China – Don't hold your breath

Walking Hong Kong

A day is not long enough to get any kind of insight into Hong Kong, but it is just enough for a long walk through the island and get an impression of how complex it would be to live there. I could just quote statistics at you until I run out of breath. It is not as densely populated as Dhaka, Mumbai, Jakarta, or Beijing. But it is definitely in the same league as Shanghai or Guangzhou, and quite a bit ahead of Cairo, Tokyo, Moscow or London. But a walk really told us what these numbers mean. First of all, Hong Kong is built on hills, and unlike Mumbai, the hills have not been cut away. So walking is a good way to keep your blood pumping.

What you notice first are the high rises: all mirror facades and full of offices and flats. The next thing I noticed is that in spite of these, there aren’t as many people on the road as one sees in Mumbai. So, in spite of the similarity in weather, it looks more spick and span. Passageways thread through the buildings, so that you don’t often have to walk on the pavement. The passages connect different buildings too. Very convenient in bad weather I’m sure, but it makes navigation hard for tourists. Your phone will show you a turn to the left, and you see that the turn is on a different level!

I found the smaller streets more interesting: full of mom-and-pop stores. A tiny restaurant had a Michelin star and was packed to the gills with tourists. I wondered what fraction of restaurants here was sampled by Michelin’s reviewers. It was interesting just to look at people sitting in some of these small places

Wellington street, Hong Kong

Searching for signs of normal life in Hong Kong, I moved out of the glittery main roads. Duck through an alley, and suddenly you are in narrow roads, where regular life goes on. Even on emptier, more traffic-bound sections of these roads, the sunlight plays games that the camera likes. High-rises crowd together so the sun reaches the ground only in a narrow window around noon. The rest of the time the towering blocks present a lovely contrast to the twilit bustle below them.

The regular surge of vehicles released at metronomic regularity by traffic lights seemed to me like the pulse of mechanised blood driven by a pumping heart of the city. An all-encompassing boom-boom: lane, street, lane, street. People drive at breakneck speed here. Strange to an Indian eye, where you always have to watch for a pedestrian who might have gone off course. Not that the pavements are free of obstruction here, they are quite as bad as in India. But people scurry out of the way of the rushing traffic.

Human crowds are to be found in the alleyways where the street vendors are. We were lucky to find these places soon after breakfast, so the press of bodies was not too bad. I could take photos, and help The Family put a few fruits in my backpack to serve as snacks as we walked about.

Winter festival, Hong Kong

Lost in Hong Kong, we meandered downhill and came on preparations for the Winter festival. This is one festival that has been enthusiastically accepted across the world, since it allows businesses to make money. We were lucky to hit this spot around the lunch time break on a workday. A group of carol singers was assembling. We joined the gaggle of bystanders around them.

The Family had spotted a conical spire off our route and made a beeline for a photo. It was an innovative take on a Newton’s tree. I liked it, especially the stacking of spheres that reminded me that Newton explained the regularity with which the planets move around the sun.

Our waiting paid off. The group started to sing. Bystanders jostled to come closer, but I managed to get an unobstructed view of the big choir. I leave you with the Hong Kong winter choir.

Dim sum central

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?
Douglas Adams (Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

As a tax-paying member of our galactic civilization, we faced the where question after descending from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. Since our intention was to saunter through parts of the island before lunch, we decided we would eat at Hong Kong station, otherwise known as Central station. Finding your way in Hong Kong is not easy, we found. You have to know the names of roads to follow signs. Maps are confusing too, because there are corridors and roads at different levels. We knew we generally had to head down, so it wasn’t too bad. But we worked up a bit of an appetite by the time we came to Central.

The place that caught our eye was a very popular dim sum place. We took a ticket: tenth in queue. But the queue moved fast, and we could order as we stood there. We tried, and then decided that we would look at what neighbours ordered before we decided. We sat facing each other on a long table. On one side was a big family sharing food. On the other there were two office goers who read while eating: one on the phone, the other a book. The food was terrific, in the Guangdong style.

Thirteen in Chinese is Four

When we checked into our hotel in Hong Kong I came face to face with a superstition which I’d never actually seen in this form elsewhere in China. Every number ending with four was missing from the buttons in the lift. That doesn’t mean you have to walk from to floor four from five. It is not used, for the same reason that floor 13 is sometimes not used in floor numberings in the west. The Chinese word for four ( 四 pronounced sì) is said to be unlucky because it sounds like the word for death (死 pronounced sǐ).

