Sunday Nov. 25
Today I slept in, resting my weary bones after an eventful four days, and preparing for the adventures of my final day.
The first thing I did after checking out of the hostel (a rather Spartan place, but it had everything I needed, for a low price), was to go to find the Noonday Gun. It's a long-standing tradition that the gun is fired at noon to mark the time. There are various legends that accompany the origins of the tradition. Anyway, the Noonday Gun is by a busy waterfront highway, opposite the Excelsior Hotel. Last time I was in the area, I couldn't for the life of me find how to get across without walking a kilometer in either direction to an overpass. Then a couple months ago I heard rumors of a tunnel that goes under the highway.
So I went to the Excelsior Hotel and asked the concierge. Instead of explaining how to get to it, she took me outside and showed me. She pointed to two doors on the opposite side of the alley, at the northern end, and said "Take the right one and follow the signs". Well, the signs brought me along a convoluted serious of stairs and tunnels that was reminiscent of that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, when the band gets lost trying to find the stage. There was one place where the sign said to go straight ahead. Straight ahead there was a choice of two directions! I took the wrong one, and then came to a sign saying to go back. OK, it's the other one. (Hong Kong signage is notorious for leading you somewhere and then not telling you where to go next when you come to a junction!) Anyway, soon I was at the Gun.
Here's a video I took!
There's a Noel Coward song that goes: "In Hong Kong they strike a gong and fire off a noonday gun". Well, turns out they actually ring a bell and fire off a noonday gun.
After that I went to Times Square for another Ben & Jerry's (flavor: Chocolate Therapy), before heading up to the Hong Kong Cemetery with the aim of taking pictures until the charge ran out in my camera. And that's exactly what I did.
After that, I went to a noodle shop I frequent - it's across from the World Trade Centre shopping complex at the end of Jaffe Street. I ordered fried noodles in Cantonese (chau min), and the waitress was delighted...she told me I spoke good Cantonese (she called it chung man - "Chinese"), and then babbled away something I could barely understand.
I'm quite proficient in Mandarin Chinese, and had little trouble getting around Hong Kong and Macau using English and Mandarin. And the written form poses few problems, with the exception of a few colloquial words. Cantonese is quite a different language from Mandarin: think Italian vs. Portuguese. There are regular phonetic rules through which a Cantonese word can be converted quite accurately into its Mandarin cognate perhaps 70% of the time (the reverse direction is much lower because Cantonese preserves many features of Middle Chinese that Mandarin lost over the centuries), but there's also a different grammar, as well as quite a few vocabulary differences. So this made it hard for me to understand. OK, enough language geekery...
Finally, it was getting late, and it came time for me to go back to the airport. A quick train ride to the airport, an easy check-in, a short flight, a short bus ride, and I was home in Taiwan.
