I am comfortable here now. I can hop on and off the subway in various cities with no need to pause and check the map to figure out which transfer to make. I can buy my tickets or withdraw cash at machines without needing an English option. And perhaps most importantly, I can walk confidently into a Korean diner with no foreigners in sight, sit down, scan the menu for what I want, order, locate the chopsticks and spoons, know that the water is self-service and that the tumblers are in a little sterilizing cupboard thingy somewhere, and eat alone without worrying about what to do or how my chopsticks skills are being judged. It has been well over a year since a waitress felt the need to rush over to me with a fork.

The scowling ajumma (for they are always scowling… I believe I’d feel a little cheated if one smiled at the customers) brought me my stew and rice, and I inhaled deeply as I became momentarily enveloped in a cloud of kimchi-scented steam from the bubbling, boiling jjiggae in the familiar black earthenware bowl. I put in my earphones and let an episode of Frasier entertain me as I ate.

When I was almost finished, I felt a tap on my arm and looked up to see a woman in her forties mouthing ‘excuse me’. I pulled out my earphones and swallowed my mouthful of soup, looking inquiringly at her.

“Excuse me,” she said earnestly, “do you like Korean food?”

I looked briefly at my table, the side dishes of kimchi, pickled radish cubes, and squid all now empty, the bowl of jjiggae almost finished, the last square of tofu poised in my chopsticks. “Ew, dear lord, no!” I almost replied. Seriously, it was right there on the tip of my tongue. “I would not touch Korean food, how could you suggest such a preposterous and disgusting thing?”

“Yes,” I replied with a sweet smile. “I love Korean food.”

She giggled behind her hand, going “ohhhhh… wowwww!”, and then bowed respectfully to me before saying “thank you, goodnight!” and leaving.

I still think these moments are ridiculous and incomprehensible. I find the attention bemusing. But in a strange, inexplicable way, they have become part of my familiar, ‘normal’ daily life in Korea, and I know that when I leave I will look back on them with a fond shake of the head and a laugh rather than with irritation or annoyance.

I worry sometimes about getting stuck in Korea, never moving on. But however comfortable I’ve become, I will never ‘belong’ here… and these little moments remind me of that in the nicest possible way.

However, there are two main childish qualities that I will never, ever understand. I have tried, and I have failed miserably, and unfortunately both lead to ructions on an almost daily basis.

The first is the importance they assign to the most absolutely trivial and unimportant of things. The colour of a pencil, for example. I’m not even talking about the colour that it writes – I can see how one might not want one’s work to come out yellow, or blue. No, I mean ordinary, plain, grey writing pencils with kid-friendly designs on them. The ones currently in my classroom all have exactly the same pattern, involving some kind of overly cheerful cartoon dog and cat drinking lemonade. Unfortunately, half of them are yellow and half are green. You cannot imagine the untold levels of stress and grief this apparently insignificant detail has brought to my life.

I’ll be handing out the pencils while repeating my instructions for the task ahead, expecting everyone to be listening so that I don’t have to go around explaining it to all twelve of them, individually. Within 2 seconds of distributing the first couple of pencils, however, someone will emit a cry of distress. “Teacher, no. Me yellow!”

I give them a Look and continue speaking as if I heard nothing, but this tends to backfire as they generally then assume that I heard nothing, so they start rhyming on incessantly about it. “Don’t want green. I want yellow. Teacher. TEACHER! Yellow. Me yellow.” On a good day, I will firmly explain that it makes absolutely no difference and that we can’t always have what we want, and they accept it and move on. On a bad day, they completely ignore me to the point where I end up throwing as big a strop as them and yelling “Well, TOUGH!!!!! You have green. It MAKES. NO. DIFFERENCE!!!! Stop whining!!!”, and they sulk, and it’s all very unpleasant. The same thing happens with the handle colours of the scissors. A pink eraser or a white eraser. Who gets to be first to line up at the door – there are actual physical fights over that one, despite the fact that they’re all going to the same place, where they all have assigned seats and gain absolutely nothing from being first through the door. I really do wish I could speak to them in Korean sometimes, just to have a serious conversation about why the hell these things MATTER SO DAMN MUCH to them. I mean, really, WHY? I cannot get inside the childish mind on this issue, and it drives me batty sometimes.

