Veg out

As Hurricane Sandy - or as I prefer to call it, the Al Franken-storm descends on New York, you may have missed another kind of natural disaster is taking place in Asia.

No, I'm not talking about Typhoon Son Tinh - which incidentally must be totally pissed off that it has been so comprehensively upstaged - I'm talking about a drought. A drought which is causing untold suffering amongst little expatriate children all over this small green land. I'm referring to the Great Hong Kong Vegemite Drought of 2012.

A jar of Vegemite, not in Hong Kong yesterday

The disaster seems to have first come to light on 21 October, when "Newbie_hk" on the geobaby.com forums noted that there was no Vegemite to be had at three supermarkets near her (I am going to assume Newbie_hk is female - let's be honest, not too many blokes post on geobaby.com's "Hong Kong Baby and Pregnancy Forum").

This created a mild panic amongst other posters who raced to their local stores to check for Vegemite.  Well, all except for that one poster - there's always one - who didn't read the first post properly and helpfully responded by noting that Vegemite is available at most major supermarkets in Hong Kong. Well yes it normally is but right now it isn't that would be the whole point of the original post.

There was a sighting in Fortress Hill on the 22nd, but it appears that source was quickly depleted as Newbie_hk remained bereft of Vegemite by the 24th.  She has not been heard from since then - hopefully she has not given up on life in the absence of yeast extract.

I also notice that there have been a few plaintive pleas on the Kraft Foods Australia Facebook page. I do not expect this to lead to anything - after the whole iSnack 2.0 debacle, Kraft has presumably resolved never to listen to its consumers again because they are morons with bad ideas.

I myself checked four supermarkets in a futile attempt to score a hit of the good stuff.  Not only did I fail to find a single jar or tube of Vegemite, but several of the supermarkets had with misguided good intentions, filled the space on the shelf with jars of Marmite.

Now I am sure that as a black, salty paste that spreads on toast, Marmite would appear to a Hong Kong supermarket manager to be an acceptable substitute to Vegemite.  Clearly, it is not.  I am not sure why it is not - I frankly have very little idea what is in either product - it's just that Marmite is English and strange and belongs in that class of strange British food that we recoil at, along with Bovril, haggis and kippers.  Vegemite, on the other hand, is Australian and strange and belongs in that class of strange Aussie food that is awesome, along with pie floaters, Tim Tams and Moreton Bay bugs.

That said, our helper went ahead and bought some Marmite anyway and we are currently serving it up to our unsuspecting boys on toast in the mornings.  We will tell them when they are older.

Unfortunately, Kraft has form in this kind of supply chain blockage - any expat will tell you about the legendary Great Vegemite Drought of 2008, which lasted more than three months and rated a mention in both The Age and the South China Morning Post.  Fortunately, my parents are visiting next week and will bring some Vegemite with them, hopefully enough to see us through until this accursed drought breaks and the Australian community can go back to having vegemite toast for breakfast once more.

Ten things Hongkongers never say about food

1. This queue is far too long. This restaurant simply isn't worth the wait.

Hongkongers will wait in a queue for any length of time, for anything.  It is not unusual to wait 45 minutes for a table for lunch at a moderately good restaurant, and a couple of hours at a really popular dim sum place.  You rarely pass a restaurant of any standard which doesn't have a queue outside at lunch.  A good trick is to go alone - single diners get in straight away to fill gaps in the seating.

2. I'm really busy today.  Let's just get a sandwich and take it back to the office.

In Hong Kong, lunch means sitting down in a proper restaurant, and never means bringing your lunch back to the office.  You could fire a cannon in our office at 1:05pm and you wouldn't hit anyone.

3. Have we ordered too much seafood?

You can never have enough seafood in Hong Kong. Shark fin soup, whole lobsters, crab claws, abalone in addition to the prawns, mussels, oysters and fish Westerners are used to.

4. Ask them if it has bones - I hate having to avoid the bones.

There is a simple rule in Hong Kong - if the dish has the word "fillet" in the name, then it has no bones.  Otherwise, expect it to be between 50 and 99 percent bones.  My personal unfavourite is sweet and sour pork ribs.  That would be batter covered pieces of either pork or bone in sauce. Do not bite down too hard until you have ascertained which.

5. Are you mad?  You can't eat that part of the chicken!

The supermarket's default setting for whole chicken involves leaving the head on, which is kind of disturbing to us sensitive Westerners who don't like to meet our dinner face to face. Chicken feet of course are legendary.  Like skydiving, I admire those who partake but feel no compulsion to ever do that to my own body.  

6.  I don't go to that place anymore, they use too much MSG.

That whole 1980s "no MSG" thing evidently only happened in the West and passed the Chinese by. The cheaper Hong Kong restaurants have no problem with MSG and use it all over the place. 

7. Could I have a small coffee please, without cream/whipped cream/sugar/hazelnut syrup?

Hong Kong coffee basically consists of Starbucks and the local rip-off, Pacific Coffee.  The coffees are enormous and full of stuff that isn't coffee. Syrup is popular enough that I have even seen it in the few Australian-style espresso bars in Hong Kong.  Why not just go and have a milkshake?

8.  Is there a 7-11 around here?

Hong Kong has the second highest density of 7-11s per square kilometre of any country in the world (Macau is first). There are often 2 or 3 7-11s within sight of each other. Hence the trick Hongkongers like to play on tourists is to tell them the place they are trying to get to is "just next to/across from the 7-11".  True but useless.

9.  You know what I hate?  Cake.

Ok, I know cake is popular everywhere but if Hong Kong had any more cake it would be constructed out of cake. I have never seen so many cake, muffin, biscuit and baked good shops as in Hong Kong, and they are generally big shops in prime real estate positions.  I have a theory that in Hong Kong you are never more than 100 metres from a swiss roll.  

10.  I'll just heat that up in the oven.

The oven is not a standard kitchen appliance in Hong Kong and the vast majority of people do not have one.    Our house has one and I am the envy of my colleagues at work when I tell them how I had a meat pie or a roast on the weekend.  I don't really know why this is: roasted meats are a big part of Asian cuisine and as I noted above, everyone is mad for cake. Still, kitchen space is at a premium in Hong Kong, and I guess the oven is the least frequently used of the major cooking appliances.  To make up for it, Hongkongers have at least one kitchen appliance that I have never seen in Australia: the steaming microwave.

Bronze... bronze... bronze for Hong Kong!

I'll probably write more about the Olympics in due course, but for now I will just offer a brief observation on the medal tally and the relative positions of my home and my adopted countries.

Australia finished with 35 medals - 7 gold, 16 silver and 12 bronze.  The Australian media largely agree that this was a dismal failure and an embarrassment on the global stage.  They are currently debating as to whether to allow the 2012 team back in the country. 

This is because we are Australia, a nation of lean, muscular, determined, underdogs. We spend a lot of time playing sport when other countries are off inventing things or composing operas, so we had better make sure it is time well spent. We spend a lot of money on our athletes and we expect them to finish first so that we can yell "Gold... gold... gold for Australia".  We will accept the occasional silver but only in appropriately heroic circumstances - say if your best mate was shot during the race and you had to go back and carry him across the finishing line.  We secretly believe that other countries only know us as "that country that is quite good at sport considering their size" and if we were to stop overperforming at the Olympics they would forget us entirely.

Hong Kong most definitely does not define itself by sport. With the exception of the Rugby Sevens, international sporting events are pretty much unknown here. As everyone knows, Hong Kong's most nation-defining pastime is capitalism. Hongkongers do like to go for a hike on Sundays or perhaps do a bit of dragon-boat racing, but unless they make merchant banking an Olympic sport, medals are going to be few and far between.

