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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  • The Office ‘Christmas Special’ on TVB Pearl

    TVB Pearl are showing “The Office” Christmas Special just after midnight on Friday, but of course, no details are available on the TVB website or in the Sunday paper. What’s that all about, then?

    As it happens, I recently managed to watch it on a plane, and I have no doubt that I’ll buy it when it comes out on DVD, so it doesn’t matter all that much, but I’m slightly baffled. You might think that TVB could manage even a tiny big of publicity for it, but it seems not (or at least it hasn’t got through to me). Mind you, I think that they showed the first half of the last ever episode of Friends on Sunday without any fanfare at all. What a bunch of clowns!!

    Incidentally, Star World now has an excellent double bill of British comedy on Saturday nights – Coupling followed by The Office.

  • Democratic helpers

    This story had me puzzled.

    More than 100,000 foreign nationals work as maids in Hong Kong, and most of them are from the Philippines. But for how long?
    The labor ministry in Hong Kong says there were 155,470 Filipina maids in Hong Kong in 2001 but only 123,189 in 2003. At the same time there was a sharp increase in hiring of maids from Indonesia.

    The ministry said unofficially confirms that there some sentiment in Hong Kong that maids from democratic nations are harder to manage than maids from other societies.

    This makes no sense to me at all (even allowing for the mangled English). Am I missing something?

    If there is a preference in Hong Kong for Indonesian maids I thought it was because they are more willing to work for lower wages. I can’t imagine that the political system of Indonesia or the Philippines comes into at all, but I must say I thought that both countries were democracies. Very puzzling.

    UPDATE: A slightly more coherent account of this nonsense can be found here. There’s a quote from what I assume to be a Philippine government official, trying to explain the popularity of Indonesian maids over Filipinas:

    Mr Julve also cited the Filipinos’ assertiveness as a factor.

    “Its a cultural clash because Filipinos are born, raised and educated in a democratic society while the Chinese with their Confucian values value discipline, order and hierarchy,” he said.

    No, I still don’t get it. Hemlock has another take on this story, incidentally.

  • Football Crazy

    Ah, the football management merry-go-round. The season is only a few weeks old, and already three Premiership clubs are changing managers.

    I have some sympathy for football club chairmen because I’m sure that it is a very challenging role, but you have to wonder whether it makes their job any easy to leave the manager in charge all through the close season and then dismiss him after a few games (when it’s already too late to sign any new players). Two clubs have done this, and in both cases it appears that they had been thinking about it for some time. Stories appeared in respectable newspapers after the opening game of the season saying that Paul Sturrock only had a few games left to prove himself (at Southampton), and prior to that Newcastle announced that Bobby Robson’s contract would not be renewed at the end of the season. Then Kieron Dyer had a very public falling-out with his manager and it seemed that Robson had lost his authority with the players.

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  • Pills and potions

    Cathy Holcombe, writing in the current issue of Spike, highlights a pharmacy in Central that is apparently famous for offering controlled medicines without a prescription. She also reports that it’s cheaper than Watsons. I am sure that’s right – I have briefly touched on the subject of Hong Kong pharmacies, and at the time I made the observation that independent pharmacies are always cheaper than Watsons and Mannings, and often significantly so. It’s also true that pharmacies seem quite eager to dispense “controlled” medicines without the doctor’s prescription that is legally required.

    The most egregious example I have personally come across was when I was asking for something for a sore throat and was offered antibiotics, but it seems quite routine for them to dispense medicines on request, usually after they have been prescribed by the doctor. Just bring along the small plastic bag that the doctor gave to you with 3 or 4 days supply of medicine and the pharmacist will sell you some more. Or if you have a doctor’s prescription they will sell you the medicine but let you keep the prescription for future use (which is not how it is supposed to work).

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  • Four more years

    Well, the Olympics seem to have finished.

    It wasn’t easy, but I managed to avoid most of it. I wasn’t really paying attention, but it seems that the thing was actually quite successful in spite of all the gloom and doom that we heard for the months and years leading up to it. Construction may only have been completed at the last minute, but who expected anything else?

