Night on the Town

Last night we went out with our friend Cecilia in Hong Kong. Cecilia grew up in Hong Kong and her family still lives here (she resides in Beijing). So Cecilia told us to meet at a subway station at 11 p.m. and from there we departed for the very lively bar district on Hong Kong Island. It was a lot of fun and we really enjoyed ourselves. As a semi-clarification/semi-retraction of our last blog entry, we asked Cecilia why there was a Catholic Church in Beijing if officially the government doesn't support religion. She informed us that in fact, the Church was built before the Communist Revolution of 1949, and was left standing so that ex-pats might attend church if they so chose. She said that if you wanted to attend you needed to bring your passport with you and show it upon entering the church. However, around 2002, this began to change and the government became more relaxed about this policy. As Cecilia put it, the government doesn't encourage religion, but will not stop you from going to church now. Just one of the many changing policies that Julie and I, as outsiders, observe differ from mainstream western media. In fact, just the other day, Julie and I were watching CNN and they did a segment on religious practices in China being "underground" and that people were not allowed to practice their faith openly. According to Cecilia, though, this has changed in the past few years. We have discovered on more than one occasion that our presumptions and our information garnered from Western media is often incorrect or inaccurate. [for instance, we didn't know that there were other political parties in China...in fact, there are about 8 or 9 minority political parties]. This is one of the joys of traveling and meeting people from these countries, it tends to break down miscommunication, misinformation, stereotype and bias. We feel like we have learned so much about the countries we have traveled, and yet, we have only skimmed the surface, and we really have so much more to learn.