25.6.13 - What's going on in the Tine Mine? Friendly Franco-Germans, grumpy Russians and Australia-shaped bananas

A few snippets that have entertained Claire and I during our stay here…

Holiday in’t mine

The resort is Tin Mine themed. Of course. Turns out, before it was a tourist have, Phuket was a huge tin mining area. So our resort owners decided to give their gaff a distinctive theme to make it memorable that is anchored in the past. It’s a bit full on – e.g. all the bars have metallic names (Rivet, Plumb); the cutlery is shaped like wrenches and spanners; all the décor is metallic – see the bolted metal swing seat held up with chains overlooked by a smiley face made of industrial cast offs below. Excellent if odd theme.

Having such a nice time…?!

It’s been a great resort to people watch in. By far our favourite is a Russian couple who are always at the same infinity pool as us (what an awful sentence, sorry!). The woman of the pair always arrives wearing a tiny bikini, massive sunglasses, huge high heels (to the pool!) and a filthy scowl. She stalks around taking photos with her SLR camera or moodily posing next to tin-mine-themed-gubbins, or openly sneering at the awful, scruffy Brits messing about with a ball in the pool. She and her husband do not exchange a word; nor does she smile. Ever. Fun. Fun. Fun.

Banana art?

We had a great laugh doing a 4-hour Thai cooking course as an anniversary present to ourselves, esp as we cooked with such a fun bunch of other guests and a giggly, expansive instructress called Ann. Highlight photo-wise was accidentally creating a banana fritter that looks EXACTLY like Australia. It even has a Tasmania, look! Couldn’t fashion a giant Lion’s head eating the Aussie banana whole, though…

Do mention the war, apparently…

Finally, we had a great last evening hanging out with our cooking buddies Stephanie and Sven, a couple from France/Germany who live in Switzerland. As the cocktails flowed, we had such cross-cultural exchanges as Claire and I teaching them the Peter Kay-inspired “Walking to the dancefloor walk”, and Sven teaching us the “German gangster walking to the dancefloor walk”. And I was on my best Basil Fawlty-esque behaviour of NOT mentioning the war. I thought mentioning the Franco-Prussian war by mistake (as you do) was bad enough, when out of nowhere, Sven was the one to make a joke about The War! Don’t let anyone tell you the Germans don’t have a sense of humour…

23.6.13 - Hotel room bigger than our flat...does this say more about the resort or property in HK?

My plans to do a blog a day while away went by the wayside due to having too lazy a time…oops.

But here are some pictures of the room we’ve had the pleasure of staying in the last few days. Now, when I started this blog I promised to try to steer clear of boring stuff like ‘Here’s some nice food I ate’ etc…but in this instance I must make an exception. The room we’ve found ourselves in – due to lack of bookings, we got upgraded for free – has been very opulent indeed.

The bed is about the size of a king sized bed with a single tacked on. The ceiling is double height, the décor stark but in keeping with the resort’s Tin Mine theme (more on that ‘tomorrow’). The balcony is huge, with a table, a lounging day bed and most outrageously a mock tin bath.

As advertised above, the room definitely is bigger than our flat at home…but equally, this probably isn’t saying very much for HK’s apartment sizes.

So far so dull. Sorry.

To be a bit more reflective there is an interesting point to make behind how impressed we are with this place. I don’t want everyone to think we have let expat life go to our heads, and started blowing all our cash on extravagances.

This sort of decadence is the second big bonus of living in HK travel-wise. In the last post, I talked about the ease of hopping to lots of exciting places out of reach to the UK, unless you mount a serious expedition. What goes hand in hand with that is that these, to us Brits, ‘exotic’ spots are very cheap in relative terms. I’m not going to pretend this resort was dirt cheap, but it certainly didn’t break the bank and we spent no more for an anniversary weekend away than we would have at home. The difference is, with Europe you could probably afford for this price a decent city break to a European capital in a fairly nice hotel; where here the same sum allows us to go to award-winning, embarrassingly nice, jaw-dropping super resorts like this one.

It’s another brilliant perk to having made this jump to HK…and a tanatalising possibility for anyone coming to see us, as all this could be yours too if you take a few days away when we’re working…just a thought…

22.06.13 - Stereotypes in Thailand

And so oo-day dap fai gay hai Thai-gok yesterday morning (we took a plane to Thailand, which we laboriously learnt to say with the help of our early morning taxi driver. Who thought Thailand was ‘Very good, haha, yes, very pretty’.).

