Anyway

My son is learn­ing Man­dar­in, so when I went to Hong Kong recently, I asked what I should bring back. His teach­er sug­ges­ted a Man­dar­in dic­tion­ary; it soun­ded like a good idea to me. Find­ing one to buy ended up being more of an odys­sey than I expec­ted though.

The hotel had an Eng­lish-lan­guage Yel­low Pages, which seemed like a good place to start. Bad assump­tion — there was a cat­egory for Book­bind­ers, and one for Books — Whole­salers, but no retail books. Even if they had had a list­ing there, it’s doubt­ful it would have done me much good. It turns out that the Hong Kong Yel­low Pages lists addresses in terms of the name of the build­ing the store is in (e.g., Prosper Com­mer­cial Build­ing, or Tai Sang Build­ing), with no hint as to which part of Hong Kong it might be in, let alone which num­ber on which street. I guess they expect people to know which build­ing is where.

One of my tour­ist guides men­tioned that Dymocks (which I always think of as an Aus­trali­an store) is near the Star Ferry ter­min­al, so after the required trip on the ferry (well worth it), I stopped off there. They did­n’t have any Man­dar­in dic­tion­ar­ies, so I bought anoth­er book and asked the cash­ier where to find one. Her answer? “Com­mer­cial Books, on Sug­ar Street, ask when you get there, every­one knows it”. So I went down to Sug­ar Street, walked along it twice, up and down stairs at the Com­mer­cial Build­ing, before find­ing the actu­al book­store is called “Com­mer­cial Press” and it’s on Yee Wo Street, near the inter­sec­tion to Sug­ar Street. Close enough I guess, I did find it eventually.

Of course, I don’t speak any Chinese lan­guage, so I needed help to find what I wanted. I com­pletely bam­boozled the first book­store employ­ee I asked for help, she could­n’t believe she under­stood what I was ask­ing for and asked someone else for help. They showed me lots of books on learn­ing Man­dar­in, and Eng­lish-Man­dar­in dic­tion­ar­ies, before finally believ­ing that maybe I did want a Man­dar­in dic­tion­ary with no Eng­lish and show­ing me those. 

As an aside: if you see a book in Hong Kong with a large num­ber on a stick­er on it, the num­ber is the per­cent­age of the nor­mal price that you pay, not the final price. So if the stick­er says “85”, you don’t pay $HKD 85, you pay 85% of the nor­mal price (which is on the back of the book). This can, ahem, be quite a dif­fer­ent price.

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.