Blood and Chocolate, and Salsa!

The next day, I decided it was mandatory that I take it easy for a day. The sinus infection was finally breaking up, but due to all the extra walking and the excursion to find the Tiger Balm Gardens, my feet and legs were exhausted and my body had decided it was a good idea to spend some time not hiking around.

So what do you do in Kowloon that involves not walking anywhere in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday?

You go to the movies!

Normally, going to see a film is the last thing I would do while I'm traveling, as I can always watch movies at home. However, when I traveled to Europe in 2005, Adrienne and I went to see Sahara, and had a blast, and it was actually a really relaxing way to spend some time. And besides, I had an excuse, the movie was Blood.

Some of you might watch a little Anime (Hi Bill!), if so, you'll probably remember Blood, a 50 minute Anime piece from late 2000 with next to no story and absolutely gorgeous, over-the-top art. It featured a young vampire in Japanese Sailor garb bifurcating a race of psychotic, human-eating demons, who could shape shift and heal any wound within moments. Thus the flimsy justification for the premise, and the epic title: you have to inflict a wound so grevious that a significant amount of their blood leaves their body all in one go in order to kill them.

Yeah, the Japanese, as a race, are fucked up. But we actively maintain Fear Factor, Waterboarding, and the Atom Bomb, so I think we're about even.

Plus Blood isn't going to be available in America for months, and will probably never go to wide release, even if it is mostly in English.

So I went to the movies. A couple of things to know about movies in Hong Kong: 1) ticket prices aren't based on the time of day, they are based on the day of the week. No I don't know why. 2) The theatre in question might be hidden in the 10th floor of a vertical mall, behind a set of elevators that go to ladie's lingerie and a store named "Snoopy" featuring giant wall-sized prints of old Charles Schulz cartoons and clothing sporting the dynamic duo of bird and dog. 3) The theatres here use assigned seating, meaning you get to see an electronic floor map of available seats embedded in the counter when you walk up, and you just tell the clerk the coordinates of the seat you want ("I3!") as if you were playing battleship using your own butt as ammunition.

Aside from that, it's pretty much like home.

The show was similar to the original Anime, only A) it was twice as long, B) The Vampire girl (Saya) was killing her own kind, since she was half human half demon herself. C) There was a random general's daughter added as the token friend character to give Saya some humanity, D) A 'master vampire' was added in who turned out to be Saya's mother, and E) the whole last quarter (and final battle) of the film takes place in a complicated dream sequence set in a hallucination of ancient Japan.

So yeah, it was pretty much the same. The art still rocked out and watching a Japanese schoolgirl in a sailor outfit put an Afro-sporting 70s-era disco-lounge-outfit-wearing demon through a concrete wall using a giant sledgehammer will probably never get old.

After my air conditioned carnage was over, I went to the Wellcome. Wellcome is the Hong Kong equivalent of Tesco, a sortof grocery store that gets embedded in other things. In more spacious parts of town it might have its own corner shop, but downtown it tends to be on a second floor, hidden belowground, or entered only through a secret entrance in the dressing room of a men's clothing store. They seem to expand or contract to fill the space provided, and for some reason there are never any good signs. I think they just assume that the people that really need them already know where they are. I'd been keeping an eye out for a grocery of some kind in my area since I arrived. The Chinese don't really seem to use Grocery stores the same way we do, so they aren't as common, and I had been unable to find one over the previous three days, finally stumbling across one the night before when I'd taken a wrong turn at Nathan Road.

So I went to Wellcome, and bought some local stuff for breakfast. I'll post a picture when I make tomorrow's entry. I'll warn you ahead of time that if you don't like pulp in your Orange juice, you might want to avoid reading that one. I did purchase some Ghana black Gold, which is Chocolate directly from heaven. Hands down, this is some of the best dark chocolate I've ever had. Strong without being bitter, with a light finish and just enough sweetness to make you swoon on the cocoa flavour. This stuff is amazing. I'll try to bring some back when I come home.

So after sampling a little of my new chocolate addiction, I'm glad it'll be hard to find, or I might start buying it constantly and eating it like I used to eat Altoids.

Done with my shopping, I headed back to the hostel, grabbed a shower, changed clothes into something stylish, and headed to Club Sugar, on the Hong Kong Island side. I found out that there is Salsa dancing somewhere in Hong Kong almost every night, and as I used to dance a little Mambo (and they're somewhat similar) it sounded like fun. Besides, the cover included two free drinks and a Salsa lesson.

On the way there I stopped by a small corner stall that fried things on sticks and stold them to people. I honestly don't know what all they cooked, except that at least one of the items smelled kindof like poo. There was no line, just a sortof huddle of customers and two cooks, plus a woman by a change drawer. People gave that woman money, and then she gave them little tickets with dollar amounts on them, and then they gave those dollar amounts to the cooks, who handed them bags they filled with sticks of stuff directly from the open grill. I identified Sausages and balls of meat, at least, as well as some things that might have been vegetables. There was one type of stick with a weird looking sortof thin pastry cube, the inside of which appeared to be something green and vegetably. It looked interesting.

I finally shouldered my way up to the woman at the change drawer. "How much is that one?" I said, pointing to the stick. She held up the $8 ticket. "Eight!" "Ok. I'll have one of those." I dug out $8 in HK coin and handed it to her (The smallest Hong Kong bill is $10). She handed me an $8 ticket and pointed to the woman cooking--two feet from her--standing next to me at the grill and yelled something. That woman took one of the sticks from the grill, dropped it in a bag, and handed it to me, in exchange for the ticket, which then went immediately in a little basket in between the two women. Why I couldn't have just paid them directly and saved them the paper ticket, I'll never figure out. Maybe it helps them keep track of inventory? I dunno.

I showed up at Sugar around 8 (when the lesson was to start) and the place was empty as the grave. They finally started (with about twenty people there) around 8:45, and I figured out halfway through the--very intermediate and above--lesson that the teacher had been teaching this whole crowd for weeks, and the "beginner and improving" lesson that was advertised on the flyer was complete horsepucky.

Complicating matters, around 8:30, when I had thought the whole experience might be a complete bust, I'd downed a whole rum and Coke (apparently Coke is only a polite suggestion in the HK version of that recipe, by the way) in about two minutes, so the incredibly tight spins of Salsa and I were not getting along so well.

Thankfully, I had some Mambo to fall back on, and once I gave up and slipped out of my boots (that goodness black socks look so much like dance shoes in club lighting) I did a lot better, I just cut out the hook turns, cheated on the timing, and laughed whenever my rock step instinct from too much Swing dancing kicked in on the exit from a turn (which was almost every time).

Still, I met some neat people, including a very cool Asian kid visiting from Sidney, and a sweet Chinese girl named "Rainbow" who had matching skulls on her Tshirt and the back pockets of her jeans. Plus the dancing was actually pretty fun once I got my feet back under me.

Exhausted and amused, I retired around 11pm, headed back to the hostel, and collapsed. My restful day had at least involved less walking, but maybe high speed latin dancing wasn't the most laconic way to wrap it up.

Tomorrow: Breakfast of Champions (and madmen), Museums Galore, and the Hong Kong LightShow Spectacular!