The end of December... a busy time for visiting theme parks and the like. In 2005, I went back to the UK over the Christmas holiday and went to Limmud. In 2006 and 2007, I hosted picnics on the beach at Repulse Bay - very successfully in 2006, and a little less so in 2007. In 2008, we did things a little differently - went to two theme parks and spent the night in China on the 25th.

Hong Kong Disneyland

Hong Kong is the site of the 5th Disney theme park (California, Florida, Paris and Tokyo are the others), opened in 2005 to a somewhat muted response. It's the smallest Disney park, by quite a long way, there were a number of scandals both before and after it opened, and visitor numbers have been consistently below predictions. The general opinion in Hong Kong is that it's inferior to the home-grown Ocean Park, and that it's aimed squarely at mainland Chinese. However, my gf managed to wrangle a couple of free tickets - she's good at that - so we went to check it out the weekend before Christmas. Short summary: pretty good.

Longer summary: We rode the special Disney MTR train with couches instead of seats, Mickey-shaped windows and hanging handles, and small Disney statues in the carriages. We went on a bunch of rides, including some classics (Autopia, It's a Small World, Space Mountain) and some newer, character-driven ones (Stitch Encounter, Festival of the Lion King, Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters). We spent quite a while queuing for photos with various characters - rumour has it that the park had to take on extra costumed staff after they opened because they'd underestimated just how photo-mad the Chinese are, and the characters the did have were being overwhelmed. We ate a very indifferent meal at the burger joint. We saw the afternoon parade, the fake snow in the evening (actually soap bubbles, but it worked well) and the night-time firework show. We went home tired but happy, and there's not much more you need from a day out, really.

Window of the World

On the 25th, we crossed the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen and went to Window of the World, a home-grown theme park whose main attraction is a huge selection of scale models of famous buildings and other landmarks from around the world. I did pay for this one, although it was a lot cheaper than Disney would have been and I was also largely impressed. We started off by taking a monorail ride around the park (for an extra fee), which was a pretty good way to get an overview, and to get an idea of which areas we wanted to focus on. Sensibly enough, the park is mainly divided up by continent, so we started in Asia, including a large-ish Taj Mahal and a nice Japanese garden, complete with apparently insanely hungry fish to feed (for an extra fee). One of the two negative points of the day was lunch - after spending a while looking for anything other than meaty Chinese food, we gave up and just bought some crisps and nuts from a snack stall. You might have thought a theme park attempting to provide a view on the world might also have made an attempt at something other than local food, but you'd be wrong.

After lunch we went to the Europe section, which includes a 1:2 scale reproduction of Stonehenge, only without the hippies. Two of the most striking models in the park are the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, which tower over the central area - and in the case of the Eiffel Tower, over the surrounding neighbourhoods. After we'd let our lunch settle, we went to - and remember this was on December 25th - the ski/snow dome. Yup, white Christmas in sub-tropical south China! They have an indoor ski slope, and an ice sculpture area with smaller slopes for rubber ring tobogganing, which was pretty fun. We didn't bother with the ski-ing - my gf has never skied, and I haven't been near a slope for about 15 years - but I did go down the main slope in a rubber ring... One thing which we really noticed was that it was cold, proper cold, compared to the so-called winter going on outside in which it's still perfectly possible to be comfortable in a short-sleeved t-/polo-shirt, at least during the day. After a few minutes in the dome, we had numb and pink faces and hands, exactly how winter should be.

After the snow, we spent a bit more time in the park, visited the African and American areas, noted that the Capitol building in the USA area was closed for maintenance - yes, really. We went on one ride, a metal-tracked bobsleigh-like ride, and I was completely unsurprised to find an Israeli family just behind us in the queue, chattering away in Hebrew. They get everywhere - a local theme park in China is exactly the sort of place you would expect to find Israelis, of course. The second disappointment of the park was the nightly firework show, which is apparently not nightly and wasn't on that night, and the show in a building variously referred to as the Kaiser's Palace and Caesar's Palace, but strangely never as the Czar's Palace. The show consisted of ladies in somewhat skimpy costumes dancing to very loud recorded music and just wasn't very interesting.

In short, good day, good park, bring your own food and don't bother too much about the show - but do stay to see the models in the dark because they look cool. Oh, and bring a hat for the snow dome - I happened to have a Santa hat with me, which may have looked a little bit silly, but kept my head warm.

Holiday Inn Express Shenzhen

We've stayed over in Shenzhen a couple of times, in massage places, which is alright, but not great - massage and shopping in Shenzhen being a topic for a later post. I decided this time to find us a decent hotel, and after a bit of shopping around, decided the Holiday Inn Express looked like a good deal. It's a budget hotel, 3 star and 400 Yuan (under US$60) for a night, it only has one class of room with a choice of smoking or non-smoking, and there's a breakfast buffet thrown in. The room was pretty spacious, if not luxurious, with a very firm queen-sized bed, sofa, writing-desk, TV, wardrobe, wired and wireless (with a weak signal) Internet and a shower bathroom. I am quite picky about showers, and I was impressed by this one - a rain shower, lots of room, and shampoo/shower gel in a dispenser rather than little bottles. We ended up checking in at around 11pm, having gone for Pizza Hut after the day at the theme park, and the staff were welcoming at that hour. Breakfast was decent - nothing special, but a good enough selection of cold western and hot/cold Chinese food, certainly enough to start the day. The three complaints I found online before booking are all true - but none of them really matter that much: there's no refrigerator in the room, the breakfast is a little limited in range (it's a $60 hotel room!), and our taxi driver didn't know where the hotel was, so he had to ask his control for help.

