Pssst. Hey Mister, Yeah, Over Here.

Tuesday, the girls and I spent the day at Ocean Park –Hong Kong’s answer to Six Flags Great America.

It was there that I had one of the biggest thrills I’ve had since I have been in Hong Kong. And we hadn’t even entered the park yet.

Over two months ago, Julie bought us four tickets with the expectation that we would use them as a family right after school let out. But things change. Obviously Julie couldn’t attend considering she was back in Chicago. This left us with one extra ticket that I did not want to waste. I had suggested to the girls that one of them invite a friend, but nothing became of that.

So there we were outside of the entrance to Ocean Park and I was determined to unload this $28 ticket. I instructed the girls to stay close. I figured the cute-gweilo girl factor could only help. Besides, this was a chance for the girls to learn some good life skills from their old man. Girls, I am about to teach you the stuff they don’t teach you in school. Stick close and see how it’s done.

But the girls wanted nothing to do with this cockamamie plan. They promptly retreated to a distant bench.

Granted, I had never done this before, but I had studied with the best of them. I spent my fair share of time on the corner of Michigan and Trumble Avenues as my Dad scored us cut-rate Detroit Tiger tickets. To be honest, I’m not sure what he enjoyed more; watching the game or hustling those tickets.

While keeping one eye peeled for security, I sidled up to one group of park-goers and asked if they needed a ticket. Shoot, they speak no English. My first attempt and I pick Mainlanders.

Then I approached some gweilos, but they already had tickets.

I approached two young women, but then I got cold feet. I am afraid that they are going to think that I am Creepy Man.

Skirting the law; engaging in grey market commerce. I felt like I was driving without a road map; flying without a safety net. I haven’t had this big of a thrill since we tee-pee-d Matt Algate’s house in tenth-grade.

Man, am I living life on the edge.

Finally, on my seventh or eighth try, I hit. It was a young Chinese Hong Konger and his two female friends. When I approached him, he said he was planning on getting his ticket at the counter. Ah yes, I told him, but with me, you’re gonna get it cheaper. Face value, it was $28. How much, he asked. $22.

And with that, we traded money for the ticket.

Girls, that is how we roll in Detroit City.

Watch and learn, ladies, watch and learn.

Man after that adrenaline rush, The Dragon rollercoaster with its three loops and a corkscrew is going to feel like child’s play.

See, I told You Something was Going On

When I lived in Japan in the late 1980's, one of the things that struck me was the uniformity. Not only did the people all dress very similarly, but they all seemed to behave well within the norms of expected social behavior. A Japanese proverb says that it's the nail that sticks out that gets hammered. True enough. The extreme punk rockers that used to gather in Central Park on the weekends seemed to be the exception that just proved the rule that there was a very narrow tolerance of aberrant individual expression.

In The States, by contrast, individual expression seems to be paramount. Do your own thing. Let it all hang out. Be true to yourself. Express yourself.

Hong Kong seems to be in the middle somewhere. As any ride on the train will show, compared to Japan of twenty years ago, there is certainly a greater variety of personal expression when it comes to clothing. But I haven’t experienced the full-on, eyebrow-raising, goofballs that you might encounter on the streets of San Francisco, Miami or Chicago.

That was until we walked past this banner on the island last Saturday.

It reads: American Secret Agents are using Using Wireless Mind Control Techniques to make people sleepwalk and kill themselves, destroying China’s social and economic stabilities.

It’s good to know that conspiracy theories are alive and well in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the man (is it fair to assume it was a man?) who was responsible for this banner was nowhere to be found. I looked, but didn’t see anybody with tinfoil in his hat.

I'm relieved to know I'm not the only goofball wandering the streets of Hong Kong.

This gives me great hope that I might actually find a support group here in Hong Kong for those of us who have been abducted by aliens.

Many Miles to Go Before I Sleep

It's 1:30 on Saturday morning. I just got back from the airport where I put my daughters on midnight flight. They have a five-hour layover in Korea before continuing on to Chicago.

