Most of the fisher people wear these sort of woven straw things that remind me of those 70s melamine bowls mum used to have - sort of A-line, straight sides getting wider at the top with a raised ring in the middle of the bottom they sat on (but upside down on their heads). Street cleaners have a flat straw disc with a hole in it that their cloth covered scalp pokes through. I saw one today who had a mad black net mini curtain hanging off around the brim of hers, I kept expecting her to pulll a string to sweep it apart like a puppet theatre curtain. Every now and then I pass a solar powered hat, not sure if they are running a fan or an oxygen supply or what inside, as they have a mini solar panel on the top and a dark visor in front as if they were about to weld something (they aren't, always in a suit or casual clothes!). Quite a few have those hats with mini brollies attached- I always thought they were just a joke! Lots as I said use brollies, some made with silver reflective stuff inside to keep out UV, or even proper parasols ( I presume thats what they are as no way is the fabric waterproof) so I tend to wear my sunglasses a lot as eye protection from all their poking brolly ends. The reason I'm on about hats is I have been trying to buy one, just a baseball cap, as my floppy sun-hat is a bit much to wear around the city/ stuff in my bag. This is proving impossible unless I get a major brand (Gucci etc) which I won't, I HATE names, and everything else is too garish even for me - mad colours AND gold braid AND sequins AND metallic writing.....oh dear! Or unless I want a knitted beanie........?
I noticed that a lot of the boats moored up in the channel/harbour are decorated with what looked like fairy light or tinsel but turned out to be fish carefully arranged by size on strings. I was on a bus going through the dried fish-selling region today, I have NO IDEA what most of the millions of things on display were, apart from dried shark fin (the best soups sell at £30 a bowl!) which I know is decimating shark populations, and they tend to waste the sharks as they just slice off the fins & don't even eat the rest! Oh, one for Sue/ Kate J - apprantly horse 'beezors' (no idea how they spell that) which are sort of hair or grass balls taken form horses stomachs, are good business as they are supposed to be antidotes to poisin. Then again they also sell dried dog's penises so I don't know if you can get a back-door trade going at your vets.......And later on I realised the cases of 1 weird creature I couldn't ID were actually sea-horses, dried with their tails straightened out, not good. Bit sad as I picked up a leaflet about visiting HK's wild places & 1 of their rules is to not remove sealife, but aside from theses big business wholesale shop/stands, at the weekends hoards descend on our island & all the beaches with their little designer fishing & BBQ kits & clean out the seashore & rock pools! I also nearly went to buy sweets from a sweet stall but the front barrel had lots of whole crabs, smallish ones a few cm accross, covered in sweet 100s & 1000s (those cake sprinkles) so I copped out & went to the 7-11 instead. We did have crab curry for tea in Petes favourite Thai place, and have decided to add that to the list of not-on-1st-dates/ meeting-parents dinners, as it was SO messy - slippery curry coated massive pincers and those big metal nut-crackers don't do well together!
Thai traditional puddings - all warm, gelatin/ sweetcorn based - we like the corny one piled in the middle best
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.
Still deciding if I likeThai sweets, the gelatin stuff is just too thick & chewy, but we both like the sweetcorn& rice hot paste sticky thing. Had a scare in the loos there, it flushed automatically but something was wrong with it so the water kept RISING!!! I escaped before my flipflops were christened.
The streets are clean in the litter free sense, and many bins have really severe 'these WILL be cleaned 8 times a day at this hour and that hour' etc signs. The one thing that does annoy me is the lack of recycling - I saw 3 small paper/metal/plastic bins somewhere ONCE but at the moment have a large bag of paper & cans at home & nowhere to put them. All the rest of our rubbish goes into communal wheelie bins at the top of the steps down to the beach, which are emptied by a quad bike trailer several times a day. I have seen posters with "Friends of the Earth support simple-packaged moon-cakes (more on that later) but thats about it eco-wise. Oh, and some of the tube stations have a box to recycle batteries. Shocking really! But as Pete says, lots of people go through bins to collect stuff - when possible he leaves his cans on the top to save them the trouble.
Cleaned dog loo with chinese writing in it on pathway to Tung O Bay, Lamma Island, Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.
