Jürgen's 70th Birthday World Tour, Stop #4: Hong Kong

After experiencing Singapore for three days I thought that I was prepared for Hong Kong, but I quickly realized that both are completely different cities existing in two different cultural environments. Of course, for both all started with the British occupation, but from there the two started to develop along rather different lines. Or, to use this simply analogy: Both drive on the left side of the road, but while in Singapore people stand on the left side of escalators to allow faster traffic to pass on the right, in Hong Kong it is just the opposite: Stand on the right, pass on the left. It may be a tiny difference, but in some ways it epitomized how the two entities differ.

Singapore is what one would call a sovereign city-state (having morphed from a British trading post and later crown colony (shortly interrupted by the Japanese occupation) to a self-governing state under British authority, then being absorbed into what had been newly invented as Malaysia, and finally becoming an independent nation in 1965. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China in 1997 after having endured similar colony/occupation/colony cycles in the years prior. Independent and not independent, that's the kicker here, yet both are doing exceedingly well.

Hong Kong owes its wealth and position in the world to shrewd politics and policies that made good use of the small enclave's geographical position on the footstep of China, super-charged by Britain's political whomp. The history that trade and especially the opium trade played in establishing Hong Kong as what it is today (third-largest financial center in the world, one of the world's top 10 merchandisers, etc.) is a story that should be taught in finance and pol sci classes, especially in light of our quickly changing economic realities. Singapore, at least in my view, was somewhat more ethical than Hong Kong in moving itself from a third-world country to a member of the economic elite in just a generation.

Quite frankly, I wouldn't call Hong Kong beautiful, an adjective that I wouldn't hesitate to use on Singapore. After a few days here in HK, I would rather use words such as powerful, bold, and definitely gritty. The cultural melting pot that Singapore is gives it a certain charm and even elegance, something I so far haven't seen here in HK. Wherever I look, I see in-your-face, ostensible wealth, glitz, glamour, and—yet—also the other side.

Hong Kong must have the world's highest concentration of shopping malls, gargantuan complexes with underground walkways that stretch for kilometers and that make escaping to the outside difficult. Singapore had its malls, too, but not to that extent. One high-end or luxury store front next to the other, time and again, wherever you go. Louis Vuitton, Audemars Piguet, Hermès, Tiffany's—you name it. And it's not as if these malls were empty—people flock to them as if there were no tomorrow. I can't tell whether it is visitors from China and Asia in general or locals, but the commerce machine is firing on all cylinders. Go outside of the malls into the streets, and it is shop after shop, bank after bank, restaurant after restaurant. The entire city is bathed in a constant hum of busy-ness, generated by both the people themselves as well as the continuous traffic that doesn't seem to stop.

Hong Kong has about 7.5 million inhabitants, and it seems as if at least half of them are in the streets at any given time. The most reliable transportation method is by far the metro (MTR here, as to MRT in Singapore) as it doesn't choke at every intersection the way the electric trams, buses, and especially private cars do. Walking the sidewalks takes patience, and crossing a street takes even more of it as the cycles of the traffic signal seem to be measured in hours, not minutes.

Despite this never-ending, slow-motion movement from one point to the next, there's little sign of visible hurry or even frustration. I've hardly heard a honk (usually reserved as a warning sign but not as a way to denoue a traffic jam), and pedestrians at a crosswalk will endure 120 seconds waiting for the red light to eventually turn green. If you ride the bus, you will queue up in a quiet and polite manner, meaning that the British influence is still alive and well. In the metro, riders allow those alighting to clear the car before they enter.

I mentioned the underground walkways in the malls. If you are not familiar with your exact location you may easily end up walking an extra mile to finally get to the bus or metro stop you were looking for; if heading into the metro, be prepared to walk literally another kilometer through long tunnels without travellators to finally make it to your platform. I have no idea how many extra miles I have covered over the course my three days in town, just trying to cross a road but having to make a sizeable detour because there is a center-lane barrier.

