Category Archives: Travel

Our new flat is on the 32nd floor of a 63-storey block. This is the highest I have ever lived by a margin of 30 floors (unless you count a week in the Algarve where I vaguely remember needing to take a lift to access our room).
We moved in over a month ago and the view from our flat still takes my breath away. I wake up to see some of the world’s biggest cruise liners glide into the cruise terminal juxtaposed with sampans quietly wending their way across the harbour. Looming behind all this is the 602m Kowloon Peak barely a kilometre from the sea.
Life in this sort of flat is a very different life to what we were used to. Exiting the building can take five minutes, with numerous doors and two lifts to navigate making you more inclined to hunker down at home once you’re inside. It’s small: 670 sq. feet, which is still large by Hong Kong standards – the average flat size being 450 sq. feet.
The atmosphere is like that of a holiday resort – the development boasts a shaded 25m all-year swimming pool, massive gym with sea views, café, Jacuzzi, BBQ space and lots of rooms for hire: bowling, snooker, events and music. While there’s no green space within the complex there are two municipal parks nearby. We do have an elevated walkway with exercise equipment and a tiny allotment for children to grow flowers and vegetables. The Internet speed is a blistering 50Mbps. The ISP was apologetic it couldn’t deliver the 1000Mbs available to others in the building. It had to restrict speeds for new customers because of a local capacity constraint. The building is popular with expats from Japan and Korea as there’s a Korean school just opposite so there is a great variety of excellent restaurants for the well-heeled executives. There’s quite a few ABC (American Born Chinese) judging by the accents. So far we’ve not properly met many other people and I still wouldn’t recognise my neighbours. Despite the having so many people packed together, it feels an anonymous place to live. Developments like this are sprouting up all over Hong Kong and other big cities.
Tower blocks are more made from electricity, than from matter. Our building has four high speed lifts, pumps to supplement the standard head of pressure, so drinking water can attain the building’s 210m summit, air conditioners to shed the heat gained from its acres of glass. Our electricity supplier, Hong Kong Electric, has maintained a reliability of supply of 99.999% since 1997 – which translates into around three minutes of unintended break in supply a year.

People sometimes compare Hong Kong’s appearance to the set from Blade Runner. But this is inaccurate, far too dystopic. A better Philip K Dick comparator would be the anaesthetically clean cityscape from Minority Report. Why are such vertical cities catching on? And how green are they?

Hong Kong has built vertically because land is scarce, developers have cheap access to capital and the electricity supply is highly reliable. For the other cities seeking to copy Hong Kong’s upward trajectory, reliable electricity is the most difficult precondition to meet: capital is anyway mobile (Hong Kong’s developers are turning this same trick in many other cities) and land scarcity is happening everywhere – the automatic consequence of urbanisation and local politicians natural aversion to annoying their current stable of voters.
That constructing tower blocks is favoured by developers should surprise no-one. Hendersons, the developer that built our home, says in its annual report: “Our strategy is to acquire sites with good potential for future value enhancement through development density intensification.”
And have they intensified! The tactic of developers is to get hold of prime land – either prising it off the people in the pre-existing 5-10 storey walk-ups, getting Government to create it afresh through land reclamation, or take over some green space – then quickly build the new tower block. Our development has 2000 flats spread over its five buildings. Looked at from Google maps its footprint is a mere 5000 square metres. By way of contrast our home in London, population 2, had a footprint of 100 square metres, and Highgate ward where we lived has a population of 10,000 and an area of 3,000,000 square metres (admittedly including quite a bit of Hampstead Heath). So my block is something like 40 to 240 times more densely populated than where we lived in central London. Land prices in Hong Kong are higher than those in London but not that much more expensive. The insanity that is the Hong Kong property market means that our flat in Hong Kong costs around 50% more than our home in UK despite being a third of the size and using around 2.5% of the genuinely scarce commodity – land. So the value-added created by the massive intensification of land use from high-rise living is not split between the developer and the resident. It’s shared between the developer and the Government.
Developers make a killing. Hong Kong has 55 US dollar billionaires compared to UK’s 53. The founder of Henderson’s is number two on the Forbes’ Hong Kong list with US$25billion. Number one, $33 billion, is of course Li Ka-shing who made his initial fortune from Cheung Kong property, Hong Kong’s biggest property company in the 1970s. His wealth now spills over into every other sector (like UK’s Superdrug and London’s electricity network company). Converting land into gold has proven a highly reliable form of alchemy. It magically transforms Hong Kongers’ prodigious work ethic, the increase in population from net Chinese migration and the gains in productivity from technological change and converts it into the wealth for the lucky few who have cornered the property market.
Government makes a killing too. Through the Land Premium charge developers have to hand over 80% of the gain in value from the intensification of land use to the Government. Last year the charge raised HK$84 billion, around two thirds more than the Government earned from salaries tax. Following the 2015 Budget the newspapers mocked the finance secretary for once again getting his budget forecast wrong. But the similarity with George Osborn ends there. The hapless minister’s error was for the 9th year running to underestimate the size of the budget surplus – HK$64bn instead of HK$9bn resulting in a giveaway budget cutting income tax on the lowest band of earnings.

