Hong Kong Uncovery

As already feared, the low pollution of the recent months was not due to any kind of improvement in the situation but rather a favorable weather situation. Now, since the wind comes from the north again and is much weaker than before, the levels are back up to the worst. The government is fast to tell us where it’s coming from:

“The very high API readings at roadside were due to the trapping of local pollutants from motor vehicles under the poor dispersion in urban areas, coupled with high regional background air pollution.”

In other words, from everywhere. You can check yourself. Or just look out of the window. If your nose still works, you can smell it, too.

Having that, there is still no sign from the government to impose stronger pollution limits on cars, to force removal of street signs that block winds, or anything else for that matter.

Aquaplaning is a real danger in Hong Kong. During heavy rain, the streets fill up with water and create lakes to drive through, on side streets as well as on the highways. I am quite surprised that there is not done against that. On my way to work, I know exactly where I can expect those lakes. Why does the police not know about this and fix them?

If Li Ka Shing knew!

There are some things that might be very familiar and commonplace at home, but once you see them abroad, you know there must be someone from the same country around. When I went to Stanley last night to have dinner & a drink, I ended up at a place called “Spiaggia” for the latter. On the menu, I saw a drink called “Rivella“, and I immediately thought the chef/owner must be Swiss. And I was right, too! Rivella is one of the things that are not like a Swiss beer or so (which were also on the menu), that might be exported for variety reasons, but rather a drink where you know that only Swiss people (or people who lived there some time) would order it. I have spent my time there, and Rivella is something a bit odd, since it is made from milk whey. I think for Switzerland, priding itself for good dairy products, it is somewhat normal to have a drink like this, but I have never seen anything similar like it anywhere else in the world. Its a bit sweet & sour, carbonated and has this odd milk-like flavor that is hard to point down.

Maybe next time I try the food?

If you like spicy food, Hong Kong is a good place to be. You get plenty of Thai, Indian and Chinese food, spicier than you can imagine – if you are up to it. Of course the most famous Chinese spicy food is Sichuan. While there are a bunch of Sichuan restaurants in Soho and TST, there is one in a truly unexpected place: In the Midlevels. When I heard this the first time, I was astonished to find ANY restaurant up there. San Xi Lou has two floors in Coda Plaza, where they specialize in Hot Pots and a wide variety of famous and tasty spicy dishes. As with most Chinese food, it’s best to go there in a large group, order a half-and-half hotpot, mix your own spicy dip from the sauce buffet and roll down the hill once you are finished. Next to the very friendly service I appreciate a lot that they have a large box of tissue papers on every table. You will need it.

Today Batman is pondering about the recent raid to a poker club in Hong Kong. The Joker must be involved somehow!

Background: The police seems to be acting harshly against certain ideas because others use those to do illegal things. Like raiding a knife shop.

It is quite rare to see the moon or even stars in Hong Kong. Today was exceptionally clear night and in the early hours of the evening, one could see a nice crescent over the western horizon. It seems that this time Hong Kong Muslims are specially happy about this, since it is written in the Koran that they have to see the moon with their own eyes to be able to start the Ramadan. In Egypt, there seems to be some trouble with this… Although I have never doubted it, I am not sure if it is good to have proof that there are places with a worse pollution than Hong Kong :-)

Today I went to see the movie Inception. But what I want to talk about here is not the movie but the viewers.

There was, not far from me, a group of 6 children together with one adult man. Now when I say children, I do not mean “definitely below 18″. I mean “they just learned walking”. One of them, shorter then my knees,  got bored after half the movie and started walking around. This was disturbing as such, but the fact that the other kids (I can guess now only that their age was somewhere between 3 and 7) stared at the screen was worse for me. The movie is rated “Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout.” There are dead people every couple seconds, being run over, shot, spitting blood, committing suicide. Not really what you watch when you are 5.

