Hong Kong Impressions

Tim had a busi­ness trip to Hong Kong, and since I’m cur­rently under­em­ployed, I thought I’d tag along. It was only for a couple of days, which is a shame giv­en how much there is to and see in Hong Kong. It was also my first trip.

First impres­sions are that Hong Kong is clean and very organ­ised. You arrive at the spark­ling new air­port, right out­side the arrival doors there’s a booth to sell tick­ets to the train (if you’re doing this, get the trav­el­ler pass that cov­ers the MTR and the train trip, it’s very con­veni­ent), the train is on the same level as the arrivals hall and whisks you into Hong Kong, to be met by a shuttle bus that takes you to your hotel. All very use­ful for the jet­lagged trav­el­ler (and in my case, one with a bad cold to boot). The only oddity was being told to take off my hat in the air­port for what looked like a cam­era and was likely a thermal imager (after­math of the SARS out­break, one suspects).

The shuttle to the air­port drove along some of the main roads in Cent­ral, and my first impres­sion was how much like Singa­pore it looked. Lots of traffic, tall shiny build­ings with lots of glass, con­crete over­passes over the roads, inter­spersed with palm trees and oth­er vegetation.

Walk­ing around Wan Chai the morn­ing was a little dif­fer­ent — there were no palm trees there, although there’s still the same crazy traffic. I walked along Gloucester Road to the beat of an alarm that every­one ignored, walk­ing by gleam­ing bath­room fix­ture com­pan­ies and jumbled hard­ware com­pan­ies, over to Vic­tor­ia Park with people walk­ing around slowly, stretch­ing as they go, and then back along Hen­nessy Road, one of the main shop­ping streets on Hong Kong Island. The oddest thing to me was that I was taller than many people on the streets, both men and women. 

This part of Hong Kong is remin­is­cent not only of Singa­pore, but of New York, Lon­don, and almost every Chin­atown I’ve been to. Chinese herb­al­ist shops jostle with glob­al names (in par­tic­u­lar Star­bucks and McDon­alds, but also well-known cloth­ing and phone com­pan­ies), the people mostly speak at least one Chinese lan­guage as well as Eng­lish, the Eng­lish is accen­ted with UK pro­nun­ci­ation. They drive on the left, and mostly walk on the right like the Eng­lish do. 

At lunch­time I headed back to the hotel and dis­covered the ped­es­tri­an over­pass sys­tem. A bit quick­er than the streets, and a lot safer than try­ing to cross the roads. It was also notice­able that the people using the over­passes (which lead through shop­ping centres and hotel lob­bies) were, on aver­age, taller, bet­ter-fed, and much more expens­ively dressed than those walk­ing on the streets below. The typ­ic­al busi­ness appar­el seems to be dark suits, for both men and women. Pin­stripes seem to be con­sidered flashy.

Hong Kong is intense. I walked through much of Wan Chai, Cent­ral, Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok, just look­ing at things and absorb­ing the atmo­sphere. I saw lots of obvi­ously poor people, but few home­less people and the only beg­gars I saw were in the tour­ist areas of Tsim Sha Tsui. I marveled at the mid-levels escal­at­or sys­tem, and at how thin all those build­ings look from the top of Vic­tor­ia Peak. You can tell that Hong Kong does not have a sig­ni­fic­ant risk of a large earth­quake by how close the apart­ment build­ings are build to each oth­er, and how tall they’re built, even on the reclaimed land. The build­ings on the mid-levels look like they’d bang into each oth­er when sway­ing in a big quake.

I want to go back and see more.