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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  • Things I don’t understand (2)

    Put a Hong Kong person near a lift, and they will jab compulsively at the buttons. 

    Outside the lift they will press the button to go up or down (probably both), even if someone has already pressed it.  They even press the button when the light goes out because the lift door are about to open, because, well, you never can be too careful, right?

    Once they get inside the lift they will push the button to close the doors the very second the last person leaves the lift.

    Yet, put the same people at a pedestrian crossing controlled by traffic lights, and they will stand there like zombies waiting for the lights to change.  What’s the difference? 

  • Super, super

    I had a look around the new CitySuper in Sha Tin.  The space they are occupying is the upper floor of what was once a department store (Yaohan?).  When that went bust, SHKP turned the lower level over to restaurants and the upper level to a weird assortment of outlets (a Wellcome supermarket, a couple of bookshops, and two different electrical stores, amongst other things).  Now, as part of a huge program of renovation (and corresponding increases in rental charges) they sent Wellcome packing and relocated everyone else.

    I find City Super a bit of a puzzle.  They have gone to some trouble to source products from around the world, but apparently without really giving much thought to what they are selling.  There are well-known brands, but who would pay HK$80 for a Bernard Matthews turkey-based abomination (three times the price you’d pay back in the UK), or HK$50 for Country Life butter?  New Zealand butter is widely available for a fraction of that price, or CitySuper itself sells French butter for HK$20).

    In addition, City Super seem to have a tie-up with Nisa, who supply corner shops in the UK, to provide bacon and other fresh food.  When I lived in the UK, the only reason I would buy from a corner shop would be as a last resort, so this is hardly an attractive proposition.  More sensibly, Park’n’Shop (and Great/Taste) have a deal with Waitrose to sell some of their own-brand products.  Now, when I lived in the UK I was willing to drive a few miles to Waitrose, even though their prices are higher, so paying a premium for their products in Hong Kong is not a problem.  Couldn’t City Super have cut a deal with Sainsbury or Tesco? 

    As for fruit, there’s expensive Japanese stuff (presumably there must be customers for the HK$50 peach and the HK$100 bunch of grapes, but I’m not one of them). There’s other fruit and vegetable at higher prices than normal supermarkets – the quality does seem higher, but sometimes the price is so much higher that I couldn’t bring myself to pay it.

    They have a good selection of fish and meat, but bizarrely much of it has been frozen and then defrosted.  I don’t understand the logic of this – if it’s frozen, why not sell it frozen?  Better still, sell it chilled rather than frozen, as Taste do with Australian pork.

    All around the store there are puzzling examples such as this.  Or perhaps I am wrong, and there really are expats who are homesick for Country Life butter and Bernard Matthews turkey products.

    Yes, there is a cheese counter.  The English cheese selection is small and almost entirely mass-produced rubbish, though they do have something that looks like Quickes cheddar.  However, there is a goodish selection of soft cheeses from France, so it’s not all bad.

    Of course the ambience and level of service is much better than the Wellcome/PnS duopoly provide, and that alone justifies higher prices, but I think a bit more effort in sourcing the right products would also pay dividends.

    Best free entertainment: watching people walking around and picking up items, then saying "Gauchoi" (something like "surely that can’t be right") when they see the price.

    (more…)

  • A strategic change

    I love this type of self-delusional nonsense.  Business Week is closing down its Asian and European editions, and has made 60 staff in Singapore redundant (SCMP via Asia Media).  They say that they are getting increased traffic on their website, so there’s no need for a different regional editions of the printed magazine. 

    The truth is obviously that there is not enough advertising to support the Asian edition, but the company seem to feel that they must try to present this as if it were good news:

    In order to most effectively meet current business and customer needs and to strengthen the franchise for future growth, BusinessWeek announced today that it will reposition its approach to global markets. A greater emphasis will be placed on providing online news, analysis and information and on developing local language publications while maintaining a single flagship print product.

    As a result of this strategic change, BusinessWeek will cease to publish its Asian edition and its European edition. As an international subscriber, you will receive Jan 9/16, 2006 as the last issue. We are offering an option of receiving a full refund for any unmailed issues on your subscription or applying that refund to a subscription to the global edition of BusinessWeek magazine. The global edition can be delivered to you by email in a digital format or by post at your postal address.

