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 Google™ images, 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.

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 '唔好意思' (literally 'not good meaning') which is a colloquial way of saying sorry. I even heard one of them say the usual response, which is '唔緊要'(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 '中心'. 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.

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!

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...

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 (地鐵站 - 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 (二元).
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, 最近點呀), 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.

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.