Where is the responsibility here? Is the cinema supposed to block people that are clearly more than 5 years below the recommended age from entering the cinema? What are the other viewers supposed to do? Throw popcorn at the father? Ask him to leave? I am quite shocked that there are people like this. It’s not that the kids start watching the late night program while the parents are out. These kids would not have found the entrance to the cinema from the cashier. All I can hope for is that the kids unload all the nightmares and other consequences of this exposure directly back onto their parents.

Here is something new I came up with, based on this interesting series. I was thinking that Hong Kong needed a superhero to fight against all the evil around here. And since Batman was already here once, he might as well come back! Today he is pondering how the octopus card could have been overlooked of being evil!

If you want to get away a bit from the downtown feeling of Hong Kong, you have quite some places to choose, most of them reachable by car or bus. If you are willing to take a boat, there are some islands in reach that let you really forget the sky scrapers. They are less crowded since it’s not as easy to get there, and the food is sometimes cheaper than on the mainland or Hong Kong island.
If you are already in central or even in Aberdeen, the ferry to Lamma island is a cheap trip (about 30 HKD for 2 people). When you get there, you will see immediately that Lamma does not have any cars, like a few other more remote places in Hong Kong. There are quite many touristy shops, but also many that simply sell day to day items, so you do not feel like you came to Disneyland. Also, there are very few chainstores, which gives everything a strong holiday feeling.

You take the road from the ferry pier into the main village and simply continue straight until you reach the beach. If you go there on a nice weekend, it might be crowded, but still nothing like the south side of HK island. There is an inner ring on the water that is observed by a baywatch guy, who is taking shifts with some others in either sitting on chairs in the shadow staring at the girls or standing on a boat in the water. The other, outer ring is actually a shark net. Now before you get scared, you have to know that there were some shark sightings 2 years ago. Tba shark was apparently some 60 – 100cm long, so not exactly the great white. Also there was not even a hint of an attack. Despite the quite intensive fishing on the coast, none was ever caught. So there is a net, and I would not really worry if there wasn’t. The area outside the inner ring and the net is quite empty and child-free, so you might want to spend your time there.

The only thing that might spoil the sight is the power plant with it’s 3 massive chimneys, but all other factors make Lamma island a great place to eat, hike, swim and hang out in general.

Hong Kong is infamous for being cultural wasteland. You will never, ever hear someone say “Let’s go to Hong Kong, there is now the [fill in cultural event]“. There are hardly any exhibitions, concerts, theaters, operas or performances of international acclaim. I am leaving aside now the almost funny if not sad attempts of the government to change this.

If you want to get culture, you better learn to like the locally produced. There is, of course, local celebrity in showbiz and all the glamor & drama that goes along. But most of it is in Cantonese, even the names of the performers will be different in English, so if you want to talk to locals about some celebrity, they often do not know who you are talking about or the other way around.

There are however a number of live music venues. Be careful though, many of them would not write the name of their band on their website. They simply have the ever returning band of Philippine entertainers that play more of less the same play list up and down, night after night. Good for a party sometimes but pretty worthless as a place to “rock & roll”.

Many other places however still deliver quality music from local artists. One of them is “The Wanch“, where they run open Jamming every Monday, and it’s always worth a visit. It’s in Wan Chai, but not overrun by prostitutes, it’s live, but with a soul and not overproduced party-music, it’s drinks but not overpriced cocktails. And you are not scared away from experiencing a new band by a hefty entrance fee.

Taxis in Hong Kong are great! Wait. Let me rephrase that. Taxis in Hong Kong can be great!

Why? Well first of all, they are cheap. If you have taken taxis in Europe or Japan, you know what I am talking about. Already the minimum fare is a fraction of what you will see in other countries. Also, there are many of them. Unless it’s Friday evening while it’s raining, you hardly ever, anywhere have to wait longer than 10 minutes to get one. In most other large cities in Europe you would not even try to catch one in the street. You would have to call one and wait 20 minutes.

But as indicated before, it’s not all roses. Literally. Some of the taxis have a stench that makes you sick before you moved anywhere. The old plastic seats together with the sweat of the driver and whoever sat in the back before can urge you to jump right back out. Luckily this has improved a bit over the last years with more and more using air fresheners, flowers and the like to overpower the other scents you do not want to smell.

