Hong Kong Travel Diary
Hong Kong Travel DiaryThe airport was amazingly busy and crowded. This one has 3 more months of life before the new one opens. We flew in on a very large air bus, and had to deboard down stairs on to a bus, not even a gate! The landing was amazing, the jet comes in right over the city, imagine landing in a part of south Central Park in NYC, flying in between sky scrapers, I could've looked into people's apartments!
The city looks amazing at night, so many lights, reminds me of the European cities with all the neon corporate logos.
So many gritty apartment buildings, very blade runnerish looking. Most windows have a clothes bar outside the window where they hang clothes, like an outside closet, or for drying things I guess. But I imagine their clothes must get awful dirty from all of the pollution, and it is often very humid out..
I'm in a hotel right on the harbor, 20th floor, really nice view.
Many of the apartment buildings here puzzle me. They are 20-30 floors tall, but so thin, perhaps only a small apartment or two per floor!
I'm located right near the place where US sailors used to come for R&R. So there are a number of "discos" and strip clubs. The strip clubs have older women outside cajoling you, and from the pictures outside I suspect most of the places are populated by South-East Asian women. (Philipino's are the largest group of foreigners in HK, roughly 130,000, with the US and UK coming in 2nd and 3rd at over 30,000 each.) There are also a number of normal clubs. I went into one disco, which seemed the most decent compared to the others, club-pop type stuff, the best song was a remix of no doubt's "don't speak." There was this one woman who was dancing up to me crazily, so I shifted away, then she was dancing up another white couple; I don't know if she's a prostitute or not, but there are a fair of them around here and I feel seedy just being a white male walking about. There are a fair amount of English and Australian accents about. On the street, there is an intriguing form of advertising, tons of handbills that looks just like money, scattered all over the place.
Saturday, I walked, and walked, and walked. I explored both Admiralty and Central (which are the business like sections), as well as Causeway Bay. Central has the large sky scrapers, Japanese departments stores, and designer shops. HK is a truly 3 dimensional city, the roads twist, turn, dive, and soar amongst themselves, and to move about Central you must use the sky-bridges, or walk through the endless upscale shopping centers and malls that connect to each other. I must say that in terms of shopping, I don't really encounter anything exceptional other than the magnitude of it all. There's no sale tax in HK, and I can imagine how officials from other governments must envy the amount of retail sales that happen here. If they had this much business and could tax it, there'd be billions.
I often took the subway back and forth between these places, and it is quite a nice system. Also, all the cars are connected (without a door) so you can walk from the front to the back car easily. The interesting part is that you get a real breeze as you accelerate and decelerate. Also, the line of site is perfect for "subway skating." (I usually don't hold on, but flex my knees and watch the next car for signs of the bumps and turns.)
Saturday evening I was determined to find a real dance club. I went back to central, to Lan Kwai Fung. This area supposedly has the densest amount of bars in the city, and in the past tended to be a "Western ghetto" though the amount of Chinese there is increasing, and was significant when I was there. Maybe 60/40 (Chinese/Western). I was not really interested in the bars/discos here, very main stream and yuppie. I was in search of the CeTop, which supposedly had drum&bass on a couple of other Saturdays, though I didn't see any much of an event tonight in the HK magazines I found. Unfortunately, I couldn't find CeTop, though I found the road it was supposed to be on, a very quiet and dead street off the main way of party go-ers.
Accidentally, I also stumbled across the famous set of stairs up Victoria's peak. I actually had seen this in the tourist guides, and forgot about it, but when I saw it I remember reading about it elsewhere. The small mountain is populated just as the areas near the water is, the only difference is that the roads are narrow, and the incline steep. At some point, the government built a huge series of outside escalators up the peak, and I'd say it'd be hard to make the journey without it. On the later half of the trip up, there was a "cop" standing right behind me which I though was odd, but once we got to the top, he spoke into a mic, and the escalators stopped, so I guess I was the last person to make it up that evening, around midnight. At the top are the huge apartment buildings that look so pretty from below against the green mountains, and this is where the wealthy people live. The car parks and garages are filled with Mercedes, BMW's, Jaguars, and the like. So I walked back down, encountering locals walking up without the benefit of the escalators and thinking what a pain in the ass that must be. (The wealthy people at the very top obviously drive.) I looked again for CeTop and return discouraged to Lan Kwai Fung. I think what they say about the commercial, consumeristic, and cell phone mentality of the people here is true. People all over clutch their cell phones in their hands, just to show they have one. In the back of the "milk bar" there were these two dudes with long hair, with funky framed glasses, just sitting there like statues. I think this long hair look is kind of creepy on Asian men and they were dressed from head to foot in designer clothing. I sat nearby sipping my cranberry juice and watching the people. Eventually, the two dude's girlfriends returned from dancing, and the first thing they did was grab their cell phones out of the little designer back backs their boyfriends had and sat their clutching them in their hands.
