Before Its Time

After a relaxing morning in bed on Thursday (after all, how many times can you say you've slept in a former US Ambassador's bed?), I was woken up by a very excited David because there were, naturally, parrots on the porch.  While this was a novel experience for us, it was fairly commonplace for our hosts, who dust the porch railings with nuts and seeds each night and awake in the morning to flocks of color.

When we finally made it out of the house, we wandered into town and stumbled upon the City Gallery. While the urban planning aspect got the others excited, it was the to-scale model of the city in various time periods that got me going.  It was made in some rip-off version of Legos at a scale of 1:3000 or something similar.

For lunch, we went to Butao, a ramen restaurant, at the recommendation of a friend.

The menu is fairly simple, allowing you to choose from 4 ramen bases (classic, red (hot), black (squid ink), or green (pesto)).  Then you choose how thick and rich you want the broth and what meat and veggies you want in the dish.  The correct choice?  Always go green.

It looks like a random pool of green but it was INCREDIBLE.  The rest of us were incredibly jealous of Chris, who chose green.  The other dishes (we also got original and red) were great but our taste buds had been ruined for everything else after trying the green variety.

Since Nick worked at RAMSA (Robert A M Sterns and Associates, I think), we went to go check out the RAMSA building here in Hong Kong.

On the ferry back over to Kowloon

The building includes "The White Cube", an exhibition space off to one side.  The exhibit there right now is rather disturbing.  It's an incredibly detailed series of scenes crafted by two British brothers, with titles such as "You Will Never Be Loved Again" and "All Evil".  The scenes were post-apocalyptic and featured thousands of tiny skeletons wearing Nazi uniforms, Ronald McDonalds, teensy McDonalds cups, skeletons, spears, dinosaurs... It was a madhouse with thousands upon thousands of tiny bodies strewn everywhere.  The exhibit sparked a question within our group about the role of art... And how depressing it would be to make these tiny figures for years on end.  The amount of work and detail was truly phenomenal, but what a downer.

Next we went to the New Asia Society exhibit on art that was made in secret during the Cultural Revolution and was then displayed in protest of the proclaimed death of art.  The various groups of artists who chose to exhibit together included the Grass (CaoCao), Star (XinXin?) and other movements.  The majority of the art was abstract, and most of it was quite interesting and often beautiful.  The most modern movement included the work of Ai Wei Wei. My favorite of his pieces was a clothes hanger shaped into the profile of a face where one would normally find a triangle, titled "The Hanging Man".

At long last, we returned to the apartment to grab our things and head to the airport.  While we were sad to leave such good company and accommodations behind, we were all excited to get to Thailand.  Wen we went to check in, it seemed as though our excitement was going to be rewarded - our flight was schedule dot leave 10 minutes early.  Yep, early.  An unprecedented move in our books, and one that didn't end up panning out due to a line on the runway.

One uneventful flight later, we landed in Bangkok and began the search for our hostel.  We got onto the right street but couldn't find it anywhere, finally getting out and walking.  After the kind concierge at the Westin down the street called them for us, we were able to find the hostel down an alleyway between two massage parlors.  We had found our new home.  And, gleefully, we collapsed into bed.

Spotted: apparently we got out of Beijing just in time! Look at that smog+storm combination: http://www.businessinsider.com/beijing-goes-dark-at-noon-2013-6