The Language Barrier of Cantonese

Admittedly, I struggle with accents that aren't South African. Give me an Indian speaking Afrikaans while trying to be respectful of the Zulu person he's talking to and I'm fine. However, my ears are stuck that way. Try as I might, I can barely understand the people in Hong Kong unless they speak decent English (my weakness, not theirs).

Whoever may have told you that Hong Kong was perfectly English speaking is communicating via the seat of their pants. While the signs around the city may be in Cantonese and English, the population does not speak both lanuages equally. In fact, dear Britain, this was a pretty weak attempt at colonialism all round, if you ask me.

There is no easier way to find this out than to go and try and buy something.

In the last week, while shopping, I have had to act out dustbin bags (make circle with arm and use other arm to point inside), lemon juice (squeeze pretend fruit in the air and then make sour face), moisturising cream (rub arm repeatedly), toothpaste (this one is easy - just pretend to brush teeth and it's the first thing you get taken to after the toothbrushes, floss and whitening products) and toilet paper (the easiest one of the lot).

I have also been given Coke when I asked for Diet Coke, been told Red Bull is called "cocaine", been given after-sun cream when trying to buy tanning cream (not for me, I swear), had my name spelled Williamsa and exchanged many shrug-shoulders-and-grin looks... which is cute and funny at the beginning, but gets tiring later on. Ordering something by telephone is a nightmare as the constant presence of fast-food oddities testifies. If we get exactly what we order we run to church to give thanks.

The peak of this was using the realtor expertise of a man called Mr Wong who didn't speak a word of English. Now, bear in mind you can't even write things down here because the scripting isn't A-B-C-D. At Mr Wong's shop, to ask for a flat with 2 bedrooms in a building with a lift within a certain price I had to pretend to sleep while holding up two fingers, then use my hands to make an oblong, act like I was in a lift and then use my fingers to spell out the rent price. He looked at me like I was insane (not altogether untrue) and phoned someone who could speak English and told her in Cantonese what I had been trying to do. "Mr Wong doesn't know what you mean" she spat down in the phone in that typically polite Hong Kong fashion. And I used to be good at charades... I also had to draw a clock to tell him what time I would come back to his office and point to the date on his calendar.

Trying to buy tickets for the Hong Kong Sixes was much the same issue but I, once again, had the added joy of trying to organise over the phone - an exercise in total futility as I couldn't even wave my arms to try and explain myself. There was also a problem on their website which I tried to point out but, as things stand, it's still very much there.

There's only so much frantic arm waving and sign-language I can do in a day. It was exactly the same when I lived in Italy. My brain goes to sleep at night utterly exhausted. Of course it's not Hong Kong people's fault. And they do speak more English than I'd imagine we will find in China or other countries around the place, so the challenges shall continue.

But it's time to pull that Cantonese for Dummies out of the bag, methinks.

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.