About Me

Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Monday, January 31, 2011

Ignorant gwai lo buys unknown food!

I wonder what this is? It certainly looks good!
One of the joys of being in a new country is to be able to try new foods. This is slightly complicated by being a vegetarian, but I try not to let that hold me back. There are so many interesting things being sold at the moment in honour of Chinese New Year, and I am curious about nearly all of them.
Today, as I was shopping in one of the wet markets in Tai Po, this little thing caught my eye. I handed over the cash and continued with my shopping. When I got home, I dove into the choppy waters of the internet to try and find out what it was I'd purchased. No luck! Nowhere on Googleimages, or indeed anywhere I stumbled upon, contained pictures or a description of what I had bought. I googled desserts/cakes/sweets, because I thought it was a sweet, I googled red, and sesame seeds, and chrysanthemum, because that is what the decoration resembled. Nothing, nada, 莫!
All that was left to try was to actually eat it. Now why didn't I try that first? Inside there turned out to be a sort-of peanut-brittle mixture, with a very hard and crunchy texture, not too sweet, with a pleasantly nutty taste. I couldn't work out what the outside was, perhaps a rice flour shell, who knows?
So I am left with a bit of mystery. When do these things traditionally get eaten? What are they called, in Cantonese, or English? Do they signify anything important? Are they supposed to be eaten by the young, the old, the single or the enspoused, or can anyone eat them? So many questions... If anyone has any ideas or clues about these, I'd love to know more. There seem to be dozens of traditional sweets at New Year, but I still don't know which category these fit into.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Bits and bobs

Stepladder in a tree, evening
Sometimes there are things that I need to write about my experience in Hong Kong that don't really have a logical home in this blog. When, for example, I come across a stepladder upside down at the top of a tree, I don't know what to think. Is this an adolescent prank? A normal occurrence after a typhoon (not that there have been any big ones for a couple of years, or so people tell me)? A new approach to waste management? An art project?
Speaking of art projects, I love coming across bits of public art here and there in Hong Kong - often in shopping malls, perhaps because that is where most people seem to spend their time.
We were wandering around in Tsim Sha Tsui the other day, and a display of bamboo carvings caught our eye. As a bamboo lover, this was too good an opportunity to overlook. I'm glad we went in. The carvings were amazing, though probably too traditional for me to really enjoy. These were done by a Master Bamboo carver, as he was described, from Anhui province in China.
I really do not know how anyone can carve this amount of detail with any sort of tool, and I guess I have to add this to my informal list of incredible-things-that-humans-do. These things had depth and perspective, and all carved in minute detail from single pieces of bamboo culm. Wow! In a nice early-childhoodish touch, we could have had a go at carving our own bits of bamboo as part of the exhibition. Many people were trying it out, but I felt rather intimidated after having seen the intricacy of the carvings on display. As has been our experience in Hong Kong, the people at the exhibition were very kind, with one woman giving us a brief tour of the pieces, and short explanations, and then pressing a catalogue on us, apologizing that is was only in Cantonese. I recognised two easy characters I have learnt, bamboo (竹) and mountain (山), which is always a thrill.
Forest of metallic balloons
Video of child and balloons
In the same mall a few floors up we came across more art, this time one I had seen mentioned online or in the paper somewhere. This was interactive, playful art, aimed perhaps at children, or for those feeling in a light-hearted mood. It had caught my eye initially because as an early childhood teacher I am always interested in how children are perceived and catered for in the wider arts world. We didn't have time to give it the attention it deserved - video installations always take a bit of time and energy to participate in - but I saw a couple of things I liked, including this simple but effective balloon forest. I guess I am always a sucker for interactive art, like the work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres that I saw in the NGV MOMA show in Melbourne. It was also a bit of a thrill to play a large game of quoits with the artist, a young Cantonese woman, using hula hoops and a 'Danger- slippery floor' sign, continuing the participatory art theme.
The last thing I wanted to note, in this very wide-ranging post, was my great affection for the laundry-hanging culture in Hong Kong. It is the absolute antithesis of the American suburbs where hanging laundry outside is banned. Yes, banned, in 'the land of the free' (right!). Here in Hong Kong, people are a lot more relaxed about this sort of stuff. You see clothing hung out to dry precariously from 40th story windows (they must really trust their clothes pegs/pins) as well as people stringing up their washing over bicycle-path handrails, or on washing lines they string up in parks. Just as people might play football in parks in Australia, people here seem to be relaxed enough to dry their laundry in them, particularly those pesky sheets that are a pain to dry in any apartment. To prove I'm not joking, I snapped this picture in Tai Po the other day - please note the need explicitly to ban hanging out laundry in this small public.

Sometimes you can learn a lot about a culture by what needs to be prohibited, and what does not!

Canto-shop?

