At last...

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I finally made it to a Dragon Boat race. It's June 6th, and so it's 端午節 (Dragon boat festival), a public holiday devoted just to this event. If I was going to watch a Dragon Boat race this year, I figured it had better be today. The public holiday commemorates the sport (which is pretty ancient) as well as the story of Qu Yuan, which you can read about at the wikipedia link, if you're interested.

Now there are many different dragon boat races on today, but I wanted to go back to our old neighbourhood, and enjoy the familiarity of Tai Po. I've walked many times in Tai Po waterfront park, and figured it was as beautiful a place as any to watch some racing.

Loved all the bamboo structures

My interest in Dragon Boat racing came about because of a book that I read by two New Zealanders called "Time to eat the dog", which was an attempt to put some numbers on the environmental impact of many common activities, such as sport, keeping pets, or whatever. Their discussion of which sports had the smallest carbon footprint concluded that the best, at least out of the ones they examined, was Dragon Boat racing. Now at the time, I don't think I'd even heard of it, or at least it hadn't made much of an impression on me. Their analysis at least intrigued me enough that when we moved to Hong Kong I thought, 'I must see one of those races', and so here I was. The 271 bus provided a convenient, and uncommonly peaceful, way to get there, and the place was buzzing with people, even at 8.30am.

So what did I learn about Dragon Boat racing? Well, only what I could learn with my eyes and ears, because I didn't see any explanations of the proceedings, and I didn't understand the commentary, except for the numbers and the word Tai Po! Every dragon boat seems to have twenty rowers, ten on each side, each with an individual paddle. There is also a drummer, who keeps time up the front with a regular beat on a big drum, and an oarsperson at the back who stands up and keeps the boat heading in the right direction. I liked the way it is a mixed sex sport, as there aren't that many of these, and certainly a mixed ability one, as some of the teams were very strong and fast, while others seemed to be just happy to finish. I think this is because most, and perhaps all, of the teams are formed by local businesses, community groups, or whoever (at least one team was connected with a bar in Tai Po), and so they will all take it with varying degrees of seriousness depending on the culture and size of the organisation.

All the teams getting ready to race

I was expecting the boats themselves to be a bit more varied. I love the dragon-head prow, and dragon-tail stern, but they all seemed very similar, at least to my undiscerning eye. Perhaps there is a standard design to try and level the playing-field for the sport? One of the curious aspects of it was the difficulty in getting six to eight very long thin boats lined up at the starting line. When the wind got up a bit, many of them got blown around so that they were facing sideways, and often this seemed to necessitate one boat, and then another, paddling around in a circle to get in place again. I don't know how common this is, but certainly one race seemed to take about ten minutes before everyone was lined up to the satisfaction of the starter. Perhaps this is normal for boat races - I'm certainly not a regular visitor at any others.

One of the most startling things to me, as a newbie to Hong Kong, was the complete absence of commerce at the Dragon Boat races in Tai Po. With so many spectators, athletes, and officials, I would have assumed there would have been many small food stalls, if nothing else, and perhaps a bit of a mini-fair besides. Certainly the Tai Po district council had organised things very well, with a number of different bamboo VIP viewing platforms, plenty of portaloos (Kenny eat your heart out), a number of St John ambulance divisions, and various police, Leisure services staff, and others I couldn't identity, on duty. So where was the commerce? I mean, this is Hong Kong, where there must be more places to shop per person that anywhere in the world. And nothing?!? It was actually reassuring to have it be all about the racing, rather than anything else, though given the sticky 31°C day, I was secretly hoping for at least an ice-cream vendor. As there seems to be with many festivals here, there is a particular food associated with the Dragon Boat festival - sticky rice parcels wrapped in, I think lotus leaves. There weren't even these for sale at the racing, which would have at least fitted with the theme. Fortunately I got in early, and tried a vegetarian version of one a day or two earlier, so that I didn't miss out. I learned at Chinese New Year how fast some of these special foods can disappear, once the holiday is over, and I'm always happy to experience Hong Kong through my tastebuds, as well as my eyes and ears.

The joys of a local library

Feeling like you have settled into a place is different for different people. Probably everyone has their rituals for feeling settled, whether this is getting all your boxes unpacked, cooking a first meal, learning the names of your local streets, or perhaps finding out the best pizza place in the vicinity.

