Hong Kong feels like a safe, friendly place,one of those cities I feel instantly at home in and believe me, I'm no city lover.
I'm sitting outside a street bar on Queen's Road East drinking a mojito (v. Hemingway!) and watching early evening Hong Kong rolling by before my eyes like waves on a tide of humanity. It's a cliché but that's what it is, a human sea.This city is vibrant and thronging.'Throngs' seems to describe perfectly the hundreds, thousands of people constantly on the move, on foot, in taxis, cars, buses and trams.
It's early Friday evening, the end of the working week for most of Hong Kong's inhabitants and already the sub-tropical dusk is settling in. Even the ubiquitous crested bulbuls and black collared starlings have ceased their screeching and whistling and have flown off to roost in the surrounding parks and public gardens. It's not been a memorable day weather-wise.Once again, after three of four days of warm, pleasant sunshine, the anticyclonic murk has enveloped the city. Driven down from the north of China by the north-western monsoon winds it has been augmented,some say,by the industrial pollution from the factories in the southern Chinese provinces adjacent.
The buses and the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) deposit their human cargo. Businessmen, office workers and pretty Chinese shop-girls, elegant and so delicately featured that they resemble dolls, surge towards me and onwards like an incoming tide. Individuals stop and linger for a drink, it seems like a ritual, before taking the bus or a taxi back to their homes in the outlying suburbs.They must live, I imagine, in the myriad apartment blocks and skyscrapers which line the city streets and jostle the shoreline of the harbour creating the vast canyons of concrete and steel which characterise this seething,amazing city. Hong Kong is a culture shock as well as a shock to the senses. Not in the same way as some Asian cities where there is a dramatic contrast between wealth and poverty but in that the sights and scenes are so unfamiliar.The contrast perhaps lies in the juxtaposition of the ultra-modern and the older,more traditional way of life which seems to continue to exist despite the perpetual modernisation. Also perhaps in the sense that, as Europeans, we find it difficult to understand how so many people can live in such close proximity with seemingly so little personal conflict or annoyance.Everyone seems at ease, purposeful and positive. People smile, chat and relax even if only for a short while on their way to wherever they are headed.
In Hong Kong tables and chairs in front of street bars, street restaurants and cafeteria terraces are, I'm told, considered by law as public areas and as such anyone has the right to sit down at a table and stay for as long as they wish without obligation to buy a drink or meal. One often finds this on Sundays when the city's thousands of Philippino maids and home-helps have their day off and congregate to spend the day together. They find a place to meet which suits them, meet up and occupy it for the day.Picnics are produced and card and board games begin.
In front of me tonight the three furthest tables are occupied by little old ladies knitting and chatting and street workers consuming plastic tubs of steaming noodles from street takeaways. A fishmonger arrives complete in white apron and white wellies.He's fresh from Wan Chai fish market where he guts and cleans the fish. It's his cigarette break and he settles in the chair next to them and lights up. Seemingly oblivious to his presence, his blood spattered apron and boots and his smoke they continue to knit and chat unperturbed.
Wan Chai market is a wonderful place.It takes a little getting used to at first but once you're accustomed to the noise, bustle and smells it's a total sensory experience.Row after tightly packed row of stalls offer the discerning customer all manner of exotic Chinese vegetables from pak choi to water chestnuts and Chinese mushrooms.It's a living stir fry! Fruit is everywhere.Oranges,apples and pears,limes,rambutans, lichees, mangoes and the cloying, cheesy smelling durians are snapped up by the eager,choosy shoppers.
The fish stalls exhibit fish, molluscs and crustaceans and even the sad eyed, long necked turtles, all the fruits of the New Territories fish farms and the South China Sea.The fish are so fresh that they are still alive.When she has selected her fish,the discerning housewife watches her purchase dispatched, eviscerated and filleted. A Chinese friend tells me that unless the fish is killed before her she does not consider it to be fresh.She cannot understand why some people, presumably Europeans, seem to prefer to buy fish which are already dead. Perhaps my fishmonger needs a cigarette to steady his nerves.
The side streets next to the market are thronged with shoppers and stalls.It's the eve of Chinese New Year and the stalls are decked out in red and gold talismen and trinkets promising good luck in the coming Year of the Dragon.My friend Mark, who has lived in Hong Kong for the past thirty years,tells me that the birth rate will rise dramatically this year because babies born in the Year of the Dragon will be lucky in life.
Next a group of students (or are they young office workers?) arrives at the table next to me.They sit down and begin an animated discussion until they are finally persuaded by a pretty,overworked waitress to buy a drink. It's getting late now and slowly but steadily a few Europeans and Australians drift in for the post work 'swill'.Judging from the number of beers they consume they seem to be here for the long haul. It too seems like a Friday night ritual.
'All human life is here', a newspaper slogan from my long gone youth comes back to me unbidden.Perhaps this is true too of this vibrant, colourful city where Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese,Philippinos, Asians of every nationality, Australians and Europeans seem to work, socialise and co-exist happily together in the post-handover Hong Kong where the patronage of the New China seems to offer relative economic and material prosperity to the majority of its citizens.
