Alcohol

It is a truth universally acknowledged (by my friends) that this young man, in possession of a few hundred HK$, must be in want of a cocktail. Which is why I find myself pecking this out very carefully and quietly, in the dark, nursing a hangover.

I am not, generally, a very big drinker. Until, that is, I get off the plane at HKIA, when I appear to be possessed by the spirit of a functional alcoholic for the duration of my stay. Which is not normally a problem - the city has many fine bars, containing many fine waiters and barmen, who are only too happy to help me. And, while alcohol has led me to wear flashing horns, dance on bar-tops and talk to random strangers (all at once), it's never led me into any actual trouble and I've never regretted it.

Until last night, that is. Last night, to celebrate M's birthday, we went for cocktails at the Mo Bar and then H treated us to dinner at the Mandarin Grill. I'm not normally given to hyperbole (oh, okay - sometimes) but it was probably the best meal I've eaten and I just wish I'd had a few fewer Hemingway daiquiris so that I could have enjoyed it more. And so that my head wouldn't hurt so much this morning.

Kowlooney

Hong Kong as a region is a collection of different areas. There's Hong Kong Island itself, obviously, the other islands, the New Territories to the north and, sprawling across the bay from Hong Kong Island, there's Kowloon.

If HK Island is shiny and posh, Kowloon is its dirtier, disreputable brother. They're both obsessed with business but very different types of business. HK Island is big, international brands and multinational finance companies. Kowloon is small, individual market stalls, micro-businesses and guys out on the streets, hustling you into their shops.

Strolling down Nathan Road, the main north/south thoroughfare, I was endlessly accosted by hawkers, pitching three main products. First there were the guys, mostly Asian, offering fake watches. I don't know what a fake watch is - I mean, it's either a watch or it's not - but I guess I know what they mean. Fight your way through them and you run into the guys - mostly Indian - selling tailoring services; shirts and suits, mostly. Should you make it past them (and they're much more persistent than the watch guys) you enter the realms if the massage parlours.

Now it's not what you think (calm down) - it's little old Asian ladies, waving laminated cards with pictures of feet on them, offering reflexology massages.

Up to this point in the blog, I was sober. For this paragraph, i'm drunk and watching X Factor US. Consequently, this paragraph will make no sense at all. Hatstand.

Typhoon Nesat

Well, plans for today were scrapped after the Hong Kong Observatory issued a bulletin around 4am, local time, raising the typhoon warning to level 8. The significance of that number is that, once it's issued, public transport in the city shuts down after two hours and citizens are advised to seek shelter.

No taxis run, shops and offices close and not a lot happens as the city waits it out. That means work for this morning is cancelled so, as I type this, we're all looking out at a rather grey and windy Hong Kong, wondering what to do with ourselves.

Of course, the irony of this is that, as HK suffers its first T8 of the year, back home everyone's enjoying a heatwave...

Typhoon Part 2

It has been brought to my attention that Stormies (correct spelling) does indeed exist and, furthermore, that I've actually been there! In my defence, jelly shots were involved, as well as a pair of flashing horns, so I may have been drunk.

Here's another random picture.

Typhoon

As I type this, I'm sat on the bus taking me into town. The plan is to take the Star Ferry across to Kowloon to visit a couple of museums and do a bit a shopping. That's the plan but it may change - due to the weather.

It's a little touch of home, in a funny kind of way. Just as in the UK, the weather can interfere with what you hope to do, the same can happen here - except here the interference is a typhoon. There's currently a typhoon warning out although it seems likely that it'll pass harmlessly by.

I'm told that, when the typhoons hit, the braver ex-pats head to a bar called Stormy's, where they pull the shutters down and drink until it passes. I'm not sure whether it's true or not but I hope it is - I love the idea of all these Brits getting steadily pissed on gin whilst the typhoon howls outside. It's the kind of thing that made Britain great.

By the way, the picture's not related to anything - I just liked it.