Today, M. and I went and found where our local library now is, the compact and slightly-hidden-away Tsim Sha Tsui library. In fine Hong Kong fashion, to get to this you have to go up in a lift - only one floor, mind you - but enough to remind you that Hong Kong is a vertical city. I'd like to think there are stairs somewhere, but if so, they are not easy to find. Naturally, the first thing we needed to do was to get our library cards. One of the beauties of a Hong Kong Identity Card is that it gets used as a multipurpose form of identification for all sorts of things. In a car-oriented culture like Australia, a driving licence gets used most regularly for this sort of thing, but in Hong Kong, where few people want or need to drive, the HKID is a very useful and universal form of identification.

Even better, as we found out today at the library, it can be used as our library card, due to the power of the microchip. So instead of my bag getting cluttered up with too many library cards, my HKID card can do the lot. The library staff very patiently, and with very competent English, explained which form to fill in and the correct way to insert your card in the card-reader (wait until the light stops flashing), and so we were on our way.

Best of all, this is a library that will just be for pleasure, because we are desperately in need of reading that isn't just academic. One of the great finds of today was the book above, that describes all the local neighbourhoods, in just enough detail to make them interesting, unpacking some of the history and culture that has resulted in what we see today. I did not know, for example, that until the 1960s, the Tsim Sha Tsui area was quite dominated by the (then) British military, so  that much of what has shaped this place is the requirements of the military personnel at the time. This explains, in part, why there are so many restaurants, bars, nightclubs, tailors and so on, in this area. It is the sort of detail that I would not have even thought about - TST just seemed to be that way - but naturally all places have a history and a reason behind their current existence. I suppose as the bars and restaurants sprang up, so people from other neighbourhoods were drawn here for the nightlife, and so as the military presence was withdrawn, this more 'tourist' aspect took on a life of its own. I had the funny thought as I started to read the book, 'Wow, this book is as good as Wikipedia', and then felt a bit ashamed at how Wikipedia has started to colonize my life! It is very easy to forget how much information that used to have to be searched out painstakingly is now at the tips of our fingers, quite literally.

The English language fiction section of the library is quite small, as you would expect, in a country where the first language of 97% of the people is 廣東話. On the upside, our new library membership gives us access to all forty-two (I think) branches of the Hong Kong library system, so there are bound to be quite a few books to read across all of those. And no matter how small the fiction section, it was certainly a lot more books than we had available to read at home. I was secretly pleased to see the library so well-used. All the communal tables were pretty much full, with people using them to read books, newspapers and magazines. Most of them looked like they were retired, and reminded me of one of the many things I am going to do more of when I retire. Shouldn't heaven be more like a library?

It was an interesting reminder of the local culture to see the balance of books in the social sciences section (academic curiosity). Most of the sections were pretty small, except for the sections on finances, money-management and information technology, which were pretty extensive. It is hard to miss when you come to Hong Kong that the power of money is big here. People respect money, and everyone wants to earn money. This is true of many places, I know, but in HK it is tied up as well with a lot of other religious and cultural aspects of the place that I am still only just getting a sense of. It is why the most common greeting at New Year is 恭喜發財 (which means sort-of 'Congratulations on becoming rich'). In a way that I have only seen elsewhere in the US, the myth that 'if you work hard you will prosper' seems alive and well. Given all the things I have been reading about social class and the education system in the last few months, while it may be true that all things being equal, you will do better if you work harder, for many people the harsh truth is that even working very hard brings few rewards, and for many the deck is really stacked against them.

Fresh from the glow of public education that is the library, we swung back past Crema Coffee, for a delicious espresso, with the added bonus of being able to flick through our new books. For the espresso aficionados, the latte art on M's coffee today was a swan! A lovely morning...

Oh what a bad blogger am I?

