01.04.13 - Trip to Macau Episode One - A New Special Administrative Area

There isn’t only one Special Administrative Region (the term for how HK is governed within/by China) in our neck of the woods. So Claire and I decided to go and visit this rival - Macau.

I have never been so unprepared for a day trip. As we whizzed across the sea on a ‘jetprop’, we realised that (appropriately for April Fool’s Day) we knew next-to-nothing about Macau. We had no map, no guide book, no idea what the major sights are. We just knew – there’s old European stuff, old Chinese stuff and an area like Vegas.

Luckily, we found a map and guide on arrival that had a section called ‘About Macau’. Let me reproduce this in full for you:

Many years ago, Macau was just a fishing port. There was a mass of seafarers decided to sail in a beautiful day. Unfortunately, they encountered a huge storm, but a mysterious girl occurred and ordered the storm to cease. After stood on harbour, the girl had just gone, therefore the seafarers built a temple named A Ma Gao, “a place of A Ma”, in hour of the Goddess.

No one knows Macau has became the perfect crossroad for the meeting of East and West cultures that gave the city an historical appearance that distinguishes in to these days.
Got that? Good, glad that’s all cleared up.

This is me in front of the major European history photo trap – the façade of the 17^thC St.Paul’s cathedral, the rest of which burnt down in the 1800s.

31.3.13 - #adifferentkindoftwittering*

Pictured here is half of the vast area underneath HSBC, which is full to bursting with thousands of migrant workers (helpers, domestic maids, cleaners etc). Sundays are their only day off, and several hundred thousand of them spend this time occupying public spaces en masse.

This occurrence locally is known as ‘the twittering birds’. Initially, I assumed this was some half-patronising, half-racist imperial throwback term…I imagined a jowly general blaring “Golly, I say, look at all those Filipinas out there cluttering up the pavement again. Gadzooks, they’re like a pack of twittering birds, what? Ha! Where’s my gin?!” But actually, the tone and pitch of the languages spoken in these gatherings, especially when confined under a roof as they are here, sounds exactly like passing through an excitable aviary.

The extent is staggering – imagine, Londoners, perhaps an area from Westminster to Embankment, across to Oxford Street and down to St.James Park. There’s something satisfying that the group that usually waits on the rest of HK hand and foot dominates the most expensive parts of HK for the day.
The thing I find most fascinating is the diversity of what people are up to. Some build small ‘rooms’ out of cardboard boxes, which become impromptu nail/beauty salons, photography booths, union representative sessions, health clinics of sorts. There’s a lot more happening than meets the eye.

And yet, these workers were barred this week from ever gaining permanent resident status in HK. I, however, could get such status if I stay here 7 years. Even I never work a day during that time.

*Yes, I am aware the term is ‘tweeting’, but the title didn’t work if I wrote tweeting rather than twittering…!

30.3.13 - Chinese Temples, and the harsher realities of expat life

Pictured here is the beautiful old Man Mo temple. Very different experience to going to church in the UK – though the shiny things, icons and incense aren’t a million miles away from Catholicism. Devotees worship by ritually waving incense around; attaching prayers/messages to lanterns or huge incense coils suspended from the ceiling; or, my favourite, banging a big ceremonial drum and hitting a giant bell, both of which you see in the gloom in the background.
A place of worship that hinges around family and ancestors and where locals go for rites of passage feels sadly appropriate today. The negative trade-offs of expat life bit for the first time.

Firstly, we missed Claire’s uncle Steve and his now-new-wife Esther’s wedding. We were thinking of them all day, working out what time it was there and counting down to the ceremony. Congratulations to them, and we wish them every happiness. We were very sad that the timing of our move meant that we could celebrate with them and the Priestley/Adcock clan.

Secondly, my great aunt Hazel passed away in the early hours. She had been ill for some time, and she slipped away peacefully with her friends and some family at her bedside. Our thoughts are with them and her good friends at her local church; and we are sad that the amount of support we can give to my dad and aunty Annette from here is limited, and that we will not be at the funeral.

We know we will gain a lot from this move to HK. But this Easter weekend has brought home to us that moving to the other side of the world means we will miss out on some things, too.

29.3.13 – Lion couldn’t believe it when Claire told him she’d gone running with Paddy and really enjoyed it…

Well readers, a threshold was crossed on Good Friday (I forget what this is in Cantonese, but the literal translation is Painful Experience Day). I have been really getting into this hashing lark, and was determined to get Claire to come along to one. I talked her into coming on a Good Friday family-friendly, short-ish one on the beautiful, car-less island of Lamma. She agreed with a heavy dose of trepidation, and on the condition that I ran it with her and didn’t streak off into the hills leaving her to work out the chalk symbols on her own.

