Field Trip To The Tree Top Cottage In Tai Po.

We joined our homeschooling group out in Tai Po at the Tree Top Cottage for a full day of tight rope walking, rafting, and zip lining. We packed lunches and plenty of water, since the weather in Hong Kong had turned sweltering and hot. However, we did not remember to pack mosquito patches and just mosquito repellent lotion and spray was not strong enough to deter the little black gnats that attack legs here in Hong Kong. We came away from our fun day looking like our legs were inflicted with a disease. 

Subways Are For Pedestrians.

Two years ago when we arrived in Hong Kong, the signs that read "subway" threw me for a loop, because they did not refer to a train system, but rather to an underground tunnel where pedestrians could walk from one side of the highway to the other. What I knew as a subway back in the United States is referred to as the MTR and has a distinct symbol of its own. 

Well Wishing Festival.

We came in search of the Wishing Tree and immediately saw it from the road. It's an artificial tree that you pay to trow artificial oranges onto. The saying is that the higher the orange and your wish lands in the branches of the tree, the more likely your wish is to come true. If you throw your orange and it falls out of the tree, but you repeatedly try to make it into the tree, you are being greedy with your wish. Although our family does not believe that wishes actually come true, it was a fun tradition to participate in.

We also wrote down a couple wishes on the floating lotus flowers that we then set free to bob around in on the water. The kids wished for Lego sets and I wished for a particular bracelet. We made sure to make silly wishes since we were doing it all in fun. 

We walked around the festival and ate our new favorite tang-hular treats, a bowl of noodles, and some bean curd. There was a shuttle bus from Tai Po going directly to and from the festival, making transportation accessible. Although it's not a religious festival for our family, it is a religious festival for other people who attended and there was plenty of incense burning and alters set up for prayer. 

Christmas Cookie Exchange.

We have had a week of Christmas activities, which keeps us busy, but which the kids enjoy being a part of. We joined another homeschooling group that we've not been part of before. They put together a cookie exchange and had the kids act out the nativity story. I packed up the fudge I made and our kids got to be Joseph and Mary in the nativity play. We met at the Taipo Waterfront Park where the kids played at the playground and then performed at the amphitheater. Fun was definitely had by all and we left with the kids wishing they could play forever.

My two kids love getting together with other homeschooling kids their age. They love the friendships they have developed with them. Both of our kids are social kids and thrive off of relationships. It's also been great to see their relationship deepen while they are with other kids. Those two are a pair, always looking out for each other. Homeschooling groups for me as the parent are also a great opportunity to build relationships with like minded people. It's always nice to commiserate with other people in our same situation. To hear from them what encourages them and what they have to work on.

Biking The Tai Po Waterfront Park.

When we got back from Thailand, our family had a week of friends from North America that came to visit us. The first set was a family that live in the same housing development as our family back in Myrtle Beach. Their kids would come over to our house and play with our kids and vice versa. It was exciting for our kids to see familiar faces and to be reunited with their friends. The second set of friends that came to visit us, I knew from my high school youth group days back in Canada. There's something so special about friendships that have lasted over the past {almost} twenty years and have not only spanned time, but distance as well.

With my friend and her husband, who is an avid biker, we thought it would be fun to rent bicycles in Tai Po and ride along the waterfront. We rented bikes for a couple hours, thinking that would give us plenty of time with the sun beating down on our heads.

The Tai Po Waterfront Park is a beautiful park, with so many interesting facets to it. We walked through the insect house, and as a homeschooling family, it automatically became an impromptu science lesson. We climbed up the 106 ft. look out tower that boasts views of the Tolo Harbour. Little did we know what we were missing when we lived in Tai Po a year ago for that first hard month in Hong Kong!

Our friends rented a tandem bike, our son rented a fatbike {also known as a bike with wide tires}, and my husband rented a bike that pulled a covered cart behind it so that he could give his favorite girls a ride in the shade! The two hour time limit was plenty, although it would have been nice to stop and eat lunch at one of the restaurants we saw along the waterfront. The breeze off of the water kept us cool enough, and it was a fun two hours spent with friends.