In London, Hong Kong finished with 1 medal.  It was bronze in colour.  It was won by Sarah Lee Wai-Sze in the women's keiren (that's the one where they chase a motorbike for some reason). This placed Hong Kong 78th overall.

The Hong Kong media were absolutely delighted with this result, and with good reason. Despite having sent a team to every Olympics since 1952 except Moscow, this was Hong Kong's third Olympic medal of any colour.  Hong Kong's medal haul could so nearly have been higher too - they narrowly were beaten to table-tennis bronze by those giants of the table-tennis world, Germany.  (Although, when you think about it, we are all giants as far as table-tennis is concerned.)

Even so, the Hong Kong team managed to increase the total number of Olympic medals the country has won by 50%.  That has to be considered a successful games - to do the same, the USA would have had to win every medal on offer and then somehow another 300 medals on top of that.

So well done to all the medal winners on their achievements. And if any of you Aussies who won silver or bronze want to feel a bit more appreciated, you might want to try moving to Hong Kong.

The case for the defence

July in Hong Kong means heat and humidity.  It's the best month to get out of Hong Kong if you can.  My wife and kids did exactly that recently, heading back to the cooler climes of Melbourne for a few weeks.

While they were away, I entertained myself in a number of ways - television, video games, enjoying reading the Sunday newspaper without a 1 year old slapping me across the head. One Sunday morning, I went to Hong Kong Disneyland.  Without my kids.  You probably think I'm strange now. This is where I try to justify that decision in 500 words or less.

Firstly let me say that I was by no means Robinson Crusoe in being at Disneyland without kids.  The majority of people there on an average day do not appear to be accompanied by children (although it is possible they arrived with children and have simply left them having a tantrum in the line for the Slinky Dog ride, as I have been tempted to do).  Chinese culture appears to have a love for Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters as one of its central tenets, so to require people to have kids before they can, say, get their photograph taken with Buzz Lightyear would be unnecessarily cruel.

I did have a reason of sorts for going to Disneyland.  We have just bought a car, and I had been charged with picking up my family from the airport when they returned.  Hong Kong roads are a treacherous series of motorways, interchanges, tunnels and bridges designed to overload the senses and lead the uninitated astray.  I have driven to Sha Tin twice since I got the car, and never intended to go there once.  So I needed to take a test drive to the airport.  Disneyland is just before the airport and my yearly pass gets me free parking, so it seemed a more fun destination for my test run.

Fair enough, you say, but a test drive would merely require me to find the airport/Disneyland.  It does not require me to stop, or indeed to get out of my car and go into Disneyland.

You are correct.  It does not.  But I have yet to tell you about Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters.

Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters is basically a laser gun shooting gallery.  You get in a little pod mounted on a conveyor belt, and you get taken through an alien landscape which is full of targets to hit with your laser gun.  You can rotate the pod using a joystick.  Your dashboard has a display which shows your score.

Astro Blasters is my sons' favourite ride at Disneyland because they like shooting things (we do not encourage this but it seems to be coded into the DNA of small boys) and they worship Buzz Lightyear. It is my favourite ride at Disneyland because it rarely has a queue and is airconditioned.  The boys and I can get through it 6 or 7 times in the half an hour we would spend in line at a lot of other rides, and during that time no-one complains about being thirsty or hungry or that they didn't get as much popcorn as their brother.

The only problem with Astro Blasters is that the kids cannot ride alone. We all have to squeeze into one pod, and the pod is only equipped with two laser guns.  This means Dad gets to sit in the middle and do nothing.  Actually that is not quite true, I get to steer the pod, but on your sixth trip through in half an hour, that starts to wear thin. The boys are having far too much fun to allow their father to have a go on the guns, and this is fair enough. Even with my own limited parenting skills I can appreciate that being a Dad sometimes means sacrificing your own fun for the sake of your kids.  Even when you are sure you could rack up a pretty good score, given that your many trips through the ride have allowed you to memorise where all the high scoring targets are.

On one occasion, my 5 year old had a flash of generosity and decided to give me a turn on the guns, given that he had just had 7 in a row.  He would steer.  Unfortunately, this meant that he just jammed the joystick hard to the left and we spun in circles the entire ride, making it impossible to hit anything and making me vaguely ill.  He thought it was hilarious. It was this incident that finally made me accept that I was destined never to test my potential in the Astro Blaster arena, and I would be forever left wondering whether I could have achieved the rank of Galactic Hero.

Until, that is, I realised that I needed to do that test drive.  I parked the car, headed straight for the front gates and then Astro Blasters.  My first run was a warm up - good but not spectacular.  On the second run, the ride temporarily paused in front of one of the higher-value targets, and I hammered it for all it was worth.  I scored 734,000, enough for Level 6 - Cosmic Commando.  I could have gone back and tried for the high-score (the score display only goes to 999,999) but I suspected that I was probably already well past the point where a bit of fun becomes a pathological obsession (although you may reasonably consider that I left that point in my wake some time ago) and decided to leave it there.  I headed back for the car park, stopping only for a Mickey Mouse-shaped ice cream (hey, it was hot) and reflected on a mission accomplished.

Thar she blows

It's typhoon season in Hong Kong and we got a doozy last week.  Typhoon Vicente was rated as a T10, the highest grading and the biggest typhoon to hit Hong Kong since 1999. 

Vicente was a bit of wake up call for me. To a newcomer, Hong Kong seems pretty paranoid about the weather.  Everyone carries sun umbrellas for a start, to ensure they do not risk getting a suntan (Hong Kong shares an inexplicable affection for skin-whitening creams with many other Asian countries). 

There is a spectrum of rainstorm and typhoon warnings - the lower-grade warnings seem to go up every time there is a bit of drizzle.  When a typhoon warning gets to T8, all office work ends and most shops close.  If we are fortunate enough for the storm to arrive in the early morning, work is called off for the whole day.  Everyone is supposed to stay indoors and shiver under the table or something. 

So when the T8 was called last year I looked out the window and expected to see fire and brimstone but was greeted only by a little rain and a slight breeze. I work in an international law firm which is populated by workaholics who I assumed would feel a duty to turn up even if the office was underwater.  So I went into work confidently assuming that my boss would expect to see me there.  No-one else came in.  Not my boss, not the tea lady, not the cleaners.  It turns out everyone goes shopping or to the cinema on T8 days and not even workaholics try to get to work.

Therefore you can understand my scepticism when a T8 was declared last Tuesday afternoon.  I was watching the weather map all afternoon, and was cheering Vicente on as he suddenly lurched north off his eastward path, like a driver who almost missed his exit, and headed straight for us.  Having no plans to go out, I figured the rain would at least be good for the garden.  Little did I realise that, weather-wise, shit was about to get real.

Vicente ripped huge trees out of the ground and left shredded branches and leaves everywhere.  Random pieces of metal and glass were strewn across the streets. Buses were rocked from side to side.  Remarkably, not a single person in Hong Kong was killed - the same cannot be said for mainland China.  It seemed that abundance of caution did have a purpose after all.  

As for my garden, when I got home, I found that my pot plants had been blown off my garden wall and into next door, a barracks for the People's Liberation Army.  I assumed that this meant that any rainfall they were receiving was moot.  The recent face-off in the South China Sea has shown that the PLA are not too keen on giving back any patch of dirt, however small, so I did not hold out much hope for seeing my pot plants again. Imagine my amazement when, the following night, my pot plants had been placed back on the adjoining wall by army personnel unknown.

So I have learnt two lessons from Typhoon Vicente: 1) the typhoon warnings are a good idea; and 2) say what you like about Tiananmen Square - when it comes to looking after pot plants, the PLA are very nice people.
   

Pleasant, in a violent sort of way

Hello again. I had to post before the month is up or they'd declare my blog legally dead and distribute my digital assets.

