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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  • What’s smellier?

    Stinky tofu or a nice ripe French cheese (brie or camembert for example).

    Opinions seem to vary on this one…

  • All just a big misunderstanding

    Mark Thatcher was once described as "a sort of Harrovian Arthur Daley with a famous mum", and until recently he was famous mainly for getting lost for six days in in the Sahara desert.  He is one of those mysterious people who appears not to be very bright, and has many failed business ventures to demonstrate this (he is supposed to have dabbled in the Hong Kong business world many years ago), but in spite of this he has managed to become very rich (I suppose that marrying a Texan heiress helped).

    He was recently given a four-year suspended sentence for his part in helping to bankroll an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. He pleaded guilty to the charges, paid a large fine and was allowed to leave South Africa. He is now living with his Mum in the UK, but had hoped to join his wife and family in the US.

    Unfortunately he has been refused a visa for the United States, even though he promised them that he was only interested in overthrowing the governments of small African countries.  He seems to regard the criminal record as a mere technicality:

    "It was always a calculated risk when I plea bargained in South Africa. As a result of this decision, I shall make the family home in Europe, not the UK, and my family will be joining me as soon as arrangements are made."

    Right. He paid a £265,000 fine and was sentenced to four years in prison (albeit suspended), and the US government takes the view that he is a criminal. I wonder what ever gave them that idea?

  • Cha Xiu Bao

    I notice that Cha Xiu Bao was mentioned on the food pages of this week’s Sunday Morning Post magazine.  Yes, that’s the new-improved-but-somehow-exactly-the-same-as-before Sunday magazine. 

    I’d have to agree with Susan Jung that it’s a good blog, and it’s worth a look if you are interested in food (in Hong Kong and elsewhere).

  • Nothing exceptional

    There was a letter in yesterday’s paper entitled "Insensitive Immigration", from a lady whose husband had died suddenly.  As he was the employer of their domestic helper she contacted the Immigration Department to ask them what she should do:

    I was told that the helper was to report to immigration…She returned with a notice to say that her contract had been terminated on March 21, the day my husband died, and that she has to return to the Philippines on Monday April 4.  The notice also stated "I am not satisfied that there are exceptional circumstances which should justify to extend your stay in Hong Kong."

    All that the letter writer wanted was for the helper to continue working for her for a few weeks before she left Hong Kong (permanently, I suppose).  Not an unreasonable request, you might think, but the bureaucrats seem to have interpreted the contract literally and insisted it had been terminated on the death of the employer, and that the helper must therefore leave within two weeks.

    Putting comon sense to one side for a moment, the illogical thing about this is that if you want to employ an Overseas Domestic Helper, the mountain of paperwork refers mainly to the household rather than the individual.  Does the household need a helper, is the household income sufficient, do you have a broom cupboard where you can keep the DH when not in use, that type of thing.  They require one member of the household to be the employer, but in reality the helper is employed to work for the family.  Hence it should be a trivial administrative matter to transfer the employment contract from one member of the family to another.

    Yet it isn’t, as I discovered when I became the employer of our helper (rather than my wife, who had signed the original contract).  There was no particular reason for making this change apart from my wife’s aversion to filling in forms (our helper was keen that we do it ourselves, rather than using the agency). 

    If you renew a DH contract it’s relatively simple and can be done at several Immigration offices, but if you change the employer (even from wife to husband) you have to fill in all manner of stupid forms and apply to Immigration Tower in Wan Chai.  This makes no sense, but that’s bureaucracy for you!

    Having to deal with this type of nonsense is frustrating at the best of times, but after the death of your spouse it must be many times worse.  The irony is that if this lady had simply ignored the problem for a few weeks it seems unlikely that the Immigration Department would have taken any action.  So by doing the right thing and contacting them she has been exposed to the full idiocy of their procedures.   

  • We apologize for any inconvenience caused

    "others who don’t blog often like Fumier, Ordinary Gweilo.." [a comment from HKMacs on Simon World]

    Well, maybe.

    I seem to have contracted the dreaded lurgy that the aforesaid Fumier and Dr Shaky have also been suffering from.  The first day I felt a bit under the weather, but the second, third and fourth days I felt fairly terrible (symptoms here) and on the fifth day I was back to feeling a bit rough.  Since then I seem to have been recovering quite slowly, but now, finally, I feel almost human again. 

    Anyway, aren’t March and April supposed to be quite pleasant in Hong Kong?  I’m fed up with this wet and windy stuff…

    I’d like to say that normal service will be resumed shortly, but the truth is that I am still rather busy at work and for all my good intentions I am not sure that there will be much improvement till later this month.  Feel free to add messages of encouragement, but I doubt that they’ll make any difference.

  • Nigel Slater: Toast

    Fumier recommended this book to me, and funnily enough I had considered buying it last time I was in the UK, but annoyingly I saw it in a bargain book shop (the hardback for £3 or so rather than the £16.99 cover price) but hesitated – on the grounds that if it was that cheap it couldn’t be any good – and then when I decided to buy it I couldn’t remember where I had seen it.

    Like ‘Gweilo’ (the last autobiography reviewed here) this is a somewhat unusual memoir. Nigel Slater is a food writer (with a weekly column in The Observer), and he has written about his childhood mainly by reference to the food that he ate (and later cooked). It is broken down into short chapters, most of which have food-related titles.

    (more…)

  • Easter is cancelled

    What’s going on?  The Easter programme used to be a key part of the football season, with two matches in four days giving teams an opportunity to boost their chances at the top or bottom of the table.  Even better, it also used to be a time for local derbies. 