The other issue is the bickering. Now, one could argue that at least children are honest – they don’t pretend to like you and then tear you to shreds behind your back, as adults so often do, or politely tell you that something’s no problem at all and then proceed to dwell angrily upon it, building it up in their minds for unhealthy periods of time until they eventually snap and shoot you in the head with a stolen rifle. No, they simply tell you exactly how they feel about your actions. This is great, and also terrible, as it means I spend a frustrating amount of time pausing my lessons to lecture them on peace and kindness and harmony and sharing, generally while dangling a small, wriggling, kicking, punching child from each hand.

The girls tend to get angry about who sits next to them, mainly because they all fall in love with the same boy at the same time and think the world’s going to end if he sits down next to their rival, and then they start saying bitchy things to each other. Oh, so many tears. (And yes, they are six.) The boys tend to steal things from each other and then resolve the situation with an interesting mix of punches, kicks, pinches, thumps, and wild howls of fury.

None of it is fun for Teacher.

And of course, the icing on the cake is the previously discussed “angry sound” in the Korean language – i.e. instead of emphasising a particular word, they simply draw out the last vowel sound for, like, EVER. For the kids, this is actually their entire argument. Meaning you can be in the middle of a perfectly peaceful lesson, and all of a sudden the silence is shattered by half a dozen children wailing “awwwwAWWWWWawwwwwAWWWWWawwwwwwwwwAWWWWWWWW!!!!”, and no, I cannot possibly demonstrate how irritating that sound is via the limited medium of the written word. Just trust me. It makes me want to jump out of windows, mainly because I would be a really Bad Person if I threw the offending children out of them instead.

Yesterday in my after-school class I turned instinctively on hearing a lengthy vowel, and chastised two girls for attempting to slap each other. Over what, I did not care – I simply told them both off, looked sternly at them, said “Be nice. No fighting.”, and then hurried to the next table to remove the scissors from a boy’s mouth. In the meantime, the squabble between the two girls apparently escalated into a full-on cat fight, and the shout of “Teacher! Jane is cry!” sent me scurrying back to find that Melissa had, in fact, scratched the hell out of her ‘friend’, drawing blood and leaving a raised white trail of broken skin. I carried the sobbing child downstairs to a Korean teacher and raced back up to find three boys fighting tooth-and-nail over an eraser. An ERASER. My eraser.

The most upsetting thing about all of this is that my theme for the next two weeks in that group is “Friendship and kindness”. We had just finished a great little introductory discussion about how people look different, and like different things, and have different abilities, and everyone was in complete agreement that this didn’t mean anyone was any less deserving of kindness, love, friendship, or respect. I tried to reason with them by reminding them of all this in light of the dramas we had just experienced, and asked if they saw the problem. They all looked mutinously at me.

The only lesson learned was that apparently you can’t reason with 6-year-olds who want the white eraser or think their friend looks too pretty.

I shall continue to try, though. Tomorrow we’re singing Imagine and making a poster full of joined handprints, sprinkled generously with hearts and peace signs…

No, really.

No question about it, living a life that is 50% isolation and 50% drinking away your money in a bar is not good for the mind, body or soul. I’ve seen myself go from a happy and fulfilled person to someone who is apparently hell-bent on self-destruction. There have even been warnings from concerned friends, but I largely ignored them, continuing to make The Local my entire social life, drinking far too much, getting horrible crushes on men who are either not interested or entirely wrong for me (or both), and dragging myself miserably through the working week with the sole aim of making it to the weekend and doing it all again.

It was only during the latest of many recent all-nighters, when the sun had already been up for several hours and I was still sitting in the bar with the usual suspects, unwilling as ever to go home, that I realised this was really, truly not the direction my life should be going. Things were as messy and undignified as you might expect when a group of 6 people have been sitting in a bar all night and day. For the first time I stepped outside of my blinkered, defiant, “I’m having FUNNNNNNN!” mentality and saw how pathetic the scene was. It’s not me. Maybe once in a blue moon, sure, but not every moment of my free time. It started being unhealthy the second I stopped wanting to do anything else.