What a treat living in HK can be in terms of a regional travel hub…for those in the UK our age, do you remember meeting those Aussies doing grad jobs or even bar jobs through the Facebook venn diagram on sunny days on Clapham common, just after we all graduated, who seemed to have been to each and all eastern European countries? And seemed to go away every other weekend to explore every cranny of Europe? Well, now that's us in Asia - Thailand is a mere 3 hours away! So for out cotton anniversary here we are.

 

Scene from our window this morning below for you, more on our resort in the next post...but for now let me address the pic above.

 

Within 30 seconds of landing, 2 of my top 3 'stereotypical stuff I think of when I think of Thailand, even though that probably isn't fair' happened at us. On the gangway off the plane we passed a 'ladyboy', in air hostess garb and make up but with a chiselled , stubbled, masculine chin and shoulders that would do a rugby player proud. 10 seconds later, we passed huge vases of over spilling bagonias.

But we're off to a fairly posh resort. So surely no hint of my third probably-prejudiced preconception - the sex industry. Right?

 

Hmm. See the picture at the top (apologies it’s unclear, I had to snap it quickly). It’s a mass of symbols depicting the services available in international signs on the door of our transfer service to the resort. Many are standard:

DVD player? Massage chairs? VIPs only? Extravagant, but fine.

 

Karaoke? Random but fun

 

No dogs, no smoking? Too right.

And...er...here it veers off course.

 

The other symbols seem to be:

 

Bong smoking

Sexual acts of various forms

Strippers

 

So when it’s  not ferrying people to a resort, this taxi is an orgy hippy stripper VIP karaoke bus (but NO smoking, because that's just TOO MUCH, ok?!).

 

14.6.13 - What links Queen Victoria and spicy fingers?

Our final night out with Jen and ed was a Hong Kong classic - bite to eat in the
expatty mid-levels then on to Wan Chai for drinking and silly dancing.

Let me tell you a little about Wan Chai. It's one of the two most cliched going out
spots in HK, a haunt of the expat and tourist alike, with a sprinkling of locals and
a generous helping of filipinas.

As such I'd be a liar if I said it's not a little seedy. Bars offering free drinks
for women are common; there are some fairly blatant strip joints; and it's not
uncommon as a chap who is not obviously in female company to be unsubtly solicited
if you walk past certain bars outside which benches of scantily clad, cross legged,
bored looking women wait to pounce.

I know that sounds nasty, but broadly Wan Chai is great fun, not at all threatening
and has barely any trouble or crime, ever [though we did see the crappest punch up ever outside a Wan Chai bar when Vinnie was here. Not that he was involved...!]. So long as you skirt the seediness, you're fine.

We guided Jed through the beartraps and into what is essentially our local - the
Queen Vic. It's a British pub but more importantly, it's the hashing pub. So it's
the closest I've had to a Queen Vic experience in the soaps - every time I've been,
I've met several people we know.

After some amiable chatting with hashing chums (including Frank, who featured as my co-hare in an early hashing blog...not only does he still run at 71, but he still goes to bars at 1am. And used to be a helicopter winchman as a hobby. Legend.), Jed began to tire. So we whisked them off to the night's main event - Spicy Fingers.

This is one of the prime venues for Hong Kong's cover bands. I suspect there are in fact only about 4 of these mainly filipino-manned bands, who circulate the bar venues Friday to Sunday; but the quality of musicianship is excellent.

So good in fact that I often feel a bit embarrassed that they are arguably wasted on
the motley crew of sozzled middle aged expats and gyrating younger women (and then us) that surround them...it's been a while since I've been in a party of 2 couples where we
have comfortably been the youngest present and jumping up and down at the very
front. To covers of songs from Erasure to Jessie J.

Sounds embarrassing and not all that fun to read this back...but I promise you it's
genuinely a great laugh.

12.6.13 – paddling, boozing and schmoozing – it’s Dragon Boat time

At midday, 5 hours after touching down, our latest guests Jen and Ed were both thrilled and shellshocked to be on a boat on the far side of HK, cocktail in hand, DJ-spun music thumping out behind them and furiously paddling teams of dragonboaters splashing past in front.

What a great introduction to how crackers things can be here.

We had a great time at, effectively, a day long party. Our corporate schmoozy junk boat was one of over 50 moored around all three sides of the course, access to which was via a swarming fleet of motor boats that ferried a constant stream of revellers and competitors to and from boat and beach from a frighteningly unstable plastic pontoonish pier. We were incredibly well-looked after - decent food and drink on tap; the novelty of a polaroid-wielding photographer; and a bonus short junk journey to another port on the South Side of the island.

