Space to think, space to move...

I'm never quite sure what the ethics of taking photos of unsuspecting strangers is, so this photo is artfully blurred.
Just a quick post, tonight, to say that yesterday I had one of those moments when I really knew I was in a different culture. I mean, most of the time as a newcomer to Hong Kong, I live my daily life knowing that it's quite different, but mostly acting as if it's all quite familiar, because that seems to be a good way of getting through the day. I think I can only take so much novelty in any given week - I think my brain is being stretched taking it all in at the moment - so this strategy keeps me moving along without worrying too much about the detail.
Anyway, back to what I wanted to talk about. So I was on the MTR, as I am quite frequently, and about to get off the train at University station. I'd got up from my seat (yes, I actually had a seat) and gone to stand in front of the door, you know, facing it ready to get off, with my nose perhaps 30cm from the actual door. About 2 seconds before the doors actually opened, someone moved into that really rather small space between me and the door, ready to get off. Now this wasn't a bad thing. I wasn't in a hurry, and I hadn't been jostled. From my perspective, coming from Australia, this would just never have happened. Whether it is about different approaches to personal space, or whatever, I can never remember any similar thing happening to me there - it is almost literally unimaginable. As it was, in this particular instance I  didn't know what to think. If you'd asked me I would have said I was as close to the door as I would ever want or need to be, unless the train was packed, which it wasn't. And yet someone saw the space in front of me as a socially acceptable gap to stand in, ready to deboard, as our American cousins might put it. Strange.
What made it a little bit stranger was that I couldn't put it down to aberrant behaviour, as if this was some outsider, even from an HK perspective. As I'd been sitting down I'd been watching these two older women chatting across the aisle in front of me. They seemed like perfectly average women, in their late forties/early fifties, chatting about life while on their way home. And if you'd asked me to think of a profile of a person, by age/class/ethnicity/gender/whatever who might step in front of me, one of these women would have been about the last on my list of candidates. I'm not going to obsess about this much longer, but it reminded me, quite forcefully, that I truly don't understand this place, and perhaps never really will.
That's actually quite a useful lesson to have underlined every now and again, particularly given the almost negligible inconvenience or harm I suffered from it. I wonder when I'll get my next reminder....

Apartment-hunting in HK

Victoria Towers (the tallest buildings)

When M. and I moved to Hong Kong we always knew we wouldn't stay in Tai Po for ever. Part of moving to Hong Kong was to be part of the bustle of the city, and that bustle is pretty muted where we are on the outskirts of Tai Po.
We had planned to move around June, but one of the problems with this plan is that we knew nothing about finding an apartment here. We have spend the first few months trying to quiz the few people we know here about the process, but because none of them are quite in our situation, what they had to say was not always very useful to us. A few generous people offered to drive us around to real estate agents, and translate for us if necessary, and we'd seriously considered taking them up on those offers.
However, when we were wandering around Tsim Sha Tsui (TST) one day, M. was looking at the display in the window of a real estate agency trying to educate herself, and one of the agents came out and offered (in English!) to show her some places. Quite by chance this became the start of our apartment hunting journey - this was late March, and we weren't planning to move anytime soon. The agent, whose English was very good, showed us a couple of apartments in Victoria Towers (pictured above), including one on the top (76th) floor. Now as someone who has worked hard to overcome a fear of heights, this was a little overwhelming. I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to avoid looking out the windows of my apartment for an entire tenancy. This top floor apartment even included a huge roof 'garden' (eg. concrete area, ready for plant-pots, BBQ or whatever) which would have been a huge luxury in the centre of the city, but at a few hundred metres above ground, it didn't feel entirely like our idea of a garden. We were able to quiz the agent on some of the many details about private rentals that we were hazy on, which was useful, but ultimately we both decided that Victoria Towers was not for us. Still, it got us started on the process and that day we wandered around some more, and worked out an area of Jordan (the next neighbourhood north of TST) that we liked the look of.
As nearly everybody lives in apartment buildings in HK, and most of these are pretty big by world standards, often a building name is the most significant thing about your address. This information tells anyone who knows the area not just where you live but even quite a lot about how you live. So as part of looking around we also started noting down the names of some of the buildings we liked the look of, such as 3 Jordan and City 18.
Of course at this stage we had no idea how to find apartments in these buildings, but they certainly looked interesting to us. On our next visit down to the area we were again looking in the window of an agency, when someone called to us from across the road. Given that in this part of HK someone calling out to you is trying to sell you tailoring services, or fake handbags and watches, you can imagine the suspicion with which we viewed this. We looked at each other, but then instinctively decided that given our ignorance about real estate we probably had nothing to lose by talking some more about it. This turned out to be a good decision. Tom, for that was his name, worked for a small agency just on the TST side of the Jordan/TST dividing line, and had pretty good English - certainly better than our skill at Cantonese! So we talked to him about some of the buildings we had liked, and made a appointment with him to see a few apartments.

'Kitchen' of an older building

I won't bore you with all of the details of our search, because so much of it is new to me that I could probably write pages and pages about it, trying to understand it all. Suffice it to say that Tom proved surprisingly diligent in his searching on our behalf, and best of all, worked hard at listening to what we seemed to want in an apartment. There is an incredible range of apartments in HK, from grungy to super-swanky, from tiny-tiny to ridiculously big, and with furnishings ranging from everything to nothing at all. And when I say 'nothing', I'm not joking. This 'kitchen' turned out to be basically a bench with a sink, without even a cooktop, let along a microwave or a conventional oven. Had it crossed the fine line between kitchen and laundry?!? Given how much we like to cook, things like this sometimes presented a bit of an obstacle.
The other difficulty, that was not immediately apparent, was that because we liked those buildings that were smaller, both in height and size, we were immediately reducing our chances of finding anything we wanted. The reason everyone wanted to show us apartments in buildings like Victoria Towers is that because there are half a zillion apartments in that development, there will always be a few available. Whereas in smaller buildings, particularly the good ones, the turnover is low and the number of total apartments is small. This means that we could be waiting a very long time even to look at an apartment in that building, let alone finding one that suited our needs.