A friend recently sent me this link to 42 things you'll only see in China.  Number 19 caught my attention because I know full well who that is.  That, my friends, is none other than Pleasant Goat.

Pleasant Goat is the star of Pleasant Goat and Big Bad Wolf, a Chinese cartoon that is available (in Cantonese or, thank the lord, English) on Cartoon Network in Hong Kong.

Now I find calling a cartoon character "Pleasant Goat" hilarious for a start.  This is a brilliant example of how Chinese to English translations often end up using English words in really awkward ways.  I'm sure that, in the original Chinese, "Pleasant Goat" conveys the essence of the character.  In English, you may as well call him "Blandly Inoffensive Milquetoast Goat".

Maybe it is just me, but every time I hear Pleasant Goat, I feel an irresistible urge to start making up other characters for the series.  Passive Aggressive Pig, Bigoted Rooster, Surly Sheep and so on and so forth.

Luckily, the actual cartoon backs up the initial weirdness of the name with a wonderful premise.  Pleasant Goat is a goat who lives in a pasture and attends school under the tutelage of Steady Lamb, the village elder.  Why the village elder is still a lamb is not explained.  Maybe there's a Children of the Corn-thing going on, maybe it's an ironic nickname, I'm not sure.

Grey Wolf (the big and bad wolf of the title) lives in a nearby castle with his wife, Red Wolf.  Grey Wolf is the Wile. E. Coyote of the piece, constantly trying to catch and eat the lambs via a series of increasingly intricate plans (but of course never succeeding, so as not to traumatise viewers).  So far, so generic, as you would expect from a PRC government-authorised production.

What is most fascinating about Pleasant Goat and Big Bad Wolf, however, is the relationship between Grey Wolf and his wife, Red Wolf.  To quote Wikipedia on the subject of Red Wolf:

"Red Wolf is somewhat impatient and enjoys making her husband do all the work. She never tries to catch the goats herself, but always yells at her husband. She likes fashion and behaves like a modern female adult. She knows nothing but lamb and she loves to hit Grey Wolf with her frying pan."

Now, as we all know, domestic violence is hilarious and certainly not the sort of thing anyone is going to object to in a children's cartoon, particularly when perpetrated by a goat who sounds like Peggy Bundy from Married With Children.  (What I particularly enjoy about this description is the statement that she "behaves like a modern female adult" being immediately followed by the observation that she frequently belts her husband with a frying pan.)

So it turns out that Grey Wolf's key motivation to pursue the goats is to avoid being yelled at and receiving a potentially fatal beating from his wife.  This adds the sort of subtext to proceedings which Wile. E. Coyote never had.  Just imagine if there was a scene every time he fails to catch the roadrunner where his spouse berates him for being a miserable middle-aged failure.  I have to say, I think Warner Bros might have missed a trick there.

The Australia Network

In 1993, Paul Keating had the idea to start an international television network broadcast by satellite to our Asian and Pacific neighbours. He originally wanted to use the network exclusively to broadcast insults at Dr Mahathir, but was eventually convinced that the new network would help engage Australia with the region by showcasing Australian culture, teaching English and encouraging foreign investment and trade with Australia.

The problem with this plan is that some of the people who live in Asia and the Pacific already speak English, and they do so in broad, semi-comprehensible Australian accents.  It turns out that these "Aussie expats" were also extremely keen on the idea of an Australian network engaging with them by showcasing football and police dramas.  These Aussie expats also had a fair bit of money and so attracted advertisers, which was handy because the Government is frankly not that keen on funding the ABC stations they can pick up in Canberra, let alone some mad venture to broadcast to dirt farmers in Ulaanbaatar.

As a result, the Australia Network has always been a bit of a messy compromise between the worthy and noble aim of engaging with Asia-Pacific and the no less worthy and noble aim of showing the footy.  

Unlike the venerable Radio Australia (which has broadcast since 1941), the Australia Network has only been around since 1993.  Still, it is telling that in that time it has managed no less than three name changes.  The whole debacle that was the Australia Network tender over the past 18 months has highlighted the fact that no-one really knows what to do with it.

As you may have noticed, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Australia Network.  I think it is a brilliant idea in theory which could be wonderful, both for engaging with the region and for entertaining expats. Unfortunately, you ultimately have to judge a television network by what programmes it shows, rather than by how good an idea it is in principle.  The Australia Network's programming is something of a mixed bag.

The good is indisputably the AFL.  For those Aussie expats who come from south of the Barassi line, four mostly live games of AFL a week is mana from heaven.  Frankly I'd be happy if they showed the footy and nothing else.  The network lost a lot of expat fans when they stopped showing the NRL a couple of seasons ago.  Those northerners found cold comfort in the NRL being available on Setanta for a mere A$15 a month.

The ABC News is pretty good too, if only for the fact I can still get my nightly dose of horrific financial news delivered with clever graphs by upbeat economist Alan Kohler.

The range of ABC documentaries and panel shows would be interesting if I hadn't seen them all several years ago in Australia.  The Gruen Transfer, the New Inventors, Foreign Correspondent and Catalyst are all two years old - which is a particular problem for a science and technology show.  I'm pretty sure I saw Bastard Boys before I had kids (pun not intended).  Two in the Top End is four years old - they were toasting Kevin Rudd for his decision to sign the Kyoto Protocol the other night in a nicely heartbreaking moment. Costa is still in his cult Garden Odyssey days on the Australia Network.

Then there are the cooking and lifestyle shows.  Poh's Kitchen is not so bad - especially when, a few months ago, it was on straight after BBC was showing Poh in an elimination challenge during Masterchef Season 1.  That kind of spoils it, when you can just check the programme guide and realise she's probably going to be okay.

Mercurio's Menu seems to be on every time I turn on the telly.  I did not even realise Paul Mercurio had a cooking show.  I have two questions: 1. Is this the same Paul Mercurio who starred in  Strictly Ballroom?  2. If so, why?

But my personal unfavourite is The Best in Australia.  I must have seen this show a dozen times on the Australia Network and I am none the wiser who the three chefs are or why the Australia Network felt that its already ample lineup of cooking shows needed one more entrant.  The internet tells me this is a Lifestyle Food channel show so I assume it is getting a wider audience on the Australia Network than in Australia.

Finally we have the Sunday Lights arts lineup.  You know how the ABC shows arts programmes from 3 to 5 on a Sunday afternoon?  Of course you don't.  You're watching the footy, mowing the lawn or interacting with your family.  Well, Australia Network has decided the arts is good for you and you are bloody well going to watch it.  So not only do they have a couple of hours worth from 3 to 5, just to make sure you don't miss it they replay it in prime time a couple of hours later.  Hooray - it's HMS Pinafore starring Jon English.  That guy just won't leave Gilbert and Sullivan alone, will he?

The only thing that gives me heart was when I visited Australia at Easter and realised that my memories of Australian television programming may have been just a little bit rose-tinted.  Seven had a promo for a show about traumatised fat people called Excess Baggage, Nine is committed to showing Two and a Half Men for as long as the Americans keep making it and Ten is reviving Young Talent Time.  Maybe having only one Australian channel isn't such a bad thing.

Get in line

In a city of 7 million people, there's going to be a lot of queuing.  There's a queue for the bus, for the lift, for lunch and especially for the new iPad.  I once witnessed a queue halfway around the block that was just to get into a department store lift.  I have never wanted to shop in a department store badly enough to join that queue.

There are several approaches to queuing in Hong Kong.  Ninety-nine percent of people queue, in the finest British tradition, with extraordinary patience.  They have long ago resigned themselves to the fact that doing anything in Hong Kong takes a really long time.  A visitor to Hong Kong can witness queues that curve neatly around corners and obstacles seemingly of their volition.  In some cases, the queue curves to avoid obstacles that have been moved out of the way since the queue formed.