Two notable contraptions that have a very positive effect on moving people in Hong Kong are the Ding-Ding and the Central-Mid-Levels Escalators. The former is a system of old-fashioned electric double-decker streetcars that move passengers from east to west along the southern shore of Victoria Harbour, a very narrow strip of land at the foot of the hills that allows such a system to work perfectly. A ride with one of these trolleys costs about US $0.25, one of the very few cheap pleasures in this expensive city. Just looking at the multi-colored Ding-Dings makes you smile, with their boxy, unpretentious look and the resemblance to miniature wind-up toys.

Just like the trolleys, the Central-Mid-Levels Escalators can also be found on the southern harbor side. As just mentioned, this area is characterized by extremely steep hillsides that reach as far as 500 feet above sea level, jutting upward just a few blocks away from the water. Back in the early1990s, the government decided to facilitate pedestrian access to the apartment blocks and neighborhoods that sprawl up the hillsides by developing a system of moving walkways and escalators that, in the mornings, takes people down the hill, only to reverse later its direction and transport people back up. The system is more than a mile long, and it is really a trip to go up through some of those neighborhoods as if one were in Disneyland. 

My hotel, the Holiday Inn Express, was located close to the Causeway Bridge that connects the mainland to Hong Kong Island. Tram, metro, and bus lines converge here, making it a good spot for my all-day excursions. Hong Kong has attractions that one could probably classify as must see, but I hadn't come here to visit another Museum of Modern Art or the like. Instead, I had used Microsoft's AI program, Copilot, to map out three itineraries to take me through various neighborhoods to get a general impression of the city. The public transportation system is extremely user friendly in that one can simply tap a VISA card to buy one's fare, and general card acceptance meant that once I again I did not have to exchange any real money. The bus from the airport cost $5.50, the metro was about $1.75, regular busses were $1.65, a ferry ride to the other harbor side was about $0.50, and as mentioned, the tram cost $0.25. Very affordable!

Hong Kong has the highest concentration of luxury cars in the world. You see them all: BMW and Mercedes, Porsche, Rolls, Ferrari, and even Pagani (showroom open only by appointment—dang!), as if there were no rumbling street cars next to you. I suppose that if you can afford a car like that you really don't care that gasoline costs just shy of $14 a gallon! Yes, that's right. Maybe that's why this city of 7.5 million inhabitants has only about 580,000 private cars registered. Do the Google comparison to Lubbock, or wherever you may live these days. It's mind-boggling.

I mentioned the super-fancy store fronts and the glistening lights. Along with that come pedestrians (=shoppers!) who are smartly dressed and are out to part with their money—but not before they have taken umpteen selfies, not only of themselves but with their boyfriend, or their girlfriend, or their group of friends, or whatever will fit into the selfie. And if they don't want to take a selfie, they simply ask their friend to take those Instagram glamor shots (or whatever the app du jour may be). The prancing and posing, the revealing clothing, the done-upness of the mostly young crowd is just overwhelming! Singapore had a bunch of that, but here it is brought to new heights!

They may be smartly dressed, but they're not beyond stopping at the fortune tellers whom you can find in the back alleys or under the elevated connector roads. Close to my hotel is an area where a half a dozen shriveled women will ask for your birthdate, pull out some papers, crumple them, bang 'em with a lucky shoe (or so I have to assume), wave them over candles and incense and repeat the whole ceremony, and then they sit down with you and tell you the exact birthdate of your planned first baby, or something like that. Being afraid of voodooism and the like I stayed at a safe distance.

My conversation just now, while writing much of this at Up At The Brew, with a young woman who's occasionally filling in for the regular help, as a favor to a friend, answered fewer questions than it solved in regard to life in Hong Kong. She looks like 22, has a 10-year-old kid, is divorced, and has a Batchelor's. I asked so many questions, with some of the answers vanishing in the ambient noise of this taproom. There's that eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, China. I asked her whether her emancipated views were shared with women on the mainland, and she was was quick to answer that women in Hong Kong are different. There's more money here, there are more opportunities, and China is only in the backs of their mind (but it is definitely present). It would be so interesting to learn more about so much.