Perhaps one day I will be able to read this!
The main thing I use my Cantonese for at the moment is shopping. I guess this is such a vital part of Hong Kong culture that I should not be ashamed of this fact. It is mostly that everyone I have met socially so far has had far better English than my Cantonese, certainly for the immediate future, and so the only times I have to use Cantonese are out there in public.
I am surprised at how easy I find it to hear Cantonese. Not that I am always hearing the tones perfectly, and most certainly not replicating them perfectly, but when I am out in public I regularly hear people say the few phrases that I do know. This is in contrast to my experience in Spain where if people were speaking rapid-fire Spanish I could easily miss everything they were saying, if I wasn't concentrating really hard. The theory I'm working with at the moment, is that the tones make it easier to distinguish between each Cantonese syllable, because they often-but-not-always provide a clear marker of what is in that syllable and what is not. This means I have less of those moments where I look stupid because I can't understand what someone has said, though I have that too, though just as many moments where I look stupid because I can't work out what to say myself. Surprisingly about five minutes later I usually manage to work out something I could have said, even with my extremely limited vocabulary, and which might come in useful another time.
So it is always nice when I can say the right thing at the right time. These opportunities come at the strangest times. Yesterday I was in the supermarket, and in the process of moving my trolley to let someone through (it was very busy in there, as it often is leading up to New Year) I accidentally nudged a stack of grocery items that cascaded down with a loud clatter across most of the aisle. Needless to say, this was a deeply embarrassing moment. I spend most of my time in Hong Kong trying NOT to look out of place or uncomfortable, and here I was drawing attention to myself in a VERY busy place. Luckily this was a stack of Pringle-like chip packets, and not something really breakable or messy, so at least I had that going for me. Two of the supermarket staff rushed up to help, and I managed to say '唔好思' (literally 'not good meaning') which is a colloquial way of saying sorry. I even heard one of them say the usual response, which is '唔緊'(literally 'not critical') or 'never mind'. So my embarrassment was slightly improved by actually coming up with some Cantonese words appropriate to the situation. I have to say this is the first, and I hope only, time that I have ever knocked down a stack of things in a supermarket, in any country, but I was glad for the opportunity to practice some Cantonese I hadn't used in public before!
I have also been practising my writing, as well as getting my head around how to generate characters on my iPhone. Basically this relies on you knowing the stroke order, and like predictive texting, allows you to put in the first couple of strokes and then brings up a list of possible characters that you might be aiming for. I don't know the language well enough to be able to interpret this list, but I presume they are ordered either by frequency of occurrence, or perhaps some Cantonese dictionary principles. Once you have chosen a character it will also bring up a list of other characters, ones that combine with the one you chose to make other common words. All very clever. So for me to enter one of the only words I know, and the first that I learnt, 'centre', I put in a down stroke, which automatically brings up '中' as the third character, and when I select that the first extra syllable in the list is '心' making the word '心'. So three keystrokes to bring up the word 'centre' - quicker than in English! Of course, as a gwai lo I have to know the stroke order, which will be second nature to a literate Cantonese speaker, but then I am trying to get that right anyway, and this gives me more incentive.
I also try to keep in practise with pencil and paper too, because I have long been a fan of Japanese calligraphy, and I figure if I work on my handwriting in Cantonese, that will make that all much easier when I get around to wielding a brush. So my latest practice has been learning to write enough of my address here in Tai Po, that a taxi driver could read it and get me home. In actuality I don't need to be able to do this, and I can get home okay without it, but I feel like it might be useful in an emergency, and it forced me to learn some tricky characters. I also learnt how to write Hong Kong (香港) because that seemed important too. I haven't got anyone to give me feedback on my penmanship yet, but hopefully soon.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

STOP PRESS: No bad coffee in Hong Kong!