Alternatively, you can just send your underlings to queue for them - the South China Morning Post recently carried a photo of a happy Lady Gaga fan so dedicated that he sent his maid to queue for concert tickets from 6 am.  He then swanned up when the box office opened at 9:30 am to pay for his tickets and give an interview.  Presumably forcing your maid to go out and queue at 6 am breeds the sort of resentment that would make giving her your credit card a bad idea.

A less amusing version of this is the increasingly popular practice of sending thugs to queue for consumer goods.  Whenever a hotly anticipated item goes on sale in Hong Kong (usually an iThingy - although in one case it happened at the release of a new designer range of women's clothing at H&M), grey market retailers send paid queuers along to buy as many as possible, for resale at a profit in mainland China and other countries where they haven't been released yet.  The thing about paid queuers is they don't really want to camp out overnight; so instead they just turn up fifteen minutes before the doors open and threaten to beat up the people in the existing queue.  At some point the police turn up and restore order, hopefully before anyone gets hurt. The SCMP generally describes these people as of "southern Asian appearance"; clearly this is supposed to be a euphemism for a particular nationality or ethnicity but I'm happy to say I have no idea which one.

The final approach is to just push in. Pushing in isn't exactly common in Hong Kong, but those that do employ this method have it down to a very fine art.  I firmly believe that Hong Kong queue-jumpers (pusher-inners?) can compete with the best in the world.  I often see tourists on the MTR left agape, unable to believe that someone has pushed in front of them so blatantly and shamelessly.   First, they wander up to the queue, feigning ignorance of where the queue starts or what the queue is for.  When the queue starts moving, they just step in front of the first person.  It's just that simple.  They wear earphones so that they can just blissfully ignore any angry remarks, and unless someone wants to challenge them physically they pretty much get away with it.

If only queuing and queue-jumping were sports, Hong Kong would be world champions.  So keep an eye out at the London Olympics.  Hongkongers will be there, competing with and beating the world - in the queues at the stadia, on the tube and at the check-in counter at the hotel.

Big White Guy

Just a short update - I wanted to point anyone interested in Hong Kong to what I think is Hong Kong's best blogger, Big White Guy.  This guy is a Canadian who has been blogging about life in Hong Kong since 1998 - which I'm pretty sure is before it was even called blogging.  He covers a lot of quirky and colourful news and happenings and he has a light and whimsical sense of humour which is a welcome contrast to my whiny-albeit-articulate ranting.

7 strange habits of Hongkongers

Hongkongers have a number of amusing and/or annoying little habits (depending on how much of a hurry you are in) which alone probably don't justify a whole blog post but together make a nice little profile.

1.  Interviewing fruit
I am always staggered at the supermarket by how long Hongkongers spend examining their fruit before deciding to take it.  Usually, I give fruit a quick turn to check all sides for blemishes, and unless there is anything major I'm pretty much okay with it.  By contrast, Hongkongers don't just give their fruit a cursory once over - they look deep into its soul, as if divining its path from tree to supermarket. I am not sure what they are looking for - perhaps they fear that they are trapped in The Matrix and are looking for signs of pixellation or motion blur.

2.  Apologising for no reason
This is probably one inherited from the British.  The locals are continuously apologising to me for everything and nothing.  This is most common in the corridors at my office, where people who are not even close to getting in my way are constantly apologising for being in my way.  This is very disconcerting to me. Frankly anyone who knows me knows that getting in my way frequently constitutes a public service.

3.  Opening the box
If you ever buy electronics in Hong Kong, always allow time to go through the compulsory ritual of opening the box and checking that every single component is there.  I have actually had the guy put batteries in a camera and turn it on for a quick test run.  On its face, this seems like the act of a kindly shopkeeper who wants to ensure customer satisfaction; what it actually means is that there is no frigging way they are going to allow you to return it for credit.  You're a long way from the Trade Practices Act here, son.

4.  Closing the lift doors
For slow walkers, Hongkongers are in one hell of a hurry.  There is a certain breed of impatient Hongkonger who makes it their duty to stab the "doors close" button of the lift approximately 0.3 seconds after the doors have opened on any floor that is not their destination.  Several times I have had to fling my hands into the closing doors while a guy inside the lift who can quite clearly see me holds down the close button in a battle of button versus infrared sensor.

5.  Agreeing but not agreeing
Explaining what you want to a call centre operator is hard enough in Australia.  In Hong Kong it is made rather more tricky by the fact that English is likely the operator's second language and they often have difficulty if the conversation goes off script for any reason.  Now of course this is much more my fault than theirs, given that I can speak all of five words of Cantonese.  However, what is annoying is their tendency to save face by just agreeing to whatever it is you just said.  After a while you get to recognise the reluctant "mmm" which means "I have no idea what you just said but I'm going to keep agreeing until you hang up."

6.  Throat clearing
Hongkongers look down on mainlanders for their habit of spitting in the street.  Hong Kong men would never be so gauche. They know to wait until they are in a public bathroom, at which point they let rip with the loudest, most unselfconscious loogey-hucking I have ever heard. I don't know if these guys smoke, have bronchitis or what but they are sure as hell not going to suffer in silence.

7.  Sleeping on your desk
I cannot fathom this one - I have trouble sleeping in an armchair or on a plane. Hongkongers by contrast are happy to just move their keyboard to one side and fall asleep forehead down on the desk. For the record, if you approach a co-worker who is snoozing at their desk at lunchtime, it is considered rude to leave the report they asked for on their shoulder blades.

Heartbreak High

To say Hongkongers are quite keen on education would be like saying Charlie Sheen is quite keen on cocaine.  It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Hongkongers consider a good education more important for their children than oxygen.

Evidence of this is everywhere in Hong Kong, although the most prominent examples are the massive billboards advertising tutor schools.  Tutor schools offer cram classes for high school students.  You remember back at high school, how every day after school finished you were just raring to start an evening of tutorials?  No?  Well, you weren't competing for a university place with tens of thousands of other students who were.

These billboards have to be seen to be believed - therefore I have included a modest example below.  They generally feature the tutors dressed and coiffed like members of One Direction (for those of us over 30, read New Kids on the Block) with their name and subject in lights.

Actually the billboard above has an unusual number of older guys in glasses (notice that those guys teach subjects like physics and chemistry, while the pretty young things generally teach English).  This school must have not run this ad past their agency - most billboards are 90% cool young dudes like Alan Chan there on the far left.   The more successful tutors earn millions, drive sports cars, get recognised in the street and (I can safely assume) alienate the remainder of the academic community.

Just in case you are missing him already, here is Alan on the side of a tram, this time wearing a cool leather jacket. Not sure if his hair is parted on the other side or the photo has been flipped.

But the insanity need not wait until you are in school.  It can start when you apply for schools.  Hong Kong has a severe shortage of English-speaking schools, which are the desirable kind for expats and locals alike.  Of course, the government has plenty of money and could fund more schools at any time, but in important areas like real estate and education, the Hong Kong government likes to encourage shortages in order to generate a bit of desperate Darwinian competition amongst the populace.

The number of applications to international and other English-speaking schools is staggering.  Last year, the German-Swiss School (which despite its name teaches in English and German) received 1,600 applications for 120 vacancies.  The numbers would be similar at other international schools.

Shortly after my arrival in Hong Kong, there was a story in the paper about a man who had been successfully prevented from jumping to his death from a bridge in Wan Chai.  He was suicidal because his daughter had failed to get a place in a private school. I can only hope they sent Alan Chan out to talk him down.  That guy looks like he could handle anything.