I have noticed that the ESL teacher life in Korea does this to quite a lot of people. For some reason, partying becomes a lifestyle, not something you do every now and then for fun. I never really understood it before, having had quite a balanced life of work, play, study, and quiet time, but somewhere around the departure of my friend/colleague, the increasing loneliness at work, and the discovery that the companionship and familiarity I sought could be found in abundance at The Local… well, it happened to me, too.

Maybe it’s a mid(-ish!)-life crisis as I try to figure out where I’m going and what I’m doing. But it occurs to me that I’m probably not going to figure any of it out any quicker by letting this slump become my life, so… I quit.

February will be 100% alcohol-free in order to clear my mind and regain control, and this hopeless floundering will stop.

I am going to spend the month cleaning and organising in all areas of my life (starting, this week, with the disaster zones that are my apartment and classroom).

I’m going to learn to love my own company again instead of being reluctant to go home.

I’m going to sign up for more of the French lessons I stopped several months ago, and I’m going to spend a portion of time each evening doing something for my brain – studying, writing, reading.

I’m going to start cooking proper meals for myself again instead of just pouring water in a bowl of dried ramen or toasting a slice of bread.

I’m going to exercise and get enough sleep.

And above all, I’m going to think long and hard about what I want… and about how to get it. I’m going to figure out what my goals are, and stop this aimless drifting. I’m going to continue to see the therapist I met with last week for the first time, who is – I hope – going to help me with the figuring out process. I know an awful lot of people who’ve benefitted from counselling or therapy in the past and speak positively of their experiences. I think it may be my turn.

Of course, I’ll still go to The Local. I’ll go out for Italian Friend’s birthday next weekend. I’ll go watch the Six Nations rugby matches (unfortunately being shown in the middle of the night here) – just not all of them. But I will not be treating that bar like it’s my home any more, and I will be drinking juice, acting my age, and leaving when it’s time to leave.

This was a hard post for me to write. No one likes to admit they’ve messed up or taken wrong turns, made poor decisions, behaved in a way they’re ashamed of. But I needed to get it out and write it down, and that’s why I started this blog in the first place, I suppose. It’s always had its cathartic moments!

Yes, it’s time to grow up just a little bit, methinks. January was, indeed, a disaster.

February will be better.

Such comments are perfectly commonplace in my life these days, and yet I still find them most amusing, if only as a reminder of how vastly different my life is now compared with how it once was. Once upon a time, my mum would help/look on disapprovingly as my friends and I got up late on a Saturday morning and feebly attempted to make coffee and scrambled eggs whilst inevitably destroying the kitchen. Or I’d go to a student bar in Glasgow and do some companionable dying over greasy burgers and chips and a hair-of-the-dog pint. The fact that, last weekend, this was my ‘morning after the night before’ breakfast…

…should demonstrate how much things have changed. Meanwhile, one friend was picking octopus heads off her plate while the other was providing amusing English dubbing for the Korean soap opera blaring from the TV in the corner.

And yet I must say that I continue to surprise myself with my changing tastes. I was amazed to find myself eating and vaguely enjoying plain old seaweed soup a few weeks ago at school, and have continued to eat it each time it’s been served since then – until now, it has been the only soup I have left generally untouched every time, aside from the polite few sips of broth at the start. I think that the only things remaining on my once extensive list of ‘things on the school lunch table that I absolutely will not touch’ are the tiny little dried fish that stare up at me in their hundreds from the side dish bowls. I have never even tried one. I can’t. I just can’t eat something that is looking at me. Everything else, however, is now perfectly acceptable, regardless of whether it did at one point make me retch.

Outside of work, I have been trying to branch out in terms of trying new foods, having fallen into a bit of a hopeless but ultimately delicious kimchi rut. To my great delight, a little takeaway place opened up right across the road from my apartment a few months ago, and I have made a promise to myself that I will not order the same thing twice until I have tried absolutely everything on the menu, bar intestines or horrible fishy things. These places serve good, hearty, generally healthy Korean food out of questionable but apparently safe kitchens, and are much cheaper than cooking the meal for yourself. To date, this is the only country in which I have found this to be true!

