Halloween 2 Hong Kong Style
Trip Start
Feb 25, 2006
1
134
148
Trip End
Jun 24, 2009
Hong Kong,
China
Friday, October 31, 2008
When the gig was finished and the beers gone, we headed down to Hong Kong to meet up with Anna. We forgot to change trains at the right station to get from Lo Wu to Central, so we had to buy another ticket when we hit the end of the train line at East TST. It's actually faster than having to change trains 2x at Kowloon Tong and Mong Kok, but a bit more expensive. Once we got to Central, our newbie friend, George, didn't realize he had to keep his ticket and left it in the machine back in Kowloon. When he told me, I thought he was just screwing around, sort of like getting to the airport and asking your wife if she remembered the tickets. I just said, "sucks to be you" and tapped my Octopus Card and walked out to meet Anna who was hysterically laughing at my evil Mask and fuzzy green antennae. We didn't even notice poor George stuck in the metro without a ticket nor any language skills. Fortunately, Matt was bringing up the rear again and saw a distressed George panicking and saying, "they just left me!". Matt's excellent advice was to jump the turnstile, but luckily George had better sense. The attendant seeing a large lost looking white boy gesticulating wildly at her, took pity on him and let him out into the chaos of Central on Halloween night.
I knew Lan Kwai Fong was going to be busy, but I had absolutely no idea how busy it was going to be. The queue to get into "Gwailo Fong" started immediately outside the metro station all the way to the more aptly named foreigner party street on Halloween than on any other night. Gwailo literally translates to ghost man, referring to the white people that frequent the area, but on this night it has a double meaning. After about 20 minutes being in the massive queue, Anna and I were getting a bit frustrated. We stopped in McDonald's for an emergency refueling and to get out of the crowd. We had lost the others already, but luckily great minds think alike and they too stopped for "food". I was ready to bail on the idea and go for Plan B, but we had come a long way and the others besides Anna wanted to trudge on. I was game for anything. About another 30 minutes of this line from hell and Anna decided to call it quits and bail. So sorry to drag you out for nothing, Banana. I know it wasn't your scene. Unfortunately, Anna bailed just a little bit too early. I hopped a fence and got some beers around the next corner and the rest of the line seemed to move fairly quickly. I'm not sure whether or not it was true or if it was just an beer attitude adjustment, but regardless it seemed better anyway. The streets were packed with all the traditional ghouls, ghosts, goblins and witches along with a great pair of zombies dressed in a police uniform torn to shreds. Every time we saw them, they were doing a very good imitation of the slow zombie gimp along. I don't know if they kept it up all night, but the fear factor would have increased by a 1000% if caught alone with them in a dark alley. It's great to have so many people all in one place with copious amounts of alcohol and virtually no problems or fights. You would be hard pressed to find that kind of fun and amiable atmosphere in a similar party in America. Almost everyone was more than happy to take and give photos whenever asked except these gwailo B(W)itches, dressed in black garters, lace and little pointy hats. When I asked one of them to have a photo with them, the crazy bitch snapped at me and basically told me to F off. Of course, I couldn't let that kind of nasty attitude go unpunished so I replied in kind with, "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean the fat ugly Witch of the West, I only wanted a picture of your pretty friends. I laughed heartily as I wandered down the street on to the next kewl costume.
My favorite costume of the night was a perfect reflection of the sign of the times. The Hang Seng Market has been hit just as hard if not harder than the rest of the world's stock exchanges. It's down some 60% from it's all time highs and about 40% just in October. The X-Lehman Brothers employee with a noose tied around his neck was perfect. I wish I had thought about it myself. If I hadn't gone to about 70% cash last year, I think I would have done a swan dive off the new tallest building in the world in Shanghai last month. My long term investments that I haven't had a chance to watch while on the road have pretty much been killed over the past year. But I digress
Around 5:30am, the party was dying down so we figured we should probably head back to the apartment that I rented in Kowloon. Fortunately, we walked down the right street and 1 block away we managed to find a passing minibus with 2 seats on it going straight to Mong Kok. We made it home by 6am. The security guard said to me incredulously as he handed me the key, that I was finally arriving NOW?!