Apple

It probably won't come as a surprise to learn that the people of Hong Kong like to shop: it seems that the thing they enjoy almost as much as making money is spending it. In rather large quantities. Hong Kong has an abundance of shopping malls and one of my favourites is the IFC Mall.

If you saw Batman Begins you'll know IFC because one of the towers features in the film. The mall is a vast palace, dedicated to consumerism. Every high-priced brand you've ever heard of has an outlet in IFC mall. It's the place that Apple chose for their first HK store.

In fact, having spent the afternoon mooching around the mall, generally lowering the tone of the place, it strikes me that Apple is the perfect brand for an awful lot of the women who live in HK, if I may be sexist for a moment. Sleek, shiny, beautifully packaged and presented; objects of desire far out of my reach. Still, it was a great afternoon's window shopping.

(Postscript: none of this is intended to be patronising or condescending. Believe me, if I had the money, I'd be in there spending with the best if 'em!)

Hot hot hot

Late September in Hong Kong means heat and humidity. After landing and getting to my friends' flat, I was feeling a little grubby and sleepy so I decided to have a shower to wake up. My usual approach to jet-lag is twofold. First, I skip sleep to get onto local rime as soon as possible and second I medicate myself with vast quantities of alcohol. Not big and not clever but it seems to work.

After showering I still felt sleepy so I decided to get some exercise. What could be better than a brisk walk up to the Peak, I thought. What indeed.

I've walked to the Peak before - it's not all that far. But it is uphill. (Most of Hong Kong island is uphill, in fact - it's one of the things that really struck me when I first came here: no matter how high the skyscraper, there's usually a natural vantage point, from which you can look down on it.) However, I'd forgotten just how steep the Peak walk was in the year since I last did it. In some places it has something like a 30 degree incline which may not sound like much but feels like a hell of a lot - especially in the muggy heat of yesterday afternoon. Within 100 meters my clothes were saturated (nice image, eh?) and by the time I got to the top it was definitely time for another shower!

Getting back down the hill is as bad as going up - the impact on the knees is pretty hard - but all in all it's a terrific workout and the views are worth the struggle. Did it sort out my tiredness? Not so much: when I got back to the apartment I promptly fell asleep on the sofa!

I love HK

This is my third visit to Hong Kong and I love the place. It's as simple as that. It's not just because I have very good friends here; each time I visit, it feels like visiting the future. It feels like an escape from a knackered old Britain of yesterday into a shiny tomorrow.

Of course Hong Kong has its faults - any place does. It's noisy, chaotic, occasionally inequitable. It's not a great place to be if you're poor, I would imagine. But I love it anyway, like those New Yorkers of the 1970s who recognised that their city was filthy, unfriendly and more dangerous than some war zones but loved it anyway because, hey - it's New York. I feel the same about Hong Kong.

Say you live in Banbury and people look at you blankly. Say you live in Hong Kong and everybody knows where that is; everyone has an impression of what it's like. Yes, it's insanely crowded but there's an energy and a vibrancy here that's very hard to describe. I'm being too poetic, I'm sure, but Hong Kong - like New York - has a personality. In the evening, you don't go out in Hong Kong, you go out with Hong Kong - the city is there with you, another guest in your party. An irascible, pushy, occasionally rude and frequently mercenary guest, to be sure, but also a wild, exotic and somehow honest guest.

Of course, such prolixity and bad six-form imagery is most likely the result of being hugely sleep deprived (I got maybe 90 minutes last night) and I'll look back on this entry and cringe after a good night's sleep (whenever that might happen). One thing won't change, though: I'll still love Hong Kong.

Random flight thoughts

As I tap away at this little screen I'm 30,000 feet up in the air and travelling at over 600 miles an hour in what I imagine is several hundred tonnes of metal, plastic and people. I fly a fair bit and the more I do, the more I begin to think that it's a really stupid thing to do!

I mean, I know the physics of the whole thing works - clearly it does or we'd be driving across Denmark right now - and I even have a vague understanding of how the physics works. The science, for me, is not the problem.

