November 9, 2010

(This entry is actually from early August, in the last few days of my China trip. I’m in Reno now, and I’m finally getting around to finishing this and posting it.)

Hong Kong came and Hong Kong went. A large Asian city with an even denser forest of even taller buildings than we had been used to, it also retains the British qualities of everyone speaking English, signs that were easy for me to read, and traffic that not only is supposed to be on the left side of the road, but stays on the left side of the road. As we moved toward home, things were becoming more comfortable and familiar. We even had a map! It became easier to figure things out and to find places, but at the same time, easier to feel OK about not doing much of anything besides waiting for the trip to be over.

Especially, when you’re feeling like that, how can you even hope to scratch the surface of a city like Hong Kong in two and a half days?

When in doubt, I look for yoga classes.

Wednesday afternoon, after arriving at the guest lodging of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Patti, who was feeling increasingly unwell, and I had afternoon tea at the staff lounge (grilled ham and cheese and samosas!), then explored the campus. It was not as huge at it first seemed, though as hilly. Then we made a conscious decision not to run off into the city, but to rest. I searched for yoga classes on the internet while Patti skyped with her husband. We had gotten so used to switching off with the one data cable in Shenzhen, having two connections was a novel luxury. As there was still no wireless, my iPad continued to sit in my bag. Good thing I got a new (used) laptop two days before I left!

Classes that sounded interesting and appeared to be quite close to a metro station went on my list. There were many to choose from. I nearly got motivated to run out right then and try to catch one, but I really had no idea how long it would take to get anyplace, and, in truth, I had already settled in for the evening. Acroyoga does value accurate self-assessment.

So Thursday morning, armed with a list of classes and a general idea of when it would make sense to split off from the pack to get to one, I joined the rest of our group to visit Lantau Island, where we could see a Big Buddha, a fishing village, and the pink dolphins. (For the sake of my sister, I feel I need to point out right now that I did not go to see the pink dolphins. Sorry, Katie.) Of course it was nearly noon by the time all of us got going, but I was mostly done being worried about that. No matter how much I saw of Hong Kong, it would only be a tiny bit, and no one but myself was going to keep me from getting to yoga later in the day. I wouldn’t make an afternoon class, at this rate, but I had a list that ran quite late into the evening.

We took the metro, changing trains several times, to get to the aerial tram station to get to the Buddha. If I could ever claim to have a superpower, it would be that I read really fast. Traveling by metro with a group of teaching peers was kind of a dramatic illustration of how much faster I attend to and integrate text than many other people. It seemed like some would not have even seen the sign by the time I had figured out where to go. I mean, what else is there to do in metro stations but look for signs? Many people are far more talented than I in many other ways. Someday I hope to always be able to say things in the nicest possible way, for example. But fast reading seems like a good skill for a traveler, at least, to have.

I would have gone along with it, but I was not sad that our group did not choose to pay extra for the glass-bottom tram. These were the enclosed ski lift hanging from the cable sort of cable cars, not the San Francisco trolley sort. Several times on the twenty-minute trip up, we stopped and swung in the wind, even sliding backwards once or twice. Holley, who had grown up practically on the slopes of Lake Tahoe, was delighted to feel so at home. I have been working on managing a fear of heights for years now, so it was not horrible, but it was not my most fun thing ever.

The tram brought us only to the bottom of the top of the hill. At the very top sat the eight-story Buddha, in the middle a temple and a monastery and a bus station, and at the tram egress, a tourist village strip mall of restaurants, gift shops, murals that you stick your head through to have your picture taken, and afternoon demonstrations of Shaolin (which was not the monastery on this hill) kung fu.

Patti found a refrigerator magnet and we had noodles for lunch. We made some remarks about how this blend of the sacred and the profane seemed incongruous. I certainly have refrigerator magnets from some large historical churches I’d visited in Europe, too. Perhaps the theme park village atmosphere was a practical function of an isolated (for all its proximity to Hong Kong, it was on the top of an undeveloped small mountain) place that many people wanted to visit. But I could also imagine this reflected a greater integration of spirituality and modern culture that I, at least, do not usually experience. Less distance between what something is and what it is not. A pilgrimage is, after all, a sort of vacation.

We climbed the stairs to the base of the Buddha. If there is one thing China means to me, it’s stairs. I thought taking the stairs to my fifth floor room in Shenzhen rather than the elevator would just help me stay in shape while I was off my regular routine for the month. Instead, it prepared me for being in China. These particular stairs, though still steeper than most stairs in the U.S., were paved and regularly spaced, unlike many of those I had climbed recently in more natural settings.