Our future home, Kimberley 26, in centre frame.

So in the end we ended up choosing one of the first apartments Tom showed us, even though initially we'd decided it was more expensive than we'd wanted. Having looked further we realised that it probably matched what we wanted better than most things we were likely to see, and so we did the Hong Kong thing, and bargained. In the end we got what seemed to us like a pretty good deal, though who knows if a shrewd Hong Kong local could have done better (almost certainly, I imagine). We ended up down in the heart of TST, rather than in the small area of Jordan that we initially liked the look of. On the upside, it is a very comfortable, nicely furnished apartment, with a better kitchen than most (by Hong Kong standards, which means that both of us could conceivably be in it at the same time, though we'll have to be very polite about it!), high ceilings, and a view out to a park, albeit at some distance. Most importantly, we are going from having just one supermarket a kilometre's walk away, to having so much public transport/commerce/ art/culture/street life right on our door step that it will take us months even to get our heads around it all. I'm particularly excited about having at least two cinemas within a five minute walk of the apartment - for me that spells civilization. There are also coffee shops nearby, though so far none that I have really been passionate about. Still, I've been getting into writing reviews for Beanhunter, so I suspect I will be able to expand the options of those looking for good espresso on Kowloon-side.
We haven't done all the formalities yet - we've signed a pre-contract and paid a deposit, but haven't signed the full tenancy agreement yet - so we're still very much learning as we go. So far, though, the process has been easier than we'd expected, though still with its moments of panic, as we realise how little we really know about the legal system here. It is all a very good reminder that there is really no substitute for the cultural capital of growing up in a place, and knowing enough about it to at least know the right questions to ask, or the right places to start looking. Without that, you just have to stumble along, like we have been doing, and hope for the best.

Happiness is a plastic bag

A display at YATA

I know as a whitefella in Australia there was a stereotype about Chinese people loving plastic bags. I don't know where this stereotype originated, because quite honestly, it seems like most people from ANY culture love plastic bags. I think about six billion of them get used annually in Australia, for a population of 22 million, so that certainly isn't the responsibility of the 2% or so of Australians of Chinese origin.
So it was interesting coming to Hong Kong and learning about the debates about packaging here. There seem to be two forces at work. Historically it seems that Hong Kong folks have loved plastic packaging for its ability to keep things hygienic (which I think gets to be a bit more of an issue in a hot humid climate than it does in the dry climate of Melbourne, where stuff tends to dry out, rather than go mouldy or breed bacteria) as well as its convenience. This is now under mild siege from the green lobby, which sees much of this packaging as contributing to the landfill problems in Hong Kong, as well as squandering fossil fuels, polluting the oceans, killing wildlife etc etc.
This leads to a situation where if you shop at a major supermarket, then you are encouraged to bring your own bag, and get charged for any (large) plastic bag that you need. I even have checkout staff thanking me when I bring my own bag, as if I am doing them a favour by saving them the few cents that the store would otherwise be spending on a bag. As with most legislation, it cannot cover all situations and so the majority of market stalls and other small retail outlets give you bags for everything and anything. Even at the supermarkets, it seems to be traditional to bag up potentially messy items (such as dairy products) in extra plastic bags, so it takes a strong sense of determination, as well as keeping your wits about you, to head out on a shopping trip and come back with NO extra bags. After trying to say 'no bag' in Cantonese, and have people look at me in puzzlement, I got smart and asked T., who is from this neck of the woods, and she told me that most people would say 「唔晒」(m saai). This works much better, and these days I manage to avoid a good 80% of the bags that people attempt to give me!

Potatoes at CitySuper

Even despite the plastic bag issue, there is a lot of enthusiasm for packaging. While you are starting to find the individually-wrapped-servings-within-a-packet creeping in with things like biscuits, at Australian supermarkets, it is still the exception rather than the rule. Here I'd say it is the other way round, and I have to read the package scrupulously (if it is in English and not in Cantonese, Japanese, or some other language) to try and avoid the double packaging. Again, I think some of this comes from the humid climate, where a packet of biscuits could probably get kind-of yucky if you had them sitting around for too long.
More weird though, is the need to package up fruit and vegetables individually. This ranges from open-air markets, where this is rare, but not completely absent, to a store like YATA (Japanese department store) where everything seems to be wrapped-to-the-max (see above). This seems to be more true with things that bruise easily, like apples, which sometimes have there own little polystyrene foam 'jacket', but really, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it. The most ridiculous example had to be, though, the individually wrapped and priced potatoes at my favourite store, CitySuper in Shatin. Though I love the range they have, I try and avoid buying vegetables there, because I'm actually not that worried if a bit of dirt from a potato gets on my bag, and if it needs a wash before I cook with it, well I can do that too.
What has to be kept in mind with all this, is that from a climate change perspective, this packaging thing is small potatoes (pun intended). HongKongers, with their public transport use and high density living, have much smaller carbon footprints that almost anyone living a Minority-world lifestyle anywhere on this planet, no matter how many plastic bags they get through in a year. And be honest with yourself, don't you secretly admire the neatness of that display of potatoes?!?