This day is not that interesting to relate - we drank, ate, had a great laugh and plenty of time to catch up with Jen and Ed. So, I’ll talk about the festival itself.

Every year, HK has a public holiday during which there are Dragon Boat racing festivals. The vast majority of expats will either be racing or going to watch; but that does not mean that it’s an expat dominated event – everyone takes part, and it has long-established roots as a Chinese tradition.

The boating is pretty straightforward – long thin boats with dragon heads, containing 20ish paddlers seated two abreast, race over 500 metres. There are hundreds of teams, from sports clubs, communities or work places, with a race every 10 minutes or so from 10am-5pm. These teams train together for 3 months, some with a daily fanaticism and others only once or twice over the whole time.

I have no idea a) Who won; b) What constitutes winning (are there categories? Is there an overall champion?); c) How you would even find this out. This is mainly because the whole affair is comparable to the Oxford/Cambridge boat race – tens of thousands of people go to watch, but the majority go for the atmosphere and the party-mood, not the spectacle itself per se aside from the couple of races where your colleague/partner/friend is racing. As well as the junks, there are tents and bars galore festooning the beach and sea front, and then thousands more people on every spare patch of sand on the beach itself.

A grand day out; a sporting venture we want to try next year; and another nescafe shot [though Jen is not serious enough for my liking]. Nice one.

08.6.13 mkII - Patrick speaks Cantonese, a play in 400 words

I did one blog a while ago in play script format, that I know a few of you liked. I thought I’d wheel it out again for this Canto conversation I had today. I said in today’s sister post that the people on Tung Lung Chau were pretty friendly, and either had no English or were much happier letting me stumble over my Canto than most people in the main island.

I was very pleased to go into the pictured café, and have a chat in Canto alone and get what I wanted…and then it all got a bit beyond my abilities.

Where I write ‘blah-di-blah’ below, this was my hosts saying stuff I didn’t understand. There’s quite a bit of it.

ME: Hello

MAN: Hello

ME: A can of coke and a bottle of water please

WOMAN: Wah! You know how to speak Chinese!

ME: Haha, a little, a little.

WOMAN:  Blahdiblahdiblah Chinese, wah!

ME: Er…haha…er?

WOMAN: HAHA, blahdiblahdiblah speak Chinese!

ME: Er…I speak a little Cantonese…er…I am English person

WOMAN: Ooooh, blahdiblahdiblah English blahdiblah, waaaah!

[MAN brings my coke, rescuing me from being stuck for what to say]

ME: Thank you. How much?

MAN: 18 dollars

ME: Wah! Very cheap! 18 dollars…[I pass him dollars].

WOMAN: [apropos nothing] Very hot! [it was]

ME: Too hot, too hot, ah!

WOMAN: [suddenly inexplicably animated, she spots my iPhone and points at it and then into the nearby undergrowth repeatedly] blahdiblahdiblahdiblaaaaaah!

ME: [having not caught even one word, I am stuffed] Erm…er…I…

MAN: [follows his wife’s example, pointing and very excited] Blahdiblahdiblahdiblah cow blahdiblah!

ME: Cow?

MAN+WOMAN TOGETHER: Cow! [man pushes the point home by miming horns on his head and snorting]

ME: Er…[looks where they are pointing. No sign of a cow. Or beef?]…Where cow? Why cow? No cow!

WOMAN: [flapping her arm now and nodding] There is cow, blahdiblahdiblah [points at my phone]

ME: [Admitting defeat] I’m sorry I don’t understand…er…

WOMAN: [looking annoyed now] You blahdidblahdiblah there is cow blahdiblah.

ME: [desperate now] Don’t know, er, understand, er, I…[trying to change the subject I sip my coke] Ah, is very cold!

WOMAN: Hmph.

Silence. I drink my coke while they look at me.

No idea what that was about.

But still, at least they, after a fashion, let me try to speak. I had the same old depressing problem when I got back to the island hours later, where they have an odd, Parisian-esque reluctance to let you speak the local lingo. Here is how my chat went with a street fruit seller. The bits underlined are in English.

ME: You have not have lemons?

MAN: YES

ME: One lemon how much?

MAN: FWEE DOLLAAA

ME: 3 dollars. [gets wallet out rummages for coins, counts them out] One, two, three dollars. Thank you.

MAN: FENK YEEEEW

Sigh.

