hong kong.

Been busy prepping for the Mendelssohn concert and the Hong Kong trip along with lots of misc stuff so haven't been posting. I hope that will change because I sense my meagre readership dwindling still further, and also because I need to practise writing more.

Hong Kong was fun; there were lots to see and do and wonder at. The pace of life there is visibly faster - in the MTR stations people walk at twice the speed of Singaporeans, there's hardly any conversation, and people frown at you if you don't keep right on the escalator. The buildings are set into the hillside at crazy angles and heights, and the bus routes are insanely long windy single-lane routes up 30-degree slopes – terribly scenic but hell to drive, I'm sure. Huge respec' for HK bus drivers.

The language barrier was surprising. In reality most Hongkongers know very little English – either that or they're uncomfortable with speaking it. You could almost tell the people apart by what they spoke – Hongkongers spoke Cantonese, PRC Chinese spoke Mandarin, and if it was English chances are it would be a Singaporean tourist. We managed to get by with Mandarin but sometimes it was amusing, like when peck tried for 10 minutes to get warm water at the dim sum restaurant. And apparently 白开水 means something totally different there.

I observed that the people there aren't all that friendly or helpful – certainly a far cry from Bangkok! If the waitresses didn't understand you, sometimes they'd just leave after a few seconds, or treat you like dumbasses. At the hotel reception it seemed that the smiley badge they wore on their blouses was supposed to make up for the lack of facial expression. The attendants at Ocean Park hardly smiled either – they generally looked bored. And worst of all, the taxi driver we got on the trip out of the airport gave us some Chinese Yuan coins and a Thai 10-baht note in change, shortchanging us nearly HKD100. That was a positively distasteful experience.

I came back with nearly HKD1000 left because things were as expensive there, if not more, and the variety was atrocious – I didn't see a single running shoe that I really liked at all the factory outlets we visited, for instance. It was probably winter season but still, I expected better.

We went to Macau too and it was quite a lovely place – crappy 60s-70s slummy tenements next to gleaming hotels and beautifully-preserved colonial Portuguese architecture. And of course the egg tarts – we only ate two each though we swore to get through ten. They were quite awesome but the back-street one was better than the one from the touristy-looking bakery (I think it's called Koi Kee Bakery). We went to the Venetian too; it was a glittering, glitzy spectacle of sheer opulence, a monument to the power of money. The ceiling paintings and carpets were admittedly awesome, but the amount of it was so overwhelming that to my mind it was in very poor taste.

Oh and of course we stayed up late nights to talk cock but I'm not going into that. Suffice it to say that many secrets were learnt.

What else can I say? Hong Kong positively invites comparisons with Singapore; they're both majority-Chinese, extremely urban, modern Asian cities. It is huge though, compared to Singapore, and the people move much faster. The buildings are ridiculously tall, and mostly quite haphazard and dingy – the view from our hotel window was of a highly unedifying high-rise block whose whitewashed exterior had turned part cream, part rust-stained from age and neglect. The shopping was disappointing, possibly because we didn't go to the right places. Weather was pretty good (cool and mostly dry) but I was wheezing most nights from the pollution and low temperatures. I can certainly feel the extent of government microplanning in Singapore and for once I'm glad of it.

Now back to life!