Hong Kong

We've been on the road for 3 months now and are having some chill out time on the islands of Koh Samui and Koh Tao off the south-east coast of Thailand.

After our epic Chinese tour and cultural immersion, we headed to Hong Kong and indulged in all the western delights we were missing and spent some time with my good friend Ben. Ben has been teaching English in Guangzhou for the last year working with physically handicapped. He was on his way back to China after spending the summer at home and was kind enough to be our "mule" and bring in a few different meds and clothes we were missing or couldn't find while in China.

In the 3 days we spent in Hong Kong with Ben, we explored the Kowloon markets, took the tram to the summit of Hong Kong Island and wandered around Stanley beach (opposite side of Hong Kong Island, feels like Malibu). While all of those cool sightseeing expeditions were fun, we most enjoyed decompressing with Ben about on our time in China and the culture and people we were trying to understand.

Ben, while working at a party-supported school and living in Guangzhou, has been exposed to more of the political difficulties the Chinese face daily that tourists have trouble understanding, or even seeing. We had some great conversations and definitely filled in our understanding of how the government plays a role in the daily lives of those who are working under the Chinese umbrella.

As Mariah wrote about earlier, we are extremely interested to see how China reacts to the influx of western culture over the next year before the Olympics. We are also excited to see how they are able to host the Olympics and have thousands of journalists digging around looking for stories both good and bad.

There were two instances during our stay that caused us to doubt how the Olympics will be run. While we were there, a number of journalists were detained for trying to cover a political group that was against the Communist party. Also, a brand new bridge that had just been built in Beijing to reduce traffic congestion for the Olympic stadium collapsed on the day of its opening when they took the last of the scaffolding off. Now you can always find someone or something to blame in these instances, but the Chinese government instead decided to dynamite the whole site, burying up to 80 people that had been killed in the accident, to cover up the story and ease international fears about Olympic buildings most likely constructed by the same workers...

There are other stories such as this which we did not cover in our previous entry - wanting to focus more on the positive aspects of what we observed and share our hopes for the future of this developing nation. The 2008 Olympic games in Beijing will be a huge indicator of what "face" they show to the world, and how they react internally to the international pressure and scrutinity.

Enough of my ramblings, but these are some of the topics we have been in conversation about with each other and other fellow travellers we've met who've been to China. While we are chilling out and sunning ourselves on the beach, we have also been challenging ourselves to better understand and make sense of how our globalizing world is coming together - and China is a large piece of that puzzle that is yet to be defined.

Best,

Eric