February, 2008

At first glance, Hong Kong might seem like a very dirty city to visit but the fact of the matter is it’s pretty clean. It just gives the appearance that it’s dirty but if you take a closer look, it’s actually a lot cleaner than Hamilton. The air quality is supposedly worse than Hamilton but it’s nothing big that I’ve noticed. I only had trouble breathing on my first day there but that might be because I was a bit sick from the bus ride home.

I think the reason why the city appear to be so clean is because there are garbage (or ask the locals call it “rubbish”) cans situated on just about every block. In Hamilton, you don’t see too many garbage cans in the area. Usually they’ll have some by bus shelters but that’s about it. That seems to encourage people who take the bus to put garbage in the garbage cans but not other.

There have been times where I would come to a stop at the lights and see people cross the street. As they cross, they take things out of their pockets and throw away the wrappers. The guy did that right in the middle of the street as he was walking to the other side. I think that the city should implement stricter laws and make the city cleaner, especially the downtown core. There’s garbage everywhere. They’re not doing enough to keep the city clean. I see some city worker walking around with a garbage bag picking up litter off the street but one work for the downtown core isn’t enough.

Every night, I would see workers going around the busy street to empty the garbage and they were pushing one of these things around. They go around to all the garbage cans that they can get to before their cart becomes full. After it’s full, I have no idea where they go. They sort of disappear along with the garbage. I didn’t take the liberty to follow them to see where they go afterwards since I was too busy with other things.

Some of the buildings look like they’re pretty dirty too. Sometimes, when I’m walking out of the store and onto the street, it feels like I’ve entered the ghetto. Some of the apartments looks like they’re about to collapse. But I think that’s what it looks like from the outside. Once you’ve entered the apartment, it’s actually pretty clean. If the owners invested more time in making the exterior look nice, I’m sure they could probably charge more since it’ll more a bit fancier.

You might not be able to see it clearly enough but most apartment has an air conditioner installed. I found that a bit weird because it seems like every apartment has one. In Canada, it’s a bit expensive to have an air conditioner but not here. The funny thing is that they have an air conditioner installed but there aren’t any heaters. If it gets too cold, the tenants simply put on another layer of sweater.
When I was staying with my girlfriend, there were some nights when it got a bit chilly but it wasn’t too bad because I had her to keep me warm. Usually when I get a bit cold, I’ll turn on the heater for a bit but not here. Heaters are more of a luxury than a necessity. Heck, in order to take a hot shower, we had to turn on the hot water heater. That thing only heated up a thousand litres of water which mean that you could take a hot shower for a couple of minutes. After that, you’re surprised with cold water.

The streets of Hong Kong are swarming with people no matter what time of day it is. At night, it gets a bit quiet but there are still people wandering around on the street. Every now and then, you’ll see the odd stray animal. But these animals didn’t look like they were stray animals because some of them had clothing. Yes, they wore a sweater of some sort.

The thing that I’ve noticed about Hong Kong is that there are a lot of things going on at the same time. The cities are always under constant construction. You can’t walk a couple of blocks without running into some people working on something. But the thing is, even with constructions going on, there aren’t any traffic jams. In Hamilton, if a street is being paved, there’s a major slow down in traffic. In Hong Kong, you barely notice any slow down at all. Even with one lane of traffic, the cars are moving along fair quickly. I don’t understand why things can’t be like that in Canada.

But the thing is, you don’t have to worry too much about traffic jams because there aren’t too many cars around. At least, it doesn’t seem like it since everything is moving so smoothly. On a busy day, there might be six to ten cars waiting at the light but before it could turn green, the drivers are already off. They have a system where the light would go green then yellow and then red. Then it goes from red to yellow to green so when it’s yellow, the drivers are allowed to proceed with caution. I do that when I’m driving here but I count down from the time the other light goes red. With the light going from red to yellow, it speeds things up a little bit and gives the driver a signal to take their foot off the brakes. The thing that slows down traffic is the amount of time it takes for cars to start moving after the light has turned green.

I’m not sure if parking is hard to come by but I don’t see too many drivers sitting around waiting for a parking space to open up. Some of them just sit there and wait with their flashes on. Even when they do that, no one drives by them to honk their horns. But they will honk their horns if someone takes too long to move. There have been times when the driver at the front had to wait for someone to complete their parking and some drivers at the back would start honking. These drivers would keep their hands on the horn until they started moving. In Canada, you’ll get the occasional one or two honks but in Hong Kong, these honks can last for over a minute. It’s annoying at first but after a while you just ignore it.