    Now the Greeks have a whole pile of expensive sporting facilities, a spectacular new earthquake-proof (but rather pointless) bridge, plus an upgraded airport and public transport system. I hope they think it was worth it! (Clue: it wasn’t)

    I remember reading a few years ago about the jingoistic and selective coverage provided by the US networks, and thinking how terrible it was. What was the matter with me? In the States all you see and hear are the American competitors, in the UK all you hear about are the Brits (showjumping, rowing, weird sailing) and here in Hong Kong it’s all about the Chinese divers, table tennis and badminton players, and shooters). It’s the same everywhere.

    Actually, I’ve been slightly surprised by the way that Hong Kong people have become so enthusiastic about the performance of the Chinese team. Was it the same four years ago?

  • Cheers

    Last night, Simon had his baby headwetting in Lan Kwai Fong, and the cream* of Hong Kong’s blogging community turned up to join the celebrations. We started in Stormy Weather, Phil dragged us into Bulldog’s and after I left they went on somewhere else. The beer and champagne flowed freely, and there must be a few people with sore heads this morning!

    The prize for the blogger who looks most how I expected goes to Giles (Sweet Chariots). Runners-up prizes go to HKMacs, Shaky,Shandyman, and Phil.

    As you might expect, we congratulated each other on the good work we all do, and bitched about the bloggers who weren’t present (though I won’t boost their egos by naming them). It seems we all know quite a lot about most of the “anonymous” bloggers except for those of us who are quite convinced that Spirit Fingers is a man. Well, stranger things have happened!

    A good time was had by all, and we must do it again sometime.

    ________
    *thick stuff that rises to the top

  • 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 their wives!!

    Simon celebrated the birth by getting his site redesigned. It looks good, but I hate the narrow column of text running down the middle of the screen on the front page – this seems to be a common problem (most of the Typepad templates have the same flaw) and I find it hard to read the text. Shaky had a design like that for a while, but has changed it a few times since and it now fills the screen. Let’s not carp though – I continue to be amazed by the amount of effort that Simon manages to put into his site, which is now a year old, incidentally, and it was his fault that I started doing this (I figured if he could do it, then so could I). Plus, last time I was rude about him, I got into big trouble!

    Shaky is also celebrating his first anniversary, though I had imagined that he’d been around longer. He also spends a lot of time messing around with his site, but he doesn’t have a wife or kids so there is plenty of time in the day.

    Phil is back in business (yes, I know this happened before I went away) and has not just redesigned his site but totally re-built it. I suppose I can just about understand that it is more satisfying to do it all yourself rather than using MT or WordPress or Blogger or Typepad, but I would never attempt such a thing. Anyway, the site looks good, and it’s great to have Phil back (even if he is threatening to run his Asia Blog awards again).

    Goodness me, even NTSCMP had a decent story (about John Egan not really being a ‘top’ lawyer), but they really shouldn’t use ideas (Hong Kong Olympic sports in full) that have appeared in Spike when they are continually whingeing about their jokes being stolen by the same publication! Funniest piece was the marvellous combination of arrogance and paranoia that has George implying that the Chinese government is deliberately meddling with their web design to sabotage the site. Yeah, right.

    Some things never change.

  • 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 posts about cheese than any other Hong Kong blog!

  • Life in Hong Kong

  • Hong Kong politics

  • Sports

  • Technology

  • 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 licence and ask you to sign the rental agreement. Then they give you the keys and tell you where the car is parked. 5-10 minutes, and off you go.

    So how come it so rarely works out like that?

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  • 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 virtually everywhere in the world, but unfortunately most of it is tasteless and has the consistency of cotton wool. For this we can thank the food scientists who developed the ‘Chorleywood method’ of making bread more quickly and cheaply. In Britain, industrially-produced white sliced bread is one of the items that supermarkets sell at very low prices to attract customers. This in turn has driven many local bakers out of business, especially now that large supermarkets bake bread on the premises.

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