Science and History and Art, Oh my!

Today was Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the major Hong Kong museums general exhibits are all free. This isn't a big deal, as a ticket which will get you into all the museums is only about HK $30 anyway, but why not save the money, right?

Moment of self-exposure: I love museums. I love big ones that sprawl on and on through warehouses the size of Costco, I love tiny ones dedicated to obscure stuff like Scorpion farming in the great Midwest that are all packed into a single Airstream trailer on the side of Route 66. I can wander through an Art museum for hours, leave it, go to a history museum across the street and be just as enchanted for twice as long. I very nearly squealed like a schoolgirl when I discovered a functioning cutaway display of the rotary phone switching system in the science museum.

But first, I promised you a picture of breakfast. There it is. I found Pears at Wellcome yesterday day before, as well as some more interesting things. I wanted Juice, and they had Orange Juice. . . with Aloe Vera Chunks. I'm not talking pulp here, these things are crispy, tasty cubes, roughly the size of a human tooth. In addition to that, a pear, and a couple of tasty bits of chocolate, I'd also found two other items. One was a Swiss Miss Roll with Sweet Red Bean Curd filling--how could I resist? And the other was the adorable, Owlish red package you see there, which claimed to be "Caramel Corn" and yet sported a picture of something that looked like cheesepuffs, and a cartoon rendering of a knockoff of Mr. Peanut.

The juice was excellent, if a bit chunkier, strictly speaking, than Juice has any right to be. I drank about half of it and saved the rest for tomorrow. The Sweet Bean Swiss Miss roll was everything one would expect from a hostess snack if they started making them exclusively in Beijing.

And the Caramel Corn? What do you say about whatever it was? It was DELICIOUS. Neither Corn, nor--save for about one handful of loose peanuts in the bottom of the bag that reminded me of the unpopped kernels in a microwave popcorn bag--especially peanuty, it was instead all of the best things about crackerjacks, delivered using a vehicle not unlike a crispier version of a packing peanut* Imagine a Cheeto with no dusty, finger-befouling residue, and the flavour of that wonderful caramel candy popcorn you get in those three-sectioned Christmas tins that are always left with just Cheese and Regular popcorn and a forlorn and empty triangle where the caramel corn used to be. It was absolutely genius. I'll be trying to bring back a case of them when I return from Hong Kong, probably.

Ok, done raving about breakfast.

*(yes, I've eaten packing peanuts. I was actually at work at the time, So technically you PAID me to eat Packing peanuts. Lots of them are made out of cornstarch now. Yes, they were, in theory(and fact), edible and non-toxic. So there).

Off to the Museums. First, the Hong Kong Museum of art, where approximately 4,000 excruciatingly polite Chinese women in matching suits direct me to the Chinese exhibits (which I can view) while politely steering me away from the Louis Vitton exhibition exhibits, which take up fully half of the museum (the entire outside is currently wrapped in imagery in homage to Louis' work. Unfortunately for my knowledge of handbags and Louis, I'm on a limited schedule, and his exhibits cost money, so I skipped them (Sorry Lyns, you'll just have to go yourself).

The Xubaizhai Calligraphy and Paintings collection exhibit is so beautiful it hurts. I spent perhaps two hours in just two rooms, reading the biography of almost every artist, and having my mind slowly rendered down to component parts by landscapes of exquisite beauty. Seeing so many of such a limited type of work in the same room finally gives you a chance to identify where there are stylistic variations in the work, and they stop looking like some sort of template and start feeling like art. In particular, Wei Ke's Narcissus might be the most confident piece of painting I've ever seen and Tang Dai's Autumn Mountains nearly made me cry.

Afterwards, I went to a Chinese Antiquities exhibit, which was entirely ceramics and pottery. I believe I can now correctly identify a ming vase (hurray?), which is kinda cool, but I was more enchanted with the obscure stuff. First, that thing over there? it's a urinal. More accurately, I suspect it's their alternative to a bedpan. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I think I'd be rather nervous about peeing in some. . .thing's mouth in the middle of the night. I can't tell if this would just be superstitious fear that the thing would come alive, be angry with me, and bite me, or the more practical and pragmatic worry that some night I'd get it's identity confused with that ouf the household cat or small dog. Whatever.

But what really floored me there were the carved ceramics. The piece in this picture is about as tall as a pint glass or water tumbler. The detail work is, to me, unfathomable. I cannot imagine a human being with the dexterity to do any of the work visit on that surface. To give you a sense of scale, that little house is about the surface area of the nail on my pinky finger.