Other cities are catching the high rise bug. Our building is the 51st tallest in Hong King, at 209 m. The Belchers estate in the west of Hong Kong island used to be the world’s tallest residential block, at 221m, until 2001 when Dubai started the frenetic development of its marina. In the last 15 years the world has gone on a high rise building boom and the tallest residential block, still under construction, will be 541m tall. Hong Kong used to be leader in building tall but now this model is being copied everywhere.
Are high rise buildings green? Well certainly they can be, especially in the hands of the Chinese. In the video a 57 storey ultra green building is constructed in just 19 days. It has walls with 20 cm of insulation, quadruple glazing and uses trigeneration to produce heat, cool and power. It is built off site to speed up construction, and reduce onsite pollution, risk to workers and noise. Carbon dioxide emissions have been cut by 80%.
China is making a reasonable claim to hard wiring resource efficiency into its every endeavour. But here in non-dirigiste Hong Kong I’m not sure. The developer builds to the minimum standard set by Government and no more. Double glazing which could reduce the need for air conditioning is unknown and even a simple technology like low-E window panes to reflect the hot wavelengths is uncommon. If you want a good laugh about lax building codes look like take a look at Hong Kong’s 2012 Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance which sets no standards at all on the building envelope for homes, and a few weak standards on air conditioning, lifts and lighting circuits. Buildings rarely have verandas or overhangs over the windows to reflect the bright sunlight. Instead air conditioning thunders away all summer. Government has just introduced a new requirement in April this year that residential buildings that want to apply for special concessions for green / amenity features have to be better insulated, and any area of verandas will be disregarded from the maximum floor area the developer is allowed to build on the site. But with just 3% of homes being built every year it will take decades for the energy efficiency to improve.
Energy efficiency standards are lax for appliances too. In a recent trip to the electronics chain Broadway’s, every appliance marked as grade 1 on the energy label. However my A+ fridge in UK uses just a third of the electricity of the grade 1 fridge here in Hong Kong. The current energy label standards (being revamped in November this year) are woefully lax.

High rise living is green but not because high rise buildings are intrinsically less energy intense. Small compact flats still need tough building codes to make them green. The big difference in compact living is that it radically changes the economics of mass transportation. Public transport buses as well as the MTR have high occupancy and as a result high frequency creating a virtuous circle. There are two floors of car park in our block but this isn’t many given the size of the development. Many of my colleagues don’t know how to drive, never mind don’t own a vehicle. If you only Hong Kong could learn to love bikes. The picture above is taken from the entrance to the wide seaside promenade next to my flat!

Swimming in the local municipal swimming pool is not usually considered a hazardous sport…but a Saturday morning dip in Kowloon Park should be. Once in the water all Hong Kong’s usual conventions sanctifying personal space cease to apply. Kamikaze fifty year olds hurl themselves in the water. Lean nimrods in Speedos juggernaut through the water unswerving, their plastic heads retracted . There’s giggles from women chatting around the sides of the pool using the water just to cool down. There are relatively few children in the pool they’re too busy cramming for their next academic hurdle.