Well, it has been a long hiatus between blog posts. I hope this is not the sign of a longer term trend. That have been many reasons for this; moving apartments, no internet connection, guests visiting from overseas, and so on.
Some of it is also that I spend far too much of my time at my computer studying, and when I am done it is hard to feel like I should sit down and stare at the computer some more. As today is Sunday, I am having a (relatively) study-free day, so I can feel free to blog.
I am excited by our new place in Tsim Sha Tsui. It is small (M. worries about this), but I love it. Unlike in our previous apartment, where I felt like I had to walk too far to find anything, even in the kitchen, in our new apartment, everything is conveniently closeby. Most importantly, the storage is great, so everything that needs to be can be put away, leaving the place uncluttered and simple, which is what we like. Now if only we had tatami floors and shoji, it would be perfect! In the picture you can see the view out of our living room window, which encapsulates so many aspects of Hong Kong that I like.
There is the combination of old and new, as evidenced, in the foreground, by the grungy older building opposite, and the gleaming facade of the Miramar to the right. Looking a little further away, there is the gorgeous spread of Kowloon Park, which is going to be a favourite for morning walks, or simply getting away from the apartment for a bit of 'nature'. Looking beyond the park you can see the somewhat tacky 80s (sadly there is no wikipedia entry to confirm or deny this) facade of the Royal Pacific Hotel, beyond which is Victoria Harbour, and a splendid view of Hong Kong Island. Conveniently there is an easy walking route that cuts across the park, over a pedestrian bridge, to an attractive waterfront promenade, to make this an even more enticing option.
The park itself is one of the biggest in Hong Kong, with a wild outdoor swimming pool, bird aviary, resident flock of flamingos, regular Sunday martial arts demonstrations, and so much more. Every morning, it is incredibly well-used for tai chi practice, with individuals and groups practicing in all corners of the part, at various levels of skill. Perhaps when I get familiar enough with the twenty-four move tai chi style I am trying to learn, I can find a group that does that and join them occasionally. Given the very multicultural nature of the area (we are close to Chungking Mansions after all, as well as one of the main mosques on Kowloon-side), there will also be people doing other forms of exercise, such as yoga, although this is strictly a marginal affair compared to the tai chi practice.
For us it is such a contrast from living on the very edge of Tai Po. Now we have everything, almost literally, at our doorstep. For a chemist shop we need only walk ten metres. For a newsagents, perhaps 50 metres. Our closest supermarket is 100 metres away, although there are many in the vicinity. There are innumerable cafes and restaurants, but I am most interested in ones that serve great espresso, and for that there are at least four closeby that meet my standards - my favourite at the moment being Crema Coffee. It is a little daggy (to use an Australianism) as far as decor goes, but the coffee is excellent (they roast their own in-house) and they do a very cheap breakfast too. There is even a resident dog at certain times of the day, which keeps M. smiling. There is a Post Office just around the corner, a number of vegetarian Chinese restaurants within a two or three minute walk, and, I think, four cinemas within a five or ten minute walk of the place. I think we feel like we are in Paradise, at least as far as the convenience factor.
As those will know who have visited us, at our old place it could be quite a chore to get a taxi, mostly to explain the complexities of how to get there across the English-Cantonese barrier. At our new place the majority of the traffic that goes past our door is taxis, a little bit like in central London. I cannot imagine there would be any time, day or night, when there wouldn't be a taxi in view, though I haven't currently been awake here at 3am to test that proposition. Mind you, with dozens of buses going down Nathan road at the end of the street, the MTR nearby, and a free shuttle-service to the airport express, it is hard to know when we will really need a taxi, unless we have so much luggage that a bit of laziness appeals.
Our apartment move was actually achieved in Hong Kong style, via taxi. We thought of how little stuff we really have (given our furnished apartment) and how difficult it might be to organise movers when we didn't know where to start, and the taxi option seemed appealing. So we have made four taxi journeys down on various days, with a full load of bags/boxes and this has mostly done the trick. Given the price of taxis in Hong Kong, this was all managed surprisingly cheaply. Even better, it gave me practise in saying my new address in Cantonese.
Actually, in one of the first taxi rides down, I heard my taxi-driver talking on one of his phones to someone, and saying something that sounded oddly familiar (I am oddly fascinated by how many phones most taxi-drivers have - the most I've seen is six, all lined up in their own brackets on the dashboard). It took me a moment, but I eventually realised he was saying our street! It made me smile, because so much of the time random words and phrases that I understand in Cantonese, pop out of people's conversations around me. Unless they're saying something very simple, it is usually not enough to know what they are talking about, but it is enough to make me realise I am making some progress, however slow. Another thing that is available in our new neighbourhood, is actual lessons in the language, organised via Chinese University of Hong Kong. So that will be one of the first tasks on my list for next week...

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?!?

