I Have Been to the Mountaintop, I Have Seen the... Buddha?

I had just begun to grow weary of Hong Kong. I wasn’t even really sure if I wanted to leave the hotel and head back out to the crowded streets, crowded with both people and buildings. The buildings clawed their way towards the sky to try and escape all the people below. Every day here has been like looking through frosted glass, not like Beijing on a bad day, but it was suffocating me somehow. At night the buildings across the strait lit up with Santa decorations and displayed messages on others. It felt hokey. And to top things off Mandarin is not spoken in Hong Kong. Exhibit A of this: Hong Kong is not how you say Hong Kong in Mandarin. It’s Cantonese. The Mandarin is Xiang Gang, meaning Fragrant Port. America and the rest of the world started going by the Cantonese ways of saying names and places when Jiang Jieshi fled to Taiwan with the rest of the Guomindang (the Cantonese is Kuomintang). He was originally from Canton, so when the world recognized Taiwan and not China as the true government of China, they picked up on the names that Jiang Jieshi used. You’ve probably heard of Jiang Jieshi’s Cantonese name, Jiang Kai-shek. So because I couldn’t communicate with the people around me, I felt completely and utterly useless. In Beijing, I could show my parents around and my favorite places to go, such as little niche restaurants that Chris and Gavin and I frequent, or underground shopping malls where the only entrance is a drink stand on the street. But here I didn't know about any places or restaurants, so not only did I feel completely and utterly useless, but my Chinese felt like it was getting worse with each passing day. But today was my last day in Hong Kong and the last day of the year 2008 and I still had one more thing to do on my list of things to do. I had to go visit the big Buddha. My parents hadn’t heard of it and I only knew of it by asking a friend back in America of places to go in Hong Kong. Gave me a sense of usefulness. But I’m beginning to ramble. We rode the subway through Hong Kong. There was no stares sent our direction on the subway, we were just another bunch of foreigners, like the other dozens that were on the subway. For the first time in four months, I wasn’t something that deserved a glance at. It didn't feel good. We arrived at the last station and got on the trams. They never stopped moving, so we jumped into the moving trams while they slowed around the curve to go back the way they came. Nine people crammed into the vehicle and then with a slight increase in speed we were off. We hung over the ocean, hopping from island to island from the giant webs of metal that had been spun within the past decade. The trams were at least two hundred feet over the tops of the mountains at times, and the wind shaking it back and forth only made it a little more nerve wrecking. We had been in it for fifteen minutes when we came over a forested peak and in the distance saw a slightly irregular mountain. As the minutes rolled by and slid closer to the mysterious mountain, it became obvious that it was, in fact, a giant statue of Buddha on the peak of a mountain. It was awe-inspiring. I looked at it and remembered the Buddha carved out of the cliff at the Longmen Grotto and began to wonder about the faith of the other religions. People believed in this particular one so much that they got a giant bronze Buddha statue out to the top of a mountain, and carved another one into a cliff face. You don’t see things like that in Europe. The tram never stopped, but we got off of it anyway at the station on the other side of the expanse. We were now in a quaint village, built around the Buddha. Or maybe the Buddha was built around it; I never did my research on the place. But I digress. The place had typical architecture like you would see in a cartoon, except with franchise names on the signs. A 7 Eleven on the left, a Starbucks on the right, etc. We walked up to the foot of the mountain Buddha was perched on and looked up at the stairs. I jogged up to the top, being the only one there wearing a blazer, with the wind blowing my coats tail around on the ascent. In my defense, I wanted to wear my Christmas/Holiday gift. I really appreciated it, though my parents called it a happy-to-see-me gift. The place was gorgeous, the railings were carved nicely and all around the giant Buddha were little statues, in kneeling positions, each holding a different offering. I wandered around and admired the view from the top. I have been to the mountaintop. The buildings around looked like they were thrown onto the mountains in front of Buddha in no particular order, and to Buddha’s back there were cliffs and more mountains. It made me wonder even more how it got here. The statue had such details in it too, like the fabric on his clothes looked like they had been sewn, not just molded. I wandered back down and took pictures with my parents. About three hours of admiring the area later, we were wandering back to the tram and on our way back home. I was happy with this excursion. It made the whole trip to Hong Kong worth it. We got on the tram and headed back to the hotel over mountainscapes and calm ocean views.