08.6.13 - HK's other side - Tin shacks and floating villages

Today I took myself off to Tung Lung Chau, an island off HK, to go for a run somewhere new (and maybe suss out a future hash route).

Wait, wait, don’t stop reading!

I know I’ve done lots of blogs that go ‘I went somewhere pretty, I ran around, it was nice”. So suffice to say that the run was nice, the island was pretty, see below. Let’s talk about something else.

Tung Lung Chau is off the east side of HK, in the mouth of the harbour. It’s very sparsely populated and only has ferry services twice a day, at weekends. So pretty remote in HK terms.

Perhaps it is a product of this isolation and meagre tourism (there were maybe 40 people on the island today), but today I saw the famously yawning wealth gap at its most obvious; and I cannot think of a better picture to show this than the one above, where you can see the floating village framed against the sprawling high-rise city.

As we pulled towards the tiny pier, I was astonished as to sail past this. From afar, I assumed it was something to do with fishing; up close I could see that people live here. The islands are fashioned from empty blue barrels lashed together with planks, covered over with netting and wood, on which wobbly wood and tin shacks are built. Dogs, children, wives, cooking, cleaning, sputtering to and fro in tiny knackered old boats, socialising with their neighbours – this is where they live their lives.

Onshore, the minute village clinging to the slope behind the jetty was fairly ramshackle. One house was concrete all the way; the rest were either concrete to knee high or just resting on a concrete base, with the rest of the house built out of sheets of corrugated metal or wood. Most were clearly home-made; and many covered over with flapping plastic sheets as waterproofing. How on earth both villages fare in black rain or typhoon I have no idea.

Little light relief in this one, I don’t have anything much funny to add here – this is just something that really struck me.

On the flip side, the people were incredibly friendly compared to most HK Chinese I have met as a customer-cum-tourist. And I had some pretty detailed chats with people in Canto. Which will be the feature of today’s double-header blog, which hopefully will be much less serious and dull…

05.06.13 - Bright Sky at Night (364 nights of the year)

I have had this photo in reserve for a while for a night when I could find an excuse to wheel it out. A long exposure job that I took sometime in the first week after our arrival…you will find better versions on HK postcards, but I have to admit I’m quite pleased with it.

I decided at last to use it, because I passed quite close to where I took it from on my Weds evening hash run. A belter this evening, a 9km sweat-drenched work out in the summer humidity and heat.

And here’s where shots like this make runs near Central HK all the more worth the effort.

You have spent 20 minutes or so toiling up hill, huffing, puffing, staring in your head-torch light at your feet  – when suddenly you hit a clearing in the trees lining the trails and the light of the city makes you look up . And suddenly, you go from grubbing for light squinting for chalk or flour marks amongst the shadows of a trail that seems to be in the depths of a forest, to staring out at the blazing lights of one of the world’s most densely populated places. And the expanse of overpowering artificial light takes your breath away.

Thanks to sights like this one, I have variously run accidentally into piles of mud; through streams; unsuspecting frogs; and large rocks.

The dazzling light shown here also reminded me of Earth Hour in late March. I will not discuss the merits of the idea here…but when it is applied in a place like this, it really is quite impressive purely as a spectacle. Take a look at this link from across the harbour, facing the other way from where my picture is taken: http://www.earthhour.org/page/around-world-stories/28-million-people

Only trouble with Earth Hour this year was that we had our first visitors with us that night. At 8pm every night usually, HK’s skyline throws out a coordinated light show from the many iconic buildings of Central (which looks very strange from behind, if you find yourself still running at 8pm in the trails behind it on a particularly tough Weds night run). The sight you see in this link is what we triumphantly dragged our guests by ferry to see…when we had expected the exact opposite.

Em. Barra. Sing.

Sorry guys. You know who you were.

2.6.13 - Delilah, Jerusalem and Flower of Scotland - the Lions must be in town

In case it escaped your notice (either you have zero sport interest or live in a cave), the British and Irish Lions rugby side nipped into HK this weekend…

The run-up – missed opportunities?

It was a big deal for HK to stage this: as a high a profile rugby match possible, outside a world cup; besides which, Lions v Barbars is a great fixture.

And so, it was a shame that ticket prices were higher than a game at Twickenham…meaning the stadium was 1/3 empty. Worse, the Barbars picked HK’s best player – Varty – in their squad. And promptly ruined this generous gesture by not picking him, even on the bench. So he didn’t play!