Staying overnight made the trip a lot more relaxed than the usual one-day rush, and it was a lot nicer and more civilised than staying in a massage room. The hotel was clean, comfortable, cheap, and had nice extras like breakfast and both wired and wireless Internet thrown in. I'd definitely stay there again.

A while ago, I listed the common types of visas used by foreigners when entering and living in Hong Kong, and I've mentioned that I applied for entry under the "Quality Migrant Admission Scheme" (QMAS), which is a much less well-known, but rather interesting scheme. It can be summed up as a way to bring relatively small numbers of relatively high-quality migrants into Hong Kong, according to some rather strict rules. There are two ways to qualify: the "Achievement-based Points Test" which is for globally-exceptional people like Nobel prize winners, Olympic medal winners, or similar leaders in other fields - and the "General Points Test" which is a much saner thing, and the way I applied. Like the scheme famously used in Australia, it's a points test based on education, experience, and other random personal bits and pieces - with applicants being ranked by score. There's an annual quota of 1000, which has never been met (unless, possibly, dependents are included in the quota), and 'selection exercises' (a phrase which rings a slight Nazi bell for me) are held approximately quarterly. Before points are even counted, any applicant must pass somewhat stringent pre-requisites - and show proof. In fact, there are five sets of documents which must be provided at different times in the process:

• Educational qualifications - in my case, a copy of my University degree certificate, and an original transcript of my course modules and results.
• Financial stability - an applicant must be able to prove that they are capable of living in Hong Kong without either work or government support. In my case, a mortgage statement, a copy of my title deed, a copy of my contract of sale and a recent valuation of my flat in London.
• Professional experience - detailed references, showing not only employments dates and positions held, which is all you normally get on a modern reference, but details of duties, responsibilities and major career achievements.
• Language proficiency - fluency in English or Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) is a pre-requisite, and applicants who are not from a native English- or Chinese-speaking country should be able to show proof of their fluency. If there's any doubt, HK Immigration can require the applicant to take a language test.
• 'Clean character' - in other words, lack of a criminal record. A police report must be submitted for every country in which the applicant has lived for 12 months or longer, within the past 10 years.

These are not easy - nor, in some cases, cheap - documents to obtain. The financial documents were relatively easy for me, because I know the right people in the UK to get the documents from. The educational documents were a bit harder - had to find the right people at my University. I don't need to prove I speak English fluently, amazingly enough, and I don't need to submit the police records - yet - as they aren't required until the end of the process. I did need to submit detailed references, and that's where things got tricky. I had planned to submit my application in July - at the latest - both to have a chance of getting into the August selection round, and so I had my application in before my previous work visa expired at the end of July. Not that it really matters, but I thought that if I had any trouble at passport control after I ceased to be a HK resident (again!), it might help to be able to point out that I'd already applied for another visa. I sort of made it and sort of didn't - I made a visa run to Macau a couple of days before my work visa expired, only to be told in a firm-but-friendly way that since I still had a valid visa, I had to use it, and I then submitted my application the following day.

Sort of submitted it. I hadn't actually managed to get hold of the right references from previous employers, but since I wanted to get my application into the system, I submitted it anyway. I got a couple of letters back - one saying they'd got my application and assigned me an application number, and one pointing out that I hadn't attached any references and politely asking me if I could send them some, please. I had managed to get hold of some at that point, late August, so I dropped them in at Immigration along with a cover letter - there is a dedicated desk for QMAS stuff, which makes it very convenient to deliver papers in person. I got one further letter, asking me for a reference from SCO, where I worked from 1998 to 2000, but since the company no longer exists - no, the company now trading under that name is not the one which employed me - I had to let Immigration know that I couldn't get a reference for that position. That was in late September, after I obviously missed the August round of processing.

Around this time, I made contact with a guy in Singapore who'd also applied, and it's been pretty useful to compare notes as we went along. We're in similar situations, both IT guys, although he probably gets a slightly higher score than me. He did get more details requests for information, due to personal circumstances, and he wasn't as obsessed as I was about getting every single bit of paper correct. Of course, he's also not relying on it as a way to remain living in the city which is his current home.

So as of early October, I had all the paperwork in, and had told Immigration that I didn't think I had anything else to give them. The way they'd published results in the past was to put up a list of successful (in principle) application numbers as a PDF, late in the month, so I settled back to wait until the November results were published. And waited... and waited...

To be continued.