The trees are budding, the butterflies are out, but where is the sunshine?

Jeff says I should stop complaining about the weather, so I will give it one last "kvetch" and not mention it again (until the next blog!).  We haven't seen the sun in HK in weeks (thankfully we had a sunny week in Cambodia to replenish the vitamin D).  The temperature hovers around 18 degrees, and most of the time there's a fine drizzle.  On Thursday, I lunched with the YWCA girls (we met in January taking a "welcome to HK" course) for three hours, trying to wait out the heavy downpour!  Jeff often wonders what we women chat about for hours on end!

Shopping in Shenzhen:  I think I'm hooked!  A few weeks ago, my friend, Ursula, initiated me into the intricacies of shopping in Shenzhen.  Shenzhen is just across the border from the New Territories (the northernmost part of Hong Kong).  It's an easy train ride from Central, and the trip takes about an hour, door-to-door.  Ursula has the system down pat - we left early, arrived at the border with our immigration forms already written out (no time to waste!), and crossed into the "real" China.  There is an enormous shopping mall right across the terrace from the train station.  It is called Lo Wu Commercial Centre.  There are literally thousands of tiny shops scrunched together on five gigantic floors of commercial space.  The aisles are narrow, and smoking is permitted!  This is not Hazelton Lanes or Westmount Square.  The minute you step inside, young people rush at you aggressively asking if you want to buy handbags, dvds, manicures, electronics, etc.  They often follow you up and down the escalators and corridors.  I have learned the art of tuning them out unless I really do want to buy dvds!  The first stop in Lo Wu is to Calvin the Tailor.  The Shenzhen tailors are great at copying clothes, so it's always good to bring along a shirt, pants, skirt, or dress that you like and have them make it up in another fabric or colour.  My initial reason for going to Shenzhen was to order a "party dress" for David Sax's wedding in May.  Working from a photo in a fashion magazine, Calvin made me a cute "flapper" dress in green chiffon.  And while I was there I also ordered a few other dresses and a pair of jeans.  The prices are so incredibly cheap!  The other bargains at Lo Wu are watches (copies of all the name brands), handbags,  fake jewelry and tea.  I found this video on Youtube - it'll make you slightly dizzy, but you will get the gist of what the experience is like: shopping in Shenzhen

As a follow up to the wonderful Passover Seder we attended a few weeks ago, we decided to join the UJC (United Jewish Congregation).  They are a most welcoming organization.  On Thursday evening, Rabbi Martha hosted an interesting session.  We watched the short movie "The Tribe", which was about Barbie (the doll) and Jewish identity (I think it's available on Youtube).  Did you know that Barbie, the ultimate blonde, was invented by a Jewish lady?  The film provoked a lively discussion (and the wine and sweets were delicious, too!).

In addition to the UJC event and shopping, our week was filled with lots of local culture.  The Asia Society presented a program about the Chinese in America.  Nancy Tong, a documentary filmmaker, showed several short videos highlighting early Chinese American immigrant life.  These films are installed in the newly-opened MOCA (Museum of the Chinese in America) in New York http://www.mocanyc.org/.  I'm sure the museum will be as interesting as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which Andrew and I visited in 2008.

On Friday, I joined one of Jason Wordie's outings. (Jason Wordie) We visited a few Hakka (minority group) walled villages, ancestral halls and study halls in the New Territories.  The NT are the part of Hong Kong between Kowloon and the China border.  This area was largely villages and farmland until recently. The entrance in the left-hand photo is to the village of San Wai.  The fortifications are well preserved in this village, unlike many of the other places, where the stones have been dismantled and reused as foundations for newer buildings.  Within the walls are crowded, modern, 3-storey apartments.  The descendants of the original Hakka clans are the only people entitled to own the land in these villages.  We noticed lots of older people playing cards or gardening.  In one village, the very oldest women always dress up for visitors.  They bargain with the tour leader for a few dollars, although Jason assured us they are quite wealthy, and only do this for fun!

Jeff was scheduled to attend a conference in Bangkok this week, so the plan was for me to join him there for the weekend.  Unfortunately, the "red shirts" foiled our plans.  The conference was moved to Singapore, and there were no good flights available for the weekend.  As it turns out, Jeff just cancelled his plans to attend the conference:  the venue is a resort that is a 1-hour ferry ride from the Singapore airport.  Jeff's flight was due to land at 8 p.m., and the last ferry to the island is at 8 p.m.  So we are staying put in HK this week.

