Shopping in Kowloon

We’ve explored Sheung Wan, our area of choice on Hong Kong’s main island fairly explicitly, but over the weekend we decided to hit up Kowloon – a portion of the city which sits on the mainland. It’s a quick boat ride away which costs HK$3 (about R2.70) each way or about HK$4 on the MTR (the metro, tube, underground, whatever you wish to call it).

The first few streets of Kowloon are where the rich people shop. It’s like 5th Avenue in New York or Regent Street in London. As this catered neither for our tastes or budget, we caught the train two stops further to Mong Kok. And this is how we were greeted as we left the station:

There were more people swirling about than I have ever seen in my life. Block after block of this shopping district was just rammed with people who were peering into shops aplenty. We waded through the horde, all dispersing in different directions, only to be replaced by more and more bodies following them.

Getting used to the scale of things in Hong Kong is the process under which we’re currently going. In one of the electronic shops which wasn’t all that big in terms of area, there must have been 200-300 people wandering around, with at least 30 or 40 shop assistants helping them. And I’m not talking a big wholesaler like Makro – this shop was about the size of an average South African pharmacy.

While fitting around trying not to lose each other in the throng of spenders, we decided to pop into a restaurant for a cheap lunch. Mike ordered fish balls with noodles and I ordered black pepper beef balls with noodles. Well, the beef balls tasted so bad we’re still trying to ascertain whether they were meatballs or literally balls off of the animal that makes beef. I tend to lean toward it just being bad food, as I am sure that bull knackers would cost a lot more than the HK$32 (about R30) we paid. With our stomachs doing flik-flaks we carried on through the deluge of people and came across a proper market after browsing through a seemingly non-fake DVD store that had some movies for HK$20 and some for HK$300.

This market was the first place I thought had really cheap goods in it and two pairs of shorts and two pairs of undies later, at a cost of about HK$50 (about R45), I felt satisfied. Well, until the shorts broke the first time I wore them and the underwear turned out to be basically see-through... essence of markets and paying that sort of money, I suppose. Here's a pic of the market from a raised walkway:

We carried on ambling around and eventually, as night fell, we headed back towards Mong Kok station which was our first ever journey on the MTR (we’d ferried across the water earlier in the day). I still find it amazing that they can build tunnels under the sea through which trains can run, but nonetheless, it’s how it is. The MTR trains are much longer here than in any other city in which I’ve taken them (limited to London, Barcelona and Rome) and they are set up in far superior fashion too – it’s no surprise that over 90% of commuters use public transport here. The maps of the MTR in the trains are lit up with arrows telling you which way the train is going, which side of the train from which you’ll be exiting and all that jazz. It’s probably more flashy than useful, but it’s SO COOL! And as cheap as chips.

This arvie we’re off to look at flats to rent, so I’ll be able to inform you if real estate people are as irritating and useless as they are around the rest of the world. Recruitment agents certainly are.

‘till next post.

Wan, two and free

Well it's 6am here in Hong Kong - midnight, South Africa time (at the time I began writing this) and I am officially nowhere near dealing with this goddam jetlag. The closest we've come so far was the first night we spent here where we made it up at 1pm. The other two "mornings" have been 2pm. It's tricky as Mike has to be up and at them on Wednesday when he starts his new job, and I am going to have to start keeping Hong Kong office hours to begin getting my life in order: work permits and all that malarkey. And I'd like most of my day to actually be in the light hours.

It's been an action-packed few days. We sedated ourselves into oblivion for the flights over here, remaining awake for meals (like anything is chemically strong enough to separate me from food) and the landings on our Emirates flights from Joburg to Hong Kong via Dubai. Annoyingly, out stopover was so short I didn't have time for a smoke and we were rushed around by some dwarven airport official who insisted we board our Dubai-HK flight immediately, which, again, thanks to sedatives was spent drooling while snoring, rather than the usual panicky, white-knuckled terror which regularly accompanies my every air journey (irony in a travel writer being scared of flying noted).

The first thing one notices about Hong Kong is that it is humid as all bloody hell. It makes Durban seem like a Johannesburg winter. We're currently heading into winter here - we're kind of just in the northern hemisphere - and there is so much moisture in the air combined with a 28-30 degree temperature. I can hardly put the beer in as fast as I sweat it out. And we've exercised, walked and explored so much that by god, there is barely any moisture left in me.

We are currently in the smallest apartment in which I have ever stayed. It's a studio, so it has two rooms. A bathroom, and a kitchen-bedroom-lounge-entrance hall. The front door virtually opens into the bed and is next to the kitchenette. Should you trip over the bed on your way in, never fear, the couch is between it and the wall on the other side. Our luggage takes up more floor space than there is available, but it's actually quite awesome and is being filed under "experience".

Hong Kong's main island has a similar make-up to Cape Town in that it has a mountain and the city is squeezed in between the peak and the sea. The major difference obviously being the fact that seven of the world's tallest buildings (amongst hundreds of others) have to fit in here for the incredible mass of people. The mountain is called Victoria Peak and highlights one of the quirky features of Hong Kong - the leftover British colonial names which sometimes permeate places. The area we are currently staying in is called Sheung Wan, but our road is called Hollywood Road. The roads running parallel to ours are Robinson, Caine and Queen's Road Central, yet the cross roads are Tai Ping Shah, Shing Wong and... erm, Chancery Lane.

Interestingly, the steep slope on which the CBD and suburbia on the main island are built is counteracted with a long-ass escalator which stretches virtually from the harbour to about two-thirds of the way up to as high as residential properties (read: 60-storey super luxurious buildings) are built. Loads of people call it the Mile Long Escalator but I doubt it stretches quite that far. Victoria Peak is about 550m above sea level and we climb it as exercise (twice in three days). Well, Mike runs up it (and halfway back down, then back up to the top) while I walk up it, sweating like a donkey praying that the muscles in my leg manage to stay fastened to the bone and each other. It is steep as all shit and gives me a decent work out though - added to a never-ending diet of noodles I should be nice and thin by Christmas. The view from the top is quite incredible but I refuse to put a camera in the pocket of my running shorts, lest it become sweat-logged (really, it is THAT humid. I was wringing the sweat out my shirt two days ago after jogging (ok it was a fast walk (ok it was a moderate stroll))).

So the beginnings of our lives are starting to fall into place. We know where the grocery shop is, shopping districts are, where the cheap bars are not (we're yet to find a good affordable one), where to exercise and all that jazz. We've also realised we want to live in Sheung Wan which is on the main HK island and kind of has a foot in old China and a foot in the modern-day first world. It's clean and safe and hosts a whole lot of trendy crap, but has a whole range of markets, really old people and dodgy (cheap) restaurants as well.

Oh, and the subject line? When a shop steward tells us something is free, we think it costs three dollars. That's not a joke. It's happened twice now.