A Rambler Garrulous
My dad's birthday was yesterday. To celebrate, we got him shirts from Hong Kong, as detailed in the last post, and some cake (moist and delicious and French Cheese and decidedly unhealthy, and we bought it at a discount too!), and a Wii to distract him from the nightly Chinese classical TV adaptation; the last series ended a couple nights ago and we've apparently decided that he will not get started on another bunch of love triangles, young martial students, and wise old men who haven't had access to a good barber in the last fifteen decades. Granted, the CGI are interesting and I enjoy pointing out the tropes to my kid brother, but eventually you can only take so much of the main character becoming insanely strong (to the point where he walks past and trees crumble to dust in his wake) but still can't see through the thinnest lies the next random assassin tells him, proving that he has a pure heart of gold and is completely guileless. Or completely gullible. Oh, and he's also likely to fall in love with three girls at the same time and so cause the rest of the series to be about the three girls' family, extended family, clan, teachers, etc. to annihilate each other in the name of love.
Anyway... so yeah. We had cake and a Wii marathon that's still continuing outside while I'm typing this up in relative peace and quiet.
I suppose I should tell you all about the day at Ocean Park, partly to assuage your insatiable desire to know the minutiae of my life, but more importantly to ensure that I don't forget those myself, despite the 230 photos I took there.
We chose a Monday morning to go, with our reasoning being that as the Hong Kong students aren't on holiday yet, the weekdays are likely to be least crowded at the place. Also, if you get there in the morning, you're less likely to be swamped by the groups of tourists who're visiting just for a couple of hours (so they can boast of having been there), plus you avoid most of the intensely searing heat of the afternoon. Win all around, we thought; and to avoid the cutthroat prices of the food vendors of the place, we bought plenty of canned food and bread to make sandwiches with for lunch. And then we even made a schedule that went something along the lines of "Get there, go on all the rides and be the only ones there, have lunch, and go see the shows", which was actually pretty much what we did. See the power of a well-made schedule!
So we left the house quite early in the morning, armed with large backpacks and paper bags of canned food, bread, water bottles (only five amongst the four of us, unfortunately for me and my aquaholic kid brother), and plenty of money. As a side note, the entirety of Hong Kong's public transport system runs on something called the Octopus, which is evocative and probably quite accurate if you see the entirety splayed out on a map. It also drinks money, and during our four days there we used up almost HKD 200, primarily because on that system, you pay a fixed price for every trip regardless of the distance you travel--so we paid huge amounts for the number of bus rides, tram rides, MRT or LRT rides... I suppose owning a car would be even more expensive, but you can't argue that making people pay more for longer rides and less for shorter ones sounds much more attractive. (Then again, most of our rides there took at least half an hour... each way...)
We arrived at Ocean Park in the midst of a horde of other people who were presumably using their medical leave, skipping school, or conveniently playing tourist at the same time as ourselves. We had pre-purchased our tickets, though, so we went in as soon as we arrived and didn't have to line up behind the other people for tickets--the line extended out beyond the shade of the roofs and they probably got a lot more than their recommended daily dosage of UV radiation. I bet their bones thanked 'em for it. We went in, and almost immediately started sweating profusely: the foliage in the Park is extensive, yes, but nowhere near extensive enough to provide adequate shade for anybody walking through it. Heck, even the sprinklers were showering the plants with hot water... and there wasn't any wind, for some reason, and the sun was shining as brightly as it possibly could at 10am. We walked, sweated, and were thankful that we weren't wearing long pants or anything remotely sweat-promoting; even the massively long elevators that the Park has, for getting to the top of the place a little faster, don't help very much with it (although I'm deeply thankful for them anyway). It was hot, incredibly so, and that's probably the reason for the cutthroat prices of the drinks at the stalls, which in turn may be the reason for the inadequate shade and the lack of large industrial-strength fans or moisturisers at strategic spots along the paths. Yes, I'm cynical, but then if you're going to pipe music throughout a whole park, why not provide a little air circulation as well as a little cooling?