So anyway, I’ve been calling in once or twice a week on the way home from work after scrutinising the menu outside the steamed-up windows and taking an educated guess at what something may or may not turn out to be. I have been rewarded with a selection of tasty noodle dishes, stews, and stir-fries, all of which have hit the spot. Of course, this haphazard, devil-may-care attitude towards ordering one’s dinner is bound to end in disaster at some point, and that point was reached this evening when I ordered what I thought was a Chinese-Korean fusion dish involving mushrooms. I sat down on my usual rickety stool inside and idly decided to Google the dish on my phone as I waited for it to be brought to me. I gazed dismally at the screen when the Google image results showed me a little preview of what I would soon be throwing in the kitchen bin. Yes, it was a noodle soup, and yes, it certainly contained a lot of various kinds of mushrooms, but unfortunately all of this was overshadowed by the alarmingly overwhelming presence of seafood in all its glorious shapes and sizes. I really fecking hate seafood, by the way.

There was nothing I could do but reluctantly accept the food container when it was brought to me, hand over my money, and trudge home with a growling stomach, silently hating the meal in my hand. When I opened it up just to check, all my worst fears were confirmed.

Still, it didn’t smell overpoweringly fishy, and the broth actually looked quite nice, so I took a sip of it. It was fabulous, so I looked suspiciously at everything else and had a mouthful of noodles and a piece of mushroom. So far, so good. Well, what the hell. Clearly I was living on the edge. I picked up a curly and unidentifiable part of a sea creature and chewed tentatively on it. It wasn’t bad, actually. Then I had a prawn… and another chewy thing… and something out of a shell… damn it, I even ate a baby octopus or five…

…and good grief, if I didn’t finish that whole bowl and drink every last drop of the soup, hot spice-induced tears running down my cheeks. I do not know how this happened, readers, but somehow I have ordered, eaten, and enjoyed a seafood dish. Not only that, but I will most likely order it again.

Well… when I’ve tried everything else on that menu, of course.

Is it the fact that you can spend entire lessons teaching a specific sentence structure or grammar point and there will always be one or two students who clearly have not listened to a single word, as is nicely illustrated when they hand in their homework or show you their workbook exercises? Or is it that their other teachers seem to have just as little understanding of the topic as they do?

All correct, good job!

Honestly, sometimes I just put my head in my hands and gurgle insensibly to myself at my desk.

The above is a page of homework marked by my Korean colleague. We share the class and take turns at marking the homework exercises, which are always simple and designed to practice a point taught in a recent lesson. They are even given the sample sentences and sentence starters to show them exactly what to do. It is not difficult, and any child who has listened in class and made the slightest of efforts has no problems completing the work correctly.

Most of them do, of course, but occasionally you’ll find something like the above picture, as I did today when I was flicking through to the most recent page to do my share of the marking. I said a few incredulous and not-terribly-complimentary words, shaking my head in disbelief, before turning to the next page to take my turn at marking.

What does this MEAN?!!

Oh, and the sentence structure being practiced here, for your information, was “_______s are insects. They are _________er than _______s.” The example given was “Butterflies are insects. They are prettier than beetles.”

To be fair, I may have taken my frustration at my colleague out on the student somewhat, but really. This kind of thing is probably why there are even native speaking English teachers who don’t know the difference between your and you’re, or its and it’s, or is and are… did their teachers just let them get away with it?

It has been a while since I had a grammar-related rant, but GOOD GRIEF this is annoying!! If you’re going to teach, teach properly and don’t tell a child that sentences like the ones in these pictures are correct! The whole thing makes my mind boggle and my blood boil.

I despair at what the English language is becoming back home, and I know it stands to reason that it can only be worse in a country where it’s a second language – and a very different language, at that. Not on my watch, though. I mean, of course a teacher has to be patient and forgiving and understanding of mistakes. I am all these things, most of the time, I swear (!), but this level of carelessness on the part of both teachers and students drives me up the bloody walls.

It needs to stop now or i is mad go run than his eat leaf. Or something.

Still, I crawled out of bed – spilling a forgotten glass of orange juice all over the floor and a never-again-to-be-white shirt that happened to be reposing there – and stumbled blearily to the coffee machine. New filter… water in… open coffee bag… scream in terror as multi-legged creepy-crawly thing runs out of said coffee bag… not a good start to the day. Not a good start at all.