    It’s a strategic decision, and nothing to do with the Asian and European editions losing money.  Er, right…    

  • Not so scary anymore

    Every since I first came to Hong Kong, my various jobs have required me to travel to China, almost invariably to Guangdong province. This is hardly unusual, and many Hong Kong people spend several days a week (sometimes the whole working week) across the border.

    I have to admit that the first few times I made the journey I really hated it. Long queues at Lo Wu, getting past the aggressive beggars in the car park, followed by a hair-raising journey along the rather dodgy roads, marvelling at the "flexiblity" about driving on the left or the right, and the chaos of roundabouts and other road junctions. Eventually I became more sanguine and started to trust that anyone who drove in this mad place would have to pay full attention if they wished to survive, and hoped that was basically good news. Well, I live to tell the tale.

    Perhaps I was unlucky in the first area of Guangdong I visited. Identikit factories as far as the eye could see, interspersed with nothingness and derelict sites, and those terrible roads. Or perhaps it was all like that a decade ago. Certainly the areas I have visited subsequently have been much better, though obviously industrial estates are hardly areas of outstanding natural beauty whatever country you visit.

    Of course the roads have improved since then, as have the train services.  I am quite impressed with the trains going out from Shenzen, and it certainly seems safer than the highway.  Shenzen now has its own version of the MTR, and again it seems to be clean and efficient – and there’s the entertainment value of watching people trying to figure out that the "coin" must be passed over the sensor when you enter the system but placed in the slot when you leave (which is not exactly obvious). 

    Even the border crossing seems easier – the Hong Kong side now has the automatic gates (if you have a Smart ID card and are a Permanent Resident), and the queues on the China side seem to be processed reasonably quickly.  Perhaps one day all Hong Kong Permanent Residents will be given a ‘home visit’ permit rather than needing visas in their passports, and then it really will be trouble-free. 

  • No offence

    There was (I think) a time when obituaries were written with great care so as not to cause offence. Not any more – this is from the Daily Telegraph (several months ago – I forgot about this and have just found it again):

    William Donaldson, who died on June 22 aged 70, was described by Kenneth Tynan as "an old Wykehamist who ended up as a moderately successful Chelsea pimp", which was true, though he was also a failed theatrical impresario, a crack-smoking serial adulterer and a writer of autobiographical novels; but it was under the nom de plume Henry Root that he became best known.

    Willie Donaldson’s alter ego was a Right-wing nutcase and wet fish merchant from Elm Park Mansions, SW10, who specialised in writing brash, outrageous and frequently abusive letters to eminent public figures, enclosing a one pound note. Donaldson’s genius was to write letters that appeared absurd to the public but not to those to whom they were addressed. The recipients duly replied, often unaware that the joke was on them.

    An inspiration to Harry Hutton, methinks.

    In 1971 Donaldson fled wife and creditors and left for Ibiza, where he spent his last £2,000 on a glass-bottomed boat, hoping to make money out of tourists. By the end of the season, he had no money left and had to sell the boat for £250. He returned to London when he heard that a former girlfriend had gone on the game, moved in to her Chelsea brothel as a "ponce" and used his experiences as the basis for his first book, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen (1975).

    He seems to have led a full life, as they say.

  • Happy New Year

    It’s 2006 already.  It hardly seems any time since we were all worrying about the disasters that awaited us when almost everything stopped working because of the Y2K problem, but we survived that and now we are half way through the decade without a name (no, you can’t call it the "noughties").

    My new year resolution is to find the time to post here a bit more often, even if I am very busy.  Whether you view that as a good or a bad thing is another matter entirely.

    Enjoy.

  • Sent to a barren rock

    Fumier has already mentioned this, but never mind (from The Guardian):

    When a middle-aged man swore at airline staff after he was refused a drink on a flight from Manchester to Tenerife, he got a sunshine break he had not bargained for. The pilot diverted the charter plane and dumped the troublesome holidaymaker 300 miles from his destination on a barren volcanic island off the west coast of Africa.

    Well, a barren volcanic island with "several luxury hotels and a golf course".  Moreover, The Guardian reports that he "was was not detained in a cell and was released to enjoy the island’s famed tranquillity for 36 hours" before leaving the island.  So, not much of a punishment, really. 

