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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  • Overdue

    I recently went to the library for the first time in many years, and the first time ever in Hong Kong.

    As a child I was a regular visitor to my local library. I remember the building as being a very modern glass and concrete structure with a curious split-level design. From the entrance you went down a few stairs to the children’s library, or up to the adult library. I still have very strong memories of the place, though I haven’t been there for many years.

    Then when we moved (less than a mile) we started using another larger library that was in a much older building. Here the children’s library had a separate entrance with a curious spiral staircase, and it also had a free car park for library users, which was very handy when I started to drive! I spent many happy hours there selecting books.

    My other main memory is that this library had very weak systems to look after their stock. When you joined you were given three or four ‘tokens’ and when you took out a book they kept your token and gave it back to you when you returned it. However, they didn’t actually track the individual books, so we discovered that you could take a book off the shelves of the library and “return” it in order to get an extra token. They also had a strange scheme whereby you could apply for additional tokens for ‘serious’ books, but this system also fell apart because when you returned the ‘serious’ book they gave you ordinary tokens!!

    Needless to say, libaries now have computer systems that can track every book, though doubtless kids will still find some way to defeat the system!

    I’m not quite sure why I got out of the library habit when I lived in the UK, or why it has taken me so long to join the library here. Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to encourage my son to start using the library, so I finally got round to joining. My son’s approach is to go into the library saying he doesn’t want any books, then pick the first 3 or 4 he sees on the shelves that look vaguely suitable. Now we have read them several nights in a row and he is asking if he can keep them!!

    I spend a bit more time choosing my books, and of course I am too ambitious and select more than I can read in the two week loan period. The two I have read (or at least started) are Peter Hennessey’s book about British Prime Ministers, and the second part of John Campbell’s excellent biography of Margaret Thatcher. I’m not sure how long the latter book has been in stock, but I was the first person to borrow it!

    The most impressive aspect of the system is the facility to renew your books over the Internet. Very quick and easy to use (and handy if you forget which books you have borrowed).

    I think I may have got back into the library habit.

  • Timesaver or timewaster

    Is the Internet a great timesaver or a terrible timewaster?

    I’ve just spent the last few days trying to get information about car hire and hotels in the UK for a relative who is going over for the first time later this month. I am happy to help, but it can be a very frustrating experience.

    (more…)

  • Fair and Balanced

    It’s amusing to see how some people either wilfully or accidentally misunderstand what is going on. Especially when they regard themselves as experts on the subject.

    Take Conrad, for example (you’re welcome, I don’t want him). If there are two subjects you would expect him to get right, they would be law and politics. He’s a lawyer, and reckons himself to be an expert on politics.

    Last week he managed to confuse  [link deleted – site no longer available] the Progressive Alliance (PA) with the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB) when writing about Beijing’s apparent plans to abandon the former to give more support to the Liberals and the DAB. Earlier, you may recall, he got very confused about the date of the Spanish General Election and very upset about comments made by the opposition leader about John Kerry (Americans, you understand, never interfere in other people’s elections).

    This week he compares  [link deleted – site no longer available] John Kerry’s mixed results in the opinion polls to a ‘dead cat bounce’. The point (I think) being that even a dead cat thrown from a high building bounces up in the air, but John Kerry didn’t get much of a boost from the Democratic National Convention. In opinion polls we trust…

    I suppose we have to ignore Conrad’s earlier protestations that he couldn’t support George W Bush and accept that he is a highly partisan Republican, but anyone who is following the election surely knows that it’s close and Kerry is a serious threat to Bush. One opinion poll showing Bush in the lead proves nothing.

    As Conrad surely knows very well, in this election there are very few floating voters. Most people have made up their mind either for or against Bush, and the result is going to be decided by what happens in a few ‘swing’ states. There is every chance that we will again see a candidate win the popular vote and lose the election (as happened to Al Gore). In short, it’s going to be close, and both parties know it and are planning accordingly. It really doesn’t matter whether Kerry trails at this stage or leads by 7%. What matters is how people vote in November.

    Dead cat? I don’t think so.

  • A pleasant drive

    Watching TV last night I caught a very amusing piece of fiction.

    Yes, the one with the happy smiling minibus driver kindly requesting his passengers to fasten their seat belts. Then he turns the key in the ignition to start the engine before pulling away.

    This must come from a parallel universe where minibuses are quite unlike the ones I travel on. Yes, the ones where the engine is always running, the driver stops momentarily for passengers to clamber onboard before setting off at top speed and crashes the gears at every opportunity.

    Not that seat belts are a bad idea – in fact they will be very useful when the minibus goes round bends at 50 mph – but I fear that travelling on minibuses with always be ‘interesting’.

  • Home sweet home

    Shaky is in the UK for a few days, and seems to have the same rather ambivalent feelings about being there that I do. There’s more to watch on TV, people speak a language you understand, working hours are shorter, the weather is good (er, hang on…). However:

    then there’s the news.