Talk about missing the point…

HK Village

In a stadium with 10,000s of people, in a city of 7 million where you’ve lived only 3 months anywhere else in the world, you’d be unlikely to be bump into anyone you knew. But HK expat life being akin to a small village came through…we met people from my work, from Claire’s work, people we were on a junk with and a group of hashers – just in the seats within 20 metres of where we settled (see our view above!).

Small. World.

Sweaty action on the pitch

I don’t intend to give you a match report. It was a one-sided but entertaining affair with plenty of tries to cheer. In all honesty, the on-pitch highlight was watching the brazen left hook that South African Brits landed squarely on the Lions’ fly-half’s jaw blown up in slow-mo on the big screen – I suggest you youtube it.

Also notable was the heat. Despite 15-minute drinks breaks, by the end some players were on their knees.

Banter in the stands

The South Stand atmosphere and spirit was fantastic – I saw no aggro, and any joshing between the Anglo-Celtic fan factions was friendly. Every drinks break was filled by a classic like Delilah or Wonderwall, which the whole crowd took up with gusto, keeping the verses going well over a minute after action resumed.

Fancy dress abounded – topped by the chaps we stationed ourselves next to in the 2^nd half, resplendent in full-body lion suits.

 

Brilliantly, one of their number had a bugle. A burst of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ led to a barrage of water-filled cups plummeting around us from all angles. Beyond this though, the bugler created a fantastic singing ‘duel’ between his party, and another group about 20-strong behind us. They traded 6-nations classics – strange to be an Englishman at a rugby match belting out Bread of Heaven. Irish songs were, admittedly, absent – despite knowing the words to the ‘Fields of Athenry’, I was not quite drunk enough to lead that anthem…

It was all such silly fun, we threw ourselves in. See Claire being picked up by our friendly Lions and blowing on their horn (oy oy); and me posing with the programme in my Barbars cap (I cannot pinpoint when the hat went on backwards. Maybe sometime in the early 90s?).

1.6.13 - Twin ambitions

Dearest reader, I am sorry to have neglected you. Work has done what I predicted it would a) Made me busier and b) Left me with material that reads: ‘Got up. Went to work. Work is fine. Came home. Did some sport. Probably had a beer. Bed.’

Never fear! A double entry coming your way!

The plan – The Twins

So. It’s due to be the hottest day of the year. The sky clear. The sun fierce. Humidity 94%. The best thing we could do? Clearly, accept our friends Rachel and Charlie’s invitation to hike over the island via two enormous hills with 1000s of steps carved into them. Photo one shows both hills off to the right; photo two shows the last hill, with part of Stanley - our final destination - just visible beyond.

We’d been keen to take this on for some time.

First casualty

Sadly, Claire did not get to test herself against the hills. An hour in Claire went over on her ankle…having traversed some trails and steep slopes, she did so on a flat road. Near some bins. Glamorous.

It was weak from a fall two weeks ago, but she was still deeply frustrated to hurt it all over again. We packed her off with regret into a taxi, with a first aid kit for her cut knee.

Fellow travellers on trail

An imposing group of four chiselled men wearing nothing but tiny shorts and sunglasses thundering down the hill at breakneck pace.

Scandalously unprepared expats, e.g. a young bloke slumped, poleaxed and topless, on one of the steps in the shade, totally out of water. I reckon there were some serious heat stroke cases out there.

Blasé locals from teenagers to grandmothers, strolling casually in normal clothes, armed only with fans and umbrellas, blinking confusedly at the fanatical gweilos pounding up and down the hill.

Pride before a fall?

I was warned the twins, once you reach them, are ’45 minutes of pain’ – 900 concrete steps on the first; then 20 mins of up and down and 300 more concrete steps. I did both without breaks…but only due to foolish pride. At 600 steps I felt weak. I had set off too fast and was paying for it. But as I was about to stop, I came across a slower walker, who turned and stepped aside to let me past. I wanted shout “No, no, don’t make me go on!”, but instead, British sang froid kicked in. I composed my pain-wracked face, nodded graciously and yomped off faster. Ouch.

The verdict?

9.5km, 2950 feet of elevation, 2 hours 40 and 3 litres of water later, we collapsed onto a wonderfully air conditioned bus to the beach.

I’d definitely do this again, and think it’s a great one for hiking/fitness freak friends to do when they’re here. But I will wait until it’s cooler, or do it at night…pleased to chalk this up to experience, but not something to do again.

As my sunburn and flooding blogs showed, the weather here is not to be trifled with.