A few posts ago, I was saying that I hadn't managed to find bad coffee in Hong Kong, yet. In the interests of research I was feeling brave enough today to try deliberately to find bad coffee. Where would I find bad coffee? I'm never going to darken the doors of Starbucks, I'm afraid to say. I am still running an informal boycott after they misguidedly opened a branch in Lygon St in Melbourne, the  birthplace of espresso coffee in Australia, mere years after Antonio Gaggia invented the espresso machine (thanks to Australia's nascent Italian community in the 1950s) Readers in Melbourne may want to check out this website if they're looking for somewhere new to try. I'd noticed a cafe in Tai Po called Blue Mountain cafe whose menus were all in Cantonese, and which seemed a very local place. To put this in context for those who don't know Hong Kong, Tai Po is a town way out in the New Territories, far from the cosmopolitan haunts of Hong Kong island. I thought it was therefore a likely place, if there was going to be one, not to have learnt the finer points of coffee making.
A perfect double espresso
The coffeegeeks among you will recognise the name 'Blue Mountain' because it is the name of one of the most famous coffees in the world, namely Jamaican Blue Mountain (and incidentally, the only written English in the whole place). I thought this meant at least that they would serve coffee, so that I wouldn't look like a total idiot trying to order coffee (咖啡) from a menu that didn't even contain it! So I went and tried out my best Cantonese - the staff seemed to know a little English, and asked, 'double or single'. I went for a double (in for a penny, in for a pound, as the English would say), and this is the result. Wow! Look at that great crema. It even came with a little jug of milk on the side, in case I wanted to turn it into a macchiato. Some days I might want this, but today I did not. So hats off to the barista guy at the Blue Mountain cafe in Tai Po. He deserves more business with coffees like this.
It turns out that the only bad coffee in Hong Kong so far has been at home! Being a true coffee nerd, the only thing I really HAD to bring was my trusty Rancilio Silvia, and the Nemox grinder. These survived the journey via UPS (though the grinder base got a little bent), and were swiftly installed on the benchtop in our kitchen. As you will know, the Silvia is a very reliable domestic machine, so I was confident I would at least be able to make good coffee at home. However so far, and it has only been a month, I have not been able to source good espresso beans reliably at all. At first I was buying supermarket beans, because that was the only place I knew how to shop at, and of course these never tell you when they have been roasted, and often have expiry dates up to a year away. Those who know these things say that coffee is at its best within two weeks of being roasted, and my experience of these last few weeks makes me believe that the 'stale beans=bad espresso' meme is true. I was spoilt in Melbourne, knowing many good places to pick up great freshly roasted coffee.
Here in Hong Kong I have only found one place so far, Zambra in Wan Chai, that roasts its own coffee locally. I have heard rumours of many others, but have yet to track them down. Now Wan Chai is five changes of public transport from where I live in Tai Po, which is not the most convenient place to restock my coffee supplies, to say the least. The coffee I did buy from them has been the best so far, but I was loathe to buy more than a couple of hundred grams without trying it first, and that quickly ran out. I know there are places that mail order, but I am worried that this will involve the package being delivered, not fitting in the mail box, and then me having to go through the whole palaver of either going to the Post Office in Tai Po (lovely though it is, it is another bus trip), or waiting in deliberately for a not-very-prompt Hong Kong Post redelivery. So I'd rather be able to buy them directly from a retail outlet, preferably one closer than the Island.
So if you're reading this and you're a local, can you help? Where can I find great coffee beans?

The Year of the Rabbit

New Year lights in Central
One of the nice surprises here has been the buzz generated about New Year according to the Chinese calendar, which this year falls on February 3rd. This is sometimes called Lunar New Year, because it falls on the second new moon after the Winter solstice (December 22nd) and traditionally is the start of spring. Normally in Australia, the quite mild Melbourne winter can still be rather bleak, mostly because it is a time of year with no celebrations, no public holidays, and nothing to distract you from the bad weather except the thought of holidays in Queensland.
In Hong Kong serendipity and tradition have combined to make winter a celebratory time of year. The colder weather in Hong Kong only really seems to last for a bit of December, January, and some of February, but during that time there is a big fuss made over Christmas, and now, about the New Year. This means lots of decorations, and lots of coloured lights, which due to the early onset of subtropical nights, you get to enjoy for much more time than you do in summers in Australia. The photo to the left doesn't capture the real glamour of the lights, but may give some sense of how much effort goes into decorating large buildings across the city. Entire facades of many buildings are given over to huge lighting displays, this year commemorating the upcoming year of the Rabbit. Apparently this astrological sign is famous for its diplomacy, so perhaps we can hope for some resolution of existing conflicts between and within countries this year! Is it too much to hope for some progress on the Israel-Palestine issue, or perhaps a resolution of the schism over gay-rights within the Anglican/Episcopalian community?
New Year display in Landmark building, Central
I like the way that there are New Year displays everywhere, from the cheap and cheerful, to the more elaborate ones that can be found in upscale malls. Given that I will be beginning my research into a thesis about class issues in early childhood this year, it is hard not to read these displays through the lens of class, and see how 'good taste' is displayed and performed according to the presumed clienteles of the different malls. I liked this display in the Landmark building, but is that simply because it uses more naturalistic materials, rather than acres of plastic, and so appeals to my class-based preferences for these materials?
Mushroom theme at New World, Sha Tin

I assume I am capable of reading these class issues accurately, but is this really true across the cultural divide? How much of the presentation of these New Year themes is affected by the designer's own class, and their exposure to more global notions of taste or fashion? Do some of the Cantonese people who use these malls wish that the displays were more like those of their youth, which presumably were more traditional?
I myself have a lot of resistance to the Christmas traditions, now that they have become freighted with so much consumerism. This is compounded by being a teacher, and having the busy end-of-year time in December compounded by friendship and family obligations for Christmas. So as an outsider, Chinese New Year seems very benign and quite lovely. There are lights, there are fireworks, and lots of visiting with family and friends. I might almost feel a bit jealous. Perhaps though, from within Chinese culture, New Year can be every bit as wearying as Christmas often feels to me.
Maybe it even comes down to one of my favourite laws, the law of diminishing returns. Perhaps in an emotional sense, your favourite Christmas, or Chinese New Year, or whatever, will always be the first ones you remember celebrating, but the more you do it, the less joy it gives you, until eventually the 'work' associated with this, whether emotional or physical labour, overtakes the feelings of satisfaction and happiness that used to be there. Perhaps an overly sobering thought to start the New Year with!

