Ordinary Gweilo

I notice that the KCR is advertising their "direct" service from Tsim Sha Tsui East to Lok Ma Chau.  The irony here is that when the "Southern Link" is completed in a couple of years, it will be necessary to change at Hung Hom so it won’t be direct at all.

Mind you, maybe by then people will actually want to go to Lok Ma Chau.

It reminds me that a few years ago, the MTR extended the Kwun Tong line to North Point and constructed new platforms that provided a same-level interchange for passengers arriving on the Kwun Tong line and travelling west on the Island Line (and vice versa).  Which is a splendid thing, of course.

They then ran an advertising campaign extolling the virtues of this new interchange, and the few minutes it would save on each journey.

Which is all very well, except that less than a year later the Kwun Tong line was diverted to Tseung Kwan O and passengers for Quarry Bay or North Point had to change trains at Yau Tong.  Not so fast any more!!

I used to think that Hong Kong supermarkets were easy enough to categorise.

• CitySuper and Great have lots of stuff I want, but can’t afford
• Park’n’Shop certainly isn’t Tesco or Sainsburys, but it is (just about) OK
• Wellcome generally isn’t.
• CRC?  Who goes there?

And, of course, the basics are available everywhere.

Or so I thought

I found a product called ‘Rice Crunchies’ (they’re rice crackers from Thailand) in Park’n’Shop, but now they have disappeared from their shelves and are only to be found in CRC, of all places. 

Even basic items are not immune.  Currently, Gala Apples don’t seem to be available anywhere apart from Wellcome (and possibly CitySuper).  What’s that all about, then?

CitySuper itself even managed to be out of stock of one of their ‘own brand’ basic products (oats) for several weeks, which is quite impressively incompetent – especially since they have a label on the shelf saying that they are a ‘best seller’.  Not if they’re out of stock, they’re not.

Did I miss this story in the SCMP?  I found it in New Scientist:

Tsunami risk for Hong Kong and Macao

Hong Kong and Macao are enormous, sprawling economic centres perched on the coast. And both stand a 10 per cent chance of being hit by a serious tsunami in the next century, warn geophysicists. The warning follows a new assessment of how earthquakes along the nearby Manila trench could radiate tsunami waves across the South China Sea.

Although Chinese records of tsunamis date back to AD 171, the hazard was largely ignored until the cataclysmic Sumatra tsunami in 2004. However, the structure of the complex plate boundary on the eastern side of the South China Sea, running from Taiwan to the Manila trench, makes shallow subduction-related quakes particularly likely. This problem was highlighted by the quake in December 2006 that hobbled internet traffic in the region when it ripped through subsea data cables. Such earthquakes could also trigger tsunamis.

To assess the threat, Yingchun Liu of the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing developed a computer model with David Yuen’s group at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. They identified the sites where major quakes were most likely, then modelled how the tsunamis they produced would spread and their heights as they reached major cities. Finally, they factored in the tsunami risks of all possible large quakes for each location.

They found that all coastal regions, stretching north from Macao and Hong Kong to beyond Shantou – a city of 1.2 million people where the tropic of Cancer crosses the Chinese coast – have about a 1-in-10 chance of being struck by a tsumani within 100 years (Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, vol 163, p 233).

Last week I mentioned that the drive-in cinema in Kowloon appeared to have closed down.  Today comes confirmation of this in the SCMP (Drive-in cinema shuts after just 8 months – subscription required):

The curtain has fallen on Hong Kong’s first and only drive-in cinema just eight months after it opened.

Movie fans might have voted with their wheels because they were not used to watching films in a car, a viewing experience common in North America and Australia before the age of multiplexes.

To mark the finale, a charity screening party organised by the Children’s Institute of Hong Kong to raise funds for autistic youngsters will be staged at Austin Road West tomorrow night.

The Drive-In, nestled in the concrete jungle next to Jordan’s skyscrapers, opened in January on the 200,000 sq ft site. In front of its screen was space for 90 cars.

People without cars had the option of sitting in a few vintage vehicles or comfortable seats. Tickets cost HK$100 for a car space and one person, HK$50 for a second person and HK$40 for more people.

Partners behind the venture included entertainment lawyer John McLellan and Winnie Tsang, managing director of film distributor Golden Scene.

But the cinema got off to a slow start. Only about 30 people in 16 cars attended the opening night and just six tickets were sold over the internet for the late-night second screening.  Business had reportedly been poor since.

Recently, fans calling to buy tickets were greeted with a taped message: “Sorry, the drive-in theatre has now closed down. Thank you for your support in the past.”

So they were willing to admit on their phone line that the cinema was closed, even if the adverts in the SCMP claimed that it was being used for a private function.