FAKED OUT OF MY SKIN
Trip Start
Dec 15, 2002
1
10
18
Trip End
??? ??, 2003
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Finally, success. And I begin...
I feel more and more local these days. I know my street names, my bus routes, my directions. I've started to develop a firm repertoire of Guys - Plane Ticket Guy, Hair Cutter Guy, Phone Card Guy, Bouncer Guy, Photo Developer Guy, Sandwich Guy (er, Girl, but Guy obviously works better with the literary device I've decided to employ). I eat my meals at my favourite seat; I have a favourite breakfast (runny eggs - I'm dying to learn how to say 'Leave the eggs on one minute more' in Cantonese), lunch, and dinner; I have favourite (and least favourite) classmates and favourite (and least favourite) professors. I have a favourite shower and a favourite toilet stall.
I've got my daily routine down pat. I wake up at the same time every day - namely, at whatever ungodly hour of the a.m. the floor's cleaning woman has the audacity to knock on my door to dump my garbage can - usually when x is less than y, where x equals the amount of time it would theoretically take for me to take a shower, get dressed, and walk leisurely to school, and y equals the amount of time before my next class. Fashionably lateness is God and I am its devout follower. Because of this (i.e. the whole x less than y time crunch), I tend to waste a couple minutes debating which of those things (i.e. shower, clothes, walking) I'll have to forgo on that particular morning; on a side note, did you know it's not socially acceptable to walk around university without pants? (I didn't personally discover this, but witnessed it live and in person when Ting - quiet Ting of Philippines fame - commemorated Valentine's Day by stripping down to his fluorescent Speedo (sock stuffed) and briefly handed out Hershey's Kisses before being reprimanded by the campus security guard and led away, to great applause.) Usually, it's the walking that I sacrifice - not to mention my normally intransigent anti-exercise beliefs - and I'm forced to run frantically in the general school-direction, getting about 50 meters from my hall before I collapse on the sidewalk, lying comatose until at least mid-afternoon.
I feel at home now; by at home, I mean at home, in theory, assuming a perfect world where no one paid attention to my obvious racial and linguistic differences (and theLeafswontheStanleyCupPraiseJesusAllahandSandwichGuy).
(By this verbose preamble, I'm trying simply to disguise that I am currently in the midst of a four-week between holiday period (read: school) and trying to communicate the routine of school in a slightly more entertaining manner than my personal emails {Dear Mom, I'm Fine. Love Jordan}). I am double bracketing, and often. That can't be grammatically correct.
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To break routine, I've kept my eye open for, um, eye-opening experiences. Sometimes I act too slowly to capitalize - Tonight Only! Live in HK! Vanilla Ice! Tickets Marked Down from HK$380 to Free! - and sometimes I try to hop aboard before I die. Still others are made most entertaining by arriving after death...
More preamble: a couple years ago, a professor in Germany became disenchanted with many of the practices which fell under the typical interpretation of the revered Hippocratic oath. His beef, as it were, was that medicine had been a mystery for too long, that the common person deserved to know what was going on behind surgical curtains worldwide. (He obviously never watched any of those TLC or Discovery Channel surgery specials. They should have an all surgery channel - Today, Only On the Surgery Channel! Rhinoplasty! Not Just For Michael Jackson and Jews Anymore!). Dr. Frankenstein - as he became derogatorily referred for reasons that will soon become obvious - began doing oddball things like holding public autopsies before he stumbled on his medicinal magnum opus.
Moving to China - where medical regulations and other standards of human rights are, shall we say, sub par - ol' Franky invented a procedure he called 'plastination'. Basically, the process involved dehydrating a corpse and injecting various parts of the body with plastic. The injection perpetuated the corpse's 'shelf life' (ew) and allowed common people like you and me to peek into the inner workings of actual human bodies. From there, he added a little artistic flair and put together a travelling exhibition. Highlights of his 'BodyWorlds' include a deskinned corpse, holding all of his skin in one of his hands, a man hunched over a chessboard, the top of his head lopped off so you can see his brain, and, the piece de resistance, a man perched atop a horse, again, deskinned - both the horse and the man - with the horse's brain in one hand and his own in the other.