A Place To Burn Sacred Objects.

After offering food to their ancestors in the shrines at their home or place of work, a person will also burn joss paper {also known as spirit money} in front of their homes or places of business. I recall first seeing this when we lived in a village house in Tai Po and our neighbor was performing this ceremonious act.

The paper is burned in the hope that the deceased family members have a better afterlife. There are three different types of paper - gold, silver, and copper. Each paper has its own distinction and when burned means something different to prevent confusion or insult to the spirits. Joss papers are believed to provide their family members or loved ones who have died with the means to give them what they might need or want in the afterlife.

A Hike To Bride's Pool.

On Sunday, we skipped church to hike up to Bride's Pool in Tai Po, because Sunday and public holidays are the only day that bus 275R runs. Once we got off the MTR at the Tai Po Market, it was easy to find the correct bus, since there were so many helpful signs pointing us in the right direction. We haven't been back to Tai Po since we first moved there for that moldy first two weeks of life in Hong Kong.

The weather was ideal for our hike. There was no rain during the hike, but it was a cool 67 degrees Fahrenheit and there were some clouds overhead. There is something so calming about hiking among nature after being surrounded by skyscrapers and crowds of people all week. As you can tell from some of the photographs, parts of the path were pretty narrow and there was a lot of uphill climbing. The friends we hiked with, as well as our family, all came away from this hike a little sorer than from our previous hike up Monkey Mountain.  

We had packed a picnic lunch that we purchased from the grocery store. Containers of salad, fresh fruit, and rice with chicken {that rice and chicken was my husband's lunch}. The kids got the excitement of choosing anything they wanted to eat, and they chose slices of margarita pizza and chips. I find it's the little things that can get my children excited about something that might not be as exciting for their little legs. As soon as I mentioned we were going on a hike to the kids, my son looked forward to it as another hiking adventure, while my daughter dreaded having to walk for a long time. But as soon as I told her she could pick out her lunch, her attitude switched around and the walk to the falls was no longer an issue. We enjoyed eating our picnic on the rocks at the base of the falls. 

According to Wikipedia, the legend of Bride's Pool is that a bride was being carried in a sedan chair by four portors to meet her husband. As they were walking beside the pool, one of the porters slipped on the muddy path, causing the bride to fall into the water and drown. As a result, the pool is named in memory of the bride.

Park In Tai Po.

Right down the hill from our village apartment there is another park. With two kids in tow it's a good fifteen minute walk. I am impressed with how well maintained everything in Hong Kong is – at least what we have seen so far. This is a public park, and immaculately kept. There's a nice area with a dog park, a manicured park with ponds and water fountains, and a playground for children to play on.

Making The Most Of Living In Tai Po.

As grim as we thought our introduction to Tai Po was, there is beauty around us. Although we only lived at the hotel for one week, we quickly became accustomed to city life and having the ability to take a lift {elevator} down to the street where we could walk across to a grocery store. We enjoyed having that easy and immediate access to the outside world. Now we're a good 10 minutes taxi ride into town, or a 15 minute minibus ride. There are no grocery stores in sight around our village apartment, which requires us to be intentional with the time we do spend in town. 

Sitting in the park which is located in the heart of the Tai Po wet market watching little old men without any teeth playing Mahjong together. Occasionally one of the men will get up and shuffle over to another park bench. They wander by our family and give us the slow once over look that covers our head to our toes.

I love the old wet market. There's another shopping plaza that is newer and has a more western feel to it, but wet markets remind me of my life in the Philippines. Seeing the fruit on display and even the meat cut up and sectioned out in each stall, reminds me of home. There is a beauty to it and a familiarity that draws me in.

Goodbye Kowloon And Hello Tai Po.

We said goodbye to our safe, comfortable, cozy, clean hotel in Kowloon that we had been staying at for one week and hello to a ground level village apartment in Tai Po that we rented for one month.

