Hong Kong

Trip Start May 05, 2008

Trip End May 09, 2009

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Flag of Hong Kong Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Hong Kong is a city which we were looking forward to before our trip and it certainly is interesting, though we cannot necessarily say we love the place. It is a very important cog in the modern world's machinery: one of the largest ports through which China's massive output of manufactured goods is outpoured to the West and a huge financial center. As would be expected from a critical hub in the world economy, from a place which was founded by money-minded westerners and populated with even more money-minded Chinese, money governs everything here. And where money is king in our modern world, image takes here rightful place as queen. There are so many flashy lit ads on the streets that Hong Kong makes Times Square fade with envy. The skyscrapers are all gaudily decked out with colourful neon lights across the surface: the skyline looks like something between a gigantic Christmas tree competition, and the futuristic dystopian cities one sees in science fiction movies. The city is quite clean on the surface: the main streets and the parks are kept nicely swept, but once one goes behind the scenes, one can see buildings covered in grime that rival Delhi's greatest hits

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The city's financial success has attracted immigrants from all over the world. In the area in which we were staying in Kowloon, Indians, Africans and Arabs all work hard for their big dreams. Unexpectedly for a rich city, the touts here can compete with the hotshots from Fez, Cairo, Delhi or Bangkok. Everything is sold here in the streets: custom-tailored suits, fake Rolexes and Gucci purses, cheap baubles and even drugs. Walking down the streets we had to dodge a gauntlet of dozens of touts a minute all converging desperately on our obviously tourist mugs. We did get ourselves some suits tailored, for a pretty good price and quality; it all went smoothly until the tailor did not want to make alterations to a suit which obviously did not fit well, prefering instead to tell me that I was wrong and that I would never have any business extending both arms forward at the same time (say to put your arms on a desk?!) Obviously, it is better here to insult the customer's intelligence and make sure he doesn't come back than dip into your margin of profit. By the way, I did manage to push for the alterations and the suit looks nice.
Hong Kong does not offer the same kind of discounts it used to. The city's prosperity means that no one here wants to buy cheap Chinese products any more, but prefer instead to dish out loads of cash for expensive brand names made in Italy or France. One can still find cheap products though, mostly knock-offs which are cheaper than food

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. Speaking of food, there's meat in everything. Yes, including bread! Pork is the Chinese symbol of prosperity and in a prosperous town it permeates everything. A piece of fruit is more expensive than a noodle bowl with pork...
We stayed in a tiny room in Tsim Sha Tsui (Ginny likes to call it tu me chatouilles!) which looked and smelled just like a hospital room, only half the size. At least it was clean: the interior courtyard of the "mansion" in which we were staying looked like a rat's paradise. Judging by the ads we saw for apartments in the city, most people live in conditions not very different from that: a 600ft2 apartment goes for 4 million Hong Kong dollars (about $700k Canadian).
We did have some good times here exploring the city; we went on the longest escalator in the world which takes you halfway up the mountain which dominates the city. The skyline view from the top of the mountain is quite spectacular by the way, even for jaded tourists such as ourselves. For much of the time, it was business though, quite fittingly. We did some shopping, mailed a package home, and we went to get our Chinese visa.
We will add some more pictures soon, as soon as we get access to a computer with a DVD drive which can accomodate the backed-up pictures we had to erase due to a cluttered memory card.