Obviously, this is something people used to protest about in times before society banned its children from going to nightclubs and the US State Department decreed virtually every country on the face of the planet unsafe. Nevertheless, several friends of mine had seen the exhibit on tour in Europe and gave strong recommendations. I had heard rumours that it was in HK - another exchange student had gone out and seen it several weeks earlier - but the website didn't mention anything about this city, only Munich and Seoul. Casually skeptical, we rounded up an interuniversity entourage and sought out the exhibition.
No wonder it hadn't been on the website - this exhibition, called 'Mysteries of the Human Body' was same same, but different. The idea and method employed were similar, but the exhibition had a distinctly Chinese flair. Unfortunately, there was no man on horse - however there were several other equally stomach-turning exhibits.
We started off exploring the 'bits and pieces', deciding to leave the full bodies for last. Some 'bits and pieces' left me utterly disturbed; one exhibit of a 'bit' cut in two, exposing its insides, was more than any man should ever know about his apparatus. There was an opportunity to hold a plastinated (delicious) brain and a particularly disturbing timeline of six foetuses from four to nine months. In truth, it wasn't nearly as gross as I expected (or as I'm sure it sounds). The exhibit was crowded with school children, and after examining a fair number of specimens I generally began to feel fairly detached. The only sight that really disturbed me was the little hairs that protruded from lips, reminding you that this was (once) a real person.
There were several highlights of the fake BodyWorlds. One body had his face lifted straight up from his skull, reminiscent of a robot from a sci-fi movie. Another had surgical tools protruding from all over his body, displaying a plethora of prosthetic joints and bone reinforcements. A third has his skull open outwards, exhibiting his brain with eyeballs still attached.
My personal favourite exhibit was the cross-sectioned body. The artist? doctor? had sliced the corpse into two inch cross sections from head to toe and spaced them evenly to elongate the body to about twice it's regular size - think of a loaf of bread evenly spaced. As you walked down the body, you got an idea of where everything started and finished relative to everything else, as well as the feeling that you were lost in a sci-fi movie. I entirely expected to see fingers moving or eyes blinking throughout the entire exhibit.
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Not content with just one fake experience for the week, Q and I decided to cross to Shenzhen, Mainland China's border town, where we would meet up with Emily and some friends we had met in the Philippines. The idea of a border was somewhat nonsensical - we were crossing simply from China to China - something like having to go through customs on your way to Montreal. Shenzhen isn't really representative of China; its raison d'etre is to allow Hong Kong Chinese to cross the border, spend obscene amounts of money on fake clothing, fake purses, fake DVDs, and fake watches, and indulge in massages and nights on the town for far cheaper than pricey HK.
After six hours of shopping, I never want to see another watch or DVD again. I spent CAD$100 for 38 DVDs (including the entire Bond collection), a watch, and the aforementioned unlaceable pair of shoes. It was great fun, scrutinizing Rolexes and Cartiers and flipping through binders filled with the newest and hottest DVDs,not to mention the serene enjoyment I get out of bargaining for everything and anything.
I did have two interesting experiences. I almost fell for the 'cute child' pickpocketing scam. As a result of the influx of money, Shenzhen brings the worst in China to the street right in front of the border crossing. A little Chinese girl came up and started touching and grabbing me as Q and I walked away. Luckily, I turned behind me just in time to see a hand reaching for the zipper of my backpack, before disappearing into the crowd in deference to my angry stare. That would certainly have been a day-ruiner.
On our way back to the train station, we encountered another sight that reminded us we weren't in Kansas anymore. A one legged beggar, crawling around on his hands and knees, was trying to get closer to the tourists and the shopping area. A policeman had decided that wasn't going to happen. They negotiated, then screamed at each other, before the policeman started kicking and hitting the beggar, who was pretty much defenceless to fight back. There was a significant crowd watching the policeman grab the beggar's hair and throw him into the wall. We lingered for a moment or two, finally seeing it come to an end, and got out of there before the police considered arresting foreign witnesses.
Between Q and I, we purchased 92 DVDs, which we estimate to total around eight days of non-stop viewing. If I don't write for the next couple months, you'll know where I am. But not for long - two weeks tomorrow, I'm on my next vacation, taking the HKU-ordained reading week (and the Jordan-ordained pre-reading week) to go to Vietnam.
So many options, what to watch first...
...Jordan
