We moved out of the quaint campgrounds of Sai Kung and are now in the race hotel in a different part of the city, among scores of massive apartment buildings. At street level, there are small eateries and tiny convenience stores, but not much else. With all of these apartments, I’ve been wondering how such a large concentration of people can be serviced with so few local businesses. Missing are the supermarkets, laundries, hardware stores, butchers, bakeries, etc. Do all of these people get their services elsewhere? I don’t see many privately-owned cars parked around, so I doubt that they travel to their regional mall. Do they just live without these consumer products? Do they live so simply as to not need such amenities?
Meals are being supplied by the race organization in within the hotel. It’s a dining-room buffet with music (for now, we’ll call it that) being played out of large PA speakers. The food is good, but the music we’re being forced to hear is, well, interesting. It’s similar to the unfortunate disco-ish music of the 70s, where they created a seamless, uni-rhythmic medley of Beethoven, The Hustle, The Beatles, and other songs that had no business being played to a faux-disco, monotonous, mindless up beat. But the selection of songs for their medley is of (brace yourselves) Christmas songs and K.C and the Sunshine Band, where K.C. is used as the ongoing theme of the medley. Every 40 seconds or so, between songs like White Christmas and Deck the Halls, they would move into, “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it…” They also used, from Deck the Halls, “Fah la la la la” to segue between each song when there was a key change. And each key change modulated higher to give the feeling of something building or growing. So when I first heard it, I was offended. I felt as if my senses were being attacked and I didn’t have a choice in the matter. And who decided to create this “music”? Did they think that someone might enjoy it? To inflict this on us was cruel.
4:30AM, can’t sleep again, decided to go for a walk and look around town. Across the hall, I heard Wilson and Alberto in their room talking– they couldn’t sleep either. Wilson and I walked around a bit, but there was nothing to see– just big apartment buildings. So I went for another early-morning ride. The roads were quiet and I made my way through the town center and out of town along a nice road through the hills. By some weird coincidence, I ended up back in Sai Kung, where we had stayed previously! I love that place. The other guys rode after breakfast and, coincidentally, rode to the same place.
We arrived at the breakfast buffet and– get ready to boogie– the Christmas medleys were back! It was the same K.C.-themed medleys, but the selections were different, and Deck the Halls wasn’t used as a tool for torture, as if something from one of Stanley Kubrick’s more psychologically-sadistic visions.
This afternoon is the team presentation in downtown Hong Kong, and we race tomorrow (Sunday). Also check out Katie’s blog.
And, here are more pictures from Katie.