Ersatz Venice

The Venetian casino - 'Disney' Venice

My parents recently visited us on their way back from Australia to the UK. It seemed like a good way to ease them back into winter from summer, although from what I've heard, it doesn't seem to have been a very warm summer anyway, back in Melbourne.
Dad has a fascination with islands and other isolated outposts of humanity, so he was very keen to visit Macau, the other Special Administrative Region of China apart from Hong Kong. Keen observers will know that Macau is no island, but a peninsula attached to China, some 60 kilometres from HK. Interestingly, it was once an island, but a sandbar that connected to the mainland gradually built up until it became a peninsula, and now humans have helped this along with a land reclamation project.
I was curious about Macau too, but mostly because I'd heard it was an intriguing blend of Europe and Asia, with many remnants of Portuguese occupation amid what is an Asian city. The pace of development in Hong Kong is so fast and furious that very little survives for very long - at times it seems that only the temples in this city have survived the developers.
I'll get onto the real Macau soon, but I couldn't resist the temptation to drag everyone to what I'd heard was one of the Seven Kitsch Wonders of the World - the replication of Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal, in the Venetian casino. I'd read about it and heard about it, but like any good skeptic, I couldn't quite believe it until I had seen it with my own eyes, and having finally realised my dream of visiting the real Venice a couple of years ago, I had something to compare it to.
So we joined the crowd of Mainland tourists and made our way to the Casino, grabbing a handy taxi to cross one of the three amazing bridges that connect the main part of Macau to the island of Taipa, three kilometres to the south (now if only they installed some coloured lighting on these, like they would in Hong Kong, the effect would be perfect). As we walked in, via the West entrance, I couldn't see anything to distinguish this from any other bland but gaudy casino building. Not that I've been in a lot of casinos, but between movies and other media images of casino life, I have a sense of what passes for normal in these places. There were signs to the Grand Canal, so putting my disappointment aside, we followed these. Dad, as a retired water engineer, was somewhat disturbed, when he realised that the whole fake Venice complex was situated upstairs, above the main Casino level! Were there really canals, he was thinking, and why on earth would you attempt to engineer them in such an unlikely location? Nonetheless, they were indeed upstairs, and as we emerged into 'St Mark's Square' we were greeted by the sound of Italian opera, as sung by a small troupe of opera singers. Though the singers were Cantonese, they had clearly been trained in Western, rather than Cantonese opera forms. This was quite magnificent, if a little bizarre. The acoustics could have been better, but then this was essentially a very glamorous shopping mall, not an opera house.
Fake Venice was, I have to admit, all my kitsch heart had hoped for. There were gondoliers (a few whitefellas, but mostly Cantonese men and women, and interestingly, more female gondoliers than in the whole of Venice, Italy), three canals, and plenty of fake Italian architecture, as you can see in the picture above. Sadly, the photo does not do justice to the sky, because in Ersatz Venice, it is always sunset, with the evening light putting the first touches of colour on a few clouds studding an otherwise blue sky (complete with not-entirely-subtle ventilation system). Though none of the canals are really long enough to make it worth getting a gondola from anywhere to anywhere else, the price is certainly much more reasonable than in Venice itself, where you practically have to remortgage your house to afford the fare.
A more striking contrast with Venice itself is the absurd cleanliness of the place, which lent it a very Disney feel. The water itself was the pristine chlorinated blue of all the best swimming pools, unlike the canals of Venice, which can look like a hazard to marine life. It was perversely reassuring to see one piece of litter floating in one of the canals, perhaps an artistic homage to its namesake?!? I have to admit that I wouldn't actually recommend anyone visit the Venetian. Despite my love of kitsch, I had to admit is was essentially a shopping mall with a funky theme. I think they missed a great opportunity by not including the actual hotel rooms in the place as part of the faux Italian facades. It would have been much more alive, and a little less Disney, with some actual people inhabiting some of the hundreds of windows and balconies above street level. Did the designers think that nobody lives in any of the houses in the real Venice?
However, if you are in the neighbourhood, the outside of the Venetian is certainly worth going past, where there is a replica of the Campanile, the buildings look a little less 'plastic', and the water not quite so 'swimming-pool blue'.
You'd be much better to spend your time exploring Macau itself, which despite the overwhelming number of casinos (thirty or more, I believe), is a flourishing little city. Here you will see all sorts of marvellous sights, from a lion dance that we tracked down, after hearing the drumming at a distance, or a shop that seemed to sell only coconuts, though admittedly some were marked with lucky characters, allowing them to be sold, presumably at a considerable mark-up, to wedding organisers. I imagine we will be seeing a lot more lion/dragon/unicorn dances in our time here in Hong Kong, though I have to say I still haven't got the differences between them sorted out. I think this is a lion dance, because it only has two performers in the costume, rather than many, which would make it a dragon. And though the unicorn looks nothing like a 'Western' unicorn, I think that is recognisable by the forward curving horn on its head. This particular lion, as you can see, had a problem with a snake, and eventually danced the story through to where it was worrying at the snake like any self-respecting cat might worry at a lizard or mouse.
The Portuguese heritage of the place was still very much in evidence, with most of the signs being bilingual Portuguese/Cantonese. Given many of the similarities between written Portuguese and Spanish, it was an unexpected lesson in Spanish vocabulary, as the similar Portuguese word would usually trigger my memory of the word in Spanish. The narrow cobbled streets and curious back alleys were also very reminiscent of a visit we made to Spain back in 2009. Wandering around this area was an odd sensation, blending memories of that holiday with overlays of classic older Chinese housing that we know from the few parts of Hong Kong where these survive. We definitely plan to return, and explore a bit further.

