you are eating breakfast while i am eating dinner.: I went to Hong Kong!

What an unexpected thing. I got the call while I was in California, about three weeks ago, I guess someone realized at the last minute they couldn't go on the tour, and the orchestra needed one more bass player. Luck! Fit perfectly in my free dates in between things. So last Wednesday we boarded a plane in Basel and flew over to Hong Kong, through London Heathrow. Around 13 hours to HK from LHR. Had the good fortune (mostly) to sit next to a Swedish man living in HK, working for "a company called H&M" ("Hmm, I haven't heard of that company." "Yeah, most people haven't.") and figuring out good restaurants and bars and hikes in the area. He wrote me a neat itinerary in between the printed engagements on the orchestra schedule, and all of his suggestions were right on the money. The only bad part about sitting next to this guy was the time he spilled his red wine on my coat. It mostly came out, he gave me money to get it dry cleaned. As someone in a lavender cashmere Izod sweater, he felt really bad about it. Oh well. The first night I got the other bass players to come with me to the Sichuan restaurant he recommended, and it was great. The menu had no English (unlike most things in HK, which was an English colony for ca.150 years) and so we told our waiter what we wanted: fish, beef, and "no meat or fish" and then we got beautiful, big plates of food. Delicious, good atmosphere.

It can be funny at first to walk around the city, since all the streets have very British-sounding names; our hotel, the Luk Kwok, was on Gloucester Street. Walking around feels a bit like being in a tropical NYC. Between the tall buildings and busy, noisy streets, there are flowering trees, parks with fountains and carefully manicured topiary, and of course in early March the weather was warm and humid. The Chinatown areas I've been to in SF & NY really aren't so far from the feeling in the "real thing" -- restaurants and markets are everywhere, lots of the residential towers had clotheslines in the windows, and neon signs line the streets in Wan Chai, the district where our hotel was located. There's a good subway system, lots of double-decker buses, and a fleet of vintage, colonial-era double-decker trams. To ride a tram costs $2HK, two Hong Kong dollars, which is roughly the equivalent of 30 cents in USD. $10HK is equal to €1, and everything is really inexpensive. Our huge dinner, plus three giant Tsing Tao beers, cost $330HK. Taxis are absurdly cheap. On our last day, a few people and I went to the south part of Hong Kong island, a 30 minute ride away. Cab fare? $80HK. I got a sunburn. Hey, beach! We were able to really packed in activities, for having two full days and two partial days; with only one rehearsal and one concert, there was plenty of time to wander around, eat things, look at stuff.

One highlight was the ferry ride we took on Friday night at 8, the right time to see the laser show put on by all the buildings lining the waterfront. There's a lot of waterfront. Someone (Lukas?) asked me today if it was like Star Wars. Kind of like that. Another highlight was another recommendation from my seat-mate on the plane: Café Gray Deluxe, on the 49th floor of the Upperhouse hotel, with harbor views. Pretty spectacular. Most of the time the weather was what you might imagine if you tried in your head to mix SF fog with LA smog.

The orchestra played as part of the Hong Kong International Arts Festival, and everyone we met was really nice. Organizers, stage managers, bus drivers. Related/unrelated, there's this interesting and cool phenomenon you can see everywhere in the after-work hours: all the pedestrian bridges, which are covered, are lined along the walls by women, presumably just come from work, who lay out pieces of cardboard, then sit on them in groups of maybe 3 - 10 people, eating food someone has prepared, playing cards, giving each other massages, painting each others nails. Generations of women, from the really old to teenagers and babies. A few men, but really, mostly women. Shoes were all left outside the cardboard-picnic-blanket; in some cases, rather than settling for just a flat surface, the groups had created a little wall from the cardboard, held together with string at the corners. There was something really great about the whole thing, and it was clear that people were having a great time, relaxing and unwinding after a long day.

I'm back in Basel at the moment. Second part of the trip starts tomorrow, heading to Vienna for the first time. I feel lucky to be part of these things. There's some amount of loneliness and alienation that comes with playing with a new group, in a foreign place, halfway across the world from anyone you know. It was weird to stand in the HK airport and see flights to SF & LA getting in sooner than my flight back to Europe. Tempted? Heck yes. Still glad to be here, though. Obviously.