My husband and I experienced that moment of panic when we had to be out of the hotel and had nothing lined up. Even though we have been working diligently on securing a home for our family since we landed in Hong Kong, this is peak season for tourists and people moving into the area. Thus rent is exceptionally high and all the serviced apartments we had called were fully booked except for one. We got this house through a connection of a high school friend's fiance – who had a friend – that put in touch with her parents – who had a friend – that had a sister who would be willing to rent us this place temporarily while we searched for something more permanent. 

The sister came to pick us up from the hotel in Kowloon and we loaded all twelve of our suitcases into her minivan, along with the four of us. She drove us out to the house, where we were immediately bombarded by the smell of mildew when she unlocked the front door. Black mold was visibly growing up the walls, coating door frames, and covering both sides of the doors. The floors were filthy and the bathroom was disgusting. When my kids take one look at a bathroom and refuse to walk into it, you know it's filthy.

By Hong Kong standards the house is fairly large. It's a three bedroom flat with a large living space. One bedroom is filled with the landlady's personal belongings. The second bedroom has a single bed in it. The final bedroom contains a couch that is folded out permanently into a bed big enough for my husband and I to lie on. Both beds only had a thin fitted sheet covering them. 

I feel as though there is some part of Chinese culture that I have completely missed, while we were under the impression that the landlady was helping us out by offering us a place to stay, when we politely tried to get out of renting the house, we were given a guilt trip and told this was basically our only option. It was actually one of two options. The other option was a 200 square foot studio serviced apartment for all four of us. All of our reasoning for not wanting to rent the apartment – primarily cleanliness reasons were countered with a coldness in personality and a determination that she would not let us get out of renting this place from her. There's that balancing act and struggle of how much do you compromise your personal standards and not wanting to hurt the relationship of the friend of a friend of a friend of a friend.

We were told she would send her maid to come clean the house for us the next morning. We gave her the month's rent in cash and unloaded all of our suitcases out of her van. It was then that we found out there was no internet service at the house. But it wasn't until after she drove away did we realize that there was no refrigerator, no pots to cook with, no washing machine, and no hot water. A really hard adjustment for our two kids when they take cold showers. A really hard adjustment for our whole family coming from the United States and being used to certain amenities in life.

We could not spend the night in the house with those kind of conditions, so I immediately took the dirty sheets off the two beds along with our dirty laundry, and we hailed down a taxi to drive us into town. We dropped everything off to be washed and dried at a laundry service shop and we walked around the streets in search of an internet connection. We also managed to purchase cleaning supplies {including a couple bottles of bleach} to take back to the house with us. 

Back at the house I started cleaning like a woman possessed. I started washing down walls with the bleach; trying to remove as much of the visible black mold as possible. Bleach was my weapon of choice in this battle to make this apartment liveable for our family. I attacked the bathroom and the kitchen. At about 10:00 the next morning, our landlady called to tell us that her maid would be coming around 12:00 for a couple hours and we needed to pay her 400.00 HKD. That is an equivalent to 52.00 USD. I knew the landlady was trying to take advantage of us since this is a country where maid service is cheap and maids are often taken advantage of. I know she does not pay her maid 25.00 USD an hour. I declined her offer of a maid and kept on cleaning.

I'm telling myself we just have to live here for four weeks instead of thirty days, because it just sounds more doable to me. I know... it's the same amount of time, but doesn't the number four sound better than the number thirty?!?!!! We currently have the air conditioning blasting to eliminate as much humidity as possible. I unpacked a few of my kitchen items and they make the place look a bit more homey and personal even for just the month we plan on being here. Once the house was all cleaned up it looked a lot better. I still refuse to sit on that couch, because it's so filthy and I can just imagine the mold spores still living in there.

We definitely know what we don't want and want we do want in an apartment and we've learned to put our foot down and not compromise our standards. Here's to another twenty-six days in this place.