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

A new year, a new eco-system

As a gardener and plant lover, I felt like I knew something about the plant-life, and to a lesser-extent the animal life, in Australia and more locally around Melbourne. So it is very strange to move to another country, and another climactic zone, and not really know anything about this place. Of course this gives me the opportunity to learn things, which I like, but it still leaves me wandering along the street, looking at bushes and trees, and even if I have some idea of what they are, not knowing whether they are indigenous to the area, exotic imports, or whatever.
I'd actually feel more disoriented if there weren't so many Australian indigenous trees planted in Hong Kong. Everyday I have to walk past what look like a couple of specimens of the lemon-scented gum (Eucalyptus citriodora), and in the local neighbourhood there are also a lot of melaleucas planted as street trees (probably Melaleuca quinquenervia). Down at the my local park, Tai Po Waterfront Park, there is a planting of bottlebrushes (Callistemon viminalis?). Even on a walk in the local national park, a signboard told me I was seeing Eucalyptus Robusta, which has been planted to help stabilize the hillside and allow the local plant species to recover and recolonise. Perhaps this will be true in most places that I go around the world. Australian plants have adapted to cope with extremes of temperature, poor soils, lack of rainfall and so many varying conditions that they will probably be planted in many surprising places around the world.
I really need to do some serious exploration about this, but here is what I have discovered so far. The wildlife here is interesting, with many gorgeous butterflies, all of which are hard to photograph, so perhaps you can go and check out this local hiker's much better photos.
In terms of snakes, there seems to be a few venomous ones, but none to get seriously worried about, certainly not compared to Australia. There is a large snake called a Common Rat Snake (Ptyas mucosus) that is not dangerous to humans, but I imagine would be quite alarming to come across, given that they grow to about three metres long!
More excitingly for M, there are monkeys in Hong Kong, which she really wants to go and see (and of course there is a bus that goes from here to there!). These seem to be two species of Macaques (Macaca mulatta, M. fascicularis), though apparently these are not native to Hong Kong and must have naturalised from elsewhere, though they seem to be thriving.
My fascination though, is mostly with plants, so I was interested to read something of the history of forest cover in Hong Kong, from the Hong Kong Green Power (an environmental organisation) here.
This details the forests that were here originally when it was Chinese territories, sometimes nurtured for Feng Shui(風水) purposes and at other times cut down for fear of wild beasts! Often too, the forest cover seems to have been diminished by forest fires, a similarity with Australia that I was not expecting, and one that probably explains the planting of Australian trees here. Apparently a lot of trees were cut down during the Japanese occupation in World War II though there must be a lot more to this story that I don't yet know, given how respectful Japanese people are of their own forests. These days in Hong Kong there is a lot of attention to tree planting, but like in many modern cities, there is a difficulty in maintaining both nature reserves as well as urban plantings.
I know of two local plants so far, because they were 'discovered' here, namely the Hong Kong Camellia (C.hongkongensis) and the Hong Kong Bauhinia (B.blakeana), the latter of which is beginning to come into flower at the moment, and looking beautiful. However there is more to an ecosystem than these two plants, and that is what I need to learn...

Thursday, January 20, 2011

I love (HK) PT

A train on the East Rail line at Fo Tan(火炭)
I've been waiting for the perfect pictures for this, but I'll just have to add them later. I've been reading for years about sustainability and transport issues. If you want to read one book on the issue, read this one by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy. It contains so much information in it, it needs multiple reads to absorb it all, but by the end of that, you'll never quite view transport in the same way (or at least I didn't).
They make a compelling argument, that beyond a certain size all cities need good public transportation, because this is the only way to move sufficient quantities of people efficiently, and more importantly, at a lower cost to the planetary biosphere. The car lobby (and this job is often done by governments; witness the recent bail-out of the auto industry in the US) has done a good job of disguising the fact that cars are only effective for some sorts of journeys. Trying to have an automobile based city like Los Angeles is doomed to failure, because at some point, as L.A. has now discovered, the cost of building extra freeways becomes uneconomic, however desperately you massage the figures. I believe the city of Los Angeles has stopped building freeways (or so it suggests in this old article from the New York times, and is very belatedly investing in mass transit.
Which brings me back to Hong Kong, a city where public transport works like a dream. I live a long way out from Hong Kong island, way up in the New Territories, and by the logic of most cities (or at least my beloved Melbourne) this ought to mean that public transport would be rare, or non-existent. Instead we have the East Rail line (now run by the MTR) to whisk us into the centre of it all, and what seems like countless buses to go anywhere you might imagine.
Non-peak time on an outer metro line! Note wait time!

