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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  • Char Sui Bau

    #2 in the Dim Sum series is Char Siu Bau 叉燒包, and please don’t tell me I’ve romanized it incorrectly* because I don’t want to know.

    Char_sui_bauIt’s a fluffy white bun filled with BBQ pork (i.e. pork in a barbecue sauce) and, as you will see from the picture, you normally get three in a basket.  It’s a popular little Dim Sum and very widely available (I’d say it was ubiquitous if I knew how to spell it).

    In my early Dim Sum days it was quite a favourite of mine, but now I find the bun a bit too, well, fluffy, and the BBQ sauce too sweet, so I’ll eat it if it is offered, but I wouldn’t order it and I wouldn’t fight anyone for the last one.

    *If you spell it Cha Xiu Bao (which is Pinyin, I think) it’s also the name of a blog about food.

  • Designed by a genius

    If you do nothing for a few minutes and then try to log off from H**C’s Internet Banking, you get this marvellous message:

    Please log on before you access our Internet banking service.

    So I have to log on so that I can log off?  Brilliant…

  • All Washed Up

    It seems to be a well-established tradition in Hong Kong that when you sit down at the table in a restaurant you use hot tea to wash the cups, bowls and chopsticks. The theory is that the water has been boiled, so it is safe.

    Well, maybe, but what about the people who wash the bowls? Did they clean their hands first?

    And if you can’t trust the restaurant to provide you with clean bowls, what about the kitchen? Is it safe to eat the food?

    All seems like nonsense to me.

  • Third time lucky?

    Seeing the announcement about the new Intel/Microsoft Origami handheld PCs I feel overwhelmed by a sense of deja vu.  About 4 or 5 years ago, I bought a Samsung Nexio, which claimed to be a PC that you could hold in your hand.  It ran a version of Windows and you were supposed to be able to use it with your desktop PC. 

    Like so many gadgets, it didn’t quite work as well as it might have done. 

    • The battery life was horrible (and carrying a power adapter rather compromises its portability).
    • Yes, you could work with Word and Excel documents, but the formatting got messed up if you tried to transfer a document back to the desktop PC.
    • The keyboard was too small and the keys too thin for typing properly.

    I could go on, but it would only depress me.  It wasn’t a total waste of money, but had I known its limitations I don’t think I’d have bought one. 

    So I wasn’t surprised to see Samsung are having another go, and I hope this time they get it right.   

  • Scary

    What on earth is going on in Thailand? 

    Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was criticized for retaining ownership of Shin Corp.  So he sold it, but his opponents complained that he had sold it to a Singaporean company and not paid tax on the proceeds.  They stepped up their campaign to make him resign, and Thaksin called their bluff by announcing an election.  Now his opponents say they will boycott the election.

    And so it goes on.  Nothing Thaksin says or does (short of resigning) will satisfy his critics, and yet if he should resign there is (as far as I am aware) no obvious successor. 

    I find myself agreeing with The Economist (subscription required) – Thaksin may be a dodgy character, but he was democratically elected and it would not be a good thing for him to be forced out of office:

    THIS newspaper has never been a great fan of Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s embattled prime minister. His rise to power was fuelled by money, and his money obtained in part by patronage. When, in early 2001, he was on the point of winning his first election, we compared him to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. It was not intended as a compliment.

    In office, Mr Thaksin has been a mixed blessing. He has handled the economy reasonably efficiently, and has therefore managed to afford the extravagant handouts with which he wooed the rural electorate in 2001, and again last year. In other spheres, though, his touch has been much less sure. Sheer governmental incompetence, for example, is the main reason why discontent in Thailand’s Muslim south has bubbled over into insurrection and bloodshed.

    [..]

    The danger in Thailand is that Mr Thaksin’s foes will try to achieve through “people power” what they do not have the numbers to achieve at the polls, or that the army will revert to its previous habit of interfering in politics. In either case, it would not be Mr Thaksin who is democracy’s enemy, but those who refuse to accept that he has won an electoral mandate.

    If Thailand was a more mature democracy all this would be about as relevant as the Republicans impeaching Bill Clinton, but it isn’t, and so the stakes are a bit higher.  Like The Economist, I don’t feel entirely comfortable with supporting Thaksin against "the people", but really there is no alternative.  I hope it all gets sorted out one way or another.

  • That makes sense

    As I’ve mentioned before, I have almost given up buying music.  If you live in Hong Kong it seems to be impossible to buy music from services such as iTunes and Musicmatch, and I’ve heard so much about copy protection and CDs that cannot be played in computers that I take fright if I see any wording on any CD about what it might not be able to do on a PC.