We went on the Mine Train for a warm-up: 80-degree angles downwards, not too scary. We then went on the roller coaster twice in a row; I think they called it the Dragon Something. We went twice because the first time, my kid brother closed his eyes for the majority of the ride and because I got nervous about the three 360-degree loops: I always get nervous when moving at high speeds without my glasses on. (I had my glasses off for most of the rides, since they count as "loose items likely to fall off at high velocities and from great heights".) So we went again, and this time my kid brother decided that the loops went by too quickly to get his adrenaline to flow, while I got the sun in my eye from upside down, by craning my neck while we were looping the loop. It was quite glaring. And after that came the solero shot, which Ocean Park has aptly called The Abyss.
It's 51.56m tall, according to the Information sign, and decidedly scary. We only went on it once, because that once was very very definitely enough for us. My kid brother couldn't even scream, my kid sister screamed 'til she ran out of breath and couldn't take in more, and I went "WHAAAAAAAA...HAHAHA!" The WHAAAAA part was while falling, and the HAHAHA part was when we paused just long enough to get whooshed upwards again. My estimate is that the first fall is half the total height, the second rise is half of the first fall, the second fall is half of the second height, and so on... my kid brother says it's more like two-thirds of everything. He's probably more accurate. Truth be told, though, I've never liked heights. Not that I'm afraid of being at high places, but I definitely do not like the risk of falling. The Abyss is all about falling, and in that respect it's the scariest thing I've ever been on. The numbers are no comfort there, even if I measured the waiting period at the top accurately. The ride works like this: You sit on a seat and are strapped in. The strap is such that you cannot do much more than hold on to the strap itself. Your head is pinned between two large, mushy soft things attached to the strap, so you can either look down or up or straight ahead; you can certainly not look behind to see the immense towering bunch of metal that's holding you up. In fact, for all you can see, you're dangling by nothing. And then the contraption lifts you up, with puffs and wheezes, and the ground disappears below you at a quite frightening rate until you stop, seeing before you an incredible vista and lots of scenery that you're incidentally just a little too panicky to properly appreciate. You count to fifteen, which is the number of time the people before you had to contemplate their lives flashing before their eyes before plummeting, and true enough you plummet just as you say "-fteen".
And then the whole thing is over suddenly after you've gone up and down and feel rather like a very frightened yo-yo, and you look at your siblings (who also look like frightened yo-yos) and start comparing notes to see how scared each other was. And then you all swear never to go on it again for the day and that if any of you ever contemplate suicide by jumping from a height, the mere words "The Abyss" will snap you right out of that idea. And that in fact The Abyss will be your immediate cure for anybody you meet who seems bent on suicide. And when you tell all this to your aunt (who's been carefully sitting demurely on some nearby park bench while you were reviewing your past 21 years of life), she shakes her head and passes you the water.
We toned our blood pressure down a little with a ride even the aunt went on: flying chair suspended from a rotating ceiling by some nice stout chains. Peaceful enough that it was one of the few rides I didn't have to take my glasses off for, and it was something like a better version of a merry-go-round. We christened it Our Favourite Ride almost immediately after the first time, and then decided that we'd also christen it The Most Destressing Ride.
Lunch followed shortly after: we found a bunch of tables and benches, washed our hands clean--the single greatest obsession in Hong Kong is hygiene--and proceeded to devour a can of baked beans, a can of tuna, and about 12 slices of bread. Considering we were 4 people, of whom 2 were adults and 2 almost-adults, this was a tiny amount; but then again adrenaline has a way of reducing appetite dramatically.
After lunch, we went around to see the exhibits of Ocean Park, which rather predictably consist of lots of fishes. Quite large and impressive fishes notwithstanding, there's just something about huge rooms with poor lighting and huge amounts of water that I like very much. Possibly it's the fact that they seem to move so freely and weightlessly, as opposed to my own rather lumbering gait. I was unfortunately unable to get any photos, so you'll have to take my word for it: the fishes of Ocean Park are worth seeing and admiring. Sharks and mantas and octopus (there was only one) and little fishes and eels and jellies! And what was more they had a separate room for the jellies; some of those glow in the dark, so they put a bunch of 'em in floor-to-ceiling glass cylinders and put 'em in a room walled by mirrors, which made for a very cool outcome... which, of course, made a poor transition onto my camera screen. Quite sad.
