PICTURES FROM MONG KOK

Before I left the states I went to Best Buy and bought a converter for Hong Kong electrical outlets (which, for the record, are exactly the same as those in Great Britian). When I got into my room and plugged it in, the power bar for my laptop started buzzing and chirping, and then started flashing green lights. I totally fried the cord, leaving me with a drained laptop battery and a useless hunk of silicon with all my valuables on it.
Luckily, the converter worked just fine for my phone, which has been doing the majority of my computing work along with the complimentary laptop (running IE7 (not 6, still sucks) and a Chinese version of Vista that I can’t navigate for the life of me). My phone kicks so much ass it isn’t funny, the battery lasts forever even when I am using it hard, and it is basically the only thing keeping me sane. Bestest purchase ever.
Which is why I broke down in a panic the last time I went into the city. My plan was to buy a power cord for my laptop from the Computer Center in Mong Kok, and a sim card for my phone so it would actually work as a phone and not just a mini tablet, without paying the absurd international roaming rates AT&T chrages.
Seriously, AT&T charges $15/megabyte for international usage. I use, on average, 1.5 gigs of data a month, not including all the time I am at home on wifi. That means normal usage would cost me over $22,500 a month. Just slightly below my yearly gross income.
At the MTR station in Hang Hau was a PCCW kiosk (a major phone and internet/wifi provider for the city) charging reasonable rates for a sim card, so I bought it. But I wanted to check to make sure it worked in my phone before I left, so I plugged it in. Unfortunately, I forgot that I have a security program on my phone that protects it from theft by completely locking up if a new sim card is put in, unless you type in a pin number that I had completely forgotten. All my normal passwords didn’t work, and I knew that I needed to get on a real computer to sort it out. So instead of shopping, I went right back to my room. I’m not proud of this, but a broken, nonfunctioning phone nearly brought me to tears.
The way the security program works is that you can designate ‘buddies’ who will get a text message with a new pin in case you forget yours. I installed this program when I was still fighting with Lally on a daily basis, majorly on the outs with Harmony, and basically had no one that I felt comfortable texting for the pin. I vaguely remember having recently talked to Veronica a day or two before installing the program, so I figured she was as good as anyone, and that I’d never have to use the program anyway, so I set her as a buddy and basically forgot all about the program.
Fast forward a year later to me in the grips of panic, thinking I had bricked my phone, or at least that I would have to do a complete wipe and lose all my data (at least, what hadn’t been backed up into the cloud, which was basically everything that had to do with Hong Kong). There was a way of recovering on the website without using the pin, but only if you had registered your email address, which I had not. So my only hope was texting Veronica the pin and hoping she would tell it to me.
Unfortunately, it was nearly 6pm in Hong Kong, which meant it was 6am in North Carolina, so everyone that could possibly help me unlock my phone was fast asleep. I must have gchatted half a dozen people asking for help, hoping one of them would miraculously wake up, call veronica for me, get her to wake up and read the text message, then relay that info back to me. Becca was the first to respond (in Illinois, by the time she responded it was still just after 5am) and gave my sister a groggy early morning call that woke up her baby and was generally incredibly disturbing, for which I apologize a thousand times.
Shortly thereafter, Jessica left a comment on my facebook wall, so I immediately chatted her, asking her to do the same thing. After about 20 minutes Veronica finally got online, and after some confusion I realized I had to text her using my AT&T sim card, costing who knows how much, but finally she got the pin and sent it to me and I fixed my phone. This all got sorted out around 10pm, after which I was emotionally and physically exhausted, so I laid down to take a nap and didn’t awake until 4am the next morning. I am incredibly grateful to V and Jess and Becca for helping out. Thanks!
After that ordeal, I had too much work getting ready for class to go back into the city for the rest of the stuff. I also decided to take the batteries out of my little hexapod for replacing. So today I decided to go into Mong Kok for a little afternoon adventure and shopping experience.

These are the minibusses that drive like little speed demons all over the city. Its absolutely terrifying to be in one, but you have to sit there like its completely normal to be going 40mph around a curve with oncoming traffic doing exactly the same.

This is Mong Kok, a major stop in Kowloon. There are thousands of people here all day long, it is a major shopping district. It looks identical in every direction, you say? Yep, and it is about 6 square blocks of exactly this scene, repeated over and over again. No joke, I actually pulled out my phone’s compass a couple of times to figure out where the hell I was.
There are a ton of chain stores (especially electronics stores) that I poked my head into to do some price shopping, but in order to get the batteries and the laptop cord I had to go into the Mong Kok Computer Center, which is this madhouse of small specialty kiosks with just about every electronic thing you can imagine. I found a few places selling power cords, and found the cheapest one that looked reliable, and boughtit for about 35 bucks (about half of what I’d pay at Best Buy). I also found someone selling batteries that looked remarkably similar to the ones I was carrying in my pocket from my hexapod, but it was marked differently so I wasn’t sure it would work. It took me around 3 hours to do this shopping, but the years I’ve spent nerding it up on the internet and generally being a gadget geek meant that despite not knowing the language or the area, in every shop I knew exactkly what I was looking at and how much it would cost back home. I found some good deals on new laptops, but I promised myself I would wait to buy until after they pay me.
On the way back I stopped at Choi Hung, which has a huge market of fresh fish and meats and various sundry items, and found a noodle shop and had some dinner. It wasn’t nearly as good as I got on the island, but it did the job.
I came back home. The batteries worked perfectly, and now so does my hexapod. The laptop cord doesn’t fit my computer, so that’s still a brick and I wasted that 35 bucks. Now I need a nap.