Works over for me out here and I’ve got three days of vacation. I spent one of them yesterday wandering around Hong Kong on my own. I’m going to compare my visit to Hong Kong to the time I wandered the streets of New York City.
First of all, Hong Kong is actually made up of two islands and part of mainland China. My hotel and the place I’ve been working are both on the mainland, which they call the New Territories. The hotel is nice, but it’s way out in the suburbs. I took a shuttle from the hotel to the edge of the mainland, a place called Tsim Sau Tsui or TST for people who can’t say Chinese words. Wandering around here was a lot of fun. I’d compare this to the Times Square area of NY. Lots of neon signs pointing your way into electronics shops, lots of music blaring from the various CD and movie shops, and lots of little restaurants. I ate dinner in one of the restaurants here. You know how they say back in the States that if Chinese people are eating in a Chinese restaurant, it must be good? Well, that’s harder to decide in China, but I picked on where the Chinese people were forming a line or a queue (crazy Brits and their crazy words) outside waiting to get in. It was worth it. I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it was I ate, but there was chicken, beef, and rice. I picked it from a picture. I also got a “special drink” which translated into a kumquat smoothie. Tasty! I think I spend a total of 5 or 6 hours walking around TST looking in the electronics shops and the various curio shops (I wish I thought to bring my pedometer – I’m sure I went 5 miles). I didn’t buy anything, but I did notice that prices vary wildly from shop to shop. I found that I could save nearly $120 US just by looking in each store. Of course, that was on the really fancy new cellphone I lust after but won’t allow myself to buy. Back at TechEd, Glen Gordon showed the i-mate JAM off to me and told me it ran at nearly $650 in the States – I found it for around $520 here. Le sigh.
The other thing I noticed while wandering around TST was that I got hit up by street vendors for nearly everything – especially what they call copy watches and massages. I’ll get into the copy products in a moment, but let’s focus on the massages. There’s a huge cottage industry built up around reflexology and foot massages here. I couldn’t walk a single block without being asked at least twice if I wanted a foot massage. Of course, I also got offers to massage pretty much all the other various bits of my body – including the kind of “massage” where I’d be concerned that I might catch leprosy and have the various “bits” fall off.
The people I call the “copy people” were very intent – they want to sell me a fake Rolex or something really really badly. There’s a guy on the street and he’ll show you his watch and ask if you want one by reciting a litany of watch brand names. I didn’t even recognize all of them. Should I have said I was interested, they would have taken me to show me their wares somewhere. Apparently they have rooms inside the tall buildings somewhere. I didn’t go with anyone to find out.
The only people more intense than both the massage people and the copy people were the tailors. There’s at least one guy pimping for a tailor shop on every major street, and these guys follow you around trying to talk you into buying a custom made suit or something. They’re doggedly persistent and they’ll follow for half a block or more calling me “boss”. Avoiding these guys was half the fun of walking around TST.
I noticed the copy people and the tailors ignored the locals, but the massage people were equal opportunity panderers. Men got way more focus than women and Caucasian men got the most focus of them all.
After getting tired of TST, I jumped on a train which went under the water to Hong Kong Island and dropped me off in a place called Central. This is the heart of downtown Hong Kong and was kind of like being in the really nice area of Manhattan. I wandered into a really large, really nice mall (looking for both A/C and a restroom) and actually got lost on a single floor trying to find the right exit. Way bigger than Lenox mall back in Atlanta, it also had nicer shops. It was kind of like the Forums in Caesar’s Palace back in Las Vegas (which I saw when Kim took me to meet her family in Las Vegas), only larger. There were four floors in this mall, and I only went on one of them.
Central was mostly a high end shopping district and way out of my budget, so I wandered uphill to an area called Soho. Soho in Hong Kong is exactly like Soho in New York – lots of nice little restaurants and bars. They close down some of the streets at night for people to walk around on, and I’m sure this is a happening party district. The problem with Soho in Hong Kong is that it’s built on the side of a mountain. One lap around this place and I was ready to call it quits. Those hills were intense! They actually have built escalators which will take you to the top of Soho so you can wander in a downhill fashion. I didn’t find them until the end, so I was really done. I walked back to the MTR train station and headed back to the hotel where I passed out at 9:30 from sheer exhaustion.
— Matt Ranlett
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