We took the cable car ride down to the bottom half of Ocean Park, where the main entrance is (we entered by a side entrance), and were promptly badly disappointed. Apparently the main entrance of Ocean Park leads on to a section of the place that's walled by boards bearing large cartoony walruses and dolphins and other stereotypically ocean-related animals, all of them smiling and merrily promising that the walls hide a soon-coming attraction. In the meantime, unfortunately, the boards aren't any barrier to the clouds of dust and the screaming of the drills on the other side. At least they do cover up the piped music. The lower half is also where the kids' attractions are, including a booth where people dress up as large fuzzy animals and wave at anybody passing by. It was a pretty good explanation, for us at least, as to why the cable cars coming down were so empty and the ones going up were so full. (We later found that you had to line up for at least 30 minutes to go up, but the line down was nearly nonexistent.)
Pretty much the only thing of note that we did there was to watch the seals' performance, which was definitely interesting: the seals are quite well-trained, I should say, and the trainers seem to be quite well bonded with their animals. In fact the only thing I'm dissatisfied with is the quality of the PA system, which was rather too loud to be heard well. I also found out, during the show, that some camera screens really should look into retooling their icon designs, because some little kid beside me asked me to help find out which of the icons on his viewing-screen was for the remaining battery life, and for the life of me I couldn't tell whether it was the half-full one or the one with two bars left out of three. I merely told him I didn't know, but either way he'd have to get some new batteries sometime soon. After the seals, we walked around, found nothing of interest that we could ride on--there were hot-air balloon rides, but due to the bad weather that day the balloons weren't working--and joined the line of people wanting to take the cable cars up to the more interesting half of the park.
We got to the other side around 3.30pm. I know because I was trying to get back to the shark exhibit to see the shark-feeding. Unfortunately, it turned out to be vastly disappointing; the feeding of the sharks, as first, consisted of some unseen figures thrusting a sharp stick on which were impaled rows of little fish, somewhat like a shish kebab or a satay, which the sharks took absolutely no notice of. The crowd of people groaned a lot, but not all together at once; I thought we might have a quite nice chant going at one point, but then the crowd began drifting away. The sharks continued apathetically swimming around the large tank, occasionally pulling up the crowd's hopes by going near the stick... but not eating at all. You'd almost think those things were on some sort of hunger strike. The feeders eventually began tossing dead fish into the water, which sank like dead fishes, and were just as ignored as their impaled fellows on the stick. A manta did notice one of those, but ate only half of it before it apparently got annoyed at prey that didn't twitch or try to get away, so we got half a fish sitting on the floor of the habitat too. We left after awhile; I think the sharks may have been planning on hoarding the fishes for a midnight snack or something of the sort. Maybe they wanted to let the fish decompose in the water and breathe in the nutrients or something.
We left Ocean Park shortly after.
Anyway... so yeah. We had cake and a Wii marathon that's still continuing outside while I'm typing this up in relative peace and quiet.
I suppose I should tell you all about the day at Ocean Park, partly to assuage your insatiable desire to know the minutiae of my life, but more importantly to ensure that I don't forget those myself, despite the 230 photos I took there.
We chose a Monday morning to go, with our reasoning being that as the Hong Kong students aren't on holiday yet, the weekdays are likely to be least crowded at the place. Also, if you get there in the morning, you're less likely to be swamped by the groups of tourists who're visiting just for a couple of hours (so they can boast of having been there), plus you avoid most of the intensely searing heat of the afternoon. Win all around, we thought; and to avoid the cutthroat prices of the food vendors of the place, we bought plenty of canned food and bread to make sandwiches with for lunch. And then we even made a schedule that went something along the lines of "Get there, go on all the rides and be the only ones there, have lunch, and go see the shows", which was actually pretty much what we did. See the power of a well-made schedule!
So we left the house quite early in the morning, armed with large backpacks and paper bags of canned food, bread, water bottles (only five amongst the four of us, unfortunately for me and my aquaholic kid brother), and plenty of money. As a side note, the entirety of Hong Kong's public transport system runs on something called the Octopus, which is evocative and probably quite accurate if you see the entirety splayed out on a map. It also drinks money, and during our four days there we used up almost HKD 200, primarily because on that system, you pay a fixed price for every trip regardless of the distance you travel--so we paid huge amounts for the number of bus rides, tram rides, MRT or LRT rides... I suppose owning a car would be even more expensive, but you can't argue that making people pay more for longer rides and less for shorter ones sounds much more attractive. (Then again, most of our rides there took at least half an hour... each way...)