By the way, we've been watching some of the dvds that I bought in Shenzhen.  Aside from a few pauses now and then (when the illegal cameraman had to adjust the camera), the quality is good.  We watched Julie and Julia yesterday.  It got me thinking about our blog - is anyone "out there" reading it?  The movie also inspired me to get better acquainted with our little kitchen, so I walked into the kitchen today and looked around, ate a banana, and walked out again.

Thank you to Bonnie and Richard for sending us the links to two recent articles about Hong Kong:
Toronto Star article
National Post article
We hope they encourage you all to come and visit us!

Cambodia: welcome to the third world

We took advantage of the long Easter/Ching Ming holiday and visited Cambodia for a week.  Although it's only a two hour flight from Hong Kong, Cambodia is a world away.  The first thing we noticed was how flat, dry and dirty the country is.  In Phnom Penh, the capital, there are only a couple of "high rise" buildings of more than 10 stories.  Traffic flows the same way as Guilin (blog March 6), with the addition of numerous tuk-tuks (motorcycle-drawn open carriage).  In the picture on the right, Jeff is standing in front of a row of them. Since our trip to China, we are no longer scared to see cars, motos, tuk-tuks, bicycles, trucks, and pedestrians weaving their way through the streets without any Western safety restrictions.  Jeff says that I'm getting much better at crossing the street!  We noticed that most of the vehicles in Cambodia are Toyotas.



Phnom Penh has many French Colonial buildings - some are beautifully restored (owned by banks, NGOs, and the government), while others have been neglected for 50 years and are slum tenements.  The wide balconies and arched windows reminded us of New Orleans.  Upon our return to HK, I googled "Jewish Cambodia" and discovered that Chabad has recently moved into Phnom Penh.  They are housed in the Colonial building that was the former location of the U.S. embassy! (Chabad Cambodia)

The main tourist attractions in Phnom Penh are the National Museum, the Royal Palace, the Genocide Museum (S-21), and the Killing Fields.  The palace and museum were within walking distance of our charming hotel (on the right), which felt like an oasis after walking for hours in the unshaded 38 degree temperature.

The Museum, built around 1920, is a traditional terracotta structure with a beautiful tiled roof.  The four wings of the building surround a peaceful garden containing a relaxed-looking Buddha.  The Museum houses the world's finest collection of Khmer sculpture, mostly from the Angkorian period (9th-15th centuries).  There were also examples of earlier figures including an imposing statue of 8-armed Vishnu and a giant pair of wrestling monkeys.

The  ornate Royal Palace is just south of the Museum.  The entire complex is surrounded by a 6-foot-high yellow stucco wall.  It takes up the equivalent of two city blocks.  There are guard posts every few hundred metres, however most were unmanned!  The site consists of the king's official residence, temples, stupas, shrines, and gardens.  It was all a bit "over the top", compared to the poverty on the other side of the wall.

I realize that this blog is starting to sound like a travel brochure, so here goes the hard part of the trip.  Poverty.  People living on the streets (taking shelter under a lone palm tree near the Palace walls).  People sleeping/living in the parks.  Garbage everywhere.  Children left free to roam and free to sift through garbage for food or recyclables.  Much of daily life takes place on the street - for example barbers and numerous food stalls.








The Cambodian Civil War (1975-1979), led by the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, completely ruined the country.  Twenty-five percent of the population was murdered (especially the educated populace).  Even the wild animals escaped to Thailand!  The KR left thousands of land mines all over the country - you can't walk two city blocks without seeing maimed victims of these horrendous booby traps - and thousands more are still buried, waiting to be stepped on.  In Canada the orphanages have been turned into luxury condos.  In Cambodia, they house the children of land mine victims.  According to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Cambodia is an aid-dependant country with a weak government.  Political reforms are difficult to implement, so economic and social progress is slow and fragile.