    The remaining passengers arrived in Tenerife nearly four hours late, and it must have cost the airline a large amount of money to make this detour.  Was it really such a good idea?

    Perhaps they were worried that he might have wanted to smoke.

  • Phil Space

    You see, I said it wasn’t Conrad, and now it’s official – Phil has owned up to being the man behind Flagrant Harbour, the awfully enthusiastic new blog that suddenly appeared fully-formed a few weeks ago.  He’s a Brit, you see, and spelling is not his strong point.  Plenty of other clues.   

  • Chicken Little

    As for Chicken Little, it’s rubbish, and certainly not worthing braving the appalling AMC booking system.

    Disney haven’t had a hit for years, and most of their recent efforts have been panned by the critics. Not exactly true, of course – Disney have had several hits in the last 10 years, but all of them have come from Pixar, which makes it rather unfortunate that they have managed to fall out with them. Maybe the deal can be salvaged with the changes at the top of Disney, and some say that the recent deal between ABC and Apple (for TV shows to be made available on the iPod) is part of an attempt to persuade Steve Jobs (wearing his Pixar hat) to change his mind. Anyway, Disney are working on their own computer-generated animation, in the hope of becoming less reliant on Pixar, and Chicken Little is their first offering.

    Sadly, it’s a horrible mess. It’s both too short and too long – too short to properly develop the characters and the storyline, and too long for the plot they have cobbled together. In fact, it’s as if it was put together by a hyperactive child who was worried that we might get bored with a simple tale – so that is dismissed in the first half-hour, then it inexplicably veers off at a tangent before delivering an entertaining (but somewhat odd) finale. All very confusing.

    It also lacks subtlety. To a large extent the story is about a father and son relationship, but someone must have worried that viewers might not figure it out, so one of the characters spouts psycho-babble about ‘closure’ that will surely go over the heads of children and annoy most adults. Pixar would have left it for viewers to figure out for themselves, meaning that the kids would have taken it at face value and adults (or at least some of them) would appreciate that there was something to think about.

    So what’s left? We get fat people gags, and we get a bubble gum gag that is almost a direct copy of a much more effective gag in Toy Story 2, and we get some slapstick.

    Yes, I am being a bit unfair, because there are some funny gags, and parts of it are well-written, but this is Disney, so expectations are high, and you can’t help but compare it to the Pixar gold standard. Unfortunately there really is no comparison, and the really scary things is that these are the guys who have the rights to make future Toy Story movies.  Please guys, agree a new deal with Pixar!

  • Screen Test

    Animated films are invariably dubbed into Cantonese by local performers, and it is this version of the film that plays on most screens in Hong Kong – without English subtitles.

    Fortunately, the original English version is available in a few places, which for those of us in the Kowloon and the New Territories means the AMC cinema in Festival Walk. Nothing wrong with the cinema (actually it’s quite a pleasant place to watch a film), but their telephone booking system is agonisingly awful, having apparently been designed by someone with a grudge against the human race.

    Its sheer awfulness is compounded by a total lack of common sense. To book a ticket you need to know the film number or listen to a list of all the available films – but the idiots don’t print the film numbers in their advert in the SCMP. So far so stupid, but they haven’t figured out that if you call the English number you most likely want the English version, so you have to listen to a list that includes Harry Potter and Chicken Little in Cantonese (one show of each per day) before it finally gets to the eight shows per day of the Chicken Little English version (at no.9).

    You may be wondering if they are showing 9 different films, and the answer is that they are not. As definitive proof that this is a system designed to frustrate the customer, they actually ask you to choose the screen on which you want to watch Harry Potter or King Kong. Obviously you don’t care – all you want to do is choose a convenient time, but somehow you are expected to pick a screen first. Would it really be so difficult to set the system up so that you could choose the film first and then listen to all the showtimes?

    It takes a fraction of the time to make a booking on the Internet for UA Cinemas, you can choose your seat, and they have machines to issue the tickets (no queue). They do charge a booking fee, but personally, I’d willingly pay that and their higher ticket prices to avoid the pain of dealing with the AMC automated phone system. Or perhaps just wait for the DVD.