Hong Kong fast food part 2: KFC is an abomination

Apologies for the delay between posts.  This is partly attributable to my going on holidays over Easter, and partly attributable to the psychological burden I naively placed myself under last time by promising that I would write about a particular subject.  Previously I have been at liberty to write about whatever takes my fancy from from week to week.  This week, however, I have been labouring in vain to capture in mere words the sheer disappointment of my visit to KFC Hong Kong.

Last week I noted that McDonalds is pretty much the same in Australia and Hong Kong, apart from a few localised menu items and the inexplicable ability to have your freaking wedding there.  One presumes that there is someone at McDonalds HQ whose job it is to ensure a degree of uniformity across McDonalds' international operations, so as not to disorient Americans who somehow find themselves travelling overseas.  I can only hope there is no such person at KFC, because if there is, then that person is massively incompetent.

Now I am not exactly a regular at KFC in Australia.  The whole idea of KFC seems to be taking chicken, which is a pretty healthy food when roasted or braised, and seeing how deadly they can make it by coating it in batter and deep frying it. While hamburgers are pretty unhealthy too, beef is basically full of fat to begin with; at least they're not covering it in chocolate or something to make it even worse for you.

I don't really go for the idea of eating deep-fried chicken pieces, mainly because they leave a greasy residue on your fingers afterwards which reminds you of what you've done.  I prefer their burgers, which by keeping your fingers clean allow you to mentally disavow ever having eaten fast food and move on.  Everybody knows, however, that KFC Australia's main redeeming feature is the chips.  Proper chips, of decent thickness, loaded with chicken flavoured salt, in a little red box.  Sure, they're not as good as the ones at the fish and chip shop, but you can get them at the drive-through, which is another factor which facilitates disavowal.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that KFC Hong Kong does not sell chips.  No french fries either.  Why?  Why would that be the item you exclude from your localised menu?  Have sliced deep fried potatoes not yet proved that they are more than a passing Western fad in Hong Kong, like ugg boots or cognac?

What KFC instead serves up in Hong Kong is a series of side order-based insults to someone who was expecting chips.  There is rice with sauteed mushrooms or a sort of chicken casserole on top. These are not salty or deep fried and are therefore scarcely an alternative.  There is corn on the cob, which okay, goes with fried chicken but in addition to chips, not instead of.  There is KFC's venerable reconstituted potato and gravy. Right, so you imported *that* idea across borders but not chips?  That just makes things worse.

What KFC offers in lieu of chips is a bizarre waffle-shaped abomination it laughably calls the "crisscut fry".  I have so many problems with this.  Firstly, "crisscut" is not a word.  Secondly, calling it a "fry" conjures up images of the fries other fast food places serve, which are thin and long and moreish.  The KFC crisscut fry is a fat slab of latticed potato which takes several mouthfuls to eat.  Because it is so big, you only get about four to a medium serve, so the act of stealing a chip from your dining partner ceases to be a laughing matter.  Thirdly, at least when I visited, the crisscut fries were so thoroughly deep-fried that I am taking it on trust that they were once potato.

There is of course a range of other oddities, although everything else seems trifling next to the absence of chips. There are only two burgers on the menu, one of which features thousand island dressing - Hongkongers love thousand island dressing on pizza too, incidentally - and the other "savoury cheese sauce".  The adjective "savoury" implies something is added to the cheese but wisely gives no clues.

So there you have it.  Cultural relativism is all very well, but I have learnt is that it isn't much help when you just want a caramel sundae and some proper chips.  All I can hope is that somewhere in Australia there's a Hongkonger on holiday staring up at a fast-food restaurant menu and wondering where the hell he is going to get a prawn burger, a medium mushroom rice, a taro shake and a wedding for under $500.

Hong Kong fast food: part 1

Hong Kong is a foodie's paradise.  Your dining choices in Hong Kong run the gamut from curried fish balls on a stick in the street to 9-course degustation menus on the 110th floor.  But at some point, we all gravitate back to the ubiquitous fast food chains for something familar, cheap and deep-fried. Allow me if you will to do a little review of some of Hong Kong's most popular Western fast food chains.

First stop, Maccas.  What strikes me most about McDonalds is how standard it is across borders.  Most of the differences you find at Hong Kong McDonalds are minor, Vincent Vega style examples.  They have a prawn burger.  They offer taro pie and taro shakes.  And there is no caramel sundae.  I know this because I tried to order one and it was as though I had ordered a walrus in suitcase sauce.  There was nothing but confusion all around.

The only Hong Kong McDonalds item I would miss in Australia is the "GCB".  Presumably this stands for grilled chicken burger, because that is what it is.  But you cannot ask for a "grilled chicken burger", otherwise confusion reigns.

This is a problem for me because I have a policy when ordering in fast food places that I refuse to say the name of an item if I think it is stupid. There is a gourmet burger place here called "Shake 'Em Buns" whose nomenclature tomfoolery is particularly egregious. They call their basic hamburger the "Missionary" and their cheeseburger the "Cushin for the Pushin'".  I will not order those burgers by name under any circumstances. I would rather go hungry. I will ask for a cheeseburger. You know what I mean, dammit.

Where was I?  Oh yes, the GCB.  When you finally get one, the GCB is actually pretty good - the chicken has an amazing soy and chilli marinade which is frankly wasting its talents working for McDonalds.

Hong Kong McDonalds is also unconscionably cheap. I cannot be expected not to eat fast food when a regular Big Mac meal costs A$2.50. The lack of caramel on my sundae is assauged by its price of A$0.75.  A McChicken burger costs A$1. From this, we can conclude that Australians are getting majorly ripped off.

But by far the most notable thing about Hong Kong McDonalds is the McDonalds Wedding Party, the wedding for people who are still mad that their parents wouldn't take them to McDonalds for their sixth birthday.

You get a McDonalds restaurant for two hours, decorations, an MC, burgers and fries for all the guests, McDonaldland character bonbonerie and a pair of McDonalds-themed wedding rings. You can even get a cake made out of hot apple pies! Packages start at A$500 for 20 guests.

Now, ladies I know you are probably thinking "that's not for me". But you haven't heard the best bit yet.  They can also do your dress! Why spend thousands of dollars on some lame Mariana Hardwick creation when you can get a dress made out of balloons for less than A$200?

As far as I know, Hong Kong is the only place in the world McDonalds offers weddings. I am not quite sure what this says about Hongkongers. Maybe they are cheap. Maybe they just really like hamburgers. All I can say for certain is this: it is a real thing that actually exists.  I think that is all I can tell you.

Now I was going to review KFC next, but the whole wedding thing sort of took the wind out of my sails for now.  So I will be back next time with a look at Hong Kong KFC. A minor bit of foreshadowing: it is neither finger-licking nor good.

Hong Kong's newest attraction: my kids

Ok Hong Kong - you don't understand me and I certainly don't understand you.  So let's make a deal: I will start eating duck feet if you lay off my kids.

I'm fortunate enough to have three boys.  When we are out and about, it's usually on the MTR.  Now, my boys are rarely what you would describe as well-behaved on the train.  Robbie, our 3 year old, likes to swing on the various handles and poles, fight with his brother, and loudly announce that he doesn't have a seat until some old lady with a walking frame offers him hers.  Often I feel as though I have set a couple of chimpanzees loose on the unsuspecting public.  However, as it turns out, I could hardly attract more attention if I had.

I was surprised to discover that most Hongkongers have apparently never seen a small child before.  I don't know how this is possible, given that there are 7 million Hongkongers and the population does not seem to be decreasing, but it certainly seems that way.  When my kids and I walk into a train carriage, the place becomes a recreation of the scene in Children of Men where everyone realises the main character is holding a baby and they all stop rioting and just stand in stunned silence.

