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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  • Changing trains (Hong Kong MTR)

    I’m always interested in other views of the MTR, including this one:

    hong kong metro: five transfers??

    I jumped onto Google looking for hotels that would be convenient to the rail line from the airport.  Yikes!

    Is it my imagination, or am I seeing that:

    • Only three stations in the city are on the Airport line.
    • Only five additional stations can be reached in one transfer.
    • Some parts of the system (e.g. the Ma On Shan (MOL) line in the northeast) are five transfers from the Airport.

    Don't airport lines, where people are hauling luggage, need to be designed so that they plug into the network with relatively few, well-designed transfers.

    Not in London, where the Heathrow Express only takes you to Paddington.  OK, so Crossrail the Elizabeth Line will offer better (but slower) connections throughout Central London, when it opens in 2018. 

    Not in Bangkok, either, which doesn’t even have one convenient connection.  Does Shanghai?

    That’s a strange map of the MTR system, though.  The terminus of the Airport Express (Hong Kong station) is connected to Central station through an underground walkway.  This offers plenty of easy ways to get to the rest of Hong Kong island and most of Kowloon.

    If you don’t mind waiting, the so-called Sha Tin to Central link will provide more simple interchanges – and if they ever finish the new train terminus in West Kowloon, it should be easy to walk from Kowloon station to Austin (on West Rail). 

    Also, most major hotels can be reached through free shuttle buses from either Kowloon or Hong Kong station.  Or taxis are a good, reasonably priced option (although there can be long queues at Hong Kong station).

  • Bad carbs

    It’s fascinating how the “low carb” diet is finally being taken seriously by the establishment.  I have written about this many times, being unconvinced by the Atkins diet but interested in alternatives. 

    The TV series “Doctor in the House”, shown here recently on BBC Earth, featured “low carb” diets as an effective way to deal with diabetes.  Then I found this in New Scientist:

    Fat vs carbs: What’s really worse for your health?

    David Unwin, a doctor practising in Southport, UK [..] suggests to his patients with type 2 diabetes or who want to lose weight that they do the opposite of what official health advice recommends. He advises them to stop counting calories, eat high-fat foods – including saturated fats – and avoid carbohydrates, namely sugar and starch. Telling people to avoid sugar is uncontroversial; the rest is medical heresy.

    But crazy as it sounds, Unwin has found that most of his diabetes patients who follow this advice are getting their blood sugar back under control, and that some are coming off medication they have relied on for years. Those who are overweight are slimming down.

    If you want to read more, I recommend “The Great Cholesterol Myth” by by Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra

  • Odds against

    Another excellent “Long Read” from The Guardian, by Tom Lamont – the same writer as the one about pubs that I highlighted last year.

    The big gamble: the dangerous world of British betting shops

    In total, there are around 9,000 licensed betting shops in the UK, around half of those operated by Ladbrokes and William Hill. The two corporations are great and bitter rivals, tracing a contempt for one another back to the 1930s. Difficult as it is to credit now, both companies once shared a snotty attitude about the idea of bookmakers having shops.

    “I don’t think it would be very nice,” said Mr William Hill, founder of William Hill, in 1956, “to see at every street corner a betting shop.” There was never a Mr Ladbrokes; the company was named for a country house where its founders trained horses in the 1880s. Up to the 1960s it reckoned itself too posh for street-level trade.

    […] Once Ladbrokes and William Hill could not ignore the potential profits any longer, they began to open branches, or take over existing ones, and from the mid-1960s on, the two companies’ spread was rapid and aggressive. Between them they absorbed dozens of smaller now-forgotten firms – Solomons & Flanagan, JJ Simonds, Ken Munden, Fred Parkinson.

    […] [Then] around the turn of the millennium, [came] the first modern gambling machines – “fixed-odds betting terminals”, or FOBTs (pronounced fobtees), offering a digitised version of roulette as well as other arcade-style games that could be gambled on.

    […] Many shop workers I spoke to had stories about looking on, impotent, as the machines under their charge were angrily destroyed by the customers who had been playing them. Worse, somehow, was when a machine was calmly destroyed. The deputy manager of a William Hill in Hull said: “You just watch, there’s nothing else to do. It’s normal. It’s normal for people to smash up the shop.” (A representative of William Hill said this was “rare”.) A woman working at an Oxfordshire Ladbrokes told me she had watched all four FOBTs in her shop get wrecked by a man swinging a stool; by the next day’s trade, she said, her ruined machines had all been replaced. According to figures I have seen, the number of incidents of damage to machines in Ladbrokes branches rose steadily between 2010 and 2015.

    A senior figure at Ladbrokes during this period became increasingly concerned by the situation at shop-level “getting silly, getting crazy”. They told me it was their belief that with the introduction of the machines, betting shops had more or less become “mini casinos”. And how many casinos, they asked, got by without bouncers to cope with aggrieved gamblers? How many were run by individuals on their own?

    As with his story on the pub trade, Tom Lamont highlights the impact on some of the people working in betting shops.  Sadly, this time there’s no happy ending.  Very far from it.

  • Pearl River Delta – Then and Now

    Some great “before and after” photos here: image

    The great leap upward: China's Pearl River Delta, then and now

  • LeTV or Now TV?

    As previously noted, LeTV won the Hong Kong TV rights to the English Premier League for three seasons (starting in August 2016), and then did a deal with PCCW’s Now TV – so both will be showing the games for the next 3 years.

