Our Last Entry -- Leaving Hong Kong, baby!

Friday, January 11, 2008.

This was D-Day. Our last few hours in Hong Kong. We still had not gone up the "Peak" (aka "Victoria Peak") -- the largest spot on Hong Kong Island. We had meant to go our second day but ran out of time. This would be our last chance!

We quickly checked out of the YMCA, paid the bill (the most expensive place we stayed at in our entire trip -- but well worth it) and arranged to have our luggage placed in a holding area of the lobby until we were ready to come back for our cab ride to the airport express subway.

We took the subway to an area a few blocks away from where the funicular railway was situated. Strangely enough, the signage was not very well marked. We had to sort of guess where to go but Laura's natural homing instincts were spot-on and we found it after only a few minutes of fumbling around. After a long queue (tons of school kids for some reason) we got in and rode up the tram. There were many restaurants and shops including a "branch of world-renowned Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum." There was also a "Ripley's Believe it or Not Odditorium" and clothing shops -- all of which we avoided. We wanted to check out the amazing view as we were running out of time.

Alas, luck was not with us. The overcast skies were so bad that for awhile we couldn't see anything at all -- just a pea soup blanket of fog. Then, slowly the mist dissipated a bit and we could see the city's skyscrapers protruding out from the shroud, looking somewhat eerie yet most impressive indeed. We wandered about the different levels of the Peak, hoping to find one side where the sun might be shining. Nothing doing. It was overcast all around. One photographer was taking photos of tourists then, through an image editing program, inserting them in front of a sunny backdrop of the city view. We thought it looked fairly ridiculous and unrealistic so we avoided this charlatan. Then, with time running out, we headed down.

Before this -- a word about the toilets. One of the things you read up about when traveling to this side of the world is the way toilets work. In remote areas and in many cities in SE Asia you will find the "squat" toilets set up. We weren't looking forward to trying these out --for obvious reasons. Well, luckily enough, we were able to find functioning "western-style" toilets in every bathroom on our trip -- until now. Ironically, here in HK -- one of the most sophisticated places in the world, when Charles had to use the bathroom he had to uh, experience, his first squat toilet! And that's all we'll say about that....

Walking towards the subway Laura took some final photos of the amazing skyscrapers. Some truly interesting and creative architecture to be found. We could have stayed in Hong Kong for a few more days, there was so much to see. Alas, it was time to go....

Got back to our hotel, took a cab to the airport express station where we checked in our bags, then took the subway to the HK airport.

Our trip was at an end.

Postscript: the flight back was horrible. There was a group of bozos sitting in front of us -- family business people of some sort. Rude, arrogant jerks who kept putting their seats back all the way before take off, dancing and singing in their seats, talking loudly and obnoxiously the entire way, etc. Plus this plane, for whatever reason had less leg room, less comfortable seats and, worse of all, no movies on demand! The movies ran through their cycle and did not repeat. As spoiled as this sounds, going on a plane for 14 hours without this luxury was pretty brutal.

Laura's parents kindly picked us up once we finally got to LAX. We stayed and chatted with them for a bit, then left to drive back to our duplex in Santa Monica. We had not heard anything from the woman watching our place and cat since New Year's Eve (a young lady named Cena who was the personal assistant of a professor Charles knew) and were hoping that Chloe would still be alive and the house intact.

As we pulled up, to our surprise and dismay we saw the side door open -- hanging on one hinge. What had happened here, we wondered. Walking into the house we were hit by a scent that reminded us right away of Hanoi -- the faint, sickly smell of cigarettes! "Hello?" we called out. There was no answer. We had e-mailed Cena to let her know that we would be coming around now, hoping that she would have cleared out as we were exhausted and wanted to crash. Unfortunately there were signs everywhere that she was still around -- somewhere. Chloe greeted us -- she was ok, though a bit thin. The microwave was beeping. Charles opened it and found, strangely enough, a casserole dish filled with nothing but hot water. The dryer had some clothes in it. We called Cena on her cel and she answered, nervously stating she would be over in a few minutes. It turns out she had misled us -- she never had a car. She had walked over to her apartment a couple miles away with some of her stuff. When she came in she told us that the hot water heater had stopped working, our neighbor in the duplex was notified but never bothered to tell the owner so we were stuck with no hot water, a side door that they never bothered to get fixed and a cat that lost weight because this dope didn't realize that she was supposed to feed her dry as well as wet food. Listening to this idiot babble on about what happened made us both quite irritated. She had our e-mail which we checked everyday as well as our cel phones which we had told her would reach us as we added international calling to it before our trip. Cena gathered her stuff together and called her boyfriend to pick her up. While chatting we noticed a wine stain on the carpet behind a speaker. She said, "oh, did I do that?" then quickly changed the subject. A set of four wine glasses had been broken, she said, when she dropped a pot of water on the counter. Our tea kettle's handle had been burned off because she didn't realize the burner was on; Laura's mid-century, Danish teak coffee table had its finish ruined because Ms. Clueless had used Ajax on it, etc., etc. We were to later learn from Sonbol, our duplex-mate, that Cena had left loads of garbage by the side of the house because, as she claimed, we never told her where the trash cans were in the alley! Unbelievable. We also learned that she was a big time smoker - while she did smoke outside she must have not changed her clothing often enough as the stench was all over our house. Cena's boyfriend finally showed up. We were happy to see him because it meant this idiot would leave. He seemed like an alright guy, an assistant to an assistant to a Hollywood agent. How nice. Unfortunately he immediately started namedropping, talking about the stars he knew and the parties he went to, told us about a former child TV star who was gay, etc. Finally Charles said, "it's been really nice talking to you but we've just been in SE Asia for 28 days and we need to crash." Not realizing that we were trying to get rid of him, this clueless idiot proceeded to ask about which countries though it was obvious he had never heard of some of them. Then he saw Chloe and mentioned how Chloe liked it over at his mother's house. What was this? It turned out that he and Cena took Chloe over to his mommy's house in the Valley while she was away for two days! No idea if she had been given her insulin medication though it later turned out (after we counted the needles) that Cena had missed ten or eleven injections due to her negligence.

We were happy that Chloe was ok and finally got rid of this annoying couple, never to see them again. (Another postscript: months later Charles finally got around to telling the professor who recommended Cena -- it turns out she had fired her as well for similar stupid behavior!) Our hot water was restored the next day, a new door would be installed soon after and we had survived our 28 days in SE Asia and Hong Kong intact!