Everyone is transfixed by our baby.  Now, admittedly, Jeremy is a pretty cute baby, but Melburnians seem to be able to restrain themselves to a quick glance or a perhaps a smile.  In Hong Kong, it is not unusual when holding Jeremy to look up and see what I initially assume is a crazy person bobbing their head, pulling faces or making the sort of noises you make at a budgerigar.  Jeremy of course loves every minute of this.  What we didn't love so much was the old woman on the bus who reached into her handbag and handed Jeremy a packet of Tiny Teddies.  Unfortunately his motor control is not yet sufficiently advanced to open a packet of biscuits - and also HE HAS NO TEETH.  She seemed disappointed when we relieved him of the packet and put it away.  Presumably she was expecting that we would pull out a thermos of tea.

While Jeremy loves making new friends, Robbie is not so keen on the attention.  The other day I took the boys to Hong Kong Disneyland.  We got on the Mickey Mouse train (which incidentally is the happiest damn train on earth) and, as is his modus operandi, Robbie scanned the carriage for empty seats and identified a one foot-wide space with a window view between three middle-aged mainland women as prime squeezing-in room.  He shoved them aside, parked himself in between them and stared squarely out the window.

The women cooed over him enthusiastically.  Fine.  Then they started to laugh amongst themselves about how cute he was.  Ok.  Then they reached for their cameras.  Starting to get creepy.  Then they started to try and poke him to get his attention so he would turn towards the camera.  This seemed to me to be a bit much, which clearly Robbie was also thinking, as he reacted by turning to the camera and giving a frown last seen on Arnold from "Diff'rent Strokes".  This of course led to gales of laughter amongst the women, which made Robbie frown harder.

When we got off the train, Robbie was clearly a bit upset, at least for a three year old arriving at Disneyland.  He said "Daddy, those ladies were laughing at me."

"They weren't laughing at you Robbie, they just thought you were cute."

"I'm not cute.  I'm a big boy."

The child has a point.  Three year olds deserve to be taken seriously, regardless of how cute they or their expressions may be.

By all accounts, Robbie may have gotten off lightly.  Apparently some friends of ours visiting Disneyland had their two year old picked up by a stranger and carried off to be in a photograph.  Now I am trying very hard to understand Chinese culture but I can't crack this one. Let's put aside the practice of filling your photo albums with holiday snaps of you posing with the children of people you don't know, I am not quite sure who would consider physically carrying off someone else's child as Magic Kingdom-appropriate behavior.  Apart from a wicked witch, obviously.

But the creepiest bit of camera work we have encountered was on the Star Ferry a few weeks ago - and it involved a tourist, not a local.  An American guy was sitting behind Gen on the ferry pulling the usual faces at Jeremy.  He then leans over and says "My wife thinks your baby is cute".

This would have been unremarkable, except that he was sitting alone.  "Right.  And where's your wife?" Gen asked.

"Oh, she's back home.  I just texted her a photo."

I believe the Chinese have an expression - WTF?

Get on board

Like anywhere, everybody sees Hong Kong differently.  I talk to expats who love Hong Kong and would never return to where they used to live.  (Is it coincidence that a lot of these people come from England?)  Then I meet expats who are not so keen.  A recently arrived co-worker who was not particularly enjoying Hong Kong put it thusly: "Thank God the windows in this building don't open."  Yikes.

My view is that there are some things Hong Kong does better than home and some things it doesn't.  And at the top of the list of things Hong Kong does well is public transport.

First, there is the ticketing system.  As far as I am concerned, Hong Kong's Octopus card system is the eighth wonder of the world.  The locals just take it for granted and cannot see what is so amazing about having a ticketing system that lets you ride the train, bus, ferry or tram and pay for stuff at just about every convenience store, fast food outlet, vending machine, cafe and supermarket in the city. Schools and buildings use them as security passes.  If your card runs down, it automatically recharges from your linked credit card.

Coming from Melbourne, I am impressed by the Octopus card in the same way that a gorilla is impressed by quantum computing.  I simply cannot fathom how this magic card works, I just know that it lets me buy bananas.  It is a joy to walk into 7-11, grab a Kit-Kat, wave my wallet in the general direction of the terminal and walk out.  I have decided the kilojoules from Kit-Kats bought in these circumstances do not count.

Then we have the MTR.  Hong Kong trains are awesome.  As far as I can tell, they run every two minutes for 19 hours a day.  During peak, they run so close that you can see the next train waiting while the current train is still at the platform.  Very occasionally, I will be at a train station out in the sticks on a Sunday and be forced to wait 3 minutes for a train, at which I sigh loudly and mutter "unbelievable".  No one in Hong Kong runs for trains, because there will always be one along in a minute.  Changing trains does not slow you down, because often the train you are changing to will be right there on the other side of the platform.

The trains in Hong Kong are twice as long as the ones in Melbourne and because they have relatively few seats they carry about 4000 passengers each. What Hongkongers lack in urgency when getting to the train, they make up for in getting to a seat.  While trains are plentiful, seats are rare, and Hongkongers act as though this is their last chance in this lifetime to get a seat. In Melbourne, when two people spot the same empty seat, there is a brief moment where both people try to work out, based on the gender, age and physical state of the other person, whether they can still take the seat and not look too rude.  There is none of this nonsense in Hong Kong.  You enter with the mindset that there are 7m people competing with you for this seat.  The first person to get their body marginally in front of the others gets the seat.  The use of bags, elbows and small children to block your opponent is fair game. Experienced players manage to get the seat without looking up from their smartphone, thus avoiding the potential guilt associated with seeing whether your competition included any crippled orphans or war veterans.

No one eats or drinks on trains in Hong Kong.  Now technically I realise eating and drinking is prohibited on Melbourne public transport, but no one really worries too much, and there is even a certain class of commuter who openly flaunts the rules and silently challenges any of his fellow commuters to make something of it.  This does not happen on the MTR, partly because Hong Kong lacks that class of commuter and partly because it is highly probable that your fellow commuters will indeed make something of it.  Last month, an international incident was sparked when a mainland Chinese girl started eating noodles on the train and was aggressively reprimanded by a local in Cantonese (of which she understood not a word). Pushing and shoving ensued, and the whole thing was captured on video and uploaded to Youtube, where it quickly became the spark for a massive international slanging match, with Hongkongers labelling the mainland Chinese "locusts" and the Chinese labelling Hongkongers "dogs".

So for a genuine local experience when you come to Hong Kong, get yourself an Octopus card, get a train and elbow your way to a seat.  Best to leave the Kit-Kat in your pocket for later though.

Expat tech

I was reading Roald Dahl's "Going Solo" the other day and he describes heading off to work for Shell in Tanzania as a young man.  The basic deal was he would be away for three years with no trips home.  His only contact with his family was via aerogrammes. 

While being an expat still involves great family and cultural upheaval, clearly it is not what it used to be.  Scribbling on little envelopes of super thin paper is a thing of the past and it is now possible to take various bits of Australia with you.  Because I am a shameless nerd and get excited by this stuff, I thought I would link to a few of my favourite expat technologies.

TV - Cable TV as a whole is pretty awesome - we can maintain our usual diet of expensive HBO dramas and crap reality shows without difficulty.  A particular highlight is the condensed versions of Season 1 of Masterchef Australia.  If you take out all the ridiculous repetition and timewasting, it turns out you end up with pretty watchable show.

In Asia, we are both blessed and cursed with the Australia Network.  It is a blessing in that it shows ABC News and the AFL.  A curse in that it shows an unbelievable amount of rubbish.  So many cooking shows, police dramas and reality vet shows.  It hasn't got a single ABC comedy but they do find time for the full Sunday afternoon arts line up.  It even manages to spoil the good programs it does show by putting them on a year or two late.  So I can watch Catalyst to find out what the latest scientific advances were in 2010.