Tonight my family is sleeping in three different countries on two different continents.

It's only been two hours and I already miss my babies.

Please say a little prayer for them.

-Jack

Has Anybody Seen My Glasses?

"Dad, I can't find my blue pajama bottoms. The ones with the little white flowers all over them."

I had been a hectic day. The apartment was in chaos and we were behind schedule. I had to finish my grading, fill out report cards, check out of the classroom, and move completely out of the apartment all within 48 hours of each other. Oh, and we had a dear friend of ours who was going to be visiting Hong Kong for a day right smack dab in the middle of all this.

“I don’t know Elise. Everything I have washed is right here. If they’re not here and they’re not in your dresser and you haven’t packed them yet, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Actually, I was very thankful for and impressed by the girls. In their mother’s absence, they had really been stepping up. It was still falling on my shoulders to managed everything else, but at least the girls were being responsible about getting all their stuff together. They had managed to get their belongings sorted into three different piles: items to get them through the next five days, items to go home to Chicago, and items to put in storage for the summer. As I watched my neighbor down the hall tripping over her two toddlers, I was thankful for two girls who were basically autonomous. Well, except for those blue pajama bottoms. The one’s with the little flowers on them.

I must confess, I had three dozen things on my mind and I gave Elise’s request next to zero attention.

Ten minutes later I was walking through the girls' half of the apartment having just returned from dropping off yet another load of our stuff in storage on the fifth-floor. “Hey, Dad.”

“What Elise?”

“I found my pajama bottoms.”

“Oh, where were they?” To be honest, I wasn’t really listening.

She didn’t answer. She just lowered her head and pointed to her thighs.

Stuck in my adult-world haze, I still didn’t get what she was trying to tell me.

“Dad, I was wearing them the whole time.” Then she started to crack up. Then Annika joined in. Then I joined in.

It was a laugh we all needed.

In my defense, when she told me she couldn’t find her pajama bottoms, I didn’t think to look on her legs, after all, it was 3:30 in the afternoon.

Did I mention the fact that Julie is not around?

Go Team, Go!

Matching Yellow Shirts

Some people are con-noisseurs of fine wine. Others con-noisseurs of food. Gary, our friend from college, is a con-noisseur of the world’s great cities. He has traveled fairly extensively, but he also knows amazing amounts about cities he has never been to. He knows know more about Johannesburg, Tokyo, and Sydney than a lot of people who have visited those cities. His favorite t.v. show is the Amazing Race where teams of two compete in what is essentially a global scavenger hunt zipping from one major city to another looking for clues. In fact, several years ago, Gary and his brother-in-law actually went so far as to send in an audition tape to the show.

So when Gary emailed us and said that he had managed to re-arranged his business itinerary so that he would have a day in Hong Kong, we were pretty excited not only to see a long-time friend, but to introduce Gary to a city that he said had been in his top three cities to see for as long as he could remember.

As a family, we’ve spent the better part of a year exploring HK, so the trick was how to give Gary a taste of Hong Kong in just eight hours. We started out by having dim sum for lunch. We rode the subway, the Star Ferry, and a cable car down Queens Road.

And of course, no trip to Hong Kong would be complete without a trip to The Peak to take in the spectacular views of Hong Kong. The four of us had just gotten off the Star Ferry and were trying to figure out where to catch the bus to The Peak, when Annika, Elise, Gary and I found ourselves surrounded by a frenzy of activity. A middle aged man and younger woman in matching yellow t-shirts and backpacks were feverishly looking for something. A bus? A train? Apparently, they found what they wanted, because all of a sudden they took off down a flight of stairs to the street. It was then that we noticed the two guys with television cameras and the sound guys holding boom microphones. It was all over in less than ten seconds. It all transpired so fast that I only managed to squeeze off two pictures.

What was that all about? Our confusion turned to excitement as it dawned on us that we had just witnessed the taping of an episode of The Amazing Race.