In fact, the logic of Hong Kong transit provision seems to be that if people need to get somewhere, then there should be some form of transport that takes you there. So there are buses to all neighbourhoods, even quite minor ones, buses to tourist attractions, nature walks, markets, stations, you name it, and of course the airport, just in case you don't want to catch the fast but slightly more pricey train. Not only that, but there are all types of buses, from official double-decker routes, to the more anarchic minibus system, to the privately-funded shuttle buses of some bigger institutions. So, for example, when we headed on the weekend before last up to the scenic Bride's Pool waterfall, there was a bus (that runs specifically on Sundays and Public Holidays) to take us there, and very efficient it was too, even if we missed a couple of them, by being caught between stops. Not only do the buses run everywhere, but they run frequently. In fact a 'bad' service is every twenty minutes, but usually they run more often. Where I was living in Melbourne, there was one bus, which ran every 45 minutes during the week, and every 75 minutes on weekends. Now that's one bus you don't want to miss.
Meanwhile the MTR (站 - the subway) runs often on two minute frequencies, blowing out to a horrifying ten minutes or so on the less popular lines. I don't want to belabour this point too much, but frequency really does matter for public transportation. Some places I need to get to require four interchanges - in most systems this would be a disaster, because the services would not always connect, and it would take forever. I have done that and similar journeys at least a dozen times in my short time living here, and my journey time varies only by about five minutes or so either way, because the trains and buses come so regularly.
On a brief tourist note, don't come to Hong Kong, and NOT travel on the trams down in Central. They seem like living history to me, despite being plastered with modern advertisements. They are gorgeous inside and out, and look like giant cereal boxes, patiently lumbering their way along the road. You may not get there as fast as the MTR, but you will do it in style, and all for only HK$2 (元).
If you tire of all the the myriad public transport options, or simply have too much to carry, then there is always a taxi around, which are plentiful, and inexpensive. Though you do have to communicate where you are going, and for that you may need a card with your destination address written in Cantonese. The lesson is, be prepared (or perhaps indicate your destination on a map on your smart-phone).
No discussion of public transport in Hong Kong could ever be complete without a discussion of the beloved Octopus card. I have used an Oyster card in London, and quite enjoyed that, but I couldn't help noticing that I seemed to be haemorrhaging money when I used it. With the Octopus card you have all the convenience of never having to buy a ticket, and fabulous prices as well. Not content to make your travelling life easier in this way, the Octopus card is starting to be accepted in more and more shops and cafes as well, so you can buy yourself a snack with your card, or perhaps get a coffee (咖啡), as I love to do. The side-benefit to this, for the non-Cantonese speakers visiting Hong Kong, is that many transitions that can otherwise be a bit of a headache in other countries, can be done with the Octopus card with no conversation at all. You walk up to the counter, put your purchase there, and then hold up your Octopus card (insert polite chit-chat here, if you want to give it a go, for example, 最近), at which point the amount flashes up in Arabic numerals, so you actually know how much it costs, you put the card on the reader, it beeps, and you're away. I feel like I'm living the future, even if it is a future low on civility and human interaction!!
I could say so much more on this, but I will restrain my enthusiasm. If you have any questions about it though, post a comment, and I will be happy to answer it to the best of my still-limited knowledge.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Industrial chic

Wah Luen Industrial Building, Fo Tan
Even before we moved to Hong Kong, we had read about this interesting town in the New Territories where many artists has settled. Similarly to somewhere like Brunswick or Fitzroy in my home town of Melbourne, this has become home to many artists because the rents were once cheap, and there were many old industrial buildings that could be rented cheaply as art studios.
This weekend and last weekend, these studios all have an open house, which is called the Fotanian (伙炭), and is now in its tenth year. Luckily for us, we found out it was on before it had finished, rather than afterwards, which would be more usual.
After more than the usual trials and tribulations on the MTR, I met up with M and another friend at Fo Tan station, and we wandered up in what I believed was the right direction. This being a new city to me, and one I have already become lost in, I have a healthy respect for how easy it is for me to become turned around. Perhaps this is not helped by most maps at MTR stations not having north at the top (this seems common here). Apparently the most important axis of the compass for Chinese society is East-West, rather than North-South in whitefella society, so perhaps that is why.
We walked about a kilometre through fascinating blocks of industrial buildings, many seeming to be mechanics workshops, gradually seeing more and more people heading in one direction. As we got closer we started to see signs for the Fotanian, and people clutching their bright pink maps/brochures, and we realised we had come to the right place.
Given that most days I still feel like a tourist here, it was great to be traipsing in and out of these industrial buildings, often walking up and through various truck loading zones, under scaffolding
Much admired bamboo scaffolding
 and often up clanky wheezing industrial elevators. I felt a lot less like a tourist, and much more like an arts-hound, and that has to be good, I think.
Though my accomplices had much busier days than me, and did not have the energy to see everything, we managed to see quite a few studios in the time we were there. There were hundreds of people at this event, and depending on the number and quality of lifts in a building, often quite a wait for a ride up, which added to the sense of anticipation. I was interested by the history of this art community, and how many of the 80+ artists involved are former students of a particular artist, who I think was a lecturer in contemporary art at nearby Chinese University of Hong Kong.
We were investigating studios pretty much at random, as we weren't familiar with any of the names of the artists as far as we could tell, so I was happy when we stumbled upon a ceramic studio at one of the places that we visited. Having learnt pottery in Melbourne for the last few years, I am hoping to find a studio to become part of here, so I noted down the details of the place to check out later. There was the usual variety of work on display, from more functional pieces, to more conscious sculptural pieces, to whimsical creations in a category of their own.
I was quite taken with these red bowls, with their deliberately distorted rim, and little Chinese character (not one I recognised) imprint on the front. I suppose my pottery work tends towards the 'craft' end, wanting to make beautiful but practical objects from clay, so this stoneware was right up my alley.
This particular studio was up on the rooftop of this industrial building so it opened out onto a HUGE terrace (particularly by Hong Kong standards) with interesting views across Fo Tan and to the surrounding hills. I am sure most HongKongers who went up there were secretly thinking, 'Imagine if this was our place, what we could do with this space'. We certainly were.
On a final note, I was interested to see if it was possible to pick the artsy crowd by their clothing, in a way that you probably could do in Melbourne (lots of black, for starters). However it was not clear that there was a particular subculture of arts lovers gathered at this event, at least not that I could 'read'. I certainly saw a few people dressed in a funky and avante-garde fashion (I must learn how to say, 'Can I take a photo of you?' in Cantonese - can anyone help me with the jyutping for this?) but nothing like what I had expected. It is something I will keep my eye out for, at future culture-vulture type events.

