Scaffolding the Hong Kong way...

Is this a thing of beauty?

I know I tend to blog a lot about bamboo (竹), but then it is very dear to my heart. And I've been thinking a lot about this iconic 'Hong Kong' approach to scaffolding. I'd originally thought this would be the case across the whole of China, but it's not, as a simple trip across the border to Shenzhen will prove, with all the metal scaffolding that's you see there.

It's easy to fall in love with the simple beauty of such a fundamentally functional form of construction, which is why it was so wrong to see this metal scaffolding over in Central (photo left). It's lines are too straight, too precise, too square. It lurks, blockishly, on it's square metal feet, looking like it may be there to stay. It doesn't soar, it doesn't silhouette itself against the sky, in a strange ethereal blend of nature and culture, like its bamboo cousin.

A model of a Cantonese Opera theatre

It so happens that M. and I visited an exhibition in our local neighbourhood, in the Hong Kong Discovery Centre, a little and lesser known museum in Kowloon Park, which was hosting a display about the art, or perhaps craft, of Hong Kong bamboo scaffolding. Apparently there is a long and illustrious history of this form of construction, with scaffolding being a sideline, alongside other bamboo construction projects, such as the iconic temporary theatres for Cantonese Opera. These structures are apparently all built under the eagle eye of a Master Builder, who doesn't use any plan, just working from their long sense of practical experience of designing bamboo structures, presumably through a sort-of apprenticeship model. One of the more interesting aspect of this exhibition was all the scale models (which I love!) of  different theatre buildings, showing how they are each adjusted to particular sites, with unique topographies, and according to the size needed for each theatre production. Naturally, in Hong Kong, where there is a lot of very steep land, it is particularly useful to be able to fit a building onto steep plots of land, such as a piece of rocky coastland (as illustrated in one of the models). What has always fascinated me about the bamboo structures is that they don't worry about having a flat base for each bamboo pole, where it rests on the ground, because the stability of the structure is related to the ways that it is all tied together into one stable unit. I'm sure the lightness of bamboo helps also, in making it less critical to have really solid foundations.

So having been enlightened a little about some of the history and culture of bamboo building in Hong Kong at this exhibition (there was more, but I'll spare you the details), I was fascinated to see a variety of bamboo structures being built in Hong Kong park for the Tri-ciprocal Cities exhibition. With my new understanding in mind, I was able to see how the structures had been tailored specifically to those sites, and as you can see in the photos, even the particular plants that were on the site. So instead of being a liability, the natural environment became incorporated into the structure, becoming a sort of indoor garden. Like I said, they're beautiful! I thought the exhibitions were interesting, and I learnt some things I didn't know about the Hong Kong and Taipei architecture scenes, but really I spent much of my time admiring the bamboo structures.
It all makes me curious about whether you could use such structures for temporary housing? Could you build a large structure of bamboo, with a very lightweight but waterproof wrap on the outside, and another perhaps reflective lining on the inner surface, with some low cost insulation in between, perhaps loosefill straw? I mean, you might have to watch the fire risk aspect, but it seems like you could make a large, but quite well insulated structure relatively fast, with this sort of bamboo know-how. These are the things I muse over, as I wander (行吓) around Hong Kong!

Gobi 65, or Why I'll never make it as a food blogger

Blurry Gobi 65

This is really not a perfect picture, but then neither was the dish. The other day I was reading this post from my friend Johanna's great food blog, and it made me long for a great Gobi 65, or more specifically, the great Gobi 65 from Malabar Hut.
Now I can find some excellent Indian food here in Hong Kong (if I haven't already recommended Brantos, let me do so again) but they DON'T make Gobi 65, and that's a great shame, because it's the best entree (appetizer for those of you in the US) ever.
A long while back I'd tried to replicate the dish at home, and it was a miserable failure. I figure it'd been long enough that I should give it another try. Actually, I gave it two tries, and they were both vast improvements on my long-ago effort, but still not as good as I had hoped. Tasty, but not drop-down-delicious.
As I'm not a real food blogger, I'm not going to go into great details about making the dish. I used this recipe, which I have to say, is probably pretty close to the techniques that must be used in the hallowed original, though perhaps I just need twenty years more practice. I used the recipe as it was, but I did put in garlic, and I didn't have any saffron. On my first attempt, I didn't think my batter was spicy enough, and perhaps my marinading time wasn't long enough. The second time I prepared the batter before lunch, so it could marinade all afternoon, as well as upping the spice quotient, and this seemed to work well. My small problem the second time was a classic frying problem - I mustn't have got the oil temperature quite right, so my cauliflower was a bit too oily, which always takes away a little bit of the joy. Why, oh why, did I leave my cooking thermometer back in Australia? (Okay, yes, so I have a very small kitchen here, but it would still be handy!)
My only real wisdom to pass on about Gobi 65 is this - isn't there a fundamental mismatch between the size of a cauliflower, and the perfect size for a serving of Gobi 65? I found the very smallest cauliflower I could, and it still made two much-too-large servings, for our family of two. So by my reckoning, you'd probably need to have a family of about eight, to really make the most of a cauliflower without fried-food overload. So perhaps I'll be putting my Gobi 65 ambitions aside for another year or so, and settle for just a little bit of food nostalgia instead.

