The next morning I woke up with all my body aching. Beds in the far east are as hard as rocks. (Mind you, the beds we slept on in Australia were too soft for my taste, and generally we found "too hard" to be preferable to "too soft".)
I stepped out of bed and walked to the large window that covered an entire wall of the room. The previous night, when gazing out of the same window, I was looking at the furnaces of hell. I was hoping that daytime made things a little better. I guess it did. A little.
The blacks and oranges that characterized the night were gone. Replacing them was a bland, lifeless gray. There was no single ray of sun that managed to make its way through the thick bank of overhanging clouds. There were no shadows. Looking down from the window of the 8th story room we were in, it was not fog that made everything look gray. It was just a heavy sheet of rain that covered everything and made a constant rap-a-tapping noise on the window, even though it was shielded by a large lintel.
It was possible to see several streets and walkways below, but nobody was there. Directly under the hotel was the highway from which we came. It was still flooded. Cars were still making their laborious way through the muck, their headlights on and creating a cone of bright raindrops in front of them.
From the map I knew that the bay is a walking distance away, but it was impossible to see it from where I was standing. In that direction there was just a featureless gray wall.
The only people that seemed to be out - and that caught me by surprise - were down below us, in the hotel pool. It was an open-air "solar heated" (meaning bitter cold) pool, and people were swimming between the rain drops. Orit managed to place this picture quite exactly: she said it's an Alpine pool in reverse. Instead of having the lower half of your body in steaming hot water while the top half is between the icicles, here the bottom half is shivering in the cold pool water while the other half is drenched in sweat. Later on in the day, even these die-hard swimmers gave up and looked for greener pastures, as the rain doubled in strength.
It took me mere moments to formulate my plan: I will be here in the room and will feel miserable until our flight takes us home. That will ease the landing in Ben-Gurion airport.
It took Orit even less to formulate a similar plan: she will stay here in the room and order an in-room massage, enjoying her stay in Hong Kong immensely. It wasn't long before a guy came in to hand us towels, in order for Orit to be fully prepared when the massager came up. I decided not to stay for the entire proceeding, and kicked myself out of the room unceremoniously as soon as the massager entered. She was a very small woman with very large biceps who didn't know a word of English, and was therefore escorted to the room by a bell-boy in order to make sure that we were, indeed, expecting her.
Out of the room, I knew I had forty-five minutes to kill, and started by exploring the hotel, where I planned to stay for three days now. First up were the gym and the pool. Neither left any lasting impression. Then came two restaurants, and one additional coffee-bar right at the lobby level. This pretty much concluded everything the hotel advertised for, and I wasn't expecting to run into anything else, but nevertheless I did do a full follow-the-left-wall search around the lobby, seeking methodically for a place to sit down.
That's when I struck gold. In front of me, there was a glass door. I pushed it and went in. Behind the door were three stories of a large shopping mall. It turns out that Hong Kong folk are very aware of the weather in their country, and the country is criss-crossed by a grid of over-passes, under-passes and connected buildings, simply in order to avoid the necessity of stepping into the rain. Now, my spirit was finally rising.
On the second floor of the mall I found a large food court. Here they served every conceivable type of fast food: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Malaysian, Sushi (yep, that's a fast food. In Australia you get it in uncut rolls in a to-go version.), Indonesian, and many many others. The only problem was that "every conceivable" type of food only consisted of types of food that have been conceived in the far east, and most of them were staring back at me.
The first floor is where the real restaurants were, not the fast food kind. Here the dishes not only stared at you, but were actually able to swim around, following you, if you hesitated too long. Some of them, I'm pretty sure, would have been happy ordering me instead of having me ordering them. Fancy restaurant or not, this wasn't my cup of tea.
My favorite restaurant there was a place called "Country Road" promising "American Style Food". I had to actually go over there and read their entire menu, the ideas they had about what American food is being so funny. Just to give you a taste (so to speak) of what I'm talking about, one of the dishes was called "Stir-fried Chicken Shawarma in Spicy Mango Sauce". Can you imagine Joe Cartwright ordering that one?
Regarding the mango sauce, by the way, don't worry about it: in Hong Kong, everything has mango in it. It's like the country needs to finish hundreds of tons of it before it goes bad, and they're on a schedule.
Continuing my explorations, I came across yet another glass door, this being on the far end of the shopping mall. It led me to a long overpass. (It was wide and had a roof over it, and when walking on the right end of it, you would get only minimally wet when the wind was blowing.) This overpass, in turn, led to a large train station. Here I learned the other important lesson about Hong Kong's system of connecting buildings: the connection is never complete. There is always a one meter space between where the sheltered walkway ends and where the next building begins. It's as if they think it would be rude if you were to come in all dry.