A Jezebel

Hong Kong is too urban to find any wildlife in the short stay we had there, I thought. So I was quite surprised to see a Red-base Jezebel (Delias pasithoe) quietly waiting for me to take a photo of it on a road in the morning. I can recognize a Jezebel when I see one on the road (I can see some eye rolling there, but never mind) so it didn’t take me long to figure out its full identity. A lifer, although butterfly watchers don’t use that term. They are usual in montane forests at low heights, below about 1500 meters. Strange that I never saw one in Nepal or Sikkim, where they are common, and ran into one here.

On Victoria Peak

Exactly two weeks later we were back in Hong Kong, and this time for almost 24 hours. We’d both read up on how to get to Victoria Peak. Fortunately it was a very nice day, so when we reached the top, we had a wonderful view over Hong Kong and Kowloon. That’s the picture that you see featured. Warm seas always have a haze, as I know from Mumbai. So this is almost the best view that I could imagine of the two sides across the strait. I’m sure though that there’ll be locals (and luckier tourists) with clearer photos of Kowloon from the peak.

How did we get to the peak? There’s a tram station at Garden Road, near St. John’s Cathedral which turned out to be the simplest thing for us. It also gave us nice views over Hong Kong as it moved. The alternatives were to take a city bus or to walk. In spite of the crowds, this turned out to be the quickest way up. The Peak Tower turned out to be one of those self-consciously interesting kind of structures, but it did have a variety of eating options. On our way down we stopped at one of these for a mid-morning coffee and cake. But before that we wandered off along a narrow path to one side. I’d hoped to do some bird watching in the gardens up there, but it turned out to be too complicated to do in a hurry. We’ll do that some other time. I’m sure that we’ll transit through Hong Kong again, and now that we know it, we can plan better.

A short evening in Kowloon

Hong Kong has changed. We’d walked through Kowloon once many years ago on a long layover and found it a charming place, full of little streets with mom-and-pop shops. The Avenue of Stars, at the very southern edge of the island was a little glitzier at that time. But I remembered buying a grilled octopus on a stick from a roadside vendor and nibbling it as I looked at the statue of Bruce Lee. Now it was all mirror-faced bright facades. Where were the real people? In this part of Kowloon, the odd textures of real life have been glazed over.

We went with the new vibe of the place. We walked past the big showrooms of Chanel and Prada, and a hundred other high fashion stores. These showrooms dwarfed the old clock tower of the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Something which should have been anchored in history now looked like a sideshow in a Disneyland. In the long run of history, the British occupation was a sideshow, but so perhaps is this Disneyland. The Art Museum was closed. The Family took a photo of its facade. Children played in the big space in front of it. The Avenue of Stars was brighter than ever. A statue at its mouth was a blown up replica of the award statuette for the Hong Kong Film Festival.

Crowds had gathered here for the laser light show which plays every night over the skyline of Hong Kong island across the water. As the time came and passed we heard murmurs from the polyglot crowd. A young man next to us was deep in his phone. He emerged to tell us that the show was cancelled for a week in memory of those who died in the horrible fire six days before. By his accent he was Australian. We stayed a few minutes more to look at the skyline of Hong Kong. The Family asked “What’s that irregular line of light behind everything?” “I guess that’s Victoria Peak,” I hazarded. “Let’s try to go up there when we come next,” she said. So we did, but that’s another story.

Manhole covers: Monday Art

Osaka was the first place where I noticed really artistic qualities in manhole covers around the city. As a result, when I passed through Hong Kong, I was receptive to the idea that manhole covers could be examples of public art. When I saw the piece that you see in the featured photo, I knew that someone had thought about the design, and that it was worth taking a photo of.

Of course I’d noticed manhole covers before. But I’d never thought of them as public art. Now, alerted by the examples in Osaka, Himeji, Wakayama and Hong Kong, I went back to my archives. Here were three that I’d noticed in Germany in November 2017, eight years before the encounters in the east. The one from Muenster is a very plain design, but is a rather nice representation of its cathedral. The manhole cover from Dortmund is definitely one where the design has been thought through.

The second piece from Dortmund is not a manhole cover at all, but artwork set into the pavement. I would call it a variant of the genre. Even if you didn’t follow football in Germany, at one time you would hear Timo Konietzka’s name come up when people talked of the Bundesliga. He was the first footballer to score a goal in the first match of the first year of the Bundesliga, and he did it in the first minute of a match where he played for Dortmund against Bremen.

Decompression

After two weeks of travelling in China we began December with an evening in Hong Kong. In the morning we would fly to Japan. That evening was a time of decompression. We’d felt cold throughout the November in China. Now I was comfortable in just a tee. For The Family too it was a time for a change. We found a place near the Art Museum in Kowloon where we could share a pizza, a pasta, and a grilled fish. I love the knife work of Chinese chefs, here seen in the vegetables piled on the fish which look like a tangle of noodles. They also had craft beer. It all made for quite a relaxed time.