Unfortunately, ABC iView is IP-locked to Australia, which seems unfair when I am still paying tax in Australia to fund it.  There are ways around this, but unfortunately I know nothing about them. On an unrelated note, Witopia VPN service has a server in Sydney and costs US$40 a year.

Also The Daily Show streams full episodes from its website, without IP restrictions and usually without ads.  God bless you Jon Stewart.   

Radio - There are only a couple of English language stations in Hong Kong, so we got a Logitech Squeezebox Radio for the kitchen.  It is the size and shape of a kitchen radio, except that it connects to your wifi network and streams any radio station from anywhere.  It even has preset buttons for stations like your car radio.  It is mono but the sound quality is amazing.  As a bonus it can also stream podcasts from the web and music from your PCs.  Now we can listen to Jon Faine in the morning and be driven mad by his callers, just like we would be at home.  I mean, why do they bother ringing just to tell him what a terrible job he's doing?

Newspapers - Sure, you can always look at The Age website but you can only read about so many student-teacher sex scandals before you start to wish you could be distracted by the Middle East conflict or the latest ALP leadership challenge.  I want to see the print version.  So we signed up for an absolutely brilliant service called Pressreader.  The paper is presented like a scan of the print version which you can zoom into to read articles.  Better still, every headline is a hyperlink to a plain text copy of the story. 

For US$30 a month, you get access to 2,000 newspapers - including every major Australian paper (except The Financial Review for some reason).  You can select titles to automatically download every day.  The download includes every section of the real paper - so you get the Green Guide on Thursday!  One subscription covers 3 PCs and 3 tablets, so there is no argument over who gets the sport section. 

Phone - Does anyone else remember going to that telecommunications exhibit in the Melbourne Museum in the 80s and being told we'd have videophones any day now?  Skype video chat finally delivers on that promise and it is as awesome as my 10 year old self thought it would be.  Today we watched my sister-in-law blow out the candles on her birthday cake.

The free features of Skype are pretty good, but once we moved overseas we decided to pour a bit of cash into Skype's coffers to see what it can do.

First we bought my mum and Gen's mum an ASUS Eee Videophone.  It's basically a dedicated Skype videophone with a 7 inch touchscreen, built in camera and mic.  It doesn't do anything a laptop couldn't do but it is super easy to use - there is a button to pick up, a button to hang up and that's it.  It was about A$250.

For our home phone, we bought a Skype Dualphone.  This lets you make voice Skype and local calls from the one wireless handset.  Again, we could use a PC but the Dualphone makes using Skype for voice calls as convenient as making a regular phone call.  This was about A$50.

To round out the hardware, we bought a Samsung TV which has Skype built in.  (No, we didn't buy it just for Skype, we needed a new TV anyway.)  It has a little camera and mic on top.  Useful for video chats where you want to be able to see the whole family - although you can only use it when the lounge room is tidy.  I think Sony TVs also have Skype built in now.

Then we got an "Unlimited World" plan which gives you unlimited calls to landlines in 41 countries for A$16 a month.  As the Unlimited World plan doesn't cover Australian mobiles we sprung for A$40 a month for 400 minutes to Australian mobile phones.  This is a bit of a luxury but it is cool that we can get hold of our family and friends on their mobiles without worrying about the cost.

For about A$35 a year, we also got an Online Number.  This is really cool.  It is a normal Melbourne phone number.  When people call the Melbourne number, it puts them through to our Skype account and our home phone in Hong Kong rings.  Better still, if we're not home the call automatically gets put through to our Hong Kong mobile phone.  Whether we answer on our Skype phone or our mobile phone, the call costs us nothing and costs the caller a local call.  Gen has kept her Australian mobile.  We diverted that to our Online Number too, meaning that callers get put through to us in Hong Kong but only pay the local call cost.

Coffee - Ok, so this is not strictly communication, but it is an important piece of Melbourne.  I always wanted a machine in Melbourne but it kind of seems like a shame to DIY yourself out of Melbourne's cafes.  Hong Kong is similar to America in terms of coffee - there is a lot of it around, but most of it is crap.  Coffee shops are everywhere, selling giant milk, cream and sugar-based beverages which allegedly contain some coffee somewhere in them.  There are a handful of proper coffee shops in Hong Kong, mostly run by Aussies and New Zealanders.

We got a Giotto Rocket Premium Plus espresso machine and a Mazzer Mini-E grinder from Barista Jam in Sheung Wan.  Yes, it was stupidly expensive (about A$2,500 for the combo) but they would be closer to A$3,500 in Australia so we're saving money, you see?!  Barista Jam is a cafe/shop which does the closest impression of a trendy Melbourne cafe I've seen in Hong Kong.  It's run by a guy from Sydney called William who knows his stuff and is super helpful.

So there's a few of the pieces of home we've been able to take with us, thanks to modern technology.  And I didn't even mention Facebook, Twitter, email, this blog and instant messaging.  Or, like Gen did recently, you could just send people some handwritten postcards.  Lame.

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder

As I mentioned in a previous post, I live in Kowloon Tong.  To all appearances, Kowloon Tong is a nice place to live.  It has wide streets, big parks, an MTR station, a huge shopping centre and good schools. Rich important people like Henry Tang live here. Cool dead people like Bruce Lee used to live here, when they were living. On paper and in person, it looks like a great place to live.

However, as I've discovered, geography in Hong Kong is far more complicated than it at first appears.

Hong Kong is divided into three main areas: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories. 

The first two were ceded to the British in the Opium Wars.  For those who don't know your history, I hereby present my brief summary of the Opium Wars: the Brits were pushing drugs, the Chinese got into them in a big way, the Chinese government was a little concerned about a nation of dopeheads and asked the British to stop, the British slapped the Chinese around until the Chinese cried mercy, gave the British Hong Kong Island and Kowloon and let the British keep selling them opium.  Isn't history fun?

Hong Kong Island is just called "the Island" by those who live there.  That should give you a fair idea of the prevailing mentality.  People who live on the Island consider Kowloon to be some strange land they have heard rumours of but never dared to visit, except on their way to the airport. The only good thing about Kowloon, they tell me, is that is has a wonderful view of the Island; how unfair that the Island only has a view of Kowloon.

Geographically, of course, this makes no sense.  Hong Kong and Kowloon could scarcely be closer and still have sea between them.  They face each other across Victoria Harbour, which is less than a kilometre wide and getting narrower each year as land is reclaimed on both sides.  The ferry takes about three minutes and there are three tunnels to get you across by car or train.

Of course, every city has its geographical and psychological divides, but Hong Kong's run far deeper than most. Taxis in Hong Kong work on either the Island or on Kowloon, not both.  Imagine getting into a taxi at Melbourne Airport, asking to go to Hawthorn and being told the driver doesn't work that side of the Yarra.  Convincing a driver to take you from one side of the harbour to the other involves a lot of haggling and a downpayment on his firstborn's school fees.  Similarly, restaurants in Central will gladly deliver your pizza free of charge to the furthest corners of the Island, which might take up to 45 minutes,  but would never deliver to Tsim Sha Tsui, which is 10 minutes away.

People's attitudes towards Kowloon are absolutely rusted on.  Actually, that implies they could be removed with a wire brush.  What is harder to remove than rust?  Concrete?  I'm not an engineer.  Well, I'll leave you to complete the metaphor. 

If in Melbourne, I met someone at a business lunch and they told me that they lived in say, Pakenham or Sunbury or Hurstbridge, I might be mildly surprised and perhaps follow up with a question about their daily commute.  I would not immediately respond with "Why on earth do you live there?", "Are you going to move?" or "What was your real estate agent on?" which are three actual responses I have received.  It's as though the revelation that I live on the other side of the harbour has temporarily stunned them out of their usual air of business-lunch-style-politeness.  Business development be damned, I simply must solve the riddle of why this otherwise respectable-looking businessman lives on the wrong side.

