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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  • Best served cold

    The South China Morning Post reports that “Indonesia has advised its citizens to avoid travelling to Britain over fears of possible terror attacks following the recent bombings in Spain”. I couldn’t find any confirmation of this on the AP website or anywhere else, but I don’t suppose the SCMP made it up.

    Later – Proof that they didn’t make it up – I found the story here

    There is, of course, some resentment about ther way that Britain, the USA and other countries issue travel warnings, as The Guardian reports:

    [British Foreign Secretary] Mr Straw acknowledged this when he recalled that after the bombing of the British consulate in Istanbul the advice was not to travel [to Turkey] except for essential business. “I thought the Turkish government had a point,” he said, “when they observed that no such prescriptive advice was issued in the aftermath of the September 11 atrocities in 2001 in respect of travel to New York or the rest of the United States.”

    So perhaps the Indonesian government is trying to make a point. As The Guardian notes, the official advice from the British Foreign Office is still that British citizens should avoid travelling to Indonesia except on “essential business”. This is continuing to have an effect on tourism and hence the local economy, and the Indonesian government have protested to Britain about it.

  • Better or Worse?

    The MTRC have been making a big fuss about the trains on the Airport Express running every 12 minutes rather than every 15 minutes.  Yes, but up until a year ago, trains were running every 10 minutes.  Then (at the height of the SARS “crisis”) they reduced the service to 4 trains an hour, and it has taken them until now to increase the regular service to 5 trains an hour.  The original service of 6 trains an hour continues to be available during holidays such as Christmas, Chinese New Year and Easter.

    It’s all rather odd – the airport is successful and yet taxi drivers are complaining about the reduced level of business (compared with the old Kai Tak airport in Kowloon) and the Airport Express is also suffering.     

    One consequence of this is that the fares on the Airport Express are now a bit of a joke, with a vast and confusing selection of discounts available.  Most of them are only available if you ask, and simply using your Octopus card is unlikely to give you the best deal (though you do get a free trip on the MTR to and from any AE station).  The exception being if you are making a return trip to the airport on the same day, in which case your return journey is free, and this is done automatically if you use your Octopus card.  Some of the other offers are: 

    • If two or more people travel together (one-way), you can buy a group ticket and save 30-35%. 
    • Use a taxi to go to Kowloon or Tsing Yi stations, and you can get a 50% discount for up to 5 people using an Octopus card – as long as you ask for it. 
    • Children can travel free and students and the elderly get 50% off – as long as you use your Octopus card and ask for the discount before you travel (and this promotion seems to come and go, somewhat randomly). 
    • If you are travelling on your own and not using the MTR (or if your company pays your expenses) you can even buy a special ticket that gives you a small discount and Asia Miles.

    You can combine some of these offers – the taxi discount and the free return journey mean that you only pay HK$15 each way between Tsing Yi and the Airport – but most are mutually exclusive, so if you use the group ticket you lose the free MTR journey.  

    Of course, even the full fares are a reduction on what was originally announced when the Airport Express was first launched nearly 6 years ago.  There were a lot of complaints at the time about the high fares, and eventually the introductory discounts were made permanent.  Now there is no need even to pay these reduced fares!

    I think everyone knows that if you are travelling by air it is worth spending some time checking for the best offers (or at least find a good travel agent who will do the job for you), but should it really be necessary to do the same thing when taking a train to the airport?  It also seems somewhat absurd that, having come up with the Octopus card to make travelling around Hong Kong simpler, the MTRC should encourage travellers to buy special tickets instead.  Passengers are given a choice between the convenience of simply using their Octopus cards or queueing up to get a discount.

    Having said all of this, I must add that the Airport Express is clean, comfortable and fast.  It’s also much more convenient than most of the comparable services in other countries, especially the very short walk from the platform to the check-in desks (which is ten minutes at Shanghai’s Pudong airport according to the SCMP, and probably about the same at Heathrow Airport).              

  • Nothing much happening

    I’m back, in time to enjoy a few peaceful days in Hong Kong before going back to work on Tuesday. With so many people out of town, it’s easier to get a table for dim sum, the roads are less busy and the shopping centres less crowded.