    This story from The Guardian explains something that I had not realized – this obsession with copy protection has not yet spread across the Atlantic, so CDs from UK record companies are likely to be OK.  If you’re wondering why, here’s an explanation:

    Though hardly immune to physical piracy – the BPI estimates the volume of counterfeit CDs in the UK increased threefold between 2000 and 2004 – [the UK] CD album market, excluding compilations, has proved remarkably buoyant.

    In 2003, for instance, the volume of albums sold in the UK actually increased by 7.6%. In 2004 there was a further 3% increase and although overall album sales – both artist and compilations – dropped by 1.2% last year, sales of artist albums were up 1.4%. Even with supermarkets and online retailers driving prices down, the UK appeared to buck global trends.

    As a result, while the UK majors retain an open attitude towards copy protection, at least publicly, some employees are highly sceptical about the cost and effectiveness of such initiatives. One Sony BMG UK representative says the US XCP fiasco was met with evident relief.

    At Jupiter, Mulligan explains: "You might put off some of the casual copiers but you’re not going to cut out the sort of person who’s doing it on a serial basis. So you’re not penalising the hardcore criminals, the mass pirates – you’re penalising the average consumer."

    Indeed.  It’s not difficult to defeat copy protection (the simplest way is to use a standalone CD player and an audio card), so why inconvenience millions of customers in this way?  Stupidity, I guess.

  • Dim Sum: Siu Luhng Bau

    When I first came to Hong Kong, I was taken out for Dim Sum at lunchtime.  I was quite surprised to find that it was so different to the Chinese food that I had eaten in the UK, and amazed by the variety of dishes.  That was only the first day, and I was even more amazed to find that on the second day there were even more different Dim Sum to choose from.  And more on the third day.

    Of course the excitement has worn off, and going for Dim Sum has become regular Sunday ritual and an occasional weekday treat.  If I remember to continue this series I will highlight some of my favourites and a few to avoid .    

    Siu_lam_bauWe’ll start with Siu Luhng Bau 上海小籠包 because it’s probably my favourite Dim Sum. It originates from Shanghai, and it consists of a thin skin filled with pork and soup.  You may be wondering how they get the hot soup in, and I believe the answer is that they freeze the soup and wrap the skin around it (which seems like cheating to me). 

    Tricky chaps to eat as well – you have be careful picking them up in case the skin breaks and the hot soup escapes.  This can happen if the Siu Luhng Bau sticks to the basket or one its fellow Siu Luhng Bau, or by careless use of chopsticks (that would be other people, obviously, and not me).  Plus, the hot soup can burn your mouth if you’re not careful. 

    So this means that we are looking for a chef who makes the skins thick enough, and can arrange the Siu Luhng Bau in the basket with care.  The ones in the picture look to be OK, and you may notice that they have take the additional precaution of placing each Siu Luhng Bau on a small piece of carrot.  Another approach is to place each Siu Luhng Bau in its own individual metal tray, to be tipped into the mouth oyster-style (though frankly this seems like more cheating).

    If you can find Siu Luhng Bau you should order them.  A big basket of a dozen or so goes down well in a Shanghai restaurant, or (failing that) the smaller basket of three in a Cantonese-style Dim Sum restaurant is good enough.

  • Week 11: Two left

    Week 11 of your 13-week job interview, and what is the point of Carolyn?

    The previous week she so unsettled Felisha (by telling she was rubbish) that it made her determined to be the PM whilst simultaneously destroying her self-confidence.  This made for entertaining viewing, starting from the initial discussion in which Felisha couldn’t even bring herself to say that she actually wanted to be PM. Even though team mate Ulla is allegedly her friend, she certainly didn’t make it any easier for her, and Ulla’s comments to camera were incredibly bitchy.

    The task, by the way, was to do product placement a 60 second promotional video for Microsoft Live Meeting, and for some reason that I have probably missed, Ulla is seen as expert on videos, so this made an awkward situation even worse.  Felisha spent half the time trying to take charge and the other half letting Ulla decide what to do (and wondering whether that was the right thing to do). 

    Ulla decided to scrap the footage they had painstakingly shot (of Felisha getting into a cab) and show pages of dull techno-jargon instead.  Bad mistake.  Incredibly Ulla still seemed to cling to the belief that they had done a good job and how it was her brilliant idea that had won it.  The Microsoft executives were polite, but they knew (as we did) that the video was hopeless.

    Once Ulla realized that she was in a minority of one, she thought she could get away with it by denying that she had made the fateful decision.  This was was ridiculous because we had seen the discussion on video and it’s obvious that Trump must also have watched it (or would do so later).  He fired the pair of them, Felisha for being too weak and Ulla for being a lying bitch (I paraphrase slightly).  If that is how she treats her friends, I don’t like to think how she handles people she doesn’t like.