We arrived at Ocean Park in the midst of a horde of other people who were presumably using their medical leave, skipping school, or conveniently playing tourist at the same time as ourselves. We had pre-purchased our tickets, though, so we went in as soon as we arrived and didn't have to line up behind the other people for tickets--the line extended out beyond the shade of the roofs and they probably got a lot more than their recommended daily dosage of UV radiation. I bet their bones thanked 'em for it. We went in, and almost immediately started sweating profusely: the foliage in the Park is extensive, yes, but nowhere near extensive enough to provide adequate shade for anybody walking through it. Heck, even the sprinklers were showering the plants with hot water... and there wasn't any wind, for some reason, and the sun was shining as brightly as it possibly could at 10am. We walked, sweated, and were thankful that we weren't wearing long pants or anything remotely sweat-promoting; even the massively long elevators that the Park has, for getting to the top of the place a little faster, don't help very much with it (although I'm deeply thankful for them anyway). It was hot, incredibly so, and that's probably the reason for the cutthroat prices of the drinks at the stalls, which in turn may be the reason for the inadequate shade and the lack of large industrial-strength fans or moisturisers at strategic spots along the paths. Yes, I'm cynical, but then if you're going to pipe music throughout a whole park, why not provide a little air circulation as well as a little cooling?
We went on the Mine Train for a warm-up: 80-degree angles downwards, not too scary. We then went on the roller coaster twice in a row; I think they called it the Dragon Something. We went twice because the first time, my kid brother closed his eyes for the majority of the ride and because I got nervous about the three 360-degree loops: I always get nervous when moving at high speeds without my glasses on. (I had my glasses off for most of the rides, since they count as "loose items likely to fall off at high velocities and from great heights".) So we went again, and this time my kid brother decided that the loops went by too quickly to get his adrenaline to flow, while I got the sun in my eye from upside down, by craning my neck while we were looping the loop. It was quite glaring. And after that came the solero shot, which Ocean Park has aptly called The Abyss.
It's 51.56m tall, according to the Information sign, and decidedly scary. We only went on it once, because that once was very very definitely enough for us. My kid brother couldn't even scream, my kid sister screamed 'til she ran out of breath and couldn't take in more, and I went "WHAAAAAAAA...HAHAHA!" The WHAAAAA part was while falling, and the HAHAHA part was when we paused just long enough to get whooshed upwards again. My estimate is that the first fall is half the total height, the second rise is half of the first fall, the second fall is half of the second height, and so on... my kid brother says it's more like two-thirds of everything. He's probably more accurate. Truth be told, though, I've never liked heights. Not that I'm afraid of being at high places, but I definitely do not like the risk of falling. The Abyss is all about falling, and in that respect it's the scariest thing I've ever been on. The numbers are no comfort there, even if I measured the waiting period at the top accurately. The ride works like this: You sit on a seat and are strapped in. The strap is such that you cannot do much more than hold on to the strap itself. Your head is pinned between two large, mushy soft things attached to the strap, so you can either look down or up or straight ahead; you can certainly not look behind to see the immense towering bunch of metal that's holding you up. In fact, for all you can see, you're dangling by nothing. And then the contraption lifts you up, with puffs and wheezes, and the ground disappears below you at a quite frightening rate until you stop, seeing before you an incredible vista and lots of scenery that you're incidentally just a little too panicky to properly appreciate. You count to fifteen, which is the number of time the people before you had to contemplate their lives flashing before their eyes before plummeting, and true enough you plummet just as you say "-fteen".
And then the whole thing is over suddenly after you've gone up and down and feel rather like a very frightened yo-yo, and you look at your siblings (who also look like frightened yo-yos) and start comparing notes to see how scared each other was. And then you all swear never to go on it again for the day and that if any of you ever contemplate suicide by jumping from a height, the mere words "The Abyss" will snap you right out of that idea. And that in fact The Abyss will be your immediate cure for anybody you meet who seems bent on suicide. And when you tell all this to your aunt (who's been carefully sitting demurely on some nearby park bench while you were reviewing your past 21 years of life), she shakes her head and passes you the water.
