No bathroom stories this time

*** Edit: I forgot to upload the photos from the Summer Palace in Beijing to my Flickr account. They're now on there - just do a search in my photos for the tag "Summer Palace". Also, the photos have been updated to have descriptions and titles so you'll know what you're looking at now.***

Last night was a fabulous night. I got to relax in my bed and chat with Pei-chin. We discussed the differences in beauty and social structures in highschool. We also talked about the different challenges we've noticed or had to overcome while we've been here. It was fascinating seeing how she saw things.

Anyways, I dragged my ass (unwillingly) outta bed at 6am this morning so I could go on the History Study Tour I signed up for. I met my pals for breakfast (is a prepackaged ham/egg sandwich a breakfast?) before headed out to City University.

The tour was offered by City University... Amusingly, there were more CUHK students than City University students. Hee. We did the generic introductions (my name is, I'm from, I study, etc.) before getting on our way.

The prof leading the tour was a British fellow who had been in the government and retired just before the handover. He's the first white guy I've met who's fluent in Cantonese. (Seems reminiscent of my chinese massuer (you sure about that June?) who mentioned I was the first white girl to speak Chinese to him.) Whoops. I'm off topic.

Anyways, the prof was a fantastic speaker. I was really tired, so I didn't absorb much of his talk, but we got a brief outline of Hong Kong history from like, 1000AD to the 1800s.

We walked around some historical areas in the New Territories. It was amazing. If you were dropped into the middle of one of this villages, you wouldn't know you were in Hong Kong. They were crazy old and falling apart. One of my fave stops was at a temple on the side of the ocean - you could see the oyster beds (millions of oysters) and moving between them were fiddler crabs and mud skippers. The ground crawled with them. I was also amused by visiting one of Hong Kong's largest ancestral temples and learning about the inter-village wars and whatnot. It was like stepping into the past.

My regular history prof didn't instill much confidence in me as a professor though. Half the time the British Prof was lecturing MY teacher and my prof didn't know a thing about it. However, to be fair, I learned that my prof was born in Guangdong so I'll forgive him for not knowing much about Hong Kong history. But anyways, the Brit prof was a great speaker. He knew everything about everything and it seems like he's been everywhere in the New Territories.

I think one of the more fascinating things we learned about was the government housing projects. For the uninformed (which I assume is most of you), historically Hong Kong has been periodically flooded with refugees. Normally they set up squats and eventually return home when the trouble is over.

The last major wave was in 1949 during the Communist takeover in China. However the squatters didn't leave this time. A fire started in one of the larger squatting communities (there's another name for these, but I can't think of it right now), resulting in a large number of deaths and left even more people without shelter.

So the government held some emergency meetings and within a couple of days, decided to set up some cheap housing so that all these poor/destitute people could afford the houses but at the same time, the government wouldn't have to subsidize the housing too much. Cheap and poor quality houses were built and people moved in. (This was started in 1954.)

About 20 years later the government decided to "up" the quality of the public housing. It was discovered that there were enough people living in and around them that it was worth putting more effort into the houses. So they began to incorporate a shopping centre at the centre of each housing project and also ensured that there was good public transportation (each project has 2 bus stops directly at the project, with another 4 bus routes travelling through). Schools are built by the government, and organizations will purchase the right (paying a quarter of the cost) to run the school. If I remember correctly, each project accomodates approximately 8000 people.

Apparently housing is getting another "update" now, with better quality being offered and the like. I can't wait to see the inside of an apartment now. The housing lecture only lasted for like 15 minutes, but it was fascinating.