But if the smell does not make you sick, chances are that the ride will. More often than I would like to, I am witnessing digital acceleration: 0 or 1. Full speed or nothing. Full break instead in the worst case. One can not only feel it. One can hear how the engine is howling in second-intervals. This might not be too bothering in the small and short streets of Sheung Wan. One he presses the pedal, he’s at the end the street anyhow. But if you go further, like the airport, the driver might stick to the tail of a bus and see how he cannot crash into it despite continuously speeding towards it. Better not dare to drive without a seatbelt or while reading a newspaper.

But even if he knows how to drive in a way that does not indicate suicidal tendencies or absolute ignorance about moderation, your driver might be signaling you your unimportance (and of what is going on in the street) by having 5 phonecalls on 4 different phones during the ride. If you did not do it everyday several times, you could call it an adventure.

The fact that most of them are not really talkative towards you might however not only be the result of their phone habits. They often simply do not speak English very well and prefer not to try. So it sometimes comes as a surprise when one of the drivers starts a conversation with you. The most remarkable that I had so far went something like this:

I get into the cab after saying goodbye to a (lady-) friend whom I met accidentally in the street. I tell the driver where to go. He starts driving and asks: “was that lady your wife?”
Me: No, just a friend…
Him: So you go home now?
Me: Yeah….
Him: To your wife?
Me: Yes.
Him: And fuck?

I was quite surprised as you can imagine. I am still mad at myself that did not pull out my cellphone to record the whole thing. After I told him that I did not have any fixed plans to attend to marital duties that afternoon, he went on to lecture me about which time of the year of was the best to make kids, how they would be in case I missed the time and how often one should do it in general. Oh well.

So good luck with your rides. Hope that they will be rather amusing than sickening or dangerous!

If you ever get fed up with the traffic, the sky scrapers and overbuilt Hong Kong, want to take a bicycle, eat an ice cream, do BBQ and walk on a long, empty beach, you normally do not think this is possible in Hong Kong. And then you go to Tai Po and realize that you were a) wrong and b) could think that you accidentally dropped into another country, Thailand or so. Green, tall mountains, without Houses on them, long beaches with fishing boats, small villages and no cars. I could not believe it in the beginning. People come out here, rent a bike, drive over the reservoir border and have kites fly through the summer air.

Maybe I was in a specially quiet time, maybe the 37 degrees was simply reducing the tourists to a minimum, but it did not seem like there would be tons of them otherwise. There are small fishing villages scrambled on a hillside, old people playing Mahjong under a canopy outside, fisherman repairing their boats & families digging for clams and crabs in the low tide sands. If it wasn’t just about 5 degrees too hot to stay outside for a longer period, I would have waited for the sunset there!

Only if you turn around and look towards the south, you will see the sky scrapers of Ma On Shan against the Mountains, and know you are in Hong Kong again.

As mentioned before, Hong Kong is prone to have nice red sunsets because of the pollution. However, there are two things that can prevent it to become really nice: Number one, the sun is normally not really visible when it disappears over the horizon, since there are often clouds (or too dense smog) in the west. On the other hand, there are still some clear sky days or completely overcast days. So it is really, really rare, to see a sky where the whole horizon is illuminated and where you can see the hills on the horizon outlines by the sunset.

Yesterday however, was such a day. I rushed to take my 200mm lens and tried to get the Disney Land resort along with it into the picture. Unfortunately it was just a bit too early(19:30) to also get the 20:00 fireworks from Disneyland into the image. That would have been truly a once-in-a-decade shot! Well, one should not be ungrateful about what one gets ;-)

Hong Kong is known for boating. Most of the larger companies have their own boat to take customers or employees around. Some of them are basic Junk boats that anyone can rent in Hong  Kong, others are a bit more prestigious.