We've also noticed that tourist guides always assume you live on the Island.  One we read recently suggested that we have a fun afternoon out by catching the Star Ferry across to Kowloon. Sounds fun. I heard there are Chinese people living there.  I wonder if I'll need a visa?

Eyewitness news

So the wife and I were out for a stroll in Kowloon Tong the other day when, in the street across from ours, this scene greets us:

So we've got half a dozen cherry pickers set up in the street to overlook someone's yard and a bunch of guys standing on the fence, all for no apparent reason. Now, one of the disadvantages I am at, as a new and not very well informed Hongkonger, is that when I walk past something like this I can never be sure whether it is:
(a) a newsworthy event;
(b) an annual festival;

(c) a flash mob; or

(d) something that just happens everyday and which Hongkongers cannot understand why I find odd.

In this case, it turned out the answer was (a).  It turns out that we live just down the road from Mr Henry Tang.

Mr Tang is (or maybe now was) Beijing's chosen candidate for the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong. That's right, Hong Kong has a Chief Executive, which I always thought is quite an appropriate name for the world's biggest experiment in laissez faire capitalism. Also Chief Executive keeps Beijing happy, because it doesn't denote autonomy like President might.

Being Beijing's chosen candidate for Chief Executive of Hong Kong usually means that you've automatically got the job. There is an election of sorts, but the voters are an electoral college of 1,200 electors, and the majority of these electors are loyal to Beijing.

Unfortunately for him, Mr Tang's campaign seems to be going from bad to worse, to the point where one of his opponents has also been deemed acceptable by Beijing.  So now it appears Beijing has left the Beijing-loyal electors with a choice, so no-one knows what the hell to do.

Anyway, the latest scandal involves Mr Tang's wife's house, which apparently has an illegally constructed basement.  Now in Hong Kong, you do not eat on the trains, you do not cough on a stranger and you especially do not renovate without a permit.  More importantly, nothing makes a politician look out of touch more than revealing that your 6,000 square foot mansion was not quite big enough and so you had to add a wine cellar. I guess the Australian equivalent would be discovering that Tony Abbott was running a private water slide in his backyard filled with Moet & Chandon and the tears of orphaned babies, all during water restrictions.

So the scene above was the local journalists showing they are eminently qualified to work for Rupert Murdoch by taking photos over Mr Tang's fence.  There were at least six cherry pickers in the street all loaded with cameramen.  Sadly, they didn't get any footage of the basement, given that it is by its nature covered by the house.  That certainly didn't deter them, however - the cameramen and cherry pickers were there all weekend, just in case the basement felt like making an appearance or giving an interview at any point.

EDIT: It turns out that Mr Tang's pool has a glass bottom, so the journalists could see the illegal basement through the pool.  Are you kidding me?  No wonder Beijing endorsed this guy, nothing says socialist like a glass-bottomed swimming pool.

So the upshot is, we live near the guy who is either going to be the next Chief Executive or going to be famous for fumbling what should have been a formality.  Either way, it should be good for property prices, and those are far more important to Hongkongers than politics.

What's in a name?

Some of you may be wondering about the provenance of the name of this blog.

Well, firstly I am a man and I am in Hong Kong. So it seemed apposite.

The second and more interesting explanation is that I ripped it off The Man from Hong Kong, a 1975 movie starring George Lazenby and Jimmy Wang-Yu.  At the time, Lazenby was looking for something to do after it became apparent the Bond people weren't going to call back and Wang-Yu was looking for something to do after his second marriage broke down amidst allegations of wife-beating.

I have to confess I have only seen the trailer, but Not Quite Hollywood makes it look awesome.  It has kung-fu, gangsters and like all good Australian B-movies, fight scenes in which the actors actually got hurt. And it has what has to be the most perfect '70s gimmick ever, hang-gliding to the song "Sky High".

I also quite like the 1970s connection because the changes that Hong Kong has gone through since the 70s are quite unbelievable.  The 70s was when everyone started to focus on the handover and also when the power and money in Hong Kong started shifting from the British to the local Chinese. Today Hong Kong as a British colony seems quaint.  I got a one dollar coin with the Queen's head on the back in my change the other day.  I remember her.

Anyway, that is the reason for the name.  Other names on my shortlist were:
1.  The King of Kong - a little self-aggrandizing, also Universal Pictures may get upset
2.  Life in the 'Kong - sounds a bit like a war diary
3.  Honkin' On - I could actually see this as the title of an ABC youth affairs programme
4.  Well Hong - *crickets*

I'll get my coat.

Lesson one: walking

A few months ago came the news that Hong Kong is now officially the world's largest financial market. Based on this reputation as a time-is-money big-business cut-throat dog-eat-dog over-hyphenated metropolis, I expected that Hongkongers would be the world's most efficient walkers, charging to wherever it is they need to be to make that next big deal, buy those undervalued stocks or foreclose on some poor bastard's house.

However, as everyone who comes to Hong Kong quickly discovers, the truth is quite the opposite.

Hongkongers are frustratingly slow walkers. Now in summer, this is understandable, because as the temperature rises to 35 degrees and the humidity increases to the point at which there is no longer any difference between the air and the sea, the miracle is that anyone is able to walk upright at all. But this is true all year round, under all conditions.

Hongkongers wander along the footpath as though they are just having a lovely day out, with no particular place to be, just smelling the flowers (although if you are at the flower market, that may actually be fair enough). The slowness of their pace is both literally and figuratively staggering. You have to wonder where they are going; it is presumably somewhere close enough that they can walk at that pace and still arrive there before they die.
The dawdlers like to walk n abreast (where n is the necessary number of dawdlers to block the entire width of the footpath). If there happens to be (n-1) dawdlers, they compensate by drifting randomly from one side of the footpath to the other and back again in order to prevent overtaking.  The only way around is to step on the road, which is not recommended given that Hong Kong bus drivers do not slow down for jaywalkers.

Because Hongkongers walk so slowly, it is necessary for them to use smartphones while walking in order to update friends and family about the month and year in which they will be arriving at their destination. Beginners simply text while they walk; more advanced users check their email, watch streaming media and play Angry Birds. I actually saw a woman wandering down the street with a laptop open in front of her face the other day. Presumably a mere smartphone would have been inadequate for the massive parallel data processing project she was working on.

Then there are the escalators.  I worked out on day one that the rule is stand on the right, walk on the left.  Some people appear to have not worked this out by day six thousand.  If you stand on the left, I reserve the right to walk up right behind you and sigh or clear my throat in a passive-aggressive manner, until you notice me and step to the right.  You have been warned.

So when you come to Hong Kong, my advice is to be prepared for the dawdlers. Breathe deeply and keep calm. Feel free to vault over fellow pedestrians if you think you can make it. And, whatever you do, don't look up from your smartphone.

Hello... is this thing on?

Er... hello, my name is Nick and I am an Australian living in Hong Kong.

After stepping off the plane at Chek Lap Kok it quickly became apparent that I wasn't in Melbourne anymore.  The public transport is efficient.  The coffee is appalling.  They have a homonym of a rude word in the name of their airport and only I appear to find that amusing.

Barely a day passes when I don't see something that strikes me as weird and I wish I had another Australian next to me who I could elbow and ask "what on God's green earth is that all about?"

So in lieu of that, I turn to the interwebs to vent my confusion, amusement, frustration and admiration for the city of Hong Kong, its people, its culture, its manners and its absolute dread of communicable diseases. I hope you learn some valuable cultural lessons, or failing that, have a mild chuckle.