Tag: Causeway Bay

BLOG: The Wolf of Peel Street

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Wednesday. Here we are at the coffee shop. Same as always, same as always.

What is there to write about today? Hmm… Well…

Once upon a time (ak back in December), I met some random expat bro at The Wolf. Can’t quite remember where he said he was from. Hungary? Bulgaria? Something like that. He worked in Shenzhen at the time, but now he has moved here. Somehow, he remembered me (they always do) and messaged me out of the blue to ask me out for “coffee.” Apparently, by coffee, he actually meant Prime Time Happy Hour at The Wolf.

As you may recall, The Wolf is the Finance Bro Bar where I was offered a line of cocaine off of a dirty bar toilet, then groped outside of the bathroom while everyone at the bar watched and did nothing. Sounds like a pretty unsafe situation to return to, right? Right.

On the one hand, I could go and write about my observations in a cleverly-titled blog called “The Wolf of Peel Street.”

On the other hand, I’ve been to this place before, I’ve calculated the risk factor there, and I just don’t think it’s worth it to put myself in a dangerous situation like that again. As we all know, Men + Bars = Disaster Waiting to Happen.

I’m also trying to make healthier life choices, like doing more yoga, eating more salads, and frequenting the neighborhood juice bar instead of an actual bar. Nothing about this situation screams “healthy.”

I’m thinking… not. I guess we’ll see if I change my mind at 5pm. I don’t think I will. I’m still mooning over The Russian. I don’t need more problems coming from the Eastern Bloc. Let’s change regions next time, shall we? Maybe take a trip back to Latin America, where the men know how to roll their tongues and move their hips.

Just kidding.

What other news in the world is there? Oh yes, only the most exciting kind of news: The Kardashians are Taking Hong Kong!

Yes! It’s true. Kim K herself is opening a SKIMS store in my old neighborhood (aka Times Square, Causeway Bay). I don’t know if that means she will physically be here filming the show, but I strongly suspect it does. I’m not crazy enough to think I could meet her, but maybe I could stand in line at the store and see her from a short distance away. Assuming I am still living here in November, of course. And that I don’t get crushed by a flock of tourists from the Mainland in the process…

Love it. I don’t care what anyone thinks. KUWTK has gotten me through some hard times in life. They’ve been my imaginary family when my real family has let me down. It’s one of my ultimate comfort shows. Sometimes I just want to sit around the table and eat a giant salad and talk shit about whatever with my sisters. Unfortunately, my real sisters are not in my life. That’s why I watch the Kardashians do it on their show. It’s not that deep. It just is what it is.

I wonder which hotel she will stay at? The Peninsula? The Mandarin Oriental? The Four Seasons? Will she go on the Escalator? Will she take the Star Ferry to Kowloon? Will she visit Macau?

I hope it’s not one of those trips like the India episode where they flew there for like two days and were too jet-lagged to do anything. I was pretty disappointed in that episode, honestly. I was just hoping for so much more.

Lol, I remember last year when I was doing magic mushroom therapy and I kept hallucinating that Kim K and Paris Hilton were dressed up in lab coats asking me questions and talking to me. That was wild.

I remember watching the India episode before doing my MM therapy session and I got caught in some weird loop where I was wandering through a spice market looking for Aladdin. I kept pacing around my apartment asking aloud, “Where’s Aladdin? Where’s Aladdin? Where’s Aladdin?” My brother and cat were both like… WTF. Then I got really sick and had a super intense flashback of my relationship with my Persian ex-boyfriend, whose favourite childhood movie was… you guessed it… Aladdin.

Wild.

Brains are crazy, like I’ve said. I actually really benefitted from doing magic mushroom therapy. You have to treat it like actual therapy though. It can be really, really, really ugly and unpleasant. I basically had to take a dose, intentionally expose myself to various things that would trigger my worst traumas, and then relive them from a significant distance in a safe space. It really sucked while I was doing it, but it worked. I don’t get the flashbacks or nightmares anymore, at least not specifically related to that time in my life. I still get them in regards to my family, but hopefully that will go away with time.

I mainly used it to work through my PTSD related to my time in the Troubled Teen Industry. That is why I was specifically hallucinating Paris Hilton standing there talking to me. She’s leading the charge on the TTI stuff. Kim K was her lawyer.

Yet another one of those experiences I could write about for a legitimate publication if only I had my shit together. I do not have my shit together. Sigh.

What else happened? Hmm. Well, I talked to The Publisher. I haven’t talked to him in two months, apparently. Whoops! He was very happy to hear about my progress. At least someone is. He just said, “You did it, Betsey. You went there and you did the thing and you survived and you wrote about the entire experience. You did it. I’m proud of you.”

Thank you. Like I said, at least someone is proud of me, lol. No one, including myself, thought I was going to make it this far. But here I am, standing tall and proud, alive and well in Hong Kong SAR today!