No, the problem for me - and it seems to be a bigger problem, the older I get - is with the amount of trust that flying asks me to put in hundreds of anonymous people and systems. It's not just our pilot; he spoke to us earlier and seems like a decent bloke. It's the ground crew and the engineers and the air traffic controllers and other pilots and the security staff and all of the processes and systems and checks thy have been put in place precisely because people make mistakes! I should stop thinking about this.

It's not that I'm a particularly nervous flyer or anything - I don't need sedating and, truth be told, I quite like some aspects of flying. For instance, we've just had dinner and I quite like the neat little arrangement of the food; I think it appeals to a little OCD inside me. But there are other things about flying which are not so great: I guess you could group most of those things under the heading "other people."

All this, of course, applies to economy class. With one exception, a flight home from New York, many years ago, that's the only way I fly so it's all I know. Things may be different in first class or business class - I rather suspect they are.

As I type this, it's 11pm on Sunday, London time and 6am Monday, Hong Kong time. Quite what time it actually is on this plane, goodness only knows but it gives me a headache to think about it, so I'll give up trying to work it out.

Radio silence

Weird times. C's been back in Taiwan for a week now and already it seems that things have fallen apart. First she sent me some photos and told me that she had had her hair cut short, as I'd told her to. Aside from the fact that I hadn't told her anything of the sort (the closest I'd come was asking her whether she had ever had it cut short) she spent the next two days telling me how upset and unhappy she was about having it cut short.

Then she forced an argument on Skype about something else, only to apologise a day or so later. And then, on Wednesday, confessed that she hadn't had her hair cut at all and that the picture was a fake - after which, complete radio silence.

I texted a couple of times but got no answer until today, when I got one saying that she felt frustrated, although I've had no response to my texts asking why or what about.

I really don't know what's going on: I'm supposed to be flying out to Taipei next Sunday to see her but that's looking increasingly unlikely now. Not sure what to do next, to be honest. It feels like she's making all this as difficult as possible and I don't know why.

This is a test

I've downloaded the Blogger app for iPhone and this is just a quick post to see how (whether) it works. Consequently this entry will be even more trivial than my usual standard. Which is saying something, I guess!

Catching up

Things have moved on since the last, somewhat miserable, post.  Not many things and they haven’t moved very far but enough to make me feel an awful lot better than I did last time I wrote here. I don’t feel anywhere near as low as I did then, which I put down to clean living, exercise and the fact that I’m going on holiday in a couple of days!

When I get back - four days after I get back, in fact - I’ll have my final exam and then that’ll be it for my studies.  It feels very odd to be saying that; studying for this degree has been such a big part of my life for the last five years, I think it’s going to be quite a change.  If you factor in the courses I did before I started the degree, I can’t remember the last time I had no text-books to read or homework to do!  

Still, I don’t think I’ll be short of things to do.  I’ve got a stack of books about three-feet high that I’ve been waiting to read and I plan to spend a bit of time with them. Once the exam’s out of the way, I’ve got about 50 hours of online study to do for my final TEFL qualifications and then I’ll have some decisions to make - fairly big decisions, I suppose.

But those are for later. For now, I have to pack and then it’s Little ‘Un’s family birthday meal tomorrow, a few final bits and pieces to buy for the jollies and then settle back, watch the Grand Prix and then jump in the car to head for Heathrow.  After feeling ambivalent about the trip all week (and being worried about why I was feeling that way) as soon as I finished my last bit of work this afternoon, I started to get excited.

So, onto the iPod go a stack of podcasts that I’ve been saving up for the past couple of weeks (two dozen episodes of the Archers, plus Savage Love, Mayo and Kermode, More Mayo and the Word) and into my carry on luggage go “The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex” the latest F1 magazine and an issue of New Scientist that I’ve been wanting to get into for a few weeks.  On the iPad I’ve downloaded “A Single Man” “The Hurt Locker” “Insidious” and a couple of others that I’ve forgotten. I think that little lot will keep me busy on the flight!