    Whilst I was away, I managed to avoid reading any newspapers or watching anything more than a few minutes of CNN, so I am still catching up on the news I missed. England seem to have beaten the West Indies again, which is quite something for those of who remember when test matches between these two nations only ever seemed to have one result, and three of the Champions League quarter-finals had surprising outcomes. Not a good few days for Arsenal.

    The interpretation of the Basic Law by the National People’s Congress seems to be the big local story, but it hasn’t really settled anything, and they still seem to be squabbling in Taiwan. Is that all? Did I miss anything important?

  • Can’t wait?

    There are certain places that somehow manage to stick in the memory. I don’t mean very famous sights such as the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House or Big Ben, but actually somewhere rather more mundane.

    For example, that large model of Concorde in the middle of a roundabout on the approach road to Heathrow Airport has a certain resonance for me. Perhaps because I was born in London and enjoy going back there, but also (because I normally notice it when going to the airport) I am always happy to be on my way back to Hong Kong.

    Unfortunately, it’s a long tiring journey. However, if this interesting story (also here) is true, it will one day be possible to get to London much quicker than the present 12-14 hours.

    The story is that NASA have developed a plane that can fly at nearly 5,000 mph. In theory this would make it possible to fly from here to London or Sydney in around an hour or to New York in two hours. However, although the plane did really fly, it was only for ten seconds under its own power, and it had to be launched from a B-52. So we are a long way from anything that is commercially viable!

    I remember reading about another similar project a year or two ago, but that was about sending a plane high up in the stratosphere, and the drawback (as I suspect is the case here) is that it will take time to get the plane up into the sky and down again. My guess is that would add around an hour at each end, but that would still make it much quicker than anything we have available today.

    The bad news is that it will be at least another 20 years before this might be available commercially. Still, it’s a nice idea that a weekend in London, New York or Sydney would be feasible.

    On which note I am off on holiday for a few days (on a boring old jet plane). So probably no posts for a while. Back soon.

  • April Fool

    Today is April Fools day. I haven’t seen any amusing jokes, but given that I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio in the morning, and didn’t read a newspaper today, I suppose that’s hardly surprising.

    I deduce from BWG‘s comments that one of the local TV stations had an April Fools story this morning. I imagine that, like virtually all such japes, it was fairly obvious that it was not true – it’s usually easy to tell, and they add in plenty of obvious clues just to make sure.

    April Fools jokes are much more prevalent in the UK, and London Zoo allegedly stop answering their phones for the day and have a recorded message warning people that ‘Mr Lion’, ‘Mr Tiger’ and “Elly Fant” are not available. Hilarious stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

    One of the most famous April Fools jokes in the UK was a report on Panorama (the long-running current affairs programme) about spaghetti growing on trees. I suppose that when it was first shown (before I was born) there was much less interest in (or knowledge of) “foreign” food, and some people would have believed that spaghetti really did grow on trees.

    One of the most persistent offenders is The Guardian, and some of their hoaxes have been quite elaborate – they once printed a special supplement about the island of San Seriffe, with several pages packed full of jokes about typefaces and other printing terminology.

    Inevitably, some of the jokes don’t quite work out. TV-AM, who had the franchise for breakfast TV on the ITV channel, decided to announce (on Sunday 1 April 1984) that Albert Tatlock, a character on “Coronation Street”, a very long-running soap also on ITV, had died – pretending that he was a real character. Unfortunately Jack Howarth, the actor who played the character, actually died on 31 March at the age of 88. The problem was that the programme had already been recorded (as was their normal practice, to save money). Incredibly, it was broadcast as normal with captions announcing that the actor had died – which made the ‘joke’ seem very tasteless indeed.

    On the other hand, some jokes merely anticipate real developments. I remember “Music Week”, the UK trade magazine for the music industry, running a front-page story about a new invention from Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson:

    [the] “music box” would download music directly to your hi-fi using a computer chip and your telephone line. The story duly ran and, before people realised it was a joke, the share prices of several record companies went down for at least a few hours. Little did I know that I was talking about something that had already been invented called the internet.

    This was about 20 years ago!