I danced a little here, and left and went to a nearby pizza shop to grab a slice. In the store I encountered a good "cultural/events" magazine, and yes, CeTop had jungle tonight. So I set out again with a better address and asking directions every block or so, returning to the spot I first went to. However, CeTop is on the 9th floor of one of these skinny apartment buildings and has no sign. Paying a cover, and climbing the 9 floors (supposedly the elevator was out) I finally got to see what the inside of one of these buildings looked like: tiny. The DJ was playing hard break beatz and this black dude with a French accent was MCing. There were two small rooms, one for dancing, and a lounge, both about the size of my hotel room. So I did in fact discover the HK jungle scene, as small as it might be. I only stayed about an hour, being very tired and sore from all the walking and took a taxi home at about 3a.m.
I started the day off with a brunch at a vegetarian restaurant. I had dumplings with a sweet and sour sauce. That translates to large fried chip things (a very big, lighter dorito) with a bowl of sweet and sour sauce with mini-corns, peppers, and good stuff. I also had a ton of desert, little sweet cakes. I think I had a moon roll, and those puffy, doughy sesame rolls. Very yummy. Aside from a few commercials on TV, I didn't see a ton of evidence of Easter, except that the border between Hong Kong and China was extremely busy because people were visiting their relatives in China for the Holiday, which might be Easter but is probably some native holiday. With a population of 6 million people, there are about 700,000 Buddhists, 500,000 Christians, and 50,000 Muslims. 98% of the population is ethnic Chinese.
Hong Kong is in a couple of parts. First, there is the main city which is on the island. Second, there is the tip of the peninsula, Kowloon, and then there are the new territories, which are areas north of Kowloon that Britain annexed at the turn of the century. There are also a number of other islands surrounding the main one. Today, I decided to explore Kowloon. Here you get a real sense of what China must be like: crowded. The couple mile stretch of Nathan Rd puts NYC's 34th St to shame: so much neon, so many stores, a cell phone booth every couple of stores, tens of thousands of young people out, with their phones in hand.
I believe there must be some sort of network externality involved in the use of these things. You got to get a phone to be cool, then you got to display it, and even talk on it, so I imagine all these young people calling each other, just to call each other, so it seems like they have people to talk to.
Furthermore, every block has its own mini-mall, with 9-15 floors of stores. One I encountered was just full of VideoCD stores (VCD was the precursor to DVD, very big in Asia and uses MPEG-1 compression which is quite blocky). There is every movie you can think of on VCD, and you can get deals like 9 for $100HK. (Roughly $17US). Also, tons of computer stores, but nothing really exceptional. I also explored the back roads, where along Nathan Rd. I'd see one or two westerners, but back here, I was definitely alone. Really fascinating stuff. I'm really glad I went to Kowloon. The island itself is pretty much like a more comsumeristic version of east Manhattan from about 34th St up to 70th St Kowloon is like the real Chinatown. And unfortunately for HK, there is no equivalent of the Village. I could find no indication of alternative culture. But Kowloon really is something new to me.
Today I'm going to do some work, but I'll take a lunch break. At 6 there is a party/reception aboard one of the harbor cruise ships, which goes out to the island of Lamma for dinner/reception (which is supposed to have great restaurants, as well as what little bit of alternative culture there is in HK (supposedly tie-die shirts have been spotted there.))
For lunch, I wondered about the Wan Chai area near the hotel and found a very interesting restaurant. Called "Orbit Noodle Bar and Cafe." What drew me in were huge, Schwa (alien heads) door panels. It was filled with Sci-Fi stuff: StarTrek, StarWars, lots of alien stuff. I brought home some Hong Kong UFO Club fliers. Much of the alien stuff was generic, but the back part of the menu had a definitive schwa design head, and corporate defense league type wording "This menu may be deactivated from service for $100HK." I doubt Bill Barker, the creator of Schwa, had any hand in this unique HK lunch shop, but I wonder.
Also, the other interesting thing when you walk about HK is the use of bamboo scaffolding. It's everywhere. I fear that some of the buildings are held up by bamboo! Whole apartment buildings are covered in 10-20' pieces of bamboo tied together with plastic string.
Most of my TV stations are BBC or HK Chinese. The music TV station either shows ok Brit-pop, or absolutely inane, monotonous idol love songs (a new cute guy or gal comes out with some pop song every month or so), or Asian Rock (with Asian dudes with long hair, with bangs, or big poofed up hair, rock on! <ack>) Also, lots of Asian soap opera. They do show good movies every once in a while. This week and last is the HK film festival, and all the shows I wanted to see were sold out, but last night, I watched Sumo Do, Sumo Don't, by Masayuki Suo, the same guy who did "Shall we Dance," with a lot of the same actors. Another funny/cute/enjoyable movie.