Crazy. You plan for a week the tour that you want to give to your friend and then something like this happens that we could have never have planned in a thousand years. How cool is that?

See what amazing experiences await you when you come visit us in Hong Kong.

A Day in the Bay

Geronimo! part 2 of 2

I was doing this for myself. When was the next time was I was going to get a chance to dive off of the roof of a houseboat into the waters just off the coast of Hong Kong? I would have done it even if there was no one there to see. But I must confess that at the same time I was well aware of the fact that I surrounded by Nick and Jonathan and Filipe and a bunch of the other hot shot boys from the eighth grade.

A teacher’s career can rise or fall on his or her reputation. A good reputation is achieved slowly over the years. There are no shortcuts. A good reputation is never the goal, but it is a byproduct of years of doing right by kids. It is earned little by little one day at a time in the classroom and in the hallways. But once in awhile, life provides you with an opportunity while on top of houseboat in the middle of a bay to solidify your reputation –at least in the eyes of a certain demographic of fourteen year old boys.

All this was in the back of my mind while I was trying to convince myself that I could do this. That I needed to do this. Just imagine it’s 1983, you’re back at the Civic Center pool. You’ve done this before. Nothing has changed –other than the extra forty pounds you need to adjust for.

I was thinking that one day in the not-so-distant future, I will be too old to do this.

But that day is not today.

So with a few too many eyes on me, I took a deep breath and dove. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t elegant. But I didn’t damage any major organs. I had faced my middle-aged fears and overcome them –at least this time.

And yes, it certainly didn't hurt my reputation either. I may be the teacher who is forever mixing up Justin Wong and Jason Wong. I may be the teacher who doesn't give out nearly enough detentions. I may be the teacher who gives back tests the next week instead of the next day.

But I am also the teacher who dove off the roof of the houseboat.

Wow. The things I do for a paycheck.

-Jack

Now if I could just find some scrap wood and an old Schwinn. There was this one summer when I was about twelve and the neighbor kid and I built this bike jump . . . .

Geronimo! Part 1 of 2

Annika has a classmate named Maggie Su. Maggie’s mom wanted to do something special for her daughter to celebrate graduation from eighth grade. So Mrs. Su chartered a large boat and invited a bunch of Maggie’s classmates and their families.

So last Saturday, Annika, and Elise, and I spent the day on a boat. We were accompanied by a dozen parents, assorted younger siblings, and thirty of Annika’s classmates. Those thirty classmates -of course- also happen to be my students.

The boat started from the southern tip of Kowloon. So after eight months in Hong Kong we finally took a cruise through Victoria Harbor –something most folks do the first few days they're here. After motoring for an hour, the boat pulled into a cove belonging to one of Hong Kong’s numerous outlying islands. The boat could only get within 200 meters of the beach, so that’s where it anchored.

The large boat had been towing behind it a small speed boat and one of the crew started shuttling people to the beach. A few us, overtaken by a moment of manly stupidity, decided to swim. Strangely enough, we dads made it just fine. It was all those eighth-grade hot-shot superstar athletes that were huffing and puffing and complaining.

Those people who choose to check out the beach didn’t stay long. It turned out the real action for the day was back on the big boat. The boat crew were pulling inner tubers with the small boat using the big house boat as the launching station. And those kids who weren’t busy tubing had discovered the roof of the big boat. Those who had mustered the courage were leaping off the roof and making the fourteen foot plunge into the Pacific Ocean.

After I made several obligatory jumps just to keep up with my eighth grade students, I then became gripped by the idea of what it was I really wanted to do. And because I was scared absolutely witless, I knew I had to do it. After all, it’s not like I'd never done it before; it had just been just a few years.

I didn’t say anything to anyone, but it must have been the way that I was hesitating on the edge of the roof. Or maybe it was the focused look in my eyes. Or perhaps it was the fear on my face that gave me a way, but the word started to spread among the eighth-grade boys that Mr. VanNoord was about to dive.