I explained I’m only in documentation mode right now in regards to my daily adventures. I officially have a plan for this book, which I developed after piecing together that first manuscript draft back in January. I have a certain endpoint in mind now. I just need to manifest it!

Speaking of manifesting, I need to manifest a clean apartment. I picked up my second load of laundry late last night, so it’s all still sitting in the bag. I need to put it all away. It’s the perfect excuse to stay in my little cave and enjoy the aircon, which I definitely want to do today. The heat index is… yeah. Plus I was already outside doing yoga earlier this morning. No need to be out in the mid-afternoon sun.

Anything to take my mind off of the job thing. More rejections in my inbox. Really starting to panic now. I’m so ready to go back to work and open a new bank account and sign a two-year apartment lease and pay off my credit card bills. I don’t want to pack up and move, again, and start all over with the paperwork, again, and go into debt, again, and feel like this year was nothing more than a vacation from reality I took on a whim.

Manifesting. Manifesting. Manifesting.

I am a Hong Konger!

BLOG: You Want To Go To A Real Party?

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Wednesday.

Strange days, strange nights. My new favourite song lyric is “You’ll get more than you bargained for when you come to Hong Kong.” Ain’t that the truth?

Let me start with Monday night. Late at night, I received a text message from my bartender friend’s mother asking me if I knew where she was. As I had just finished that “Should I Marry A Murderer?” Documentary on Netflix, I immediately panicked. When I didn’t hear from my friend for an hour, I started to spiral. By the next morning, I was fully convinced she had been trafficked or murdered.

I texted her mother asking if she ever showed up. She confirmed that my friend was alive and okay, but the situation she described was unclear. I went to the bar where my friend works in search of her. She was not there, but her Auntie was. I showed her the message and she said, “Oh yeah, last night was crazy. It was a whole thing. I am actually about to go see her right now. Do you want to come?”

Obviously, yes, because I still hadn’t heard from my friend herself, so I was worried. We left the bar and took a cab to Causeway Bay to meet up with my friend at this rooftop bar where she was with her boyfriend. I was so relieved to see her. She explained what happened. She was out drinking and broke her phone, so nobody can currently get ahold of her. Okay, not so bad.

My friend and her Auntie both seemed half-surprised at my concern, but at the same time, they were not really that surprised at all. I have become close with them since I came back to Hong Kong. They share stories with me, I share stories with them, we laugh, we cry, we smoke, we drink. Last night we went out for a girls night and had the best time. We are all real friends now.

It still wigs me out to see how people look at me when I hang out with them. The racism and classism here is so real. There is definitely a sense of “Why is this Western white woman hanging out with Filipina women? Doesn’t she know they’re ‘The Help’? Why are you hanging out with ‘The Help.’”

Probably because I don’t want to spend time around rich white people with active cocaine addictions who classify brown people as “beneath them?” Hmm… just a theory!

Definitely a fish out of water over here. Ugh. I was explaining to them that I’ve grown to resent this concept of “networking” because nine times out of ten, it’s just rich white people doing Coke and Special K together. It’s so depressing to realize the entire financial system on this planet is run by people with active drug addictions, but it is what it is, I guess.

Not exactly a mystery why I, a person who spent 20 years working in the service industry, would want to hang out with other people who work in the service industry. They’re relatable. They have the same perspective as I do. We stand behind the bar and judge the fuck out of the crazy people snorting coke off of dirty bar toilets who somehow think they are “above us.”

Also, I’ve never had a corporate office job and I’ve been trapped out living in the middle of fucking nowhere for 17 years. Now I’m 37 years old and I’m having my first exposure to the “white collar” world. It’s like…. Ugh. Gross.

Most of these people are so out-of-touch with reality. They have no idea we are watching them like they’re characters on a TV show. They just think the people who are bringing them drinks are empty-headed slaves put on earth to serve them because of their presumed “superiority.” It’s ridiculous.

Anyway, we had a good time on the rooftop last night. Plus, we got a discount because my friend had worked there before and everyone on the staff knew her. Perks! I even said to Auntie, “This is your Jack Dawson moment. Like we just surveyed this room of corporate jerks and you looked over at me and said, ‘Do you want to go to a real party now?’”

Yes, yes I do. Take me to the lower decks and we’ll crack open the whiskey and dance until this ship sinks to the bottom of the SEA.

So that’s what we did.

We also wanted to test out the theory that some people and places are safer than others. They have serious concerns about me after hearing my stories about The Sketchy Place and The Wolf. In fact, my friend asked me I remember seeing her on Saturday night after leaving The Sketchy Place. I do not. I barely remember anything about Saturday night, to be honest.