The Net latency to sites in the US is terrible, not that my performance in Asia rocks or anything. Browsing more than 1 or 2 graphic intense sites at once tends to kill my connection, which costs $3 to bring back up (hotel surcharge).
This afternoon, I spent the morning working, dealing with some press issues, thinking about and grabbing some readings for a class I'm going to guest lecture when I get back, and working on the specification due out in the beginning of May.
I went over to Queen's Pier for the trip to Lamma Island. I recognized half of the people (Privacy Commissioners) from previous meetings, and we boarded a boat and set off for the island. I was quite frankly concerned about the waves. Evidently, as more of the harbor is "reclaimed" the harbor gets more choppy, and I expect this boat was getting tossed around at nearly a 40 degree angle on both axes. But the privacy commissioners quickly broke out the brewskies and settled in for the ride. Unfortunately it was quite foggy, but it was very nice regardless. Again, as we cruised along the coast of HK, I'm amazed by the amount of apartments, lining the shore on both sides of the harbor mile after mile. I had a chance to speak to Stephen Lau, the HK Commissioner, and ask him about the buildings. First, these 20x20ft apartment buildings are a result of the tight real-estate market. If a developer can grab the land, and build an apartment building (even if only one small apartment large) they'll do it. Also, bamboo scaffolding is indeed used all over the place, and it is evidently stronger/lighter and more inexpensive than metal. The way in which it is tied together is a learned craft passed down in the family business.
So we spent about an hour, cruising along the shore in the twilight, and we even passed the touristy "floating restaurants" a couple garishly lit and decorated (Chinese style) multi-floor barge/restaurants.
Once we reached Lamma Island, we deboarded and had a number of Cantonese sea food dishes. I had a veggie sprouts and mushroom dish which was quite good.
The trip back was very nice and the folks finished off the Rumanian wine. Stephen chose that so as not to offend the various international constituencies, not that they would be offended because its a small and informal group. But I've been to meetings in Europe where at every place, they provide German, French, and Swiss bottled water for diplomatic purposes.
Woke up early, did some work, press stuff on P3P is really starting to kick up. Today I give a presentation, then we have dinner somewhere.
Its 6:00 a.m., my plane leave at noon and I'm glad to be heading back, but a few random notes on the past two days before I forget. These past days were filled with the meeting and post meeting schmoozing/receptions. On Tuesday, we went to a very pretty restaurant with lots of decoration and mirror panels. The guest of honor was the Secretary of Home Affairs. His little speech was fairly defensive, saying how wonderful things are in HK now that they've been reunited with their Motherland, and when you return to your countries tell everyone how wonderful it is here. Evidently, HK is suffering on the tourist side.
The food itself was rather entertaining, they had a number of odd rituals, including, well, these roasted chickens come out from the kitchen wrapped in some materials, and various guests take a mallet, a very small sledgehammer, and pound these things to break them open. They also had the guy make the noodles right in front of us in that amazing way they do Chinese noodles. He started with one long piece of dough, doubled and twisted, doubled and twisted, doubled and twisted, until he has a piece of dough that is actually 64, 128, or 256 strings of dough, viola!
On Wednesday I gave my presentation which was received well, and the Working Group of International Privacy Commissioners passed a resolution that I'm pleased with. It is supportive of privacy technologies (and by indirection P3P) and points out concerns and issues that I myself pointed out in my presentation. This is a fairly diplomatic undertaking, lots of word-smithing. However, for such an undertaking this is as informal as it gets, but we are still sitting at a table with our little country flags and people refer to "the opinion of the French delegation." This level of informality is about as formal as I feel comfortable with, but it's all a matter of what you are used to.
That evening we went to the HK Jockey Club, which is the only legal gambling in HK itself. (Macao is a short boat ride away though.) It really is an amazing thing to look at, maybe a quarter of a stadium, looking out over a very green track (all grass) and its framed by the 100 surrounding apartment buildings climbing up the green hills of HK. People seemed to enjoy themselves, but I was quite tired, but it was definitely a neat thing to see.
One final point on HK fashion. The informal wear here is blue or black jeans (not stone washed) with huge cuffs at the bottom. The cuff is nearly 6 to 7 inches high (you know, roll up the jean, but don't roll, just a big flip) which looks rather odd. Last night I saw a couple with their hands full, they were holding hands, and in their free hands they each had their own cell phone.
The only thing I missed was going to an illegal software bazaar. Someone at the jockey club last night told me where there was one, but I won't have time this morning, but that is ok. I'm glad to go home.