The reasons Claire and Lion look so shocked in this picture, as Claire winds down after the run with a beer, are two-fold:

1-      Contrary to expectations, Claire had actively enjoyed the run a great deal.

2-      Claire took to the run very well, running the longer ‘Rambo’ course in 1 hour and 10, which was the benchmark finishing time, leaving several more experienced runners in her wake.

I was very impressed, and had a great time clambering around after the chalk trail in the wooded, red clay hills with Claire. Claire is cautiously keen to go on runs like this regularly, and we’ve booked in another one on Sunday. This should be great for both of us – easy way to expand our social circle, fantastic way to keep fit and gives us a shared hobby. Hooray for hashing!

28.3.13 - Happy Jellyfish, Happy Fookwutsit!

On Thursday, we had our first Cantonese lesson with the Happy Jellyfish Cantonese school, just shy of the Easter holidays (known here, phonetically, as ‘Fookwutsit’, which means ‘Back to Life Festival’). We have our lessons in the Cantonese resto pictured here.

The early signs are that I am going to really enjoy learning Canto, because it is a) Grammatically very simple and b) many sentences and phrases are incredibly literal. Here are my early highlights:

There are no tenses – you drink beer, you drink beer yesterday, you drink beer tomorrow.
You can often swap adjectives into sentences in place of verbs.

‘Aaaah’ is added on to the end of almost every sentence. It has no meaning at all, but acts as an oral full stop. Our teacher described it as ‘I can’t be arsed to say any more, it’s your turn to speak now’.

‘Ho’ is a catch all term for anything good, or numerous. So if in doubt you can just nod vigorously and say ‘Ho aaaaa’, and you’ll probably be fine. Alternatively, you can say ‘Ho Yeeeeh!’, which sounds pleasingly like shouting ‘ooooh yeah!’ but actually means ‘Good thing!’.

Absolute highlight came when the teacher was giving us clues in English on how to say things in Cantonese – e.g. Like a goat falling off a cliff (‘meeeh’, meaning ‘What kind of’); like a sheep charging into a bar (Beeeeear, meaning beer).  
But the clue she gave for the phrase ‘how much’, was ‘homosexual entrance’. The answer she was after was ‘Gay door’. My suggestion was pretty wide of the mark, “Er…bum?”

27.3.13 - high competence, and arch faffing - the GPO

This is the General Post Office in HK, which I have visited now to send various things 4 times. It is the epitome for me of all things bureaucratic in HK.

The bureaucracy around any service in Hong Kong can be best compared to the trams. A little quaint, even perhaps antiquated; it doesn’t always come as quickly as you like, and sometimes when you are on it is progresses a little slowly. However, you can guarantee that come what may, the tram will arrive; when it comes, it will work just fine; and no matter how long it takes, it will get you to where you want to go, and cheaply.

The post is exactly like this. On posting 2 parcels and 2 letters I had to go no less than 3 separate counters on 2 different floors; speak to 4 officials; fill in 2 long-winded and bewilderingly detailed forms (which employed carbon copy paper – who uses that anymore?!); and had to pay for these services separately. This all took 35 minutes. However, once I was in the hands of an official, everything was quite straightforward and so far as I know, each of these parcels has arrived safe and sound.

This won’t be the last time I mention tearing-your-hair-out-frustrating processes where everything is stamped in triplicate. Nor will it be the last time I grudgingly note that stuff just works well here. Both the faffing and the competence seem intrinsic to the way things are here, and I guess I’ll just have to get used to that.

26.3.13 - Sun Yat Sen. Without the Sun.

The statue here is of a chap called Dr Sun Yat Sen. Claire and I had noticed that he has many things named after him. On our visit to the SYS pool today, we noticed he has this statue looking off musingly into the middle distance. We have started to try to get into an exercising routine, making Tuesdays ‘meet after work, swim, find somewhere healthy to eat’ night. All public facilities here are excellent: I think all the pools, 16 of them, are olympic sized, clean, well-kept and about £1.70 entry!

I took this shot because I thought SYS looked particularly grand, unperturbed against the steely sky and mizzle with people scurrying by under umbrellas. The building the background is the ICC, which featured in a previous post front of the Kowloon Clock tower – you can see its astonishing scale, cloaked in cloud.

I thought It would be rude not to find out a bit on who SYS was…he is a big figure in the founding of modern China, who helped engineer the fall of the Chinese Qing emperors in 1912 and became the new Republic’s President. I was intrigued to see that he helped found the Kuomintang, the nationalist party that ultimately lost the civil war to the communists some 26 years later. My research tells me that he is respected by the Taiwanese nationalists, the communists and HK people alike…but am I sniffing something political when the HK govt dedicates all these public spaces to a Chinese figure that isn’t a communist?

PS - the blog passed 2000 views today...thanks everyone for sticking with it so far :)