In the morning I got a taxi over to my mate Alan’s house and the pair of us, along with his 16 year old step son Kevin, drove up the nearest hill (Victoria Peak) to have a look down over the city. The Hong Kong approach to tourist attractions seems to be, if you think tourists might come to see something, build a shopping mall next to it. The pollution in Hong Kong is pretty bad, so you will notice that anything in the distance is concealed by a haze. When you are looking at it you still get a lot of detail, but when you photograph it all you can see is the haze.
From there we drove down to the beach. It seems that if public transport can get you to a beach, it is heaving with people (and there will be a shopping mall there). If you need a car it is much quieter. I’m not a beach person myself, but I do like being near the sea.
From there we went back to Alan’s house, where I bonded with his step sons (Adam 13 and Kevin 16) by helping them speed up their computer so their games could run faster. They were playing MMORPGs like Aeon, Warcraft and some Chinese-specific things. I couldn’t understand a word of anything on the screen, because it was all in Chinese, so Captain Support needed a little translation help from Kevin. I did a little tweaking, but most of the performance improvements came from explaining that having 50 programs on all at once, including streaming video and music kinda interferes with the performance of the game, especially one that has to connect to a server, like MMORPGs do. As soon as I closed down the Justin Bieber video playing in HD on YouTube things got a lot faster and sounded a lot better. 🙂
From there we went out to meet a couple of the guys Alan works with. Both were Ausies, but have been living on and off in Hong Kong for a long time. We had a couple of drinks, some food, then early to bed ready for my class today.
Regarding food, being vegetarian in Hong Kong is not a great idea. It’s often difficult to find vegetarian food because even things that look vegetarian have a little something-something thrown in for good measure. During the day Kevin was keeping me on track. In the evening Phil was helping me out. My mate Alan speaks conversational Cantonese, after 5 years in Hong Kong, but can’t help throwing in sentences like, “Did you know Eskimos like peanut butter?”, or, “A big monkey is a gorilla and a big gorilla is King Kong!”, in an attempt to amuse/confuse the waiters, so when he was in charge I was a little worried. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Having recently been in Honk Kong for leisure, I’ll have to concur with most of that.
I thought of it not as pollution, but really heavy mist and lots of low cloud. I’m probably inaccurate, but I felt better.
Funny you call it a hill… I’m not used to seeing things higher than Kings Park – to me they were impressive mountains!
And it seems I still have trouble typing the K & G in the right places… from here on in, “HK” it is 🙂