    Carolyn proved that she knew nothing by agreeing that they both had to go (no surprise there – she always agrees with what Trump says), but explained that this was because they had each blamed the other, as if that never happens in The Apprentice (except, like, every week).  Trump had it right when he said that Felisha would probably admit that she deserved to be fired and Ulla should just have kept quiet – she didn’t, and thereby demonstrated why she also had to go.

    Team Randall did a competent job, but this was one task that he could have done with his eyes shut and one arm tied behind his back.  Rebecca smiled sweetly, hobbled around on crutches, and pretended that she was in charge, but was more than willing to let her team mate get on and win the task for them.  As a reward, Randall was re-united his wife and Rebecca had quality time with her rather dopey-looking boyfriend.

  • But it’s much easier than Cantonese

    Have to agree with Paul over at The Valley on this one.

    A typical conversation between a Gweilo and a local in Hong Kong goes something like this: "yes, Cantonese is not easy.  You should learn Mandarin – the tones are easier, and it’s much more useful".

    Say you were living in Hong Kong and you were surrounded by Cantonese speakers, your wife was a Cantonese speaker, the Radio and TV blared at you in Cantonese, the only way you could order local food was if you spoke Cantonese, and to scratch your ass you needed to ask permission in Cantonese, but Mandarin was considered to be slightly easier to learn, which one would you choose to learn.

    The only argument I can thing of for learning Mandarin is that an improved Chinese vocabulary would help with Cantonese, but it might actually leave me more confused, and it cannot possibly be an efficient way to improve my pathetically limited Cantonese.

    Of course, In the unlikely event that I were to move to the Mainland (or have to spend an extended amount of time there), then it might make sense to learn Mandarin, but as long as I am here in Hong Kong I don’t think it matters how "easy" it may be, I won’t be learning Mandarin.

  • Hey Jo

    I have to admit that I did briefly believe that it was possible that Essex "barrow bay" Dave West really was going to open a private members’ club for the super rich (as he claimed). However after a few minutes of "Trouble at the Top" (a BBC series being shown on Monday nights on ATV World) it became obvious that this was more of a vanity project than a serious business proposition.

    His argument was that the super rich were looking for somewhere exclusive to go, so they could mix with their own kind. He teamed up with Jean-Christophe-Novelli (for food) and was in discussion with Nicky Haslam (for interior design), so it seemed as if he was serious.

    Well, up to a point. The problem, unsurprisingly, was Dave himself, a man who had his own ideas about what was best. Haslam walked away after Dave played him a Britney Spears video (for inspiration), and Novelli departed when Dave refused to increase the size of the kitchen. It also seemed that he had either neglected to hire an architect or fallen out with him at a very early stage, so he was supervising the building work personally – with predictable results.

    There was another fairly obvious problem. Would the "super-rich" really be attracted to a club owned by an archetypal working-class-oik made good? Well, it takes all sorts, but I’d hazard a guess that he was exactly the type of person that most self-respecting millionaires would want to avoid. Dave had worked his way up from a market stall in Romford to running a huge wine and beer warehouse near to Calais (mainly for Brits who were willing to take a day trip across the Channel to pay a bit less for their booze). Money didn’t seem to have changed him at all, and he still seemed at home back at Romford market.  In his chauffeur-driven Roller, naturally.

    The opening shot of the documentary was of Dave with Jo, his 24 year-old Polish girlfriend.  The usual comedy pairing of a unattractive bloke (with a ponytail and a paunch) and a slim young girl.  Although the club was named in her honour, Jo was gone long before the club was ready (apparently she had too many ideas of her own), and soon Dave was auditioning a series of equally young and attractive girls from Eastern Europe for the role of his girlfriend. He was at pains to point out that these were not escort girls or anything like that, though he didn’t explain quite how he had arranged for a steady stream of them to arrive at his yacht in St Tropez.  Maybe just a lucky coincidence.

    One was chosen (from Moldova or Estonia or somewhere), and posed happily with Dave. Well, he looked happy, but she looked rather apprehensive. It brought to mind the marvellous question that Mrs Merton asked Debbie McGee ("so why did you marry the millionaire Paul Daniels?").

    Amazingly, it seems that the club was finally finished a few months after the TV people had gone. Less amazingly, the idea of catering for the super-rich appears to have been dropped, and the place is much more in the image of its owner, serving pizzas to page three girls and young ladies from Poland and Latvia (who, by the way, definitely aren’t escorts).