When you use the parking meters, you have the option of using coins or a prepaid card. Hong Kong’s transit system is way more advanced than Canada. Their system used a proximity card to pay for things. And it’s just not for transportation. Some of the convenient stores use them as well. The card is known an “Octopus” card. It’s very convenient to have and it’s accepted at a lot of different places. When the card runs low on funds, you simply insert it into an “Add Value” machine and deposit the credit. The card fits right into your wallet and when you want to use it, you don’t even have to take it out. So you don’t have to carry coins around. You don’t have to ask for a transfer slip when you want to transfer from what bus to another.

The MTR system in Hong Kong is a lot better than the HSR system in Hamilton. I hate waiting for the bus when it’s -13 degrees Celsius outside. And it always seems that the wait time is in correlations with the cold temperature. The colder it is, the longer you wait. With the MTR, you’re inside most of the time so you don’t have to worry if it’s cold or wet out. Even when you’re outside waiting for the bus, it’s not a long wait.

My first day in Hong Kong involved a lot of walking around and taking a lot of pictures. I’m going to try and take at least one hundred pictures a day. I’ve got a 1GB SD card which will allow me to take over two hundred fifty pictures so there’s plenty of room. There’s so many different places to go in Hong Kong and it seems like I won’t be able to capture everything but I’m going to try and take pictures of what I can.

I continued my journey along the harbour front to see what was on the other side. Even this close to the waterfront, there were a lot of buildings. I’m sure that the cost of living in this area is very expensive. Before I entered the residential area, this sign was posted to warn people. I’m guessing that if they had to post this sign, someone must have been stupid enough to pick up poison and eat it.

As I’ve mentioned before, the city is filled with high rise building. Some of the buildings look like they could be commercial but I think most of them are residential, at least a section of it is. There’s one building in Tsim Sha Tsui that is a commercial building with a residential section built in the middle of it. The owner first constructed the office towers and then later decided to connected the upper floors and make them into living spaces.

In Hong Kong, you can find a variety of flowers in the city. Back in Hamilton, I’m used to see an abundant of trees and grass but here, there are different types of plants all over the place. My girlfriend recently told me that the official flower of Hong Kong is the Bauhinia.

I don’t know the name of this flower but they were fairly small. I don’t recall any of it being sold in the local flower market either. Usually there’s a sign that will tell you what type of plant it is but not these. On the trees, I saw a little tag tell me the name of the tree but I guess the flowers are so little that they don’t bother.

I think this is what the flower looks like before it blooms. Again, I can only assume that this is the early stages of that flower since I don’t know exactly which one it is. Then again, it might be a whole other flower completely.

That’s right, you’re not allowed to fish in this harbour. Usually a warning like this is followed by a fine if you are caught but it appears that you might just get a slap in the wrist. Whatever the punishment is, it’s working because I didn’t see anyone fishing anywhere.

This concludes the pictures and events of Day 1 in Hong Kong. I’m here for seventeen days so they’ll be more things that I’ll be posted. I’m guessing that I’ll be typing most of my entries when I get home because I barely have time to do anything here. As soon as I wake up, I’m out of the house and out site seeing. And once I get back home, it’s off to bed to prepare for the next day.

I had a lot of time to walk around on my first day in Hong Kong. My girlfriend had to teach so I wouldn’t see her again until 4:00pm or so. Until then, I continued my little adventure around the neighbourhood. My next stop was the harbour front. It’s not far from where I last left off.

The water in the harbour isn’t clear and it’s not quite blue either. It’s more of a turquoise shade of blue. The harbour front here isn’t the same as the harbour front in Hamilton. This area seems to be more of a commercial harbour. By the entrance of the harbour were some people pushing carts with plants in them from one area to the next. They were working in the garden and they were moving plants from the garden and onto the trucks.

Most of the rocks were filled with graffiti. I would assume that this is a popular hang out for teenagers or something but I didn’t see anything around. I saw a bunch of old people just sitting around and talking but there weren’t any kids in sight. I think most of the kids are hanging out at the mall but given the time, they were more likely in school.

Across the harbour, I saw a whole bunch of ships. There was enough there to make it look like they were prepping for a naval work but not these ships. They look more like working ships.

This ship here is one of those passenger ships that takes people across the habour. Hong Kong has a ferry service that will take you to different parts of the country but this one here was a bit different. I’m not sure if the people I saw get into the boat were passengers or just workers. It seems like they were passengers because they weren’t dressed for working.