    First the spoilsport police managed to get the local derbies moved to other dates, and now this year there are no matches in either the Premiership or the-league-once known-as-Division Two.  That’s right – no matches from Good Friday to Easter Monday because international matches are being played instead.

    To add to the sense of unreality, there were no Premiership games two weeks ago, which means that most teams played only two matches in March. 

    According to the BBC, next season the FA Cup quarter-finals will be played in midweek, though they seem to have abandoned a plan to have the final in midweek. 

  • Dash

    Someone in my family is a huge fan of The Incredibles, so we went to the local cinema over Chinese New Year to watch it.  Now, scarcely a month later, it’s out on DVD, even while it’s still showing in the odd cinema or two!  Hong Kong was one of the last countries to get the film, but one of the first to get the DVD.

    I think Kung Fu Hustle was out on DVD in Hong Kong even more quickly, though not as fast as the legitimate PRC version (albeit in Mandarin only and without English subtitles).  I realize that they are trying to compete with the pirate DVDs that were available even before the film made it to the cinema, but this is getting a bit ridiculous.  What’s the next plan – to sell you a copy of the DVD as you are hustled out of the cinema?

    The Incredibles is quite entertaining, and follows the usual Pixar approach of aiming jokes at both young and old, though the storyline is more adult than before – it’s not easy to explain to young children why Mr Incredible had to give up being a superhero.  Fortunately, children don’t really care if part of the story doesn’t quite make sense to them, and there’s plenty to keep them entertained. 

    I did rather enjoy the part of the film with Mr Incredible working in an insurance company, struggling to physically fit into the office and finding it hard to come to terms with the idea that his job was to stop customers making claims.  Then in the evening he secretly rescues people, incurring the wrath of his wife who complains when he comes home late after one his adventures with bits of latex on his clothes.

  • “I’m on the Northern Line”

    The BBC reports that passengers will be able to use their mobile phones on stations on the London Underground by 2008, finally being able to do something that has been possible on the MTR in Hong Kong for several years.

    However, there is some opposition to this apparently unremarkable idea:

    But both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives warned the new technology could enable terrorists to carry out attacks from above ground

    Concerns were raised by the Liberal Democrats last year about the security risks of such plans. Former London mayoral candidate, Simon Hughes, said mobiles were a "cheap and effective long range detonator". He added: "Using mobiles on the deep line sections… is unnecessary. Texting is a luxury, security is not."

    Well, I have to agree with Simon Hughes that texting is a luxury, but does he really think that terrorists have been planning to plant bombs on underground trains but been thwarted by the lack of mobile phone coverage?  Seems unlikely.

    What they need is a device that limits calls to 30 seconds.  Long enough to say where are you but not long enough to annoy your fellow passengers.

  • Going Underground

    Yesterday there was one of those rather pathetic protests we sometimes get in Hong Kong.  The picture in the SCMP shows less than twenty cars driving slowly up to entrance of the Eastern Harbour Tunnel, thus delaying a few motorists out for a drive on a Sunday morning.  They are complaining about the plans to increase the toll for the from HK$15 to HK$25.  From The Standard:

    In 2002, the New Hong Kong Tunnel Company, which manages the Eastern Harbour Crossing, applied for an increase. The Chief Executive-in-Council rejected the application.  In August 2003 the company sought arbitration and in January a HK$10 increase was agreed.

    Hong Kong has three road tunnels under Victoria Harbour.  The oldest is the one from Hung Hom to Causeway Bay (known simply as the Cross-Harbour Tunnel) which is now owned by the government.  The newer Eastern and Western tunnels are owned and operated by the private companies that developed them, but will eventually pass to the government.

    The central location of the original tunnel makes it the most popular, and although the government doubled the toll for private cars when it took control, the operators of the other two tunnels have increased their prices so that it will soon be the cheapest again, presumably further increasing congestion.

    As Jake van der Kamp pointed out last week, the directors of New Hong Kong Tunnel are entitled to raise charges, and the arbitration process has actually allowed them a bigger increase than the one originally rejected by the government.  The point is that in 11 years the company will have to surrender its only asset to the government, so they have to get a return on their original investment by the tolls they collect.  The government cannot have it both ways – if they wanted to control the tolls they should have invested public money in the project rather than entering into this type of arrangement.

    There seems to be a feeling that the government should “do something”, but the only thing they can do immediately is raise the toll for the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, and they appear to have ruled that out.  One argument against an increase is that it will benefit the other two operators and reward them for their decision to increase tolls.  However, it remains the logical thing to do because there is spare capacity in the other two tunnels whereas both Hung Hom and Causeway Bay get very congested with all the traffic using the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.

    Yet it seems that the government is considering other options.  The Standard again:

    The Hong Kong government, in the midst of attempting to privatize large segments of its transport, housing and other holdings, may reverse policy and seek to buy back two cross-harbor tunnels it has privatized.  Buying back the Eastern and Western tunnels is one option being considered by the government in an attempt to solve the toll controversy and ease public irritation over sharply rising toll charges.

    Government planners are studying three options: buying back the Western and Eastern tunnels, disposing of the government’s interest in the badly congested Cross-Harbour Tunnel, or holding shares in all three.

    Buying the other two tunnels so that they can reduce the tolls?  It’s madness, I tell you! 

    Yesterday’s protest was a waste of time, because the govermment has already said they will look at what options are available, but the only thing they can do immediately would not be popular with the protestors anyway.  In a year or so the government will report back that they have decided to do nothing, but everyone will have forgotten about it by then.