One dead insect and no coffee later, I made it to the shower, where I became increasingly confused about the sliminess and lack of lather of my shampoo. Realised it was in fact conditioner. Rinsed, located shampoo, repeated process, slipped on floor, fell over, got some kind of whiplash rendering me incapable of turning my head for the rest of the day. Excellent.

My wet hair froze on the way to work and then turned into a limp and soggy mess when I went into the sauna-like school, where my director informed me I’ll be getting an extra class soon (goodbye, sweet lesson planning time!) and inquired as to why there was a sock stuck to the back of my jeans.

Hastily removed sock.

When I switched on the light in my classroom, chaos met my eyes. Groaning sleepily, I began a half-hearted clean-up operation, picking up one of the bags of macaroni from a craft earlier in the week. Did not realise said bag was torn all the way down the side. Watched in dismay as huge and dramatic torrent of miniature pasta pieces cascaded in slow motion all over the classroom, miraculously covering every square inch of the floor.

Spent entire morning caffeine ingestion time sweeping up macaroni and swearing a lot.

Classroom finally under control, I fetched the lesson plan I meticulously prepared yesterday. Or rather, I would’ve fetched it, had it still been on my desk where I left it, which it was not. A frantic search and much more swearing later, I could only conclude that I had – in a moment of outstanding genius – thrown it away.

Frantically re-planned lesson in two minutes. But only after waiting for the computer to start up again, because it crashed and died the second I started typing.

When I left the classroom to go to my first class, I was somewhat startled to trip over ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the corridor, going over on my ankle and twisting it so badly I could hardly get down the stairs. For FECK sake!!!! I howled in anguish. Except that I didn’t say “feck”, per se, and when the pain subsided I became suddenly aware of 3 small children gazing at me in wonder. Major kindergarten teacher fail.

Hello, everyone! I said – with cheeriness that was by now worthy of an Oscar – as I limped into the classroom with my mad hair and dark-circled caffeine-deprived eyes and impromptu lesson plan, dislodging a piece of macaroni from my sock. HAYLEY TEACHERRRRRRRRRRRR!!! squealed a child who had apparently forgotten that he’d seen me only the day before and was overcome with unbelievable excitement as he hurtled toward me and drove his surprisingly hard and bullet-like head into my unsuspecting stomach.

Fought the urge to cry hysterically.

I swear, I lurched through the day in this manner, from one accident or disaster or embarrassment to the next. I started to become extremely paranoid that the universe was trying to take me down. I only became aware of the date at 5pm, just after the only boy in my fourth grade class, with a loud “Teacher, what’s this?” produced a tampon that had apparently decided to jump out of my handbag and land on the floor beside him.

I am not a superstitious girl in the slightest, but seriously… what was all that about? Hmm? HMM?

I am going to bed.

It’s not on a lemon tree, though – it’s in my classroom. While work is (as my last post described) an absolute joy at the moment, the periods between classes are becoming difficult for me.

I’m alone.

I don’t mean in general – I have the best friends I could ever have hoped to find, and I spend as much of my spare time as possible with them. My social life has never been fuller or more fun. There’s always a chat ongoing with someone on my phone chat apps, and I can stay connected with what’s going on with friends near and far through Facebook. In general, I am far from lonely.

In school, however, relationships with my colleagues have been steadily deteriorating over the past 6 months or so. Terri – one of the very best friends I have ever had in my life – went back to South Africa in August, and her absence changed the very atmosphere of the school. Particularly for me. Suddenly, my friend was gone and I had no one to chat to during coffee breaks, no one to saunter home with after work and maybe go get some dinner down the road, no one to share jokes and secrets with, no one to vent to when things got stressful, no one to hug in times of sadness or joy.

My other foreigner colleagues? They get on better with each other than they do with me. They’re from the same country, they share interests and tastes, they have similar senses of humour and personalities, and they have gradually formed a friendship that I’m not a part of. We’re just not alike. Which is fine – not everyone can be friends! I was lucky to have Terri while she was here, as finding a colleague who can also be a close friend is quite a special thing. But now she’s gone, and I miss her more than I know how to express.