After I'd wandered through the antiquities section, I went upstairs and viewed their contemporary art exhibit, about the new "Literati" movement that has swept across China and HK in the past 10 or 20 years. It's mostly modern art after some fashion or another, and with the exception of an enchanting few, I was not as enthralled. I thought the exhibits explanation and writeup on display rather amusing though. Paraphrased, it basically said "This movement is recent. It tends to polarize people. We're not claiming that any of the work we collected here is actually /good/, per se, just that it is representative and we wanted to capture it now. The actual merit of the movement and this art form will be measured by whether any of the appeal stands the test of time."

When I left the Art museum, I headed off to lunch. I went back to the Overseas dragon, since I knew there was a bakery nearby, and I wanted a second crack at those tiger balm gardens.

Lunch was wonderful, Pork and Leek fried spring rolls, Soybean Milk, and Meat Ball (dumpling, really) soup.

Afterwards, I bought a couple of items from a small bakery next door. Hong kong has fewer bakerys than Europe, but they're still pretty delectable. They sell about 70% savory thhings, like hotdogs baked into croissants, or tiny pizzas you can eat one handed. The other 30$ is a few cookies that are very mildly sweetened, and then these really amazing little single-serving custard pies. The custard pies are amazing, only two or three bites to one, but they're just lovely, with a very strong eggy flavour and a sweetness to the filling countered nicely by the crunchiness and slight salt of the crust.

I located Tai Hang road as soon as my lunch was over, and spent the next 45 minutes climbing it, again, this time without a four kilometer detour beforehand. I still couldn't find those damn gardens. I finally gave up at the top of the hill, and on the way back, in the bus, spotted what I believe to be the mansion associated with the gardens, obscured by road construction. I'd walked right past it, and stopped my original search less than 50 meters from the front door.

I've decided, I /will/ see that ridiculous garden before I go back to the states. My last day in Hong Kong, that's where I'm going. It will happen.

After my second defeat at the hands of that damnable hill, I caught the MTR back to Kowloon, and this time struck out for the Hong Kong Museums of History and Science, which are across a plaza from each other, just northeast of the Tsim Sha Tsui station. The Hong Kong history museum is made up primarily of The Hong Kong Story Exhibit, an 8 part exhibit covering everything from the local flora and fauna to the occupation of the Japanese during WWII. It's a sprawling leviathan of information and edification, and I could have spent an hour in each segment and been a happy man for my trouble. But I didn't have 8 hours, I had two, so I soaked up as much as they could before they chased us all out. Whenever I'm next in Asia, if I have any time in Hong Kong, I'll definetly go there again.

When the history museum had closed at 6, I went across the street to the Science museum (open till 9). There I discovered Betsy, the DC-3 that started the Cathay Pacific Airline empire that today spans almost all of the Southeast Asian sky. I also found a really remarkable water dropplet demonstration of frequency shifting, and how the human eye can be tricked into seeing things moving 'backwards' or forward at the wrong speed with the appropriate strobe. In this case, the exhibit also gave me a really remarkable chance to photograph waterdroplets in a way not normally available without specialized equipment.

Upstairs in the telecommunciations area, I found a lot of fun stuff, like a quiz on telegraphs and morse code that required you to encode your answers as morse "T" and "F" characters. The best for me though, was a complete rotary phone switching system, (phones on both end, switch in the center) where the entire switch had been sheared open so it still functioned. This allowed you to see the tumblers in the mechanism rotate and shift heights to create the different sequences required, all in real time as the rotary mechanism on the phone actually spun back into place with its distinctive clicks. Yes, I'm a huge nerd, but it was really COOL.

I finally wandered out of the Science museum a little after 7, in time to walk down to the waterfront avenue of the stars and watch the Symphony of Lights show. I tried to take a few pictures, but they don't really convey the effect, plus you kindof need the music. If anyone's interested, I'd suggest youtube but it doesn't really do the event justice, so I suggest you just come to Hong Kong and see it for yourself. It's quite pretty, aside from the incredibly campy music. The music was apparently sampled entirely from the electronic-symphony-of-manufactured-excitement, the same people who must have been responsible for all those "buy popcorn and silence your pagers" music pieces for every moviehouse in America over the last 20 years.

When the music was over, I wandered back to my hotel, stopping for a little sushi on the way (Tamago, Crab Stick, and Cucumber rolls), and crashed. Tomorrow, I'm headed for Korea.