Towards the end of the pathway was this bed of quarry. There was another one on the opposite ends and it was like a small opening into the yacht. I decided to walk across the rows of stones and see if I could get a better picture of things at the end. It was a bit of a dangerous journey but I managed to get to the end in one piece.

There was another guy sitting there enjoying the view. He turned to look at me when I got there but after that, nothing else happened. I wanted to make small talk with him but I was worried that maybe he wanted his privacy.

The harbour was filled with boats but most of them was just sitting around doing nothing. If they weren’t moving, they weren’t busy doing anything productive. I bought a postcard a while ago and the caption read something like “A junk in the Hong Kong Harbour.” I thought it mean that the boat was a piece of junk but apparently that’s what the type of boat it was, a junk.

Anyway, I pretty much just wandered around on this day and taking pictures of this and that. I have to up date you guys with the rest of the days before it gets too late. I’m typing this on Day 10 so I’m a bit behind. I’ll just post some pictures and try to post a few captions with it.

On my first day in Hong Kong, I got a chance to walk around my girlfriend’s neighbourhood. She had to go to work so I had to wander around alone. My girlfriend showed me around for a bit so I didn’t get lost. I just wandered around the block and then back again so I wouldn’t get lost.

My girlfriend suggested that I wander around in the mall first instead of going site seeing because I could get lost. She knows me and knows that sometimes I can’t figure out my bearings on which direction I’m heading. I took her up on her suggestion and visited a couple of malls in the area.

The first mall that I headed to was Olympian City 1. There’s two parts to this mall and if you want to go to the second part, you’d have to cross over a small bridge. I had a little trouble finding the location of the second one and I ended up walking towards the harbour instead.

When I entered the mall, I saw a hanging poster saying something about art in Hong Kong. To the left of it was a giant mosaic mural of Hong Kong. Even though it looks like it’s painted, it’s actually small pieces of square tiles lined up beside each other to create one giant picture.

I went outside and found this sign on the escalator. It appears that Hong Kong is trying to save energy where ever they can. What I notice about Hong Kong is that, there are lots of escalators everywhere. And some of these escalators aren’t your average escalator that takes you up one floor. Some of these escalators take you three floors up.

There’s a general rule regarding escalators. If you’re planning on standing still while you go up or down, you have to stand to the right so that people who are walking can continue to walk on the left hand side. That’s a good idea and I think it should be enforced everywhere. I had it when I’m in a hurry and there are people on the escalator, just standing there and talking.

I took the escalator downstairs and somehow landed myself outside of the mall. I wasn’t expecting to leave the mall so soon but I didn’t want to back track just yet. I decided that I would keep going in one direction and then head back when I’m done, just to keep myself on track.

Hong Kong has a lot of high rise buildings. Everywhere you look, you’re towered over by residential buildings that houses thousands of people. My girlfriend is paying a rent equivalent to that of the price back home but the apartment is much smaller. Heck, the bathroom is small. When she tried to describe what the bathroom looked like, I couldn’t picture it. She said that the sink, toilet and shower are all in one room. That sounds simple enough. Then she said that it was small but I couldn’t picture it because if it had a shower in there, it couldn’t have been that small. Then she mentioned that the shower was right over the toilet. WTF! I’m thinking that maybe she’s using the toilet as the bath tub or something but as it turns out, there isn’t a shower stall or bath tub at all. Basically, you get a shower head and you take a shower in the bathroom. The floor is slight sloped so that the water has a place to flower. The washroom is about a six foot by six foot room. That’s all the space you get to take a shower. I tried it once and it is a little odd compared to back from.

Some of these condominiums might look like their pretty big but chances are they’re not that big. Everything here is compacted and space is very limited. My girlfriend has a kitchen but I don’t think that her and her roommate has even used it yet. They’re so tight for space that it’s easier and cheaper to eat out than stay in and cook food.

One thing that might be pretty cheap is the cost of owning a phone. I gave my girlfriend my Motorola Razr since it was already unlocked so she could use it here. She’s on a prepaid service and it lasts pretty long. In Canada, a $10 voucher can last you thirty days. Here in Hong Kong, the voucher lasts a good six months.

The telephone booths supposedly come with Wi-Fi but I haven’t actually tested that out yet. I’ve only seen the signs on the booth but I haven’t gotten into the booth to place a phone call. There aren’t too many phone booths situated around the city. Everyone has a cell phone rather than a land line since it’s a lot cheaper.

There’s more to come regarding the things that I did on my first day. This post is getting too long and it’s becoming a post on its own. I’m a little behind on the posts so you’ll see things pop up one after the other. I’ll be sure to keep you posted when I get time to type everything out.