Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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Month: Aug 2004

  • Back

    So what’s been happening whilst I’ve been away? Babies seem to the theme – Simon and his colleague Giles seem to have become fathers for the 3rd and 2nd times respectively. Simon is having a celebration on Wednesday, and I will try to pop along for an hour or so. Congratulations to both gentlemen and…

  • Short intermission

    Ordinary Gweilo is on vacation. Normal service will be resumed at the start of September. In the meantime, please visit the archives, where you can read about going to the doctor, compulsory holidays for domestic helpers, getting lost, childrens parties at McDonalds, and all manner of other worthless trivia. Including, as Fumier points out, more…

  • Weaselwatch – Car Rental

    The first in what may turn out to be a series about the world’s biggest weasels. This week – car rental companies. It shouldn’t be so hard, should it? You make a booking (by phone or over the Internet), you turn up at the appointed time, they take your credit card details, check your driving…

  • A pint of beer, some bread and a slab of your finest cheese

    The BBC report that the baguette is making a comeback in France. In France, that national symbol, the crusty baguette has in recent years been threatened by a decline in bread consumption and the rise of industrial-style baking. Industrial bread production is a curse of the modern age. These days you can buy buy bread…

  • Just sign here, please.

    Henry from Waah is feeling unloved right now because no-one is posting any comments to his blog. So I’ll link to his post about credit card signatures, referring to this prank. I can confirm that no-one seem to care about the signature on the credit card slip. A former boss of mine, a gweilo with…

  • The price is right (if you’re an American)

    After my discovery that Hertz customers pay less if they claim to be from the UK, The Guardian reveals a similar discrepancy between prices offered to UK and US customers for the Eurostar cross-Channel rail link. Tthis time UK customers lose out to the Americans. but Eurostar are defending their pricing policies: The train operator…

  • Read all about it – tree stolen

    I am no longer a regular reader of the SCMP, but I do sometimes buy it on Saturday. I’m not sure why, though. Yesterday, the front page of the ‘City’ section (Hong Kong news that is too dull to go in the main paper, plus features and sport) looked like this: The top story was…

  • EPL on Cable TV – sofa, so good

    Well, the EPL season has started, and we finally get to discover what joys Cable TV have in store for us. First impressions are reasonably favourable, all things considered. It seems that they will be showing 7 of the 10 games from each weekend’s fixtures live (including two simultaneously as ESPN/Star Sports did), and then…

  • Is she really going out with him?

    I can spot a theme when I see one, and Mia over at Discombobulated is obviously uneasy about the tendency of Western men in Asia to hook up with young ladies who are half their age (and a quarter of their weight). Recently she was unhappy that a fortyish male friend of hers has acquired…

  • Boss Swap – Lee and Bryan

    The third programme in the ‘Boss Swap’ series was undoubtedly the most interesting, mainly because it actually had a point. The formula so far has been to take bosses working in broadly similar industries but with contrasting management styles and see how they cope in a different environment. This time they took it a stage…