    Here’s a comparison on Premier League TV Packages in Hong Kong

  • Let me just push past you–whoops

    The MTR is a world-class public transport system.  The passengers – not so much.  Leading to everyday frustrations, with the occasional moment of madness.

    Case one – trying to get off a crowded train.  Doors open.  I say “Mh Goi”, but no-one moves, so I have to force my way out through a crowd of bodies.

    Case two – waiting to get off a very un-crowded East Rail train heading for Lo Wu.  Doors open.  Two passengers try to push past me.  I stand my ground. 

    One of them actually fell down into the gap between the train and the platform.  I’m still not sure how they managed to do that, but I hope they had a safe journey back home.

  • Netflix arrives in Hong Kong, followed by House of Cards

    Netflix has indeed launched in Hong Kong – and most of the rest of the world (apart from China).

    Initially, House of Cards wasn’t available.  Yes, that’s right – the series for which Netflix is best known wasn’t available on Netflix.  Along with a lot of other shows.

    The good news is that Netflix Hong Kong does now have the Netflix series House of Cards1.  Good work, Netflix people.

    1 As pointed out below, they currently only have the first 3 series, which in no way diminishes the achievement by Netflix Hong Kong in securing the rights to a Netflix owned drama series.

  • I can believe it’s not butter

    imageIt certainly looks like butter – and the shelf label says “salted butter plus vegetable oil”, though apparently the official name is "President’s Ambassador Salted Culinary Fat Blend" (which really sounds delicious, doesn't it). 

    What is the first ingredient?  Hydrogenated vegetable oil.  There is some butter, but it’s the third ingredient, so probably less than 20%.

    President should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for selling this product in Hong Kong.

    Yes, it does contain trans fats.

    [See also a later post about this product containing glycidol and 3-MCPD]  .

  • SCMP–any sub-editors left?

    OK, it’s Christmas, but the Sunday Morning Post is supposed to be an English language newspaper.

    Debate over MPF protection rages on

    Jennifer Ngo | Sunday Morning Post | Sunday, 27 December, 2015

    The row over the Mandatory Provident Fund’s offsetting mechanism continues as civil society criticised the government’s lack of commitment in dealing with the problem which had caused a lot of those in the lower-working class to lose their retirement savings.

    The offsetting mechanism – where employees’ retirement funds are used to cover their severance or long-service payments by the employers when their job is terminated, or ends – saw 43,500 employees lose a total of HK$3 billion in 2014, according to statistics in the public consultation on retirement protection.

    But Wong Shek-hung, advocacy officer at Oxfam Hong Kong, criticised that the government still refuse tto commit to cancelling the mechanism, despite of it being obviously detrimental to helping employees save up for retirement.

    “As long as the offsetting mechanism exists, the working class employees will continue to suffer,” said Hung, in a radio show yesterday.

    An average of 94 per cent of the employers’ contribution to MPF used up in offsetting, the consultation revealed. And for employees who have a monthly income of HK$7,100 or less – which mean they don’t need to contribute to MPF, only their employers do – this would mean when they leave their job, they leave with no retirement funds saved up at all, because the funds are used to pay off severance or long-service payments.

    However, the government stated in the consultation that offsetting is “a complicated matter”, and “cannot be simply retained or done-away with”, and said that the consultation was to “see if employers and employees can come to a compromise and balanced decision”.

    Wong said the unjust system had costed the lowest tier of the working class to lose even their meagre retirement savings kept in the MPF system, and said the government should work towards completely abolishing the mechanism.

    Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor denied that the government is shirking away from the offsetting mechanism debate, and that the government “has the determination to deal with the issue”, but that it would take a long-term discussion and examination over whether abolishing it would create big problems for employers.

  • The Juliet Letters

    Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet

    The Amadeus Centre, London W9

    1 July 1992

    This is inspired by reading Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello’s recently published autobiography

    imageExactly a year after the Hammersmith Odeon gigs, where Elvis Costello was overweight, bearded and apparently angry, what a transformation…

    The Amadeus Centre could scarcely be a more different venue.  It was originally a Welsh Presbyterian chapel, and has been converted into an arts centre (and, apparently, a wedding venue).  The main space was set out with tables and chairs (with food and drink being served), and many of the guests were Costello’s friends and relatives.  I was in the cheap seats upstairs, and for the interval we repaired to the pub across the road for refreshments.

    Elvis Costello looked much happier, minus the beard and the excess weight of a year earlier, but I had no idea what to expect – would it be his songs played with a string quartet? 

    1992-07-01_LondonsetlistNo.  He had written 20 or so songs with different members of the Brodsky Quartet (Michael Thomas and his sister Jacqueline, Ian Belton, and Paul Cassidy).  The idea came from a newspaper article about a Veronese professor who decided to answer all the letters addressed to Juliet Capulet. The five of them worked together to develop ideas for letters, which were then set to music.

    Once we had a title and had settled on the letter as our lyrical form, the variations came to us very easily: a child’s note, a postcard from a regretful lover, the reply of an eccentric aunt to a begging letter from scheming relations.

    Everything about it was astonishing.  Costello’s vocal performance, the lyrics, the musical accompaniment, the venue, the atmosphere.  Costello was clearly reinvigorated by working in a totally different medium (and having to learn to write four-part musical scores).  Fortunately this was just one of many collaborations over the coming years.

    Apparently the “classical” critics were rather unenthusiastic at the time, but subsequently it has been performed and recorded by other string quartets, and adapted for other mediums including a jazz quartet and a dance performance.

    For me, of course, it will always be about that first performance in London nearly 25 years ago.