  • Walk the Walk

    Good stuff from Fumier on the vexed problem of the way people walk in Hong Kong. We all know that we have some of the crowded places on the planet in this city, and at times it seems like everyone else is conspiring to make life even more uncomfortable by getting in the way wherever you want to walk. My theory is that there are strong similarities with driving – we all know that it only takes one driver going slowly, hesitating too much, or going in the wrong lane to bring traffic to a halt. In some ways it is even worse with walking, because no-one needs to pass a test before walking through a busy shopping centre, and it is much easier (and less dangerous) to get distracted.

    One of the keys to being a good driver is anticipation, both of what you need to do and what others are likely to do. Yet when we are walking it is much more difficult to anticipate what other people might do, because there are so many more alternatives. You can stop suddenly – to look in a shop window or to answer your mobile phone – turn either left or right, or speed up or slow down with no warning. There is also no concept of a slow lane or an overtaking lane, so you just have to take your chances. As Fumier says:

    People walk around in Hong Kong as if they are walking through an empty field; as if they cannot see or conceive of those large moving objects we call other people, even when they are on a collision course. They will cut through corners, or walk out of a doorway, in a busy area without, it seems, even considering the possibility that there might be another person coming around the corner or along the space they are entering. Why also, when a Hong Kong pedestrian sees his or her target doorway, he makes a beeline for it regardless of anyone between him and it, when he cannot manage to walk in a straight line at any other time to save his life, will always baffle me.

    If you drove like that you’d soon have a smashed-up car and probably end up in hospital. Perhaps that’s one of the problems – so few people in Hong Kong do drive.

    Large groups are a menace because they don’t know where they are going and usually some of the people will be talking to each other rather than looking where they are going. People who talking on their mobile phones are unpredictable, apparently suffering from the same problem as President Gerald Ford (who was accused of being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time).

    Fumier has one piece of good advice, which is that if you know where you are going and especially if you appear to be large, people will get out of your way. The other recommendation (which comes from my wife) is to to stop getting so worked up about all of this and just accept it as one of the minor frustrations of life in Hong Kong. Or always carry a large umbrella (or other pointed object)…

  • Surveys

    The Reader’s Digest survey quoted by Conrad (below) is just another example of one of the most common ways that PR people manage to get stories into newspapers. I guess they’re cheap – according to the SCMP, only 200 people in Hong Kong were questioned for this survey, which hardly makes it scientific. The journalist has an easy job re-writing the material provided in the press kit, and in return he simply has to give a few name checks to the magazine or organization that planted the story.

    Sex surveys always do well, but the subject doesn’t matter too much as long as there is some sort of “angle” for the story. Hong Kong is always a sucker for obscure right-wing organizations that bestow awards for economic freedom, usually to cartel-dominated Hong Kong or the socialist republic of Singapore.

    Actually, I’m amazed that the Reader’s Digest is still in business. My mother used to subscribe, and of course it used to be a favourite in doctors and dentists waiting room, so I have read it (but not recently), and I suppose it’s a handy size to carry around. I would have thought that their biggest problem would be that newspapers (at least in the UK and US) have become so large, especially at weekends, that you scarcely need another general interest magazine. My guess is that most of their readers are fairly elderly.

    In the UK, the Reader’s Digest organization is famous for its heavy reliance on direct mail, almost invariably accompanied by a lucky draw. Their promotional material is usually quite substantial, and entertaining in a bizarre sort of way, with all manner of different pieces of paper, a selection of different coloured stickers to denote what bonus you may have won, and goodness knows what else. Their objective is to get you to return the form, so that they can send you the book they are promoting, in the hope that you will keep it (and therefore have to pay for it). Needless to say, consumer organizations have done their best to protect consumers from their own stupidity, and I guess that hasn’t been good for business.

  • Too cynical by half

    Conrad reacts with disbelief to a survey in the Reader’s Digest that says 4 out of 5 Hong Kong people would return a wallet to its owner if they found it, and goes on to say that:

    No one in the entire recorded history of Hong Kong has ever returned any found item, as anyone who has left a mobile phone in a local taxi can attest. The local attitude towards found property is that it’s "lucky". The idea of voluntarily giving it up would never even occur to most Honkies.

    I can assure you that this is not true. I once managed to drop my wallet in a cab when getting out, realized this as the cab pulled away but couldn’t catch him. Fortunately, someone found my wallet, called my office and suggested I come and pick it up. The only bad news was that I had already told the bank and they had put a stop on the cards, and it took a few days before I could get replacements. The lady (a property agent, as I recall) only very reluctantly accepted the small reward I offered.

