How the Hong Kong Protests Changed My Trip

My flight departed Calgary at 11:00am and everything worked out well on the way to Hong Kong.  I sat in the very last row of the plane, hoping that the plane would be similar to a Korean Airlines aircraft I had been on a few years ago, in which the last row is more spacious than the middle of the cabin.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case with Air Canada. 

I landed in Hong Kong a bit early and was immediately hit with the memory of what a 30 degree humid day feels like!  I had to wait about 15 minutes for the airport bus and it felt like I sweat more in these 15 minutes than I did in the entire year and a half prior to coming back to Hong Kong.

After I landed and settled down, I came to find out that protests had started in Admiralty and Central that very day.  The protests are a result of the proposed changes in regards to the Hong Kong electoral system.  When Hong Kong was handed back over to China in 1997, there began a one country, two systems principle which was supposed to last for 50 years.  17 years in, with pressure from China, the Hong Kong government is already trying to reform its policies.  After years of disagreement and displeasure, a group of students stood up against the government’s decisions and started protesting outside the government buildings.  The number of protestors kept increasing throughout the day and it was said that there were as many as 100,000 people on the streets at any given time. 

By the next morning, some protestors had made their way over to Mongkok, which was where I was staying.  As I was walking around the streets of Mongkok, I could barely recognize it as it is normally filled with people.  On this day, it was like a ghost town.  Restaurants, shopping malls, and street markets were all fairly empty the entire day. 

As the day progressed, more and more people appeared in Mongkok again and many of them were volunteers that were out helping to clean up the streets.  Some were students that were handing out yellow ribbons, which turned out to be the symbol for the pro-democracy supporters.

When was the last time Nathan Road was this empty?

The protests also caused much of the public transportation to stop running.  I had heard that most of the buses, as well as the subway line between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island had shut down.  This definitely put a dent in my plans as I had wanted to visit Central the next day.  I was also planning on meeting up with an old friend in Mongkok on my second day in Hong Kong, but she wasn’t able to get there since there were no buses.

In the end, my 2 days in Hong Kong were almost entirely spent in Mongkok, shopping and eating.  Not that that’s a bad thing, but I had been planning and looking forward to doing so much more that it was a bit disappointing.  I guess I’ll just have to wait until next time!

On my last day in Hong Kong, my friend from China was telling me how the news of the Hong Kong protests were being broadcasted in China.  For a minute I was shocked, as I wondered why pro-democracy news would be shown in China.  It turns out that the Chinese government had twisted the story to say that Hong Kong people were on the streets celebrating October 1^st, which just happens to be National Day in China.  Just how dumb do they think their citizens are?