We toned our blood pressure down a little with a ride even the aunt went on: flying chair suspended from a rotating ceiling by some nice stout chains. Peaceful enough that it was one of the few rides I didn't have to take my glasses off for, and it was something like a better version of a merry-go-round. We christened it Our Favourite Ride almost immediately after the first time, and then decided that we'd also christen it The Most Destressing Ride.
Lunch followed shortly after: we found a bunch of tables and benches, washed our hands clean--the single greatest obsession in Hong Kong is hygiene--and proceeded to devour a can of baked beans, a can of tuna, and about 12 slices of bread. Considering we were 4 people, of whom 2 were adults and 2 almost-adults, this was a tiny amount; but then again adrenaline has a way of reducing appetite dramatically.
After lunch, we went around to see the exhibits of Ocean Park, which rather predictably consist of lots of fishes. Quite large and impressive fishes notwithstanding, there's just something about huge rooms with poor lighting and huge amounts of water that I like very much. Possibly it's the fact that they seem to move so freely and weightlessly, as opposed to my own rather lumbering gait. I was unfortunately unable to get any photos, so you'll have to take my word for it: the fishes of Ocean Park are worth seeing and admiring. Sharks and mantas and octopus (there was only one) and little fishes and eels and jellies! And what was more they had a separate room for the jellies; some of those glow in the dark, so they put a bunch of 'em in floor-to-ceiling glass cylinders and put 'em in a room walled by mirrors, which made for a very cool outcome... which, of course, made a poor transition onto my camera screen. Quite sad.
We took the cable car ride down to the bottom half of Ocean Park, where the main entrance is (we entered by a side entrance), and were promptly badly disappointed. Apparently the main entrance of Ocean Park leads on to a section of the place that's walled by boards bearing large cartoony walruses and dolphins and other stereotypically ocean-related animals, all of them smiling and merrily promising that the walls hide a soon-coming attraction. In the meantime, unfortunately, the boards aren't any barrier to the clouds of dust and the screaming of the drills on the other side. At least they do cover up the piped music. The lower half is also where the kids' attractions are, including a booth where people dress up as large fuzzy animals and wave at anybody passing by. It was a pretty good explanation, for us at least, as to why the cable cars coming down were so empty and the ones going up were so full. (We later found that you had to line up for at least 30 minutes to go up, but the line down was nearly nonexistent.)
Pretty much the only thing of note that we did there was to watch the seals' performance, which was definitely interesting: the seals are quite well-trained, I should say, and the trainers seem to be quite well bonded with their animals. In fact the only thing I'm dissatisfied with is the quality of the PA system, which was rather too loud to be heard well. I also found out, during the show, that some camera screens really should look into retooling their icon designs, because some little kid beside me asked me to help find out which of the icons on his viewing-screen was for the remaining battery life, and for the life of me I couldn't tell whether it was the half-full one or the one with two bars left out of three. I merely told him I didn't know, but either way he'd have to get some new batteries sometime soon. After the seals, we walked around, found nothing of interest that we could ride on--there were hot-air balloon rides, but due to the bad weather that day the balloons weren't working--and joined the line of people wanting to take the cable cars up to the more interesting half of the park.
We got to the other side around 3.30pm. I know because I was trying to get back to the shark exhibit to see the shark-feeding. Unfortunately, it turned out to be vastly disappointing; the feeding of the sharks, as first, consisted of some unseen figures thrusting a sharp stick on which were impaled rows of little fish, somewhat like a shish kebab or a satay, which the sharks took absolutely no notice of. The crowd of people groaned a lot, but not all together at once; I thought we might have a quite nice chant going at one point, but then the crowd began drifting away. The sharks continued apathetically swimming around the large tank, occasionally pulling up the crowd's hopes by going near the stick... but not eating at all. You'd almost think those things were on some sort of hunger strike. The feeders eventually began tossing dead fish into the water, which sank like dead fishes, and were just as ignored as their impaled fellows on the stick. A manta did notice one of those, but ate only half of it before it apparently got annoyed at prey that didn't twitch or try to get away, so we got half a fish sitting on the floor of the habitat too. We left after awhile; I think the sharks may have been planning on hoarding the fishes for a midnight snack or something of the sort. Maybe they wanted to let the fish decompose in the water and breathe in the nutrients or something.
We left Ocean Park shortly after.
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