Despite all the pampered pooches I have seen NO dog mess (several dog loos though) and often spot people with large bottles of water rinsing off trees/ poles their dogs weed on. Nice!
Many street corners & often the pillars/ shared walls between shops have little shrines with statues and incense sticks in them; some of the larger corner shrines you can pull up a stool and get blessed at, inches from traffic whizzing by. The police (who I notice have to press the ends of their radios onto little metal studs in some walls - to prove they are on their beats I think) don't seem to mind the blessings holding up traffic.
Did I say about the pedestrian crossings? Sometimes they are hard to find, and many corners are railed off which is a pain as you have to go halfway down the street to get round the railings, but all the crossings make a metallic regular chink/ping sound. As it gets time to cross the pings speed up, like a radar telling you theres an incoming missile, and when the pings go frantic everyone dashes across. Lots of warnings about what they do to jay walkers, but in the busier bits they really don't seem to have co-ordinated the lights/ pings with the traffic signals; we often stand there looking at an empty road as the cars are at a red light, but the cars pile up before our crossing pings have finished letting us accross. Apparently chinese visiting from the mainland don't understand crossings or traffic in general, and police actually waylay tour groups and force them to have road safety lessons, as so many visitors had accidents!
A lot of the pavement railings have big coloured PVC banners with the faces & slogans of governement officers, councillors etc, along with their contact details - brave!
The harbour of Aberdeen is more like a river really, long & skinny with multi storey flats both sides. Even the small ones are 30 stories high, and thats on top of the carparking/ facilities! What is cool is the massive birds of prey - I think they are a sort of big brown kite, they have that v in the tail but look more like buzzards - they dive between the boats so close you could poke them, to pick up dropped fish etc. Huge! They spiral in big groups between the buildings sometimes, its wierd, like an extra lethal 'murder' of crows! What is also cute in a sad way, is the pretty white egrets (like elegant mini herons) that are everywhere watery. They sit & wait for a fish to go by, often on the random barrels etc the boats use as moorings, but even more often on floating rubbish - mainly bits of broken off polystyrene fish boxes. We even giggled at one last night that had 1 foot in each side of an empty take-away box - like a long MacDonalds box. They have amazing balance!
I only noticed today (as the smog had cleared a bit) that 1 set of high rises had been covered in coloured tiles to continue the profile of the hills behind it, quite clever really - I put a pic of it on Flikr.
The Aberdeen high-rises with the pattern of the hills behind them mimicked in coloured tiles, Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.
Several other of the huge buildings have massive holes cut in them, on purpose - for Feng Shiu or ' to let the dragons reach the sea'! Some story about how the sacred dragons travel from the islands mountains to the sea and it would have been bad if they had to deviate AROUND the buildings! So they go through specially cut dragon-sized cat flaps instead......
Turns out that massive HSBC building (who still haven't given me an account) was designed by Norman Foster & was the most expensive in the world when done, in 1985 - and has the best feng shui ever as it sits on 5 'dragon lines', whose energy is sucked in by the escaltors!
Pete in front of the round window - locals call it the Building of 10000 arse holes! Central, Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.
My favourite building so far we ended up beneath by accident- I had read about it, a shiney high rise office block, the same age as me, with ROUND windows instead of the usual angular ones, in Central on the harbour . Unfortunately it has been dubbed the 'Building of 1000 arse holes' by locals - double meaning I expect as its offices, probably government in that area! We misssed our stop & ended up at the bus terminus there, but all was not lost as Pete had a sandwich craving (I'm not fed up with rice & nooodles yet) and took me to the high class MacDonalds there! It has a cafe attached - sorry, McCafe - that does lovely sandwiches with WIERD fillings, and coffe in china cups bigger than mixing bowls with a wee chocolate 'M' sprinkled on the top.
Petes classy MASSIVE MacDonalds MacCoffee & MacSandwhich in Central Hong Kongs MacCafe
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.
I was fascinated by National Geographic being piped in for us to watch (lions killing baby elephants) while I had a McRice burger - fried rice & mushroom patty instead of a bun, passable, actually! The highlight for me was the mall's loos; a lady checked each loo as it was exited, cleaned it, flushed it, air freshened it and then told you it was safe to go in. Even though it also does all that automatically as you leave it!
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