Friday, January 14, 2011

My bamboo life

Those who know me already know that I am a bamboo aficionado (just needed to use that word). One of the sadnesses of leaving Australia was leaving behind all my clumping bamboos that had yet to reach their full potential, particularly my black bamboo (Bambusa lako). My Oldham's bamboo was doing the best (B. oldhamii) with some culms as tall as eight metres, but that should get even bigger in time. As well as growing bamboo I love the many other uses it can be put to; as garden stakes, as a building material, for 'wood' flooring, for furniture, for clothing, you name it. Is there anything that bamboo can't be made into? In terms of sustainability, you need look no further than bamboo. It is as strong, often stronger, than most timbers, but being a grass, it matures much sooner (three to five years), rather than fifteen to twenty (often longer) for most timbers. It grows fast and strong (some bamboo culms have been measured to grow a metre in a day!) absorbing plenty of carbon dioxide and providing a very useful product on an ongoing basis. Apparently, though I have not seen this, when cultivating Moso (Phyllostachys edulis) all they do to harvest it, is cut wide swathes across the grove, then allow this to regrow, and so keep harvesting alternating strips of it on an ongoing basis. No replanting necessary. How could you not love this plant?
One of the pluses of coming to Hong Kong is to come to a place where bamboo is respected, loved and widely used. It never fails to make me smile to see all the bamboo scaffolding around town, even on the tallest buildings - it is actually a shock to see 'normal' steel scaffolds. Not only do I see it planted around widely - I walk past many clumps on my way to the bus stop - but so much that I buy is made from bamboo, not as a selling point, but because that is normal. Since we brought so little with us to Hong Kong (it really focusses the mind about what is necessary, paying air freight charges), we have had to buy a lot of things since we have been here, and naturally much of this is bamboo. So what have I got that is made from bamboo so far? A tray, a rice spoon, a spatula, a toothbrush holder (made very simply with the base being a bamboo internode, and the open top being sanded away a little bit for a more rounded look), some bamboo coasters, a bamboo chopping-board (naturally), and a pretty bamboo fruit bowl. I am sure there will be more to come, but for now that seems like a lot.
I guess I see bamboo as the shape of things to come, in an energy-constrained climate-conscious world. It is low-tech, easily created (grown) and worked with simple tools, often by hand. It is very strong, with high tensile strength, and flexible, making it suitable for use as a framing material for housing, even in earthquake zones (it is being used for this purpose by architects in Chile). To me, though I am no engineer, it is like a self-testing material - you know that if the bamboo culms are structurally sound in the grove, because they have been capable of standing upright when growing, you can have good confidence in their ability to maintain structural integrity when used for building. In my small experience of working with bamboo, it is possible to saw it, but trying to break it is immensely difficult, even with quite small culms, because it has such long and strong fibres that run right down the culms. It is these that provide the strength and flexibility both for things like scaffolding, but also when it is made into fabric.
Bamboo is also touted for its anti-bacterial qualities. I will need to research this more, but my understanding is that this is nothing too marvelous, simply that, like most woods, bamboo tends to absorb moisture from the environment into its surface, and this hugely reduces any chance for germs to breed, because they all rely on a moist environment. Please excuse this detour into hygiene - I am an early childhood teacher, so I have had to learn far more than I ever wanted to know about infection control and minimisation!
While on the subject of stuff and having to acquire more of it in Hong Kong, I have been very happy to find tableware that I love. As an occasional potter and lover of the craft of ceramics generally, I am always looking at objects made from clay, trying to understand how they are made, what aesthetic traditions they are drawing upon, and so on. In a Japanese department store here (YATA) we found a set by a Hong Kong company Dynasty, that caught our eye. I loved the ways it managed to find a different take on the teapot, milk jug and other items in the range. To my eye it looks both contemporary, but also 'cute'(俏). As there is also asymmetry in many elements, such as the off-centre lid of the sugar bowl, it also has Japanese influences. The design, which to my eye references cherries, and cherry-blossom, also seems to draw on Japanese influences. Mostly though, I love it because it makes me smile every time I look at it, and how can that be bad? Whatismore, I own my first set of ceramic 'chinese' spoons, and that must be a milestone of sorts...

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The simplest things...