Not only that, but I didn’t realise until she left just how much she helped me to interact with all the other teachers, too – drawing me out of myself and away from my tendency to sit quietly at the lunch table or shut myself in my classroom. My friends bring me out of my shell. As Terri’s friend, I was a chatty and sociable staff member, and perhaps even a popular one. Now I’m well and truly on my own, while the two more entertaining and outgoing personalities are hugely popular with all the rest of our colleagues.

I just realised today that I have gone for two whole days without a conversation with anyone. It’s not anyone’s fault, and certainly no one’s being unkind to me – I’m not a downtrodden victim or anything! I’m just not one of them any more. And I suppose I’m a little sad about that.

But as I said in my last post, not everything can be wonderful all the time. I do have a job I love, I am surrounded by incredible children who make me laugh and smile every single day, and on the weekends I have some pretty amazing friends who will laugh with me, cry with me, dance with me, sing with me, and sit chatting all through the night with me. That’s more than many people could hope to have!

I’m just missing my friend, that’s all. It’s an Eeyore day. Sometimes I need to write about those, too.

It was then, ladies and gentlemen, that I reached another milestone in this tentative teaching career of mine. One of those magical moments that make me return to my classroom and silently punch the air in triumph while grinning like the old Cheshire cat. Jennifer passed me a couple of books and said, You can have a look at these and use ideas from them. Or we can order books for the kids if you want. But it’s your class – you know them, and I want you to do whatever you think will work best for them. 

OK, I said uncertainly, used to being pressed to finish course books on time, but how long do I have to finish a book?

She shook her head, laughing. It is your class, she said. You do it your own way. You’re the teacher. 

This may not sound like much, but good grief, I was walking on air for about a week afterwards. Having a job where you’re allowed to give your opinion, have your ideas taken on board, and eventually be set free to do it all your own way… that’s just not something I’ve ever had before. And of course it works out well for everyone, because when management lets go and trusts you, you tend to want to prove that they were right to do so – which is why I’m probably working harder now that I have for months. For every 40 minute lesson, I’ve planned for between one and three hours. And guess what? They have been my most successful and fun classes to date. I’m excited and happy ∴ the kids are excited and happy. Maybe my director is more shrewd than I first suspected.

I can’t see myself ever getting tired of this teaching thing, you know. I love it. I really, really love it! Every day is different, and full of fresh challenges and new ideas and opportunities to be creative. I can bring my own personality to work with me, and make it work for me. I can pick myself up after a class fails, learn from it, and do it differently next time – and I can enjoy the laughter and chatter in English that means it’s going well. I can exchange stories and tips with friends who have different strengths from my own, such as Irish Friend One’s recent advice that has very effectively and easily turned around the struggles I’d been having with classroom discipline. I can get to know my students individually, and learn what will and won’t work for them. And now, with my newfound freedom, I can abolish grammar books and worksheets for a little while each day and teach 6-year-olds the way I believe they should be taught – with stories, games, activities, art projects, and lots of giggles.

Oh, and I’ve disabled comments on this post, because I don’t want it to seem like a self-congratulatory, fishing-for-compliments type of thing. I know I’m not even a qualified teacher, and I’m constantly learning from my colleagues and my friends. But y’know, life is not all plain sailing, and even when you move to the other side of the world, you still have problems – emotions, arguments, complicated situations, angst, personal drama, sadness, yadda yadda yadda. I’m generally happy, of course, but… well, you know. So at a time when I’ve been having a lot of serious self-doubt in other areas of my life, it just felt good to write about and be happy about the part that’s going really, really well right now. So, no… not a desire for a lot of “Well done, Hails, you teaching genius, you!” feedback.

No. This one was just for me.

I had tried to book a hostel, of course, but it seems that hostels are practically non-existent in HK. Instead, what you have are lots and lots of expensive hotels, and then two skyscrapers called Mirador Mansions and Chungking Mansions, both of which are filled with budget accommodation and immigrants hawking watches. Don’t stay here alone! warned all the reviews. Dangerous! Unsafe! Awful!

“Ah, budget accommodation?” said the girl at the tourist info place in the airport. She drew the bus route on a map for me. “Chungking Mansions.” Seeing my expression, she laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s safe. Just look for this sign saying it’s licensed, and ask to see the room before you pay.”