She said I was absolutely fucking shitfaced and she had never seen me in a state like that. She said everyone was concerned because they have all seen me drinking in their bar and they’ve never seen me act like that. I said this is the third instance of a blackout happening at The Sketchy Place. They are very against me going back. I can’t help but agree with them, considering the only two things I remember about being there are watching a drug dealer do business with everyone there and then not having to pay for our tab.

We decided to test out the “How much alcohol can Betsey actually put down before blacking out?” Theory. I was with them all night drinking mojitos, eating snacks, smoking menthols, and laughing hysterically. By the end of it, I was barely tipsy and in a very good mood. This proved to us that yes, The Sketchy Place is, in fact, unsafe, and that I should never go back there ever again.

Mission Accomplished.

Fast forward to this morning. I was not hungover. Not even a little bit. Not even at all. More proof something weird is going on at some of these places. They are convinced I’m being targeted because I’m a writer. They are probably right. It’s not the Triads I’m afraid of here. It’s the Finance Bros and their active drug addictions that make them power-hungry, paranoid, and totally unstable.

I came to the coffee shop, as I always do. However, instead of writing, I launched into a conversion with another writer I met here who is from India. We have a lot in common. He gave me some really good advice and invited me to join a local writer’s group.

I couldn’t help but smile at the fact that I had a vision of Lord Ganesha on a beach in India yesterday, and now there is an Indian man sitting in front of me imparting extremely valuable writing advice. That’s not a coincidence! That’s just Hinduism working its magic.

There are some truly strange things that happen in this world sometimes. Strange, unexplainable things. I believe in all of them. I truly do believe in magic. I believe in it more and more as this year has unfolded. There is no such thing as a coincidence. We always end up exactly where we are supposed to be.

On that note, I am off now. To do what, we don’t know. I’ll let the universe take the lead today. I trust in the process…

BLOG: I Think We Lost The Plot

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Thursday. Where did the week go? Oh yes, I know. I spent all day yesterday sucked into Netflix while actively avoiding reality. Nothing like a good true crime docu trio to wake you up to all of the different ways life could go wrong.

I’m not really partial to the murders myself. I like the documentaries about cults and cult psychology. I have watched ALL of the cult documentaries. Unemployment Level 100. I am also fascinated by cult psychology because, as an American, I recognize that my country has been taken over by a very dangerous cult.

This particular documentary was about the FLDS in Utah. It is absolutely terrifying to watch as a woman. I have nothing but respect for Dr. Christine Marie. She is definitely one of my new role models. That documentary was harrowing.

Then I watched the one about the pro cyclist who was murdered by the jealous girlfriend of some loser guy. The girlfriend took off to Costa Rica, where she was hiding out at various yoga retreats. That one definitely made me think a lot. I just looked back at some of the people I met in India and Bali and was like, “WTF were they running from?”

Some of them were really strange and off. As I’ve said before, I’m not sure I would go back to Bali again after what I experienced there. Bangkok, yes. Bali, no.

I found people in Bangkok were generally more open about the fact that they are running away from something. Maybe they won’t tell you what it is, but it’s kinda just the general vibe of the expat community in Thailand. It’s like walking into the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars. You know everyone in there has come from somewhere else to do some kind of shady business. It’s just better not to ask too many questions about it.

In Bali, people are presenting themselves to be something they are not, and what that something is generally involves grifting off of people struggling with mental health, grief, spiritual questions, and a lack of meaning/purpose. I definitely saw some cult-adjacent shit while I was there. I also met people who were just… way, way, way off. Like “maybe they should be in the Hotel California and not running a yoga studio in Bali” kinds of off. Ya know what I’m saying?

It did feel validating in that way. I think sometimes I can be sensitive and take other people’s weird behavior super personally when in reality it has nothing to do with me at all. Like, maybe that lady wasn’t mean to me because I’m a bad person who deserves it. Maybe she killed her husband’s affair partner and went on the run and now she’s hiding out in Bali and she’s worried some writer is going to go snooping around and find out the truth.

Maybe.

Or maybe she was just having a bad day. Either way, this isn’t about me. Don’t take it personally. I’m perfectly grand just the way I am.

Right now I am sitting outside the coffee shop, watching people on the street. I just love Hong Kong. I really do. Every day I wake up and think, “Wow, I can’t believe I get to live here. This is the most incredible opportunity of my entire life. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for it every single day.”

I was meditating last night before bed and the spirit of my Irish grandmother showed up to talk to me. She said, “Do you know what the Irish Dream is? Not the American Dream. The Irish Dream. The Irish Dream is for our children to be free to become writers, poets, artists, musicians, filmmakers. It’s to give them the gift of free time so they can create. You don’t have to slave away at the docks or in the factories or give up your education to take care of a dozen children. We did all of this so you can sit outside on the rooftop and write your book and enjoy life in Hong Kong. Stop feeling guilty about it. Enjoy it. We did it all for you.”