I am amused by what can be hard to find in a new country, as well as those things that are easy. If you want fresh vegetables, tea of all descriptions, clothes from super-cheap (賤) to super-expensive (貴), mobile phones and at the moment, Lunar New Year stuff, then this is all easy to find.
Two things that have surprised me by being hard to find, are sink plugs, and matches. They seem ordinary-enough items, things you should find quite easily, but not so. When I go looking for plugs, what my eye stumbles upon are many many things that look like plugs, but turn out to be suction hooks, of which there are a huge variety sold in Hong Kong. Perhaps because there are so many tiny apartments, and because so many people rent, there is a big market for cheap and easy storage, such as a hook on a suction cup. Sadly, I do not know how good they are at stopping water from flowing down a drain, and the hook might be annoying in a bath or tub of dishes. I can only assume that most sinks have built-in plug units, which means that ordinary plugs are not much needed, or perhaps I am looking in the wrong places - though where would these be?
And matches... Do people not need to light all the incense, the joss sticks, and the candles that I see for sale. They also seem quite big on barbeques here, and you see charcoal and firelighters for sale, but not matches. Is this a cultural thing? Do Hong Kongers have handy fire-breathing pets that I do not know about? Perhaps they are in touch with other ancient wisdoms, such as rubbing two sticks together?
I am very happy to be enlightened on these matters. If anyone has come across simple things that seem hard to find in other countries, I would love to know about them.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Life in the espresso lane

If I could be said to have worries about moving to such an interesting place as Hong Kong, it was around leaving behind the coffee culture of Melbourne. While I still miss some of my favourite cafes, I should not have worried. I have yet to have a bad espresso in Hong Kong, which seems amazing in a culture that is historically a tea-drinking one. Perhaps the Chinese respect for tea has encouraged in them a respect for the humble Coffea arabica bean (though how does that explain all the bad coffee in England?).
So what is coffee culture like in Hong Kong? There are a number of speciality European-style coffee shops around the place, with stylish decor, and an ambience of international cool. I have been bad about documenting the names of the places I have stumbled upon, so I will get back to specific cafes in a later post. Many of these are being run by native Hong Kongers, seemingly, while some are run by expat Australians or New Zealanders, like the very popular Fuel Espresso in the IFC mall in Central.
However I am learning that I do not need to be such a coffee snob as I was in Melbourne. There is a chain (yes, a chain) of cafes here in Hong Kong called the Pacific Coffee Company. This was set-up by an American guy called Thomas Neir in 1993 when he noticed the lack of coffee shops in Hong Kong. I have now tried out about half a dozen of their stores, and I have found the quality of the espresso good in all of them. They must have good barista training to achieve this sort of consistency across a number of outlets, and that is to be applauded I think, whatever the size of the company. So if you're in Hong Kong and need a coffee, don't be afraid to give one of their branches a try. There are always comfortable (if kitschy) red armchairs, as well as the day's papers in English or Cantonese, as well as magazines galore, and the coffee should be good enough for all but the most fanatical coffee-geek. So you can find more interesting, more quirky, and more local coffee shops if you want to look for them, but if you need a caffeine fix NOW, then this could be your place.
We headed over to Shek O yesterday, to see what is supposedly one of Hong Kong's best beaches. We were impressed, both by the beach, and by the village, which is 'oh-so-cute', but the real surprise was to get a great coffee at a tiny (eight tables or so) cafe in the village. I guess I expect some attempts at great coffee from places in the city, but would not normally be so optimistic about small owner-operated cafes in out-of-the-way places. Perhaps it is impossible to find bad espresso in Hong Kong? Right now, this is what I want to believe.
Coming soon: A list of cafes with good coffee, and possibly ones without, if I can find any!