You could also make time to see the incredible A-ma temple, reputedly built in 1488, and perched on the side of a very rocky hill. Apparently it was one of the first places ever photographed in China, presumably sometime back in the nineteenth century. This is dedicated to the goddess Matsu, who is apparently the same goddess of the sea who is called Tin Hau in Hong Kong, and has many temples dedicated to her here. This is hardly surprising, given the dominance of fishing as a trade in the history of both places.
The photo does not do it justice, with its many paths winding up the hill, past various shrines and temple buildings, to the summit where there are enormous characters carved into the rock. One of which I remember was 天 (sky or heaven) which may mean that the other character was 后, which would mean 'Heavenly Queen' (Tin Hau). However my memory for Cantonese characters is notoriously poor - they seem to slide out of my memory almost as fast as I learn them.
If you look between the bamboo in the picture you can just make out two tall thin yellowish columns. They were two of the largest sticks of incense I have ever seen, each of them about 25-30 cm in diameter. They could have been used as columns to hold up a ceiling, but instead they were slowly smouldering away - I can only imagine how long they burn for. Days? Weeks?
I am still trying to get a sense of how to be respectful around the many temples that I see or visit during my time here. In some ways they are very laid back, with various people sitting around smoking and shooting the breeze, or people coming in to quickly light some incense, before getting on with the rest of their day. Then of course there are tourists like myself, having a look around, but not really sure what the rules might be in a place like this. Cantonese locals suggest to me that I shouldn't light incense at a temple myself, unlike lighting a candle in a Catholic cathedral. To do so is to acknowledge a relationship with that particular goddess or god, and perhaps even that particular temple, and creates an obligation on a person to return to that same temple before the end of the year, as some sort of act of closure or thanksgiving. It is all a reminder of how ignorant I am beyond the basic facts of the major world religions.
Perhaps I can remedy some of that ignorance, at least in terms of Taoism and Buddhism as I get to know Hong Kong better.

Into the unknown, again...