Macy on the left, and Karla—typically Chinese-Western names 😅

While we're at the beer scene, let's just dive into that really quickly. To the best of my knowledge, there are no craft breweries in HK that also have an adjacent taproom, so no "brewing on the premises." But there are numerous well-run taprooms around town, and I visited four of them (or was it five?), and all of them had really fine beers coming off their lines. Just as in Singapore, beer is not inexpensive, and I have simply resigned myself to the fact that a non-happy hour beer will cost around $16 to $18 a pint. At least the happy hours are generous, generally stretching all the way to 8 p.m. How young people can afford this was partially answered by Macy when she said that many parents give their kids a lot of money. BTW, Saturday nights are not the big party night in Hong Kong—Friday's are.

Remember the big apartment complex fire a few months ago here in Hong Kong? Yeah, the one in those 31-story tall towers at Wang Fuk Court that killed more than 160 people? You may remember seeing those bamboo scaffolds looking like torches lighting the night. I had never heard about bamboo scaffolds before but am now seeing them everywhere. They go up, and up, and up, and the workers obviously know how to build them into structures as sturdy as or more so than any metal scaffold. But they do burn.

I mentioned the low fare for the ferry across Victoria Harbour. On my second day I had spent the day on the north side of the bay and stayed until daylight became dusk and was replaced by the night sky. The Hong Kong skyline is magnificent, regardless on which side of the harbor you are. (My first evening I had spent sipping a Guinness at the Alto rooftop bar—incidentally also at 31 stories—being mesmerized by the lights of the city.) At eight o'clock, the Symphony of Light started its 10-minute run. The few laser beams from the opposing side were just as unmemorable as the weak piped-in soundtrack, but all this wasn't needed anyway for a memorable view of Hong Kong Island. I enjoyed it so much that I searched for and found a cozy sea-side spot and had a long-overdue pizza and an IPA.

Food: I love Asian food. But—what's the correct way to put it?—so much of it lacks consistency, chewability, crunch! How much congee and soup and noodles and other gushy-wooshy stuff can a man take? Yes, it was entirely my decision to order those pickled jellyfish, and I was responsible for whatever it was that they called breakfast in the hotel. The pizza on night two felt so good. As did the crispy fried pork and the goose parts. Or today's streamed grass carp in black bean soup. Wait, I was able to squish all that with my chopsticks....

Some of the photos may have brought up other vignettes of this short stay. I didn't mention in any way my very pleasant flight from Singapore to Hong Kong, with Cathay Pacific, HK's "flag carrier airline." That's what you have to call it if you're headquartered in an SAR, I suppose. Hong Kong is really different, in so many ways; for me, many are simply foreign and enigmatic. I don't feel as if I have represented what I have seen in the way I would have liked to, but this is due more to ignorance and sheer overload than not attempting to be a good reporter of my experiences.

This time tomorrow night (this text, not necessarily all of the photos added yet), is conceived late on Saturday, GMT+09:00, but it won't be finalized until hours later) I will have just arrived in Tokyo's Haneda airport. In light of this tight time line, todays' crap weather came in kinda handy as I really didn't want to traipse around in the rain all day. Instead I went up to what is known as The Peak, the area where the really, really rich live, overlooking all of Hing Kong. My view was rather limited, but that's the way it goes.

The forecast for Tokyo is much more favorable, with much sun and temperatures that are cool during the day but not freezing. No snow storms. No tsunamis—as if they had anything to do with the weather ...

And so another segment of my World Tour is coming to an end. I still need to insert the pics, edit, proofread, and give it that last read before hitting the publish button, maybe tomorrow in the lounge or on the flight or wherever. Man, life's so damn good!

Jürgen