S-21 (the Genocide Museum) was originally a high school in a residential neighbourhood.  The KR used it as a centre of detention and torture.  The museum is a gut-wrenching testament to the legacy of the KR.  Like other holocaust museums, it is disquieting to see beautiful trees and flowers continuing to bloom, oblivious of the crimes and tortures that took place.  The museum was so disturbing that we decided not to visit the Killing Fields, where 17,000 people were exterminated.  The Killing Fields have been "privatized" and are now controlled by a Japanese company.

On a happier note, there were many many wonderful surprises in Cambodia.  The local Khmer food is delicious!  It is somewhat like Thai food, but even more flavourful.  One of the national dishes is called Amok, and Jeff ate it four or five times during our trip.  Service everywhere is friendly, and even when we were being accosted to hire a tuk-tuk it was always accompanied by a large grin!  Shopping is fun, too, especially in the markets.  Jeff bought some linen fabric in the Russian market (so-called because the Russians used to shop there), and hired a tailor in the market to sew a pair of draw-string pants the same day.  Total cost (including delivery to our hotel): $17.

After two days in Phnom Penh, we were off to Siem Reap, home to the temples of Angkor.  We chose to cover the 300 km by plane, rather than a six-hour bus ride over roads that do not resemble the 401.  Angkor is the main attraction in Cambodia.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, containing the remains of the temples of the Khmer Empire from the 9th-15th centuries.  Angkor covers 400 square km.  No, we did not see it all!  Our legs just felt as if we had.

Angkor reminded us of Raiders of the Lost Ark - with no Harrison Ford in sight!  The structures are massive - and it is daunting to think that the sandstone was imported from a quarry 50 km down the river.  In its heyday, Angkor was home to one million people.  It is now an eerie reminder of a lost civilization.

A further calamity of the Civil War was the destruction of many of the statue-lined walkways to the temples.  The KR lopped off the heads of the statues and sold them over the Thai border.  In the photo, you can see an original head, a headless statue, and a reconstructed head (which looks completely fake).  It is a wonder that they did not destroy more of the structures.

We were awed by the size of the temples, the intricate carvings, and the bas relief.

The guidebook (Lonely Planet Cambodia) informed us that Lara Croft Tomb Raider was filmed at Ta Phrom, one of more interesting sites.  The jungle has grown over many of the buildings - man conquered nature, and now nature is reclaiming its own space.

As many of you know, Jeff and I try to cover every inch of places we visit.  On the second day of our exploration of the site, we visited Angkor Wat, and wanted to climb up to the top of the highest temple.  However, the wait line was 20 minutes long, so we decided to do the climb at the end of our third day as a "farewell".  The photo on the left shows the original stone steps leading to the top.  Luckily, a wooden stairway has been installed for easier access.

Local children were everywhere at Angkor, selling postcards, bracelets, and other souvenirs.  The guidebook says that most children do attend school at least half of the time, if their families can afford it.  I bought ten postcards (for $1 US) from a little girl, and as a thank-you she gave me a bangle!

Believe it or not, we actually took it very easy on our last full day in Cambodia.  The heat was a deterrent to returning to the unshaded temples.  We visited a silk farm just outside Siem Reap, where we saw all the stages of silk production.  Rural folk are trained to produce the silk.  The farm is run like a co-op, with a percentage of the profits returned to the employees.  The workers can stay in their villages and be productive there, rather than swarming to the cities in search of work.  Back in Siem Reap, we spent time touring Les Artisans d'Angkor, which includes a school that specializes in teaching wood- and stone-carving techniques to impoverished youngsters.  There is a beautiful (and pricey) gift shop on the premises which sells their products.  We bought a teak apsara (dancing woman) statue, and a lacquered panel (oops, and a silk purse for Dale...).  We thought you would all enjoy Jeff's interpretation of an apsara.

Some parting thoughts and observations:
Canada does not have an embassy in Cambodia (it closed in May 2009).  The embassy in Bangkok is accredited to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar (Burma).
Cambodia is still a place where backpackers can survive on $10 a day.
There are no McDonalds in Cambodia.  The only chain we saw was KFC.
When possible, we ate and shopped mainly for a cause.
We did not watch the "Final Four" weekend, although we did follow the results on Jeff's BlackBerry.
While waiting for our return flight, we observed some monks checking in.  We were quite surprised when one of them reached into his robe and pulled out a BlackBerry.  Modern times!