Ten Things I Love And Hate About Hong Kong: Part 4

#4 - Hate - Walking down the street

Ok, so I’ve already mentioned cockroach-dodging, nondescript dripping and evil bus fumes on this list, all of which usually occur whilst one walks down the street – so why the separate entry, you may ask? WELL. The truth is, the simple daily action of walking down the street here in Hong Kong has the power to send me into a frothing, apoplectic rage.

First of all I should probably make it clear that I don’t consider myself to be an angry person. I’m the type of person who likes to indulge myself every now and then with kitten videos on YouTube. I’m also very polite and law-abiding and generally quite chilled and laidback. Unless you are Asian sleaze, or a fundamentalist religious hypocrite who is trying to give me a lecture on behaviour and the questionable state of my soul, I am usually unlikely to descend into a sudden fit of The Rage. However, certain things do push my rage button. And walking down the street in Hong Kong is most definitely one of them.

Before I begin, a couple of quick background-setting facts. Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Approximately 7 million people live here. It is also one of the world’s leading international financial centres – a heaving, bustling megacity, like London or New York. I have lived in London before, so I understand the downsides of spending a lot of your time pushing your way through crowds of sweaty, angry people who always seem to be rushing to get somewhere – onto trains, off trains, to meetings, to home. This constant rush can be bewildering and exhausting and patience-testing, but it’s part of city life.

So, I expected Hong Kong to be much the same, especially since I chose to live on Hong Kong Island, which is where the majority of the big businesses and expats are located.

But no. It’s not the same AT ALL.

In London, in general, it seems to be that the locals and the people who live and work there are often the ones who walk with purpose down the road, expertly weaving their way through crowds and hop skipping up and down the left sides of the escalators at the Tube stations. They don’t have time to stand around dawdling – they have places they need to be. I was one of them, and as a group, we were the ones who would get exasperated at the stupid tourists who would get in our way, mocking us with their intense slowness and holidaying and inane chatter, and who would stop every 2 seconds to take a picture of some Monument or Building or other such Famous Thing, which was all very nice an’ all but when you just wanted to go home after a long day you really couldn’t give a shit, you just wanted them to move the hell out of your way.

It seems to be the complete opposite here. Foreigners like me just want to get to the MTR station so we can get to work on time and minimise the time spent in the hot, stuffy, fumey outdoors. And we’re the ones who will cross at a green traffic light because we can see that there are no cars coming in either direction, and who feel bewildered at everybody we leave behind at the side of the road. But the general walking trend among locals seems to be the slow, meandering shuffle down the middle of the pavement, with the occasional, completely baffling stop to look at a building, or talk to a friend, or just, I don’t know, take a few seconds to enjoy the wonderful fumes?! (Whatever the reason, it’s definitely not to take a picture.)

Often, the dawdlers are indeed elderly people, which you might think makes me some kind of unsympathetic, unfeeling, ageist monster. I’m not. I get it. China, in general, and therefore Hong Kong too, is facing a massive ageing population crisis. So there are a lot of elderly people around. Now I’m not suggesting that, for my convenience and sanity, they should just stay at home and wait to die; that would be barbaric. But my question is this: if they must walk in public, on the street, why can’t they just PICK A SIDE? It’s like, for crying out loud, you’re not bloody Switzerland! Just pick a side, shuffle a little bit to the left or the right, and then continue your shuffle, so then at least people like me can get past you, instead of nearly crashing into the back of you when you decide to randomly stop in the middle of the pavement for NO APPARENT REASON.

Another thing. Umbrellas. People seem to put up their umbrellas at the slightest provocation. “Oh no! Three miniscule droplets of rain which can hardly be called rain because really it’s no more than a bit of drizzle! Put up your umbrellas! Oh look, it’s stopped. No wait, look, now there’s some sun. Put them back up again!”

It drives me nuts. Mostly because, when it really is pissing it down, and umbrellas are pretty essential, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of umbrella etiquette. In England, if you are walking down a street, holding an umbrella, towards some people who are also holding umbrellas, then there is usually some kind of tilting or lifting or ducking or other kind of mutual manoeuvring involved to avoid umbrella collision or spike-induced head injuries. Not always, but most of the time. Unfortunately, I haven’t really experienced that here. It’s more common that I have to remain extremely vigilant to try and avoid eye or head-level umbrella spikes because those umbrellas ain’t moving for me.

And umbrellas to guard against the sun? Really? What’s wrong with sunglasses? Or a hat? Even a desperately unfashionable but practical umbrella hat would be preferable to having to dodge a catwalk of tiny, stiletto-heeled girls with ginormous golfing umbrellas about three times their size which span almost the entire width of the pavement. ARGH.

So there you have it. I have to walk down the street every day, to and from stations to get to and from work, and even though that walk only lasts about 5 or 10 minutes, it still has the ability to (a) raise my blood pressure, and (b) make me late.

Ten Things I Love And Hate About Hong Kong: Part 3

#3 - Hate - The pollution

In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, at the Council of Elrond, Boromir quickly shows his incredulity at the suggested plan to thwart the dark lord, Sauron. “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” he says, launching into a brief but convincing list of reasons why just wandering into Mordor is nothing short of complete and utter madness. My favourite line is this: “The very air that you breathe is a poisonous fume.” He could’ve been talking about Hong Kong.