I'm sitting outside a street bar on Queen's Road East drinking a mojito (v. Hemingway!) and watching early evening Hong Kong rolling by before my eyes like waves on a tide of humanity. It's a cliché but that's what it is, a human sea.This city is vibrant and thronging.'Throngs' seems to describe perfectly the hundreds, thousands of people constantly on the move, on foot, in taxis, cars, buses and trams.
It's early Friday evening, the end of the working week for most of Hong Kong's inhabitants and already the sub-tropical dusk is settling in. Even the ubiquitous crested bulbuls and black collared starlings have ceased their screeching and whistling and have flown off to roost in the surrounding parks and public gardens. It's not been a memorable day weather-wise.Once again, after three of four days of warm, pleasant sunshine, the anticyclonic murk has enveloped the city. Driven down from the north of China by the north-western monsoon winds it has been augmented,some say,by the industrial pollution from the factories in the southern Chinese provinces adjacent.
The buses and the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) deposit their human cargo. Businessmen, office workers and pretty Chinese shop-girls, elegant and so delicately featured that they resemble dolls, surge towards me and onwards like an incoming tide. Individuals stop and linger for a drink, it seems like a ritual, before taking the bus or a taxi back to their homes in the outlying suburbs.They must live, I imagine, in the myriad apartment blocks and skyscrapers which line the city streets and jostle the shoreline of the harbour creating the vast canyons of concrete and steel which characterise this seething,amazing city. Hong Kong is a culture shock as well as a shock to the senses. Not in the same way as some Asian cities where there is a dramatic contrast between wealth and poverty but in that the sights and scenes are so unfamiliar.The contrast perhaps lies in the juxtaposition of the ultra-modern and the older,more traditional way of life which seems to continue to exist despite the perpetual modernisation. Also perhaps in the sense that, as Europeans, we find it difficult to understand how so many people can live in such close proximity with seemingly so little personal conflict or annoyance.Everyone seems at ease, purposeful and positive. People smile, chat and relax even if only for a short while on their way to wherever they are headed.
In Hong Kong tables and chairs in front of street bars, street restaurants and cafeteria terraces are, I'm told, considered by law as public areas and as such anyone has the right to sit down at a table and stay for as long as they wish without obligation to buy a drink or meal. One often finds this on Sundays when the city's thousands of Philippino maids and home-helps have their day off and congregate to spend the day together. They find a place to meet which suits them, meet up and occupy it for the day.Picnics are produced and card and board games begin.
In front of me tonight the three furthest tables are occupied by little old ladies knitting and chatting and street workers consuming plastic tubs of steaming noodles from street takeaways. A fishmonger arrives complete in white apron and white wellies.He's fresh from Wan Chai fish market where he guts and cleans the fish. It's his cigarette break and he settles in the chair next to them and lights up. Seemingly oblivious to his presence, his blood spattered apron and boots and his smoke they continue to knit and chat unperturbed.
Wan Chai market is a wonderful place.It takes a little getting used to at first but once you're accustomed to the noise, bustle and smells it's a total sensory experience.Row after tightly packed row of stalls offer the discerning customer all manner of exotic Chinese vegetables from pak choi to water chestnuts and Chinese mushrooms.It's a living stir fry! Fruit is everywhere.Oranges,apples and pears,limes,rambutans, lichees, mangoes and the cloying, cheesy smelling durians are snapped up by the eager,choosy shoppers.
The fish stalls exhibit fish, molluscs and crustaceans and even the sad eyed, long necked turtles, all the fruits of the New Territories fish farms and the South China Sea.The fish are so fresh that they are still alive.When she has selected her fish,the discerning housewife watches her purchase dispatched, eviscerated and filleted. A Chinese friend tells me that unless the fish is killed before her she does not consider it to be fresh.She cannot understand why some people, presumably Europeans, seem to prefer to buy fish which are already dead. Perhaps my fishmonger needs a cigarette to steady his nerves.
The side streets next to the market are thronged with shoppers and stalls.It's the eve of Chinese New Year and the stalls are decked out in red and gold talismen and trinkets promising good luck in the coming Year of the Dragon.My friend Mark, who has lived in Hong Kong for the past thirty years,tells me that the birth rate will rise dramatically this year because babies born in the Year of the Dragon will be lucky in life.
Next a group of students (or are they young office workers?) arrives at the table next to me.They sit down and begin an animated discussion until they are finally persuaded by a pretty,overworked waitress to buy a drink. It's getting late now and slowly but steadily a few Europeans and Australians drift in for the post work 'swill'.Judging from the number of beers they consume they seem to be here for the long haul. It too seems like a Friday night ritual.
'All human life is here', a newspaper slogan from my long gone youth comes back to me unbidden.Perhaps this is true too of this vibrant, colourful city where Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese,Philippinos, Asians of every nationality, Australians and Europeans seem to work, socialise and co-exist happily together in the post-handover Hong Kong where the patronage of the New China seems to offer relative economic and material prosperity to the majority of its citizens.
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