Friday, January 7, 2011

Sustainability in the SAR

Those who know me realise that I am a bit of a nut about sustainability. I want a small carbon footprint, so that I can feel like I am putting my money where my mouth is about climate change.
Moving to a new country poses some challenges to that. Back in Australia, I knew the wider political issues around climate change, I knew about how the stationery energy sector works, far too much about waste management issues in Melbourne, and I had my transport issues sorted (bike first, then public transport, and if that couldn't work, fuel-efficient diesel small car).
So how do all these work in HK? I've only been here a week or so, and don't know many people to ask, so this will just be my first impressions of these issues. 
Firstly, the good news. In coming here we made the definite decision not to have a car. This feels good. Public transportation is so efficient here in Hong Kong that we seem to be able to get almost anywhere as quickly or quicker by public transport. Sadly, I don't yet have a bike, and can only look on in envy as the Tai Po locals cycle from place to place. There is a mixed belief in helmets here. The lycra set seem to wear them - perhaps because they are going to ride fast enough that they know they would hit hard if they fell. Then there are parents riding with children, who seem to wear them to set a good example. Most ordinary folk riding slowly, and particularly students, definitely do not. No surprises there, really. Hong Kong is also very much a walking city so there are always people out in the streets, especially late at night (certainly as late as we will ever be out). I read a statistic that nine out of ten trips in Hong Kong are by public transport, so all the people walking makes sense.
Having moved into accommodation at the University, our power and water bills are paid through M's work, so I have no idea yet about how much we will use, or whether there is a choice to buy green power here (I have seen some signs that mention this, but don't know if it means the same as in Australia). That said, I also don't know about the normal mix of power generation in Hong Kong, and how green that is (it has to be better than the brown coal power stations in Victoria - Hazlewood, I'm looking at you).
We're very sensitive to water issues in Australia, so I have wondered how that plays out here in HK. There doesn't seem to be any sense of water shortage here (certainly municipal gardens seem to be watered freely by old-fashioned sprinkler systems). Perhaps the monsoonal-type rains easily fill the water storages here, and there are certainly a lot less private gardens in Hong Kong for water to be over-used on. It doesn't take much to keep a houseplant watered in an apartment!
Lastly waste-management rears its ugly head! This seems to be quite a big issue from what I can see. There have already been a number of articles in the local papers about how the landfills are filling up fast (one article said by 2013). I have also seen lots of signs up here and there encouraging people to separate their waste into the various recycling categories, and some public locations have separate recycle bins as well as general waste bins. So there is some attention being paid to it.
On a personal level it is distressing not to be able to compost. I enjoyed using a Bokashi bin in our apartment last year in Melbourne, but that relies on having somewhere to put the partially composted material once a month, when the bin is full. I wouldn't even know where to find such a place, if it exists in our neighbourhood in Tai Po. My initial searches on the web haven't been promising, but then I can only search the sites in English, not in Cantonese. Certainly the Chinese thoughout history have been very efficient recyclers of organic waste, so I hope that expertise is not totally lost here in modern HK. In our apartment block there are recycle bins to separate waste, though even this poses some problems. One of the bins is for metals (sounds normal, right?) but then it says not to put steel cans in there. WTF?!? Recycling rates for steel around the world are around 80-90%, mostly because iron/steel is so easy to separate out from the waste-stream using a good old electromagnet. Can they really be serious? I put my steel cans in there anyway, out of a sense of hopefulness, but I felt uneasy doing so. The plastics bin does not say which numbers can be recycled, so again I put all my plastics in there. Paper and cardboard was pretty conventional, with no waxed or overly contaminated waste being acceptable. So I was left with glass bottles, and where did they go? I couldn't see any bin for them at all. Is there some other system in place for these that I don't know about yet? For now they sit forlornly in my recycling box, wondering why they are left out of the party. The answer will have to wait for future installments.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Baby steps in Cantonese

 The moment has finally arrived where I must stop playing at learning Cantonese and actually practice it. Like most adult language learners, this is the scary part, because I have to risk appearing incompetent, foolish, or even offensive, if I choose the wrong word or the wrong tone.
I have forced myself to get right into it straightaway, despite my limited vocabulary. I have had a few small successes, managing to ask where the railway station is (火車站在哪裡), and directing taxis to two different places. I was less successful at the vegetable market, thinking the grapes were 11(十一) dollars rather than 51(五十一), though to my ears the five at the start of fifty one is easy to miss.
Today I may have even been complimented on my Cantonese ability, though if that was what she said, the woman at the store at Tai Po market was being very generous indeed. All I said was 'I think I want'(我想要)[notice I couldn't even remember how to say 'this'] , and then, 'thanks for that'(). Perhaps she wanted to be encouraging, because most gwai lo are so hopeless. I'd like to think that perhaps I hadn't mangled her language quite as badly as most, but how would I know?!? I need more feedback. Once I am on top of the basic household stuff here, I will have to search out some Cantonese lessons.
The competence thing is an interesting one - for me it is a bit like trying to learn to ride a horse. If I have had a couple of successful language encounters (ie. I understood something, or someone seemed to understand me) then I feel more confident, and will probably try some more. If I fall off that horse, though, and feel like I have completely frozen up, or said the wrong thing, then it is that much harder to try and use Cantonese the next time. My strategy at the moment has been to browbeat myself quietly into trying again, so I don't retreat into my usual silent gesturing or mute looks of incomprehension.
While I'm on the subject of language, I did find this nice little piece about the difference between the two sorts of thank-you in Cantonese. I have been paying a lot of attention to this particular nuance, but in no way think I have it sorted yet.
On the more fun side, I spend my time out and about trying to find the few characters I know on signs and in advertisements and things. The MTR is a great place for this, because these usually come with English translations! At the moment I think I know about twenty characters, and even some of these I may be getting confused with similar ones. As I'll need to know a few thousand to be considered literate, I have a long way to go... I was excited to discover the idea of 'radicals' (or whatever the linguists are calling them now) - the smaller sub-elements of each character. These are very handy to know, as they may give you a small clue as to what the word means. One of the first examples I have collected is Kong(港), as in Hong Kong (usually translated as Fragrant Harbour). Notice the three small strokes down the left-hand side of the character? These are the radical for water, something that most harbours tend to contain. How can you not love that? Since then I have been watching out for the radicals for person, for fire, and for hand, but I am seeing lots of others that I recognise as having seen in other different characters, but I still don't know what they mean. Part of my difficulty there is finding a Chinese dictionary I can understand. Google Translate seems okay like that, though it gives the sound in Putonghua, which is pretty useless for me trying to learn Cantonese. Still, I'm sure the truth is out there...