Wed Oct 20: The close button and little things

People are go, go, go — you need to be pushy too or you might not get on the elevator. And once on board, they use the close button. More than once. Why wait the extra few seconds for the doors to close, if you can make them close now?

Speaking of buttons, this is another example of the ridiculous design excess of the W hotel. Maybe this arrangement of buttons made sense to someone at  the time, and isn’t so hard to figure out… But when I come home late from dinner all tired out, I don’t want “not so hard to figure out”. It’s like this at each turn…

Work continues to go well; today we have simple box lunches together in the lunchroom. Outside the window is a bunch of open space to be developed, where the former Kai Tak airport was. We see that there’s a large fire burning and some firemen putting it out. Odd.

There are lots of obvious things that make Hong Kong different and special but like Jules Winnfield says, it’s the little things. Here are a few examples:

• Trailers full of thousands of bamboo poles, I don’t understand this until I turn the corner and see how they do construction scaffolding here. (!)
• Drivers slamming the automatic transmission into park whenever the taxi comes to rest.
• One of the ingredients in my fruit salad is corn.
• The slogan of the MTR (metro, tube, subway): “Caring for life’s journeys”; on the back of buses is written “longevity – serenity”.

Looking at a map of Hong Kong is kind of funny, because of the preponderance of colonial names. Sure, there are a lot of streets called Wing Lee, Po Wan, Wo Fun, and so on. But there are so many like Argyle Street, Queen’s Road, Elgin Street, Jubilee, Staunton, Robinson, Wellington, etc… And these English names are so much easier to communicate for us non-Cantonese speakers: destinations such as “Causeway Bay”, “Star Ferry”, or “W Hotel” are easily conveyed, but I still can’t say the place name “Tsim Sha Tsui” and be understood.

Took the Star Ferry to Central and the MTR to Causeway Bay (a colleague here suggested the destination). Very nice pedestrian district with lots of mixed shopping: glamourous fashion items and just around the corner a stand selling skewers of cooked things — the octopus I recognized, and I think the kidneys of some small animal, but little else. Pretty cool. A surprise awaits around every corner. Oh wow, check out these service access panels on the side of a building: when they say “gas chamber” I hope they mean something very different from what the phrase conjures up for me…

Looking for dinner. Rice pizza? You’re kidding. I’ll pass. Ah, here we are! A likely-looking restaurant with no English in sight, other than a tiny footnote here or there, perfect. I go in, and between the English menu, pointing at other tables, and some English, I manage to order spicy salted squid, pan-fried greens, rice, and a (giant) bottle of Chinese beer. Great food. And you gotta love the atmosphere: people seated to my left are watching the horse races on TV with their meal, while on the other side of the restaurant they’re watching what looks like a mystical soap opera or something.

People are really paranoid about germs here: gauze masks (only a few wear them), sterilized handrails, regular disinfection of the elevators; maybe that’s how to live with the highest population density in the world. (Over 300,000 per square mile in Mong Kok!) But people will still reach into the communal plate with their chopsticks. Weird.

Then back on the MTR (that interchange at Central/Hong Kong is lo-o-ong) to the hotel, and into bed. Check on the typhoon, but the jury is still out. It’s the biggest storm in the area since 1990, but it isn’t clear exactly where it will reach the coast. I have a bit of an itchy cough, like I’m getting a cold. I hope not! Sleepy time. Got to wake up in the morning and get back to work.