While it might seem strange to operate a junk boat that one uses only at the weekends, and that costs more to operate than to rent pretty much the same boat every single weekend, it is a bit more understandable why one might want to buy a boat that is otherwise not available for rent.

When it comes to larger boats, there is quickly a larger crew involved, 2 being the minimum in any case. One can say that luckily labor is not so expensive here. But with the larger boat, the fuel consumption is also skyrocketing. So a day long trip around Hong Kong might quickly costs you a couple of thousand US$ if your ship is a bit larger than the average. And even if you do not use the boat, the costs are not cheap either. A boat that does not move quickly gets damaged. So you will have some fuel costs every day. So what is the right size of a boat is of course a matter of what one can afford. Is there a “too big” boat, even if you can afford it? Do you need a helipad on deck? The one that I saw today (see image) apparently needs one! I am somehow lacking the understanding for something like that. But I guess there are always people whose lifestyle we do not understand, and at the same time, ours is not understood by others in return.
PS: I heard the saying: There are two happy days in the life of a boat owner: The day he buys it, and the day he sells it.

[Update] I found out by searching for the boat’s name (“Silver”) that one can rent this one from the owner -  for a mere 200’000 to 500’000 USD per week for up to 12 guests! Thats 2’400-6’000 USD per night per person – Now go and find a hotel for that money! [/Update]

Considering that Pokfulam is so close to Central, it is extremely green and quiet. The many university buildings and small apartment houses make it a very relaxed place to live, specially if the weather is as nice as today.  On this panoramic shot you can see Lama Island (on the left with the 3 chimneys, Cheung Chau (center) and Lantau (right) next to a variety of other smaller islands. Since this view is almost exactly to the west, the afternoon view deteriorates from what you see here since the sun is shining right into your eyes. The landscape becomes greyer and the color intensity vanishes. Still, it is much better than the view on the backside of another condo-tower of course.

When people live on the mainland or on the north side of Hong Kong island, they often think that the south side of the Island is just good when you want to go to the beach. The fact that the weather on the south side is significantly different from the north is often unknown. We live in the south, and have a direct view on the edge of the weather as it splits between north and south. It is often, as you can see on this image quite spectacular. Watch this space for more images like this one.

We all have a phone. Some of us have a smartphone. Probably an IPhone. I never had one, because I need my phone for business, and need it to have a good calendar app, and sync with Lotus Notes. So I used Windows mobile phones before the IPhone even was on the market.

Then I got a bit jealous about the app store. So I waited a bit until the Windows phone market came out. And got disappointed. As a Hong Kong credit card owner, I was not able to buy apps from non-Hong Kong stores, since they are all split by countires. Since the selection in the HKG shop was miserable, and everything in chinese, I gave up quite quickly.

Now I switched to Android 2 days ago, and I am very impressed. The platform is quite nice, everything is allowed in multiple parallel databases, such as addresses & contacts, not only multiple email accounts.

On top of it all, I am able to buy state of the art hardware, without being locked into the outdated Apple monopoly hardware platform. And I am not forced to buy a shiny, white-wired, look-at-me-I-also-have-a-phone gadget. It’s sleek, powerful, non-intrusive.

So again, if you live as an expat, you will too often be forced to shop around until you find the company that allows you to pick your language, and where you are not locked into national borders despite buying virtual goods.

I spent a weekend in Shanghai and went to Xintiandi (新天地) for a drink. I guess the best comparison would be to Lan Kwai Fong, but Xintiandi is a bit cleaner. There are lots of bars and restaurants, expats and some locals, and – like in LKF – some prostitutes. As in LKF, in Xintiandi they are quite obvious: Single girls, hanging around on the corner of the bar and drinking by themselves very slowly, seeking eye contact with the potential customers. Interestingly, exactly there, at the bar edge, there is also a sign (see photo)… It seems that this needs to be told to people. This leaves several possible conclusions:

- some people expect the bar to provide the service

- some people have a financial damage from meeting these girls and try to get the money back from the bar

- some people need to be told that the barkeeper is providing drinks

- some people simply hand out cash to unknown girls (!?)