Newsy Update

I know that I haven’t blogged in forever and now I feel obliged to do that oh-so-bloggy of things and give everybody the newsy update on what’s been going on in the VanNoord household. I apologize in advance that this is going to read like a bad Christmas card update letter. But here goes:

Hey y’all. Sorry I haven’t posted in -like- forever. Wow. It has been like super crazy by us. As you may have heard, Julie’s Dad had a heart attack a month ago and Julie flew back to Chicago to help out. She missed the last two weeks of school and will be home the first of July.

The girls and I managed to finish up the school year. Thanks to their father’s domestic prowess, they even managed to wear ironed uniforms most days. It has been over two weeks since Julie left and we are almost through all of the meals she cooked, labeled and left behind in the freezer. We are not sure what we are going to do for food once those meals run out.

We’ve moved out of our school apartment for the summer. The on-campus housing is used by a couple of different programs during the summer. We will be moving back on campus at the end of July, but in the meantime we are vagabonds. We stayed at one colleague’s home in Tai Wo for three nights and are now staying in a second colleague’s home in Ma On Sha for the remainder of the summer. Both of these families are traveling abroad for the summer.

This Thursday, I will be putting Annika and Elise on a plane so they can spend the summer visiting family and friends in Michigan and Illinois.

The night before we got the news about Julie’s dad’s heart attack, Julie and I had just purchased airline tickets to Vietnam. Julie obviously can’t go, but my brother Nate is flying in from Detroit to go with me.

Well, that’s about all the newsy news. You should be about all caught up. Now back to the good stuff.

I've Gotta Go

When we moved to Hong Kong, we were bracing for a bit of culture shock. We were anticipating all of those wacky moments that were going to come about because we didn't understand the local customs. But that hasn't really materialized. Hong Kong is just way too westernized.

About the weirdest cultural thing in Hong Kong is that the waitstaff in the restaurants make no effort to bring everyone's food at the same time. They just bring it as it's ready, which means that some people will get their meal a full ten minutes before the last person. The expectation is that you begin eating when your food arrives.

The biggest culture clashes come when we are in touristy areas that attract a lot of people from Mainland China. Early on some colleagues tipped me off to the fact that in China, parents will prompt their little boys to pee just about anywhere, anytime. I thought that was a broad generalization and just a little culturally insensitive.

Turns out to not be off the mark by much.

Recently, I was standing at a souvenir kiosk in Disney and the clerk was looking at me looking at the souvenirs when all of a sudden out of the corner of his eye he saw a mom and little boy walking behind his kiosk. It must happen often enough because he successful guessed what they were up to. He intercepted them before they got to the impeccably manicured bushes. I speak zero Cantonese, but I am pretty sure the conversation went something like this:

"Hey, hey, lady you can't have your kid pee there."

"What? He pee'd in a potted palm tree over in TomorrowLand earlier this morning and nobody said anything."

"I'm sorry, but you're gonna have to take him to the bathroom."

"He's such a little boy. It will be such a small amount of tinkle."

"Bathroom."

The clerk prevailed and off the mother and son went.

Yesterday, Annika, Elise, and I were Ocean Park which is a big amusement park on the southside of Hong Kong island. We were standing in line for the cable cars behind two mothers and their four or five little kids. And sure enough, little Liang must have told his mom that he had to go wee-willy-winkle, because while little Liang dropped trou right there in the shadow of the tilt-a-whirl, mom whipped out a zip-lock baggie from her purse.

Bada-bing. Bada-boom. Sixty seconds later, mom is throwing the full bag into the garbage.

Not exactly how we do things in Chicago -or in Hong Kong for that matter, but hey, who am I to judge? To each their own.

Enjoy the rest of your stay in Hong Kong and have a safe trip back to the Mainland. And if you should need them, the public restrooms are behind the Racing Rapids ride, next to the cheese fry stand.

Feel free to use them anytime.