    Then I left my mobile phone in a cab, and was most surprised to find that when I called my number, not only did the driver answer but he actually drove back to my apartment to deliver it – and totally refused to accept any reward. On another occasion, I had my phone returned after I lost it whilst in the Harbour Plaza Hung Hom.

    To be fair, I did lose another phone in another cab and that one disappeared. Since then I’ve been trying to avoid losing my phone and wallet, with considerable success.

    For my part, only last week I found a wallet on the ground outside the adjoining block and gave it to the security guard. He seemed rather put out by this, and I eventually realized that he wanted me to count the money and the cards in the wallet to prove that nothing had gone missing whilst it was in his possession. Which, I suppose, is fair enough.

    So, Conrad, I think that on this occasion your cynicism is misplaced. I always thought that subscribers to the Reader’s Digest were trusting souls, but presumably Conrad is the exception.

  • Blogs by humans, ads by robots

    I love these ads that some people have on their blog. Giles at Sweet Chariots has “Exclusive Insider Intelligence Analysis by Israeli Experts” and “Latest Israeli and Jewish News Worldwide”, plus searches for “hamas” and “hong kong radio”. I assume this “ad by Google” was prompted by his article about the new leader of Hamas.  Targeted advertising – never fails. 

    Business Week, meanwhile has a piece about the EU battle with Microsoft, accompanied by an ad for, yes, Microsoft. 

  • Tunnel Vision

    I jumped in the cab, told the driver (in Cantonese) where I wanted to go, he repeated it and I responded with “Ho Ho” to confirm.  So far, so good. 

    Then he asked me a question!  Help!!  I grunted something to indicate I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, he repeated what he had just said, and I figured out that he was checking that I wanted to go through the Shing Mun tunnel.  Funny question really, since the alternative would be a significant diversion, probably taking twice as long and costing twice as much.  However, it seems that some (normally older) taxi drivers feel obliged to check that you are willing to pay the toll to go through the tunnel, even though it’s only a few dollars.

    It’s totally my fault, of course.  If I had made a bit more effort to learn Cantonese then simple exchanges such as this one would be no problem at all (or “mouh mahntaih” as we say).  I had the same problem with French – people seem to have this irritating habit of asking questions or saying other things you don’t expect, rather than just understanding what you have asked and giving the scripted response.  That’s why I normally stick to the normal British approach of talking in English and expecting people to understand.  Which reminds me of a marvellous letter in last week’s Sunday Morning Post from a reader who was frustrated by the limited English of many shop assistants in Hong Kong.  Disgraceful, I call it – as we know, shop assistants in London are fluent in at least three European languages…

    Back to the taxi problem, it is something I’ve come across before in equally puzzling circumstances.  I wanted to go from Kowloon to the New Territories, and jumped in a taxi outside Diamond Hill MTR station, which is almost next to the Tate’s Cairn Tunnel, gateway to the New Territories.  So what did the taxi driver ask me?  Yes, indeed, he was keen to know whether I wanted to use the tunnel.  Well, yes, actually, I did.  Anyway, the good news is that I now know the Cantonese for “Tate’s Cairn Tunnel” – and it has nothing to do with Tate or Cairn, whoever they may be.

    I have to say that one of the best things about Hong Kong is that the taxi drivers are generally very good and fares are not expensive – in fact, I reckon this is the best city in Asia as far as cabs are concerned.  Taxi drivers in Bangkok never seem to have change, and just can’t seem to resist the temptation to rip you off – I had a very frustrating time last time I was there on business, turning down “special offers” in favour of using the meter, and refusing to pay a premium for using the highway – and Manila seems to have a similar problem.  Singapore, on the other hand, seems to suffer from an acute shortage of taxis.  As for China, the less said the better, I think.

    In London, black cabs are only readily available in the centre of town, and they are much more expensive than Hong Kong.  Fortunately, fares in other major cities, such as Birmingham and Manchester, are more reasonable.          

    So I think I’ll settle for Hong Kong taxis, even if the drivers do sometimes ask you strange questions!