It’s a puzzling oxymoron that HK seems to be at once one of the cleanest and also one of the dirtiest cities I’ve ever been in. The MTR, for example, is wondrously clean. You are not allowed to eat or drink on trains or in paid areas of stations, as announcements often remind you, and if you do you risk a hefty fine. You also hardly ever see litter on the streets, presumably for much the same reason, and if you do it’s usually in the form of a neat pile of tied black binbags awaiting collection and removal. The roads are continually kept clear of rubbish, and rubbish disposal seems to be regular and meticulously maintained. This is a welcome change to London, where on some nights out in Angel, I had to dodge greasy sheets of paper, fried chicken bones, tissues, beer cans, and remnants of kebab as I made my way over to the bus stop. Or Whitechapel, where a friend joked that if it were to have its own flag it would probably be a puddle with some rubbish floating in it.

So the streets are pretty clean. But the air? It’s horrendous. HK has to have one of the worst air quality indexes in the world. The worst thing is when you are walking down the road, already sweating from the 30 degree heat, and then an old, loud bus tears past, farting out clouds of nasty, black smoke from its rear end, and pelts you with fumes which are somehow HOTTER THAN THE SUN IS. I don’t remember the buses in London ever being quite so offensive in the fume department.

The other day, when I got back to my flat, I cleaned my face with one of those wet wipe thingies and it turned black. Grim.

This is probably the single most compelling reason which might stop me from staying or settling here in the long-term.

Ten Things I Love And Hate About Hong Kong: Part 2

#2 - Hate - Nondescript dripping

So I’m walking down the street. It’s a beautiful day: one of those rare, clear blue skies, and the sun is hot but not too oppressive. Thankfully the humidity is not too bad else I wouldn’t even be bothering to walk, I’d be seeking refuge in some air conditioned building or form of transportation instead. All of a sudden, however, I am assailed from above. A large, fat, unseen and unknown globule of water crashes down upon my head and then proceeds to drip down my face, slyly infiltrating beneath my glasses. I grimace, wipe my face, and curse the heavens. “Goddamn you, nondescript dripping!” I look up at the sky – still blue, still clear. Not a rain cloud in sight. So WHAT’S WITH THE DRIPPING?

The answer, I believe, is residue from A/C units. And so, as well as cockroaches, one has to dodge this dastardly dripping. It might not sound like much, but it is bloody annoying, and also a bit gross, because when it happens to you, you never really know what it is or where it came from. And no-one likes unexpected, undefined liquid on their face.

Ten Things I Love And Hate About Hong Kong: Part 1

#1 - Hate - Cockroach-dodging

In London, the myriad dirty grey splodges you see scattered all over the pavements are usually easily discernible as the remains of people’s chewing gum, well and truly trodden on throughout the ages. I don’t seem to notice many chewing gum chewers in Hong Kong, though. So whenever I spy a big black splodge in front of me on the pavement I have to wonder whether’s it’s gum, or the most likely alternative: crushed cockroach carcass.

To be fair, I haven’t see all that many cockroaches here, and certainly not where you’d most hate to see them, like in my flat (unlike in the Philippines, where my fellow travellers woke up one morning to find a curious little friend perched on top of the tube of toothpaste… somehow I managed to sleep through the squeaking, screaming and shoe-throwing that followed). However, they do exist, and on more than one occasion, on a slightly tipsy walk home, I have had to employ some super-fast reflexes to dodge those mo-fo’s in the street. Let me tell you, they move FAST, and it can be extremely unsettling when one suddenly darts into your path, especially when you’re wearing flip flops and they charge perilously close to your bare foot. Urgh,

And if that wasn’t bad enough, turns out that the little bastards have the ability to fly. FLY, I say. As if they needed any more help in the terrifying and disgusting department.

Hello!

So, as of this weekend, I will have been in Hong Kong for a whopping 19 weeks. That's almost 5 months. And in all that time, I have posted on this blog ZERO times. Which is a bit shameful. But I hope to rectify that with a whole smorgasbord, nay, a Chinese banquet of posts.

But before I do, let me share with you some evidence that shows that I actually *live* here now, like a real person, and not just some freeloading boozy tourist, even though I feel like that sometimes a lot of the time:

[From left to right: Octopus card; HK HSBC bank card; business card; HKID card(!!!); library card]

Five months later and the novelty still hasn't worn off. I'M IN HONG KONG! Whaaaaa?? I feel like Goldie Hawn in Overboard except more positive: "I live here? This is my house [city]?" Just look at it!

As the locals say: waaaaaa!

Anyways. Without further ado, allow me to present my Top Ten Things I Love And Hate About Hong Kong. And because I am still a Mancunian from 'oop North' and therefore prone to being a grumpy old sod, I am going to begin with 5 things I hate, but at least that way I get to end on a high.




  

Em-i-grate good times, c'mon!

In less than a week's time, I am moving to Hong Kong to start a new job! I'm swapping pharma for English Language teaching; hopefully it will suit me a bit better. :)

I've started this blog so that I can chronicle my East Asian adventure over the next few months. I am a little bit scared, but mostly massively excited.

I can't wait to see a bit of this:

And eat a LOT of this:

OM NOM NOM.

Apparently taking pictures of one's food is the norm over there, so hopefully I should fit right in! ;-)

Anyway, I should probably start packing...