    It’s full of murder,murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, shootings, theft, animal cruelty and police in the playground. What the fuck is going on?!

    My mate told me about the run-ins he’s had over the last few months, just walking home. A bloke having a go at him and his girlfriend for their interracial relationship, and a gang of kids giving him abuse, having a go, and actually coming into his apartment complex.

    Hong Kong is still a much safer place than London, though I have to say that when I lived there I had remarkably little trouble. Yesterday’s newspapers report that crime here has hit a “nine-year high” at about 1.3 crimes per 100 people. The comparable figure for the UK seems to be over 20 crimes per 100 people. Assuming those figures are correct (and comparable), that’s a big difference!

    There are certainly a few things I miss about the UK. Just as an example, being able to go into a supermarket and buy decent fruit and vegetables! Oh, and cheese, of course. Not exactly homesick, but sometimes I miss things about life back in the UK, and obviously I miss my family and friends over there. Anyway, I have no plans to go back to the UK, but since I had no plans to come to Hong Kong but ended up here anyway I suppose that doesn’t mean anything. Certainly I don’t have strong negative feeling about my home country, as seems to be the case with some expats.

    Someone who is leaving Hong Kong, and probably heading back to Europe, is Eshin. Seems that things didn’t really work out for him here.

  • Boss Swap – Mrs S

    The first programme in the Boss Swap series (shown second by ATV) was less dramatic, but almost equally pointless. The story so far seems to be that people get very upset when you suggest that you should change the way you run your business, though it clearly makes things more difficult when they deliberately choose bosses with very different styles.

    (more…)

  • Time and time again

    I was amused when Liam Fitzpatrick managed to fill a couple of pages of Spike magazine with the gripping story of his long association with ‘Bottoms Up’ in TST and the terribly sad news that they have closed the place down.

    Incredibly, he managed to recycle this material for a special double issue of Time magazine (Asia edition). It’s all there – his mother going to pick up his father from the bar after his epic binges, The Man with the Golden Gun, young Liam going for a drink after school, blah, blah, blah.

    Incidentally, why does Time magazine publish a double issue at this time of year? Christmas and New Year I can understand, but what’s with July?

  • Surveillance

    Fat people stuffing their faces in an all-you-can-eat buffet. Score bonus points for groups of fat people eating together.

  • Flying low

    According to Time magazine, the budget airline business in Asia is fairly cut-throat:

    Udom Tantiprasongchai, chief executive of Orient Thai Airlines routinely employs a team in his office to go on the Internet and buy up as many of the cheapest tickets on AirAsia flights as they can get, often spending more than $3,500 a day. It’s a small price to pay, he argues, to keep the low-price tickets out of the hands of potential AirAsia customers and to foster ill will toward his competitor.

    I’m not so sure this is a good strategy. His logic is obviously that if he buys the cheapest tickets real customers will have to pay higher prices, and may not bother if no bargains are available. However, if the demand is there, AirAsia will fill up the plane and make more money. If they were clever they could re-sell the tickets bought by their competitor and make even more money! Also, from a PR point of view it could rebound on Orient Thai if customers know what they are doing to force up prices. Probably not a good idea to tell a journalist, then…

    For some reason, The Economist also had a longish piece on budget airlines a couple of weeks ago, focusing more on the European market. The problem is that the UK and Ireland market is saturated, and there are doubts about the size of the opportunities in other countries.

    There was also >this strange story, about a travel company that acquired a small airport in the UK, renamed it as West Midlands International Airport and started operating cheap flights. For some reason they seem to be able to do this without needing any planning permission. Local residents are not amused (they never are).

    I remain rather unconvinced by Asian budget airlines. Time magazine reckons that the big airlines have lower overheads and so are not so vulnerable to price competition (certainly Cathay and SQ were quick to offer special prices on selected flights), and anyway these prices are not so amazingly low. Who wants to take a ferry to Macau and have all that messing about just to save a few dollars?

  • Salt of the earth

    I found this disclaimer on a packet of sea salt: “This salt does not supply Iodide, a necessary nutrient”. Two questions arise from this:

    Does salt naturally contain iodide? No
    Do most people in Hong Kong need extra iodide? No

    Iodide is added to most salt that you buy, and has been for a very long time. The warning on the salt I bought is apparently mandatory in the United States. However, for most people with a reasonable diet, there is no need for extra iodine because it occurs naturally in fish, some vegetables and some meat. The bad news is that insufficient iodide consumption by mothers and children is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation (more here).

    For people with very poor diets, the iodide added to salt can make a big difference. I read an article some time ago about one very poor part of the world where non-iodized salt was being sold much more cheaply than iodized salt, and this had led to a marked increase in mental retardation in the local population. Unfortunately I can’t find the article or remember any more details about it.

    The irony here, of course, that people who buy sea salt in a supermarket in the United States (or Hong Kong, or other rich countries) are the ones who get the warning, and are the least likely to need to worry about it.