Well, I have to say I thought the reviewers were exaggerating about the guys selling watches outside. They were not. I fail to see how there could possibly be so much demand for knock-off watches on this street, particularly as they’re targeting travellers who can’t afford to stay in nice hotels away from all the touting. Madam, would you like a watch? Watch, madam? Beautiful watches!

However, the people who warned of the dangerousness of the area have clearly just never been outside of their own country before, because I did not feel at all unsafe there. Overwhelmed, perhaps, by the sheer variety of languages, nationalities, and ethnicities around me – a lot of the time, I was the only female, white, native English-speaker in sight, and I confess that that did feel a little daunting and intimidating at first. More importantly, though, I found the whole experience fascinating. Apparently TIME magazine named Chungking Mansions as ”Best Example of Globalization in Action”, and it’s certainly the most culturally diverse place I’ve ever been. But dangerous? Not at all.

I experienced none of the scamming and conning that surrounded me in Beijing. The hawkers were hugely annoying, but not forceful or nasty. I fought my way through swarms of people from – it seemed – every square inch of the entire planet, waited in line amongst them for the lift to a “hotel”, and eventually found myself in The Dragon Inn: quite possibly my most amusing accommodation to date.

The thing is, space is a precious commodity in HK. In that there isn’t any. Apartments and hotel rooms are therefore tiny, and the budget ones aren’t more than cupboards. This is no exaggeration – part of the reason I travelled so light was that so many HostelWorld reviews mentioned the impossibility of bringing a suitcase into the room with you. My lack of luggage ended up being the reason I got a room in the Dragon Inn, as it was the first thing the owner – a slightly eccentric but businesslike lady called Ms. Lam – looked for. Ah, no bag, good, good, she said busily, you can stay here. You are very lucky. My hotel is very very excellent, very famous. 

There was something sweet yet hilarious about the pride she took in her hotel, if it was in fact a hotel. She was rather blunt and sharp-tongued on every other subject, but every time she spoke of “my hotel”, her face beamed as if she were a doting mother at her toddler’s first nativity play.

Yes, I think you will not be too long, she said thoughtfully, looking at me as I sat in her tiny office, swinging my feet. Three nights, I confirmed helpfully, until I realised that she was looking at me from head to toe and quite literally sizing me up to check that I wasn’t too long for the bed. There was not really anything I could do about this, so I just sat there meekly trying to look short as she answered a phone call from a customer.

Yes, yes, what you want? When you coming? No no, when you coming to my hotel? Yes, yes, but when you COMING? I think you are little stupid. OK, but when you coming to my hotel?

This went on for about five minutes while I stared desperately at the pictures on the wall in an attempt not to roar with sleep-deprived laughter at Ms. Lam’s customer service skills. Then it was off for a guided tour of my room, which involved her going into it and turning around in a circle, pointing at everything while I tried to squeeze just my head around the half-open door. I couldn’t get in until she’d left, and the first thing I did when the door closed behind her was experiment to see if I could in fact touch one wall with my left hand and the opposite one with my right at the same time. Having confirmed this, I tried to take a photo of the room, but discovered that the only way to even remotely manage this was to stand in the tiny ensuite, lean out precariously, and hold my camera out in the direction of the mirror.

I loved it. Clearly I am not like the majority of travellers, who had me quite concerned by only having negative things to say about accommodation in Hong Kong: dangerous, old, dirty, run-down, tiny, uncomfortable… yes, it was impossibly small, and no, it wasn’t the most modern place I’ve ever stayed in, but when there are space issues and you still manage to find somewhere to sleep, shower, and change, there’s not much to complain about. I’d choose it over a hostel, for the semi-privacy.

I say semi, because Ms. Lam and her staff do not have any issues with coming into the rooms several times a day after only a cursory knock – and because the rooms are so tiny, there’s not exactly anywhere to run and hide if  you happen to be getting dried after your shower or something. The first time she landed in beside me, I was changing my t-shirt, so I was mildly startled to find myself bra-to-face with the totally unruffled Ms. Lam, asking me if I wanted a lemon drop. Err, no… no thanks, I said as politely as one can while talking to a complete stranger in one’s underwear, and she left me to it. By the end of my stay, I didn’t even jump when I heard the door opening. You just need to go with the flow when you’re a budget traveller, you know?!

