Hong Kong Blog

One afternoon you enter your local convenience store to buy the weekly groceries. Aside from the cashier who is as oblivious to your entrance as he is to the entire universe, you are alone in the store. You slowly wonder up and down the isles until, stopping dead, you notice an unnatural heat radiating from one of the lonely back corners. You decide to investigate. As you draw nearer you see the unmistakable flickering of a spreading fire. Do you A) Shout and alert the shop keeper. B) Run out of the shop, call the fire brigade as quickly on as possible and then tell the shop keeper. C) Ignore the fire completely, pay for your groceries and leave? Well according to the Hong Kong Fire Department, the answer ‘of course for most people’ is C.

Three weeks ago the A380 double-decker ‘super jumbo’ jet flew over Victoria Harbour. As I can’t read a symbol of Chinese and with only a basic grasp of Cantonese (though with an advanced grasp of Cantonese profanity) I had no idea why at 9AM one Monday morning everyone in HSBC suddenly rushed towards the nearest window. Worried that we might be under attack, I sprinted to the window closest to the fire escape and for a moment thought my fears had been realised in the shape of a plane the size of a small city blocking out the sun. However, everyone began to applaud and whistle as the plane looped round, and so deciding this would have been even for Hong Kong a decidedly odd reaction for an invasion I reasoned we must be in the clear and joined in the applause. To make a huge generalisation in a rather self-discriminating way, from my experiences so far the people of this region are extremely enthusiastic about events back home that would have received a grunt at best, probably followed by a complaint about how it could be improved. I’d even go further and say that in my opinion people here are friendlier (if you look at them they think of talking to you rather than knifing you), much more willing to welcome a stranger into their midst, which compiled with how safe, clean, cheap and efficient everything is makes Hong Kong a fantastic place to live. However there is one thing the UK has on Hong Kong. Aside from scientific technical jargon, place names or lexis used in works of fiction, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is considered the longest word in a “regular” English dictionary (45 letters). I asked one of the guys at work how long the longest word in Cantonese is and he said one character. ONE! He went on to explain though that a character is composed of a number of strokes and so I asked ‘what is the most strokes one character has?’, to which he replied “not sure, I think 20+”. Even if he’s out by two or three we still win by twice the number! Get in!

One of the guys I sit next to at work – an Australian who knows all the dodgy /cheap places in Hong Kong so well that he calls most of the locals at work ‘tourists’ - somehow managed to convince me that he knew an ‘extremely cheap’ yet ‘professional’ hairdresser in Central fairly close to where we work. Now this guy in the past has convinced me to take Joe out to eat in a place where you can’t sit down, to a library which closed down in the 80’s and to a ‘local’ supermarket through such a complex maze of backstreets that I actually ended up in a similar supermarket but in a different district of Hong Kong. After somehow blundering my way to the right street, I entered the nearest shop and asked if they knew where a hairdresser was. He help up three fingers and pointed down the street to the right, and so three shops later I climbed the stairs to the first floor which – apparently – was where the hairdresser was located. Sure enough for $70 HK I could get a hairwash and haircut, though for an extra $600 HK I could get my hair ‘styled’. Asking out of interest which styles they offered (just to find out why on earth they charged that much) was definitely, definitely wrong the move. I was presented with a catalogue of photos. Why they thought I’d want to a female style I’ll never know; my hair was longish but still. Anyway, after an extremely thorough hairwash the delightful lady next told me that my hair could start falling out any time during the next 3 months to 20 years, and to counter this I should ACT IMMEDIATELY and-purchase-her-chemically-tested-shampoo-(twice-a-week)-for
-three-times-my-monthly-salary. I broke the news that this wasn’t exactly the deal of the century to her gently, which was the second bad decision of the day as perhaps instead I’d be interested in countering my “problem” with some hair dye? If only she’d have had the orange in stock she might have got the deal, but thankfully after only parting with $70 I finally left and headed home to straighten my fringe with the scissors on my pen knife.

In order to help introduce us to and fully experience Chinese culture, both my work colleagues and City University hall mates have used Chinese food as a tool. On Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish new year – I felt it was my turn to use food to define a culture, and so it was that the Futures department of CIBM and Floor 2 of City University dipped the apple in the honey and said the bracha loud and clear. Incidentally everyone thought the pronunciation of the word ‘bracha’ was hilarious and I had to repeat it twenty odd times. During lunchtime I returned with some apples from Jimmy’s ‘local’ supermarket, along with a pot of honey and went in search of a knife. Of course no one on the trading floor happened to have a knife in their pockets and so I headed up to the restaurant on the 28th floor. One of the things I learnt at work that day was that the question ‘have you got a knife I can use’ produces some interesting responses. After the first guy I asked returned with a plastic knife and I asked whether he had anything sharper, he looked to my wrists and said ‘no’ with a rather worried expression… I thought the next person might call the police and so settling for the plastic one I sawed my way through the apple instead.

At the end of the week we met with Raymond, our glorious leader from the first few adventures in Hong Kong and wished him luck for his exchange to England. He was flying out the next day and hoping to meet people immediately and settle down (and especially after everything he did for us) I promised to put him in touch with Si. It was all very emotional! We next attended a vital fire talk which, as you might have guessed from the introduction wasn’t overly helpful. Don’t make a bomb and put it in a microwave did seem like genuinely good advice however, as how then would you go on to make any microwave ready-meals or beans on toast?

And that brings me, finally, to answer some of the requests for pictures I’ve had over the last few weeks, until next time!

HSBC main building with water fountain

Water fountain by night

HSBC building by night

The wall of my bedroom

From the other angle

-Rich

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Hong Kong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.