I have no pictures for this one, I'm afraid, being a little too overwhelmed to take any photos at all. So our visit to Shenzhen will be plain old text - Gutenberg would be proud.
For those who don't already know this, Shenzhen is the area in China that immediately abuts Hong Kong, and has been designated a special economic zone (SEZ) by the People's Republic of China. For us, it is just a few stations up the line on the MTR from Tai Po, through a border crossing, and voilà, or in this case 这里 (if my French to Putonghua translator has any skill at all).
We were taken there by a friend who has been to Shenzhen many times, so at least we had a guide to help us negotiate the similarities and dissimilarities of the other China. The first stop in our day was to go to a spa to have a massage, one of my favourite things, and the reason I had come at all. This was to be a whole experience in itself - I'll try and keep it brief. First of all, the place was like an opulent hotel design of the 1980s; all marble, and froufrou, and lots of highly polished gold. We walked in and were handed wristbands and went to our respective change rooms where we changed into our colour-coded 'lounge-ware' for hanging out in the spa. These reminded me of those things that are sold as 'tropical pyjamas' in Australia, a kind-of open-necked short-sleeve shirt and shorts. All this with much help from multiple attendants in the change-room, some of whom  spoke a little English, though at this stage I was far too mesmerized to say much at all. From there we took a lift up to the fifth floor (yes, the place was enormous) surrounded by other patrons (all Chinese), in their lounge-wear. Did I mention that for men this was a brown and gold pattern, whereas for women it was pink and gold?
As you know, I feel most comfortable in black, preferably from head to toe, so to be skimpily clad in what felt like pyjamas, amongst strangers, was not to be at my best. We reached the 5th floor, and were directed, mostly with sign language, to our various massage-rooms. I'm pretty familiar with a massage table - after all, I did live in Daylesford - but there are always different ways that people do things, so a little bit of communication is needed. In a way it was very touching, because my masseur, a young Chinese woman, assumed that I could speak Putonghua(aka Mandarin). Nobody in Hong Kong up to this point seems to have assumed I will be able to speak any Cantonese, due to my whitefella complexion. This is clearly their own experience of white folks in Hong Kong, and probably proves their cosmopolitanism. So it was nice to be treated as if I could speak the language, whatever the reality.
For the first half of the massage we managed to misunderstand each other at every turn, but eventually we started to get the hang of communicating in some strange combination of Mandarin, Cantonese and English. She seemed to know about the same amount of English as I do Cantonese, so it was slow going, but we at least started to feel like human beings to each other. It turned out that her home language is Sichuanese, as she is from Chengdu, so English would actually be her fourth language - not bad at only 21. It was a good massage, using hot stones, which my Hawaiaan masseur from Melbourne had sometimes used. It was also mighty painful, though I'd expected that, as it has been a long time between massages.
Fortunately I was grateful enough for the massage not to mind feeling so stupid, so often, as I continually failed to understand what my masseur, whose name I learnt and promptly forgot, was trying to say. Part of the problem was one I am experiencing a lot at the moment - if people don't expect you to be speaking their language, they don't even try and interpret what you are saying as their language, and so they don't understand. This was a lot of the problem here. When we started each attempt at communication with the language we were trying to use, ie. Putonghua, Guangdonghua, Ying maan, we were much better off, because we had a clue what we were trying to listen out for.
It was a relief to get out of my spa gear, and back into my street clothes, but this was only the start of a day of more culture shock. One of the most obvious things to notice about being across the border is how many people smoke, and in how many places. As M. said, it was like being back in our childhood, where people walked around with cigarettes in their mouth routinely. To give you an idea how all-pervasive this was, there was a fancy dispenser on the table in the lobby of the health spa, with free cigarettes, and a handy lighter. It was like being in a looking-glass world. Hong Kong has not banned cigarettes in quite as many places as Australia, but it is not far behind. In Shenzhen you wouldn't even know such a thing was on the horizon.
From the spa we headed to a gigantic vertical shopping mall, which our friend described as being a mall 'entirely of fakes'. From what we saw for the rest of the day, this may well have been true, but we have no context of what is normal, or not, in China, to know how to judge it. We did get warned by a number of shopkeepers that the police were on patrol hunting for fakes, and there seemed to be a lot of surreptitious moving or concealing of various goods. I still do not know what to think about all this. There are very bizarre things going on across that border, with wealthy Chinese coming into Hong Kong to buy high-status branded goods, while on the China-side, wealthy Hong Konger and a numbers of gwai lo/gwai po, are buying up very cheap fake versions of those same goods. I know that China is fairly untroubled by the knock-off branded goods, except as far as the pressure they get from other countries and the WTO goes. For myself I think the 'genuine' branded goods with their artificially high prices are just bizarre, particularly given that most of them are made in factories in China as well, with only possible better-quality materials. It all seems deeply meaningless, particularly given that none of this 'stuff' is any better or less damaging for the future of the eco-systems on the planet.
Perhaps the best time in the day was buying teas, and tea canisters, because these are things that are from China, and do not need to be copied or faked at all. This felt like something worth buying in China, and at least had some meaning in that context. The rest of the time we were almost endlessly solicited by a string of shop-owners, 'Missee, come look, cheap [insert product here], very cheap'. It was relentless and after a while took on a surreal quality, like accidentally wandering into one of those cheap electronics stores with too many toys that talk, or laugh, or croak or whatever. More interesting was a section of the mall with perhaps fifty tailors, all one after the other, located near a section with so many fabric stalls that they seemed to stretch into infinity.
At a certain point we were too exhausted to continue, and headed back to the customs hall, and back onto the MTR. The most fascinating part of the day was probably how much it felt like 'home' to be back on Hong Kong territory - back to a world that seemed instantly more understandable and more manageable.
The experience of being in a Putonghua environment reminded me that I am not totally helpless in Cantonese, just as trying to learn Cantonese has made me realise just how much easier it is for me to communicate in Spanish. I remember being in Spain and being pained by not being able to come up with grammatically correct sentences fast enough. Pah! What a luxury! I should have appreciated having enough vocabulary to be able to carry on at least a semblance of a regular conversation, even if I sounded like a stupid foreigner.
It is all a great reminder that you can never know what you have right now, until you lose it, if only temporarily. At this point I can appreciate that I know a little Cantonese, even if it may take me years to become remotely fluent. I can also appreciate all the prolific language skills of the people around me, who so generously and so often make up that deficit.