots of touring. We went to Ocean Park and I got to be in what I call an Aquarium Room (a room virtually encased in glass, water and different kinds of fish) long before Pinoys got a taste of the same thing in Ocean Park Manila. We went to an overlooking mountain-y place, kind of like Tagaytay but with Buddha statues. My mom would point to the skyscrapers all excited, and I would think "Yeah okay. We have those in Makati." Haha.

We visited stores but I always got bored when we were in one. My mom would look at original Giordano clothes she was planning to sell back home for double the price (because they were really cheap in HongKong and really expensive back in the Philippines). I also remember an instance where we boarded a bizarre looking Pod suspended on ropes that you use to get from one side of wherever to the other side of wherever. It crosses a body of water of some sort and it would rock precariously every time somebody did a wide movement so I stayed really still. (Author's Note: I wrote the entire post before googling pictures and I found out that the Pod Thingies are called Cable Cars and they are located in Ocean Park.)

We also rode a ferry to get from one side to another. It seems like Hong Kong is surrounded with lots and lots of water. I was more terrified of the ferry than with the plane, and certainly, rocking it out at sea was less enjoyable and more dizzying than flying.

On our way back, I was less excited in boarding a plane for the second time and all I could really recall right now is how sleepy I was when we arrived in Manila. The End.



So that's that. That's all I could remember. Bits and pieces of non-chronological events that happened 15 years ago when I was still a preschooler. We took pictures but not a lot of them since that was back in the Jurassic Era of cameras with maximum shots of 36 pictures and a battery life of 3 hours.

Hopefully, this time around, I'll remember more and sleep less.