The train station was rather large and populated by a mall of its own, including book bazaars and whatnot. (Sadly, all in Chinese.) However, it didn't take me long to home-in on the fact that half of an entire floor of the building was dedicated to my establishment of choice when it comes to fine cuisine: McD's. McDonald's, incidentally, is where I like to learn about the culture of a country. You can tell much about their choice of "special plates". For example, they had no salads to speak of, but a very respectable choice of deli sandwiches. They had several Oriental versions of the McShawarma with various stir-fried meat-sorts in them. (The best of which, to my taste, was spicy pork, but there were others that were from meat sorts that Orit eats, too.) Chicken, by the way, in all its incarnations, was very cheap. There was also a McCafe adjacent, with choices of cakes and warm beverages.
However, the pies de resistance, in my opinion, was the ice-cream cone. This you could have for the equivalent of 1.50NIS. Adding an extra 0.30NIS, you could also have it topped either with warm chocolate, or - you guessed it - with warm mango.
Having ascertained all these facts, I was about to continue in my tour. The train station, it turns out, was connected by an underground passage to the Polytechnic Institute of Hong Kong. I didn't, however, get a chance to continue this wild exploration, because I saw my time was almost up. Orit was finishing her massage.
We met up, and strode back to our favorite eatery, where we had lunch for the day. (Just to give you an idea of how much we like this favorite eatery of ours, after stuffing ourselves with a hearty lunch, we learned that people who buy more than a certain amount at this McD's get a free decorated drinking glass. Getting the glass, which has colorful McD's-type imagery on it, we found that we like it, and before our time in Hong Kong was up, we already had two more of them. Given another day, it would have been a whole set.)
Over lunch, and feeling much better, I explained my grand plan for the next two days to Orit: stay in the hotel complex, never venturing into any open grounds, and feel only slightly less miserable than when being couped up in our hotel room.
Orit, however, wasn't going to give in quite that easily. We spotted, earlier in the day, a few going-ons in Hong Kong, and she wanted to see them and the city in general, the rain be damned.
I said OK, grabbed two umbrellas from back in the room, and we waited for the hotel shuttle, which was making its rounds between the hotel and a nearby subway station. On a sunny day, the whole trip is about a five minute walk. In the torrents of rain, however, this was a minivan ride worth waiting twenty minutes for.
With the minivan, the straight route was out, and the drive took roughly 10 minutes. Outside the window, one could hardly make out any details through the rain. At some point, the car stopped and we were let out. I made a mental calculation based on what I remembered from the map, and realized we were a block away from the station.
The umbrellas weren't doing their job very well. After seconds, we were already both drenched to the bone. The fact that Orit's umbrella was overturned by the wind didn't seem to make her state any worse than mine.
"Let's go back!" she said to me, shouting over the rattling of water on overflowing drainage pipes and flooded sidewalks. She pointed at the minivan that, as yet, didn't turn to leave.
"We're already here; we're already wet," I said, "Let's at least look around first."
So we did. We never made it to the subway station, but we did reach as far as crossing the street. On the other side of it we took temporary shelter from the rain instead Hong Kong's Cultural Center and Hong Kong's Air and Space Museum, both being entirely unremarkable and perfectly miss-worthy. The only mildly interesting thing the Space Museum had to offer was a Moon Walk simulator, and even that wasn't very well done. We're both pretty sure we had taken pictures of it, but we don't seem to find them now, so you'll never know what color it was.
Then, when the time approached for our return cab, we started making our way back. Of course, this isn't trivial as the only way to cross a main street in Hong Kong is through an underground passage, and usually these don't really bring you to the other side of the street, but rather to a shopping mall that connects to an arcade that connects to a residential building that connects to an office building that connects to a hotel, with all these wrapped up in some strange hyperspace, leading you, if you're lucky, to where you want to go, though in no retraceable route. I believe the technical term for this is called "tunneling".
With all this tunneling going on, however, we missed our ride, of course, and had to wait for the next one. By the time we reached the hotel, we were so soaked it's a wonder the colors didn't rub entirely off the clothes we were wearing. We reached our hotel room exhausted, dropped on the bed and fell promptly asleep.
We did, however, learn an important thing about Hong Kong's culture that day: they don't like their umbrellas dripping. Before we left the hotel, I pointed out to Orit that everybody was walking around with their umbrellas wrapped up in plastic as though they were brand new. Only afterward did we learn the secret: wherever you go in Hong Kong, near the entrance you will find little plastic bags within which you can wrap your umbrella for the duration of your stay. As you can see, these guys don't just talk about the weather.