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?