 

The concrete jungle...

Though I love Hong Kong, living where we do in Tsim Sha Tsui you can feel very distant from any idea of 'nature'. Not only is most of the land that constitutes TST artificial, reclaimed from the harbour over time, but all that is on top of it is a triumph of the built environment, with the smallest buildings being about ten stories high.
There's a lot of convenience to all this, with shops and cinemas and restaurants all within spitting distance (as they so charmingly say in Australia). The downside is that sometimes the most natural thing I am in contact with is my houseplants, which have been bred, crossbred, grown by a nursery, and then bought deep in the urban jungle, in Fa Yuen St (花園街).
So it was an unexpected pleasure to have an incursion from 'the wild' (as Bob Graham might call it!). As I was typing away, working on my thesis, I realised there was a large, rather dignified beetle, on my water bottle. I don't really know what it is, though a quick websearch suggests it may be from the Pentatomidae family. I'd be happy to be enlightened about this... Now if I were back in Australia I'd just put any bugs I found back in the garden (with the exception of mosquitos, for whom this is a mandatory, though conscious-stricken, death penalty), but what to do in my eight floor apartment? I didn't know what the bug ate, but I was fairly sure it's diet couldn't be easily sourced in our small apartment. Eventually I realised that if it got up here, it must be fairly competent about getting around, so I gently put it on the ledge outside my window (ahh, the wonders of terminal velocity - no fear of heights for bugs), and got back to my work, reassured that the message from the wild had been heard...

Fix or flick?

Our repaired handy-vac, happy again...

Picking up on the environmental thread of this blog, after a long delay, I need to say that there is one green area where Hong Kong excels.

Back in Australia, it was defeating whenever an appliance broke down. If it was a small appliance, you knew that there was no chance of getting it repaired, and if you were lucky, it was new enough that you could take it back to the store and get an even newer replacement. However with no electronic waste (e-waste) program, you knew that it was likely to be bound for the dump.

If it was a large appliance, such as a washing machine, you had a genuine desire to get it fixed, because the pain and expense of replacing it was a lot harder than taking something like a toaster or electric kettle back to the store. But even then it was hard to find someone to fix it, and when they did come out, there seemed to be little guarantee that the thing would actually be fixable, and if it was, it often cost most of the price of a replacement machine.

Now, I had thought that this was simply the modern world, and that the relentless search for cheap labour, and the driving down of manufacturing costs, had made things not worth repairing. It turns out that this is not actually true, or at least, only true for Australia.

For in Hong Kong, everything and anything seems to be repairable. This is A GOOD THING. A repaired item doesn't need to be replaced entirely, or even very much at all. It doesn't need to be condemned to landfill, and only make the world that little bit more polluted. And best of all, when it is repaired you don't have to relearn how to operate a new make or model - you have your old 'friend' back in place. Nice.

Now even though I'm writing this I find it hard to believe, but it has turned out to be true, time and time again. The last twelve months has been a bad year for stuff going wrong. I guess if you want to have bad karma, it's much better to have it with electrical goods that with your health. Bad stab-mixer or bad stabbing pains in the heart? I know which one I'd choose!

Let me see all the things that have broken... Hmmm... Hand-blender, handheld vacuum cleaner, the toilet cistern (three separate problems), the air conditioner, the microwave, and the electric kettle. So I am now quite experienced with getting stuff fixed now, especially toilets (唔該晒, 陳先生 - Thanks, Mr Chan!).

The latest to go was the hand vacuum cleaner, which we bought because we didn't have a vacuum cleaner at all, and it seemed like it might be a more suitable size for our small apartment. It has, it's been perfect, but the other day, while lifting up the bed platform to access the under-bed storage (a must in a small apartment), the cord to the vac got caught as we put it down, and completely severed. So our poor little vac gradually got less and less charged, a pathetic low-pitched whine, until we noticed it's power source wasn't actually connected to any electricity grid.

Now this had been our mistake. I assumed I would have to buy a new charging base, so I headed to my closest listed repair store, which turned out to be just near the Star Ferry terminal, in Tsim Sha Tsui. I took the broken charger to the repair counter and explained, in English (as I wasn't up to this nuance in Cantonese) that this had been our fault, and was it possible to buy a new base. The very helpful staff-member said, 'Do you have your warranty with you?' (I didn't, because I hadn't even thought this would be covered). He said, 'Don't worry, I can see the manufacturing date here, let's just see if they'll repair it for you, just sign here, take this receipt, and come back in a week.'

I came back in a week, receipt in hand, to find that the power-cord had been replaced, and even better, I wasn't being charged anything! Is this some secret conspiracy by Hong Kong appliance manufacturers to create good will? Is there really that fierce a competition for business in Hong Kong? Whatever the reason, I love it! It may be a pain when something breaks, but I am made endlessly cheerful by the need NOT to have to throw things out, and relieved when the repair cost has been minimal, or nothing.

So clearly the Australian situation is not normal around the world. Perhaps the consequences of high labour costs, and great distance from the centres of manufacturing, makes the Australian marketplace particularly prone to the chuck-and-replace approach? So for all those who might be reading this, and living in a 'repair' culture, rather than a 'replace' one - celebrate! And perhaps be extra nice to your next repairer - they're saving the world, one repair at a time...