Living in Hong Kong - Impressions
Sunday, February 26 2006 @ 03:59 PM | Contributed by: Oliver | Views: 6,299
 |
Hong Kong is a city of extremes. Poor & rich, European & Asian, business & party, superstition and financial markets - all in one place and door to door. This leaves one strolling through the city and collecting unique impressions. Here are some of them and more to come.
This first picture shows a woman at her shop in a local food market near SoHo on a Sunday night. |
  |
| Mao statues can be found everywhere in HK, most of them are old and sold to foreigners as kitsch souvenirs. This one is modern artwork and in the shape of a kind of god that is supposed to bring wealth and with a LV necktie is a specially nice connection between communist idols, capitalist brand image and superstition. The second one is Mao as a Playboy bunny... you better not show yourself in mainland China with this I guess. |
 |
| Entrance to an arabic/maroccan restaurant. Since space is expensive in Hong Kong, the entry has to represent all that a shopping window should since the whole venue is underground. There are many restaurants with large windows, but a lot of others have to compete with nothing but a sign and a staircase. This leads to crazy decorations or strange encounters if you go in some shop and find something completely different than what you expected. Other places are in the 20th floor of some office building and only survive because they do massive advertising in media or on signs on the floor. The advantage of this is that once people ventured up so far to take a look at a shop, they rarely walk out again and simply try out what they got. |
 |
| My back door might be your garden, but I don't care! The Chinese mentality seems to speak that language in HK all over the place. People are not very concerned about their environment and about what others think about them when actions are to their own benefit. This is, in the end, what makes them so successful. On the other hand, the Chinese government has trouble nowadays to educate the people that destroying the environment on this principle does not help anybody AND is harmful to the person causing it. As long as the damage is only visual, nobody cares. |
  |
| The fog in Hong Kong can be very thick. If you live in an elevated place like the peak, you might have a blurred vision most throughout spring. Sometimes its less fog and more solid clouds which makes the tall towers look like eerie spaceships or relics from some dark fantasy movie. On other nights, he view can be really amazing, very clear and nicely illuminated. Specially after midnight, when the colored lights are off and only the lights from the windows and streetlights are on, the view is great. |
  |
| When, however, you got the chance of a clear day, the view is fabulous. Those are panoramas stitched together. |
 |
| There are some signs that make you wonder from what time the shop is... some are really old and represent the former common colonial lifestyle, some are catering exclusively to Chinese people and their feeling for fashion and some special for foreign week-end stopovers, mostly serving then cheap alcohol and possibly more or less naked girls. |
   |
| The illumination at night is very nice. if there is none of the aforementioned fog, the skyline is very impressive and a good place to see it is the star ferry crossing the Victoria harbor. |
   |
| When you go shopping, you can see the most modern things scattered over the stands like fruits. Copied toys, real technology, nice gadgets are all over the place. |
    |
| On the other side, old items, fake antiques and traditional decorations are also easy to find and truly affordable. |
    |
| Going for a drink or for dinner can be a real experience when you know where to go. Next to an abundant amount of cheap and sometimes bad restaurants, where only local people can go since all is in Chinese, there is a number of places where you get truly great food and drinks. |