I was definitely too long for that bed, though, as it turned out.

After a second day of island-hopping and exploring, I had been walking back in the direction of my “hotel” (that needs another blog post by itself!), planning to grab some more irresistible dim sum for dinner along the way. As so often happens when I’m in unfamiliar surroundings, however, I got momentarily distracted – this time by a somewhat disorganised-looking indoor market which was practically deserted. It consisted of a stall here and there, surrounded by piles of tat and the odd middle-aged woman arguing over the price of a bicycle tyre with an elderly, pipe-smoking man in a rocking chair, his pet caged bird on his knee. It was certainly like no market I’ve visited before, and I’ve been to a lot!

I wandered further and further inside, certain that there had to be more, as I had the unsettling feeling of being in a derelict warehouse inhabited by homeless people rather than in the market that the sign outside had promised. The hundreds of colourful stalls and bustling crowds, however, completely failed to materialise.

Rather disappointed, I was turning to go back when I caught sight of a man in a chef’s hat ducking under a low beam and hurrying out of sight. Obviously I followed him. I had to bend almost double to get in, and when I emerged on the other side, I found myself in a different world.

Gone were the dark, dank, empty garage-like spaces and piles of assorted junk. I was now in a brightly-lit, cavernous space, every square inch of which was crammed full of rickety tables and chairs, tiny kitchen islands spewing forth clouds of steam, and scruffily dressed men howling orders at the kitchen workers. It wasn’t a restaurant so much as a food court, each little kitchen unit presumably owned by a different person and serving food to those seated directly around it. It was impossible to tell where one ‘restaurant’ ended and the next one began. And, oh yes – the place was packed. This was clearly an extremely popular place to eat, despite the rather unusual entrance route.

I stood and stared in delight and bemusement at the scene before me. It was like finding a noisy and exciting Narnia filled with noodles and dumplings and stressed out men yelling in Cantonese.

There was no order or structure of any sort to the layout of the place, so I just started to walk tentatively forward, weaving in and out of the tables and dodging the people laden with bowls and plates as best I could. The air was filled with yelling and spices, like my local Chinese takeaway back home times a million. Every available surface was plastered with brightly-coloured posters displaying menus and prices, but I couldn’t understand a single word: unlike in the majority of places outside in the real world I had just left, absolutely none of them contained English or pictures.

I hesitated, feeling slightly intimidated as clearly the only foreigner there, but my empty stomach dying to try whatever it was that smelled so good. A man hit me roughly on the arm and shouted at me, which brings us to the present moment, or the start of this story.

“What you want?” asks the man, pushing me into a seat and indicating that I need to stop getting in everyone’s way. I look helplessly at him, and at the sea of confusing, meaningless characters on the posters all around me. “I don’t know!” I say nervously, and he goes off into a spiel before dragging me over to his little kitchen and pointing out various ingredients to me. I still know nothing. “Um… just let me have some of that,” I tell him despairingly, pointing at the dinner of a man at another table.

A mere blink of an eye later, my bowl of “that” is unceremoniously slammed down in front of me, and my host – who used his entire 3-word English repertoire when he greeted me – continues to chat loudly to me every time he passes my table. The “that” is extremely good, especially after I decide that the chunks of meat amongst the noodles are definitely, definitely beef, and focus on nurturing this belief and faith as I eat.

I finish, pay, and attempt to take a photo of my incredible surroundings, which earns me another shove and frantic head shaking from my host, who apparently did not notice the shots I was snapping from my corner while I ate. “Oh… no photos?” I ask apologetically. “Sorry. Thank you. Good food!”. I point and give a thumbs-up, and he flashes me a brief but genuine smile, grabbing my arm when I turn to leave. He scoops up a couple of freshly made dumplings and wraps them in a large leaf, which he presents to me with evident pride. “Good food!” he repeats carefully. Then he gives me another shove and I make a hasty exit before he regrets his gesture and takes the dumplings back.

I walk back through the insanely crowded Hong Kong streets, eating my free dumplings and smiling to myself. This is living. Someone remind me never to leave it so long to go travelling again!