Okay, okay, okay. I get it. My sole purpose on this earth is to Create. I must honor my ancestors by finding a way to become a serious, professional writer. Well, we all know the first two steps: money and a room of one’s own. I have that right now, yes, but how to maintain it over time is a problem.

I don’t know. Somehow I keep making it work. Failing upward, as they say. Perhaps a reminder to focus on manifesting simple things like a fabulous apartment that someone else is paying for so I can just sit there and write all day. Hahaha.

I’m not joking. That’s a real thing. It’s called “patronage.” It’s where rich people give you money and a room of your own so you can create art all day. I’ve actually had several patrons in my life, including my father, my uncle, my aunt, and The Publisher. It really is the best way to go. At least, for now.

That’s what I have to manifest: a patron! Ah, yes, so simple. Why did I not think of it before? Patron, patron, patron.

Brilliant.

Haha, aww, the song “I’ll Be Missing You” just came on the street stereo the delivery guy always plays around this time of day. Definitely a message from my ancestors. My dad always does that. Communicate through music, I mean. Sometimes I’ll just be sitting somewhere random and a playlist comes on that only he would make and I just know he’s there.

Oh yeah, they’re definitely there right now. It just switched to “Empire State of Mind.” Big New York City energy coming in right now. It’s a whole thing.

Now I am sitting here thinking about my book/Netflix show, lol. I’ve been going through my manuscript I made in January and I just hate it. The first half is such a slog. I just want to delete it all, speed up the timeline, and just have the first 10 pages/minutes be a montage of my dad’s funeral, getting fired from Starbucks, car breaking down, losing the house, getting a giant check in the mail, and buying a one-way ticket to India. That’s it. Fuck South Dakota. This is the terrible Prequel series no one asked for. Everything since India is like… my actual real life as I have always wanted to live it finally began. That’s the real story here!

I think we’ve kind of lost the plot a little bit here. Yes, I have meaning. I have purpose. I am a writer. It’s my dream to become a professional writer. That is why I am here. I got on that plane to have a crazy adventure and write it all down. Take whatever comes at me along the way. I did that. I’ve done it. I am actively doing it, even when it comes at a cost, like my little adventure up to the Mid-Levels.

So now we have to figure out how to steer the career into professional mode. I have no idea how to do that. I have no talent for business whatsoever. I need an agent/editor type to guide me in the right direction. Someone who has that eye for business in the way that I don’t and all of the connections I need but don’t have. Again, a patron type.

Okay, I feel like I’m back to normal now after my date with the Russian. Wow, what was that? Hmm. Wild. I don’t actually have anything else I want to say about him here. I just wanted him to know… I could have easily ripped you apart, but I didn’t. But I could. So just… know that.

Honestly, couldn’t even tell ya what he does for a living. You could be water boarding me old school Soviet style and I’d be like, “I swear to you, I don’t know! It sounded so boring. I checked out halfway through his explanation and started examining the crystal chandelier and hanging gardens at the Four Seasons. I can list off every plant and flower in the terrarium. Couldn’t tell ya what he does for work. Something with Finance, maybe? I thought he said he owned his own business. I honestly have no idea.”

The world will never know. Furthermore, the world does not care. The world cares about the part where two Scorpios went on a date to a bar that looks like an old-timey opium den/brothel and it was the most on-brand thing ever for both of them. Show us those terrible red leather couches from the 80’s! That’s what the world really wants to see!

Netflix execs will be like, “How is this even relevant to the plot?”

It’s not, it’s just an excuse to film at the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong. Since when do we need a plot for sex? Spoiler alert: there is no plot. This is just a random, gratuitous sex scene with no purpose or relevance whatsoever. Since when do you have a problem including that in your shows?!

They’ll be like, “You’re right. Let’s make sure we get a top-notch intimacy coordinator on board with this production.”

IDK, I think that might be too “woke” for the Russian. I can just imagine the look of outrage on his face right now…

Ha ha ha!

I think I’m hilarious.

Off now. To do what, we don’t know. We know we’re not going back to the Mid-Levels anytime soon!

The battle of Hong Kong Island neighborhoods continues. So far I’ve eliminated Causeway Bay (too busy), Wan Chai (too wild), Central (too expensive), Happy Valley (too far), and the Mid-Levels (too bougie). I’m actually quite happy in Sheung Wan. It’s very… French. Close to everything, but easy to escape from the chaos of the city with a quick trip up to my rooftop.

I think I’ll go do that right now, actually. Then I have to clean my apartment because it’s a mess. All of my clothes are piled onto “the chair” instead of hanging in my closet, where they should be. Alas, I am not fancy enough to have a “helper” or live in an upscale “serviced apartment.” I am confined to my tiny little coffin box with the rats and the cockroaches, living off snacks and instant noodles from 7-11.

It is what it is.