The Buddha was lovely and it was big. Statues of the bodhisattvas surrounded the base, and as these were larger than a person but not 80 feet tall, they made an easier to photograph background for acroyoga pictures. I hadn’t taught all the teachers on the trip to fly like I’d hoped. At a meeting in the spring when we were still preparing for this trip, Holley and Jesse had expressed interest in doing yoga with me, but between the heat, the working and the exploring China, we never got around to practicing together. But Holley was game to try it now. It’s hard to be relaxed when you haven’t tried flying before, you’re wearing a skirt, and there’s lots of people watching, and she’s pretty strong, but I wrestled her into bird and we got the picture.

We stopped at the temple on the way back down. It was beautiful and they had a great sound system. It was difficult to tell the powerful chanting was not live. We lit incense. “There go your troubles,” said Susan as we tossed the incense sticks into the fire. Not a bad way to think about it.

It was about four o’clock, and as we headed to the bus station to go to the fishing village, I realized I wouldn’t be able to get there and still make it to yoga at 7:30, so I found the bus for the metro station and went there on my own instead. Susan wanted to make sure I had ID with me, just in case. I assured her I had that and a credit card and a map on top of that. A few others looked pretty concerned that I was about to go off all alone, but by myself I went.

I was surprised that the bus trip back to the metro station took nearly a whole hour, but we were on the other side of the island, and we had to go around and over, including pulling over many times so other vehicles could pass as we climbed. The metro trip back to Tsim Sha Tsui on Kowloon, the northern Hong Kong island, moved faster, but also took a while. I still arrived with about an hour and a half to spare. I located my building, then walked around a few blocks to see what there was to see. Mostly shopping for expensive purses and jewelry. I was about a block from the waterfront, where there appeared to be several museums, one with a large dome that glowed pink from the inside as it got darker outside. I popped into a boutique that didn’t seem too spendy and tried on dresses to kill time. I found one I liked, of course. Many clothes in China have more asymmetrical shapes and interesting cuts that really appeal to me. Plus, I’m a sucker for dresses with functional pockets.

As I gathered my things from the store, I realized it had starting raining. I hadn’t brought my umbrella when we left much earlier in the day. I should have known better! It was quite a downpour. The streets were cleared, as people stepped inside stores and under awnings to stay out of the rain. I only had to get to the end of the block and across the street, and I wanted to get to the studio early, and I had no idea how long this might last, so I made a run for it. I was completely drenched from head to toe by the time I made it to the lobby of the Peninsula Building. Someone followed me with a mop as I dripped my way to the elevator. (We had long noticed that, for a place that gets so much rain, China sure had a lot of slippery floor surfaces, indoor and outdoor, and Hong Kong was not different.) At the desk upstairs, someone ran and got me a towel as I dripped on the familiar “I will not sue you if I hurt myself in at this yoga studio” paperwork.

(This is where I left off writing at the time. The rest I am finishing today.)

So there were at least five people working at the front desk of this yoga studio. It had twelve rooms on several different floors of the building. The locker room was bigger than the apartment I lived in for seven years, and in the room where my class was to be held, there were about 25 Manduka black pro mats laid out on the floor, which are pretty much the best and most expensive yoga mats you can get. No wonder, when I later figured out the exchange rate, I had paid forty dollars for this class!

As I waited outside the room for the teacher to arrive, I chatted with a woman who was also there for the class. We commiserated about the rain, and she said, “At least there are blow dryers here.” I replied that that was nice, but my hair was so short. “No, for our clothes,” she said. Genius! After class, after a lovely shower, I spent at least half an hour blow drying my soaked clothes at the twenty-station make-up table.

As for the class itself, there were only maybe six of us, due to the weather. We were on the 14^th or so floor with a big picture window, so there was an amazing view of the city illuminated with lightning strikes. The teacher was Indian, from India. He decided to have us try more difficult arm balances, since it was a small group. There were at least three poses I had never seen before, and I’ve been doing yoga for over a decade. It was cool. No one, including me, had much success with these poses. At the end, the teacher basically berated us for not having good basics, so of course we couldn’t do these challenging postures. I later read somewhere that it is considered a traditional Indian teaching style to never compliment your students so that they don’t develop an inflated ego.

I feel like I learn something new every time I go to Dinah’s class in San Diego, which I have been attending for over ten years, so I was happy to get this teacher’s insights. Getting new perspectives from different teachers is one of the reasons I like to do yoga when I travel. I asked him what he thought I could work on. He gave me some pointers about getting my weight more into my feet in downward dog, and a modified Baddha Konasana to work on. Between being at the swankiest studio I have ever seen and having a demanding but helpful teacher, this class was a great experience. It was also a good balance compared to the class in Shenzhen where the teacher was very complimentary of my practice, and it turned out that I had been practicing years longer than he had. A good reminder of why doing yoga is referred to as “practicing!”

The next day was to be our last in Hong Kong, and my last in Asia. I was leaving feeling there was so much more to experience there, but not disappointed at all. Being present and involved in what I was doing felt much more enjoyable than worrying about what I wasn’t able to accomplish.

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