Jen

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I met Jen L from high school outside the port terminal after finding Catie and sending a few emails.  I asked Jen if Catie could tag along with us but that she was allowed to say no, and she said yes, it was totally okay.  She was in a really good mood and I was glad about that.  She had a big book called 2666 with her.  We walked back to the boat.  We tried to get her on, but apparently you need two weeks clearance, not just 24.  Catie went to do something and I went to put stuff in my room (computer?), leaving Jen alone with the security guard.  She was chatting him up when I came back out.  We talked on the way out, and I said I was hoping that she would do just that and maybe he’d just let her on.  She said she was thinking the exact same things, but probably he knew what was going on, and that people kept coming by and distracting him and he was giving cold one-word answers.

 

We took the subway to her college and talked along the way.  Social niceties aren’t so common in Hong Kong.  We got on a bus at her campus and took it up the crazy mountain that her campus is in to the her dorm and looked over the infinity edge pool to the amazing view right up the stairs from her dorm.  We saw her room, and met her roommate Yuki while she was eating something delicious, and then headed back out to the subway to find a restaurant somewhere near the café that Jen wanted us to see.

 

We got off at the Mong Kok stop on the red line and just walked around and looked for a restaurant.  The three of us were all having a really nice time, having easy conversation, catching up and learning about each other and just having fun in general.  We found a restaurant with English and pictures and good prices about two blocks over from the station, which was great, so we sat down.  They didn’t have any open tables, so they actually just had us sit down with a middle-aged couple that was in the middle of their meal.  Apparently this was standard procedure because some teenagers came to sit with us halfway through our meal, and left three quarters of the way through.

 

I ended up getting some duck and some chicken, and tomato soup and French fries and rice, and the other two got a whole lot of stuff too, even though we didn’t know we were getting that much and had no idea you could ever get that much with how much we paid (which was like $8 US).  I ate for a LONG time and didn’t come close to finishing all my stuff, and the other two quit before me.  Jen ended up putting hers in a box for later.  We were pretty seriously amazed at how much food the place seemed to give us for so little.  I also tried French fries in soy sauce which was better than I expected.

 

I took a sip of the water there by accident but didn’t get sick.

We went to the diner next.  It was called Kubrick and was silver and had a modern feel to it.  Jen told us we had to get milk tea and so we both ordered some and Catie got something else.  She also told us that we should browse the books, so we did.  They had a lot of movies, and a lot of stuff on world cinema and US cinema and Asian cinema and Chinese cinema and German cinema and then some on history and world history and Hong Kong and maybe some fiction.  It was a pretty interesting selection, and I picked out a book called Street-Sleepers II, which turned out to be about Hong Kong.  Mostly it had beautiful/awful pictures, but it also had some writing in it, which was what convinced me to take it.  Also it wasn’t plastic wrapped, which is the case for many books in Asian bookstores.

 

Jen showed me how much tea to pour in back at the table, and then how much milk, and then took a guess at how much sugar but then we added more later until there was no trace of bitterness.  It was actually quite good and I was glad she made me try it.  I was going to go get more, but she was like, “Jeff, you have a whole pot of tea right there.  Just pour some more.”  So I had another cup, and so did she, and then Catie had the last bit of tea from my pot and also thought it was pretty good.

 

I read about street sleepers a little bit.  Apparently they are more and more often becoming young and educated people who have fallen into a cycle of poor housing, losing hygiene, getting a casual job, getting fired, and sleeping on the streets again, over and over.  Apparently one of the biggest problems they have is with dentistry.  Their teeth all end up really bad because there’s no way they can take care of them, and then they have the problem of feeling incredibly embarrassed whenever they laugh, so they try not to laugh.  They also feel self-conscious about their mouths when they’re in an interview, and so many of them try to look down or cover their mouths, which isn’t very good for an interview, and makes it harder to look for a job.  It was really sad.  I had never thought about dentistry like that before.  The writer of the book was talking about how he wished someone would help them, and that he was trying the best he could.  I guess now I see why some people might want to be dentists.  At the end of the intro page, he said hello to everyone he’d given a place to sleep to, and asked them to come back home.

 

We found a Circle K when the diner closed and got some chocolate milk.  I got the cheap kind that came in paper and Catie (who also loves chocolate milk) got a slightly more expensive kind that came in a glass bottle.  Mine was pretty good.  Hers tasted great when it was actually on your tongue but left a pretty bad aftertaste.  We decided that I won in general, and I felt like I had won.  Not really but whatever.  We sat in a really pretty park on some big round stairs like you’d see in The Forum and talked for a long time.  There were some loud natives around us, and that was cool, and there were a lot of high rise building with lights going in and out and elevators and even the park had some neon on its columns.  We talked about when we were happiest.  I talked about when drumline was over last year, and some other things.  We talked about Jen’s relationships too.  Some of them have been kind of rough, like the one with one of her good friends who is now studying in HK with her.  She doesn’t know what to do about the situation.  And we talked about how both of us had lost entire groups of friends recently.  We both thought it was for the better and that if it ever happened at all, then it was bound to happen to begin with.

 

We ended up going to a second park after the first one closed.  A middle eastern man ran over near us, sat down on a bench, made a phone call, and then ran frantically back with the other guy on the bench to lay down on the grass.  We talked some more, and I think this was actually where we drank our chocolate milk.  We stayed there until about midnight and then walked toward the subway station, but got distracted by the fruit market on the way and the temple at the end where Catie had run that morning.  It smelled of wonderful incense and I asked Jen if she could bring some back for me when she came to the states because I couldn’t bring it on the ship.

 

Catie and I decided to walk back.  We started in the wrong direction and found a man in the suit to ask if we were going the right way.  We stopped in a McDonald’s for the bathroom and I ended up buying a child’s sized ice cream because it was like $.30 US.  She had some of the ice cream part and I had the cone part.  Some white people stopped and asked us if we knew where a bar was.  They were all dressed up to go out, and honestly, if they had just looked at us for literally half a second they would have known immediately that we’d have no idea where a bar was.  We were clearly not in bar mode.  But I told them the main street on the other island was apparently the most happening place and wished them luck.

We got back to the ship around 1:00AM and talked to Jen G for a while as we laid on the floor in front of Catie’s door, and finally made it to our beds around 2:00AM.