This is one issue that doesn’t look as if it is going away. According to today’s SCMP: English Schools Foundation teachers have voted to withdraw goodwill, including extra-curricular activities, in their fight against a proposed pay cut of up to 10 per cent. Teachers’ representatives held six hours of talks with management this week but…

The news that a Taiwanese military researcher managed to infect himself with SARS has caused alarm in Hong Kong, and I am sure that sales of masks will have been given a boost. The SCMP was calm and rational, devoting most of page one and all of page three to the story. They had a…

Hong Kong has a few supermarkets that are aimed squarely at the expat community – Citysuper (in Times Square, Harbour City and IFC 2), Great (in Pacific Place), and Olivers (in the Princes building). The majority of the customers are gweilos (Brits, Australians, Americans, Canadians, Europeans) and Japanese, and the shops tend to have different…

It’s funny how Christmas means different things at different stages in your life. My son is now old enough to understand Christmas, and at the weekend we bought him a Christmas tree (in response to frequent requests over the last few days) and he had great fun decorating it. I realized that this is the…

Interesting story in the SCMP this morning, about the approach taken by film distributors on the mainland to pirate DVDs. Infernal Affairs III was released last week, and pirate DVDs were available a few days later. So rather than whingeing about it in the SCMP they did something positive: Just three days after cinemas began…

Batgung has some amusing signs from Hong Kong. Most are examples of poor or mangled English, and one is confusing jargon. It’s always tempting to do this, but it seems a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel and I also feel it’s unfair to criticize other people’s English when my Chinese is…

Every now and then I see someone wearing a mask out on on the street or in a shopping centre. Obviously this is a reminder of the SARS outbreak when almost everyone in Hong Kong (apart from a few stubborn gweilos) wore masks. At the time I thought it was a complete over-reaction given that…

Now that it’s officially cold, a traditional dish is snake soup. However, this report (from AP) suggests that it may not be so readily available this year. Actually, I quite like snake soup. I know some people are squeamish about eating snakes, but as long as you can’t see the damn things I don’t mind.

This is the time of year when opinions about the weather vary somewhat depending on whether you are a local or a foreigner. For many of us (as Shaky noted) this is good weather, pleasant during the day but perhaps a bit cool at night. However, locals are dressing up in scarves and winter coats…