I arrived at 6am local time yesterday morning and will depart tomorrow for Taipei at 1pm. In that brief period, I suspect I've only scraped the surface of this heady, eccentric place. But, still, just under the surface lie some observations that I think are valid.
After a mostly unpleasant, sleepless flight, my five-hour walk around Kowloon (the mainland section of Hong Kong), necessitated by a midday check-in, started to reveal some things to me. One of the first was a bin full of piglets that had been gutted and sweetly dumped into a plastic rubbish bin, ready to be turned into char siu or some other delicacy. It seems that meat preparation in Hong Kong is best performed on a footpath. My friends in OH&S, if I had them, would be horrified.
After that, I was struck by the number of outlets offering foot massages, even at that time of the morning. They all have these little electronic signs out the front with an anthropomorphised smiling foot. After my five-hour walk, though, I realised why there are so many foot massage joints: if you're a pedestrian there is nowhere to sit for free, and the design of the place puts cars way ahead of pedestrians, so you often have to go through a subway to cross a road. This anti-pedestrian attitude carries through to the attitudes of the taxi drivers, who scowl at you if you dare suggest that you have more right to cross the road than they do to plough through you.
I walked from seedy Yau Ma Tei (where my hotel is) to a new feature on the Hong Kong map (at least, it wasn't actually on the map I had): the Elements shopping mall. Sitting at the base of one of a number of monolithic apartment buildings (essentially vertical suburbs), this mall epitomises all that is soulless about consumerism: vast marble floors, plush velour rest-benches and an exclusive selection of high-fashion label stores (which I found out later, aren't really that exclusive, as there are 3,932 Louis Vuitton stores and 3,933 Empori Armani dotted around Hong Kong, and a Prada on every corner).
Here's a picture of a celebratory Chinese New Year's display at Elements:
And Elements from the outside...
Can you say 'Docklands'?
Eventually, the time came for me to check-in and I found my room to be small but completely charming and very well-equipped. Here's the gist:
The rest of the afternoon consisted of emailing the folks back home to tell them I'd made it safely, and half-sleeping. In the evening, I hopped on a train to meet a TravBuddy, Pradeep - a very funny and friendly English national working in Hong Kong as a finance lawyer. We ate at a place called Can-teen, where they served a chicken chop smothered in rich peppery gravy, with rice and vegetables. It was really quite pleasant, but it was let down by a fairly repulsive broth on the side, which reminded me of dishwater.
Navigating the public transport system was a breeze. The trick is: it's easy-to-understand and unbelievably efficient. Who knew? When I told Pradeep that there are times in Melbourne you might have to wait 40 minutes for a train, he was horrified. In Hong Kong, a five-minute wait would seem to justify a written complaint. And - genius! - you just tell the ticket machine which station you want to go to and, lo and behold, it calculates the ticket cost for you: no fancy cross-referencing of maps to see if you're in Zone 1 or 2 (in fact, there is no Zone 1 or 2).
On Day 2, I wore my pedometer for a trip back into Central Hong Kong. Apparently, I took 17,663 steps (equivalent, apparently, to 8.363 miles) walking around, getting lost, looking for a restaurant that was recommended in Time Out's 'cheap eats' feature. After being thrown nearly an hour-and-a-half off course (due to a poor sense of direction), I located a restaurant mostly matching the one described in Time Out but with a different name and different items on the menu. It was cheap, but it was also decidedly average. The coffee and croissant I had for dessert at Delifrance was HK$10 more expensive.
At one point, I was stopped by a Buddhist monk who gave me a little golden card as a symbol of eternal life. Then he pulled out a carbon notepad, ready to write out the receipt for my donation. When I declined to make a donation, he snatched back the 'life token' and, I presume, wished me dead.
From my limited experience, I would say Hong Kongers are best described as 'cordial'. They always try to give you a smile and wish you a good day. BUT, on the flipside, one might label them 'oblivious': I lost count of the number of times I got caught behind a glacially slow walker and just had to take deep breaths and concentrate to keep from toppling over.
Some photos:
1. The subtle influence of Christianity.
2. So I guess yuppies like saunas...
3. Couldn't resist. Apologies to sensitive readers.
4. So hot, so pot. I think we've all thought it from time to time.
5. Year of the Tiger.