Keeping fit in Hong Kong can be a challenge. Because the city has been carved out of a mountain it’s hard to walk any distance without hitting some giddy gradient. The streetscape to the left, taken just outside my old house in Kennedy Town, shows the challenge of  jogging or simply walking on the ribbon of land around the harbour. Walkers are fenced in on the narrow pavements and jostle for space with street furniture, shop overspill and construction work. And Hong Kongers  umbrellas are as multifunctional as Douglas Adams’ towels –unfurled in fog, rain and bright sunshine alike – staking a half metre square claim on the pavement. Umbrellas usual depiction is as the mark of democratic protest, but to me they signify a threatened jab in the eye despite my undemanding stature. It’s rare to see children playing in the parks or streets. The city is asking itself soul-searching questions why its children are measurably weaker than other southeast Asian countries’, including children from China. The girl below is  a delightful exception. What terrible child exploitation and on a bank holiday!

Hopefully an inspiration for my kids

So how come Hong Kongers are so skinny compared to westerners? The secret is of course they eat less, and avoid carbs. Portion are small. In Pret-a-Manger the standard sandwich size is half that in the UK. In Cantonese meals rice is served at the end, as an afterthought and largely thrown away. There’s little use for wheat – bread is sold by the half dozen slices – often with the crusts shaved off. I’ve been served ‘All-day breakfast’ with just half a slice of bread.

Lack of exercise isn’t a problem for seniors. Perhaps its because they spent their formative years in a different era that the parks, especially in  early morning, are filled with septuagenarians walking, stretching on the kids climbing frames or doing their Tai Chi. For the first time in my life I can go for a jog in the park and enjoy that giddy feeling or overtaking someone else.
Luckily the space that has been designated for sports activities – the swimming pools, gyms and sports fields run by Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department are exemplary. For just HK$17 (about £1.50) you get to swim in spotlessly clean, Olympic size swimming pools perched on some of the most scenic real estate in the territory: overlooking the harbour or tucked in the parks. With public services so good the policy issue becomes how to ration them? In the case of Kowloon swimming pool on Saturday morning the answer is you don’t; thankfully the pools on Hong Kong Island are much less busy. But accessing the gyms or the Government organised sailing or windsurfing facilities means having to attend the compulsory half-day training course. These are held once a month and there’s a waiting list. The other gym option is the outlandishly expensive private gyms (none of which have swimming pools) aimed at the rich and chic.

Our bikes arrived with our luggage and I’ve started to cycle the 3km distance from our new home to the office. Saying that Hong Kong island is not designed with cyclists in mind is like saying Ikea store-designers do not plan for their customers to leave with just the one item they wanted. The whole of Hong Kong Island has been designed to either infuriate or kill cyclists. My Homerian commute involves first exiting the building, through a dozen fire doors and lifts, to a street system where drivers hoot you every few seconds, outraged or perhaps terrified to share space with cyclists. There have been cyclist 46 deaths so far this year – quite incredible given how few cyclists there are. It’s actually possible to walk to my office off-road on a gorgeous sea promenade through Quarry Bay park, through the huge Taikoo Shing housing estate, past sign posts that angrily warn: “You will be prosecuted for cycling “. In the UK, one cyclist I know’s favourite hobby is zipping through red lights and sail over paths he/she’s not supposed to. In Hong Kong, where they don’t have proper crimes, jaywalking and cycling on footpaths, relatively speaking, are proper crimes. One of my more Taoist colleagues, sensing my frustration, asked the profound question, do you cycle to work because you want exercise or because you want to reach here. What would Yoda have said to that? She answered before I could slip in “both favour I would” saying, “For exercise there is the gym, for travel there is the MTR or bus”. And in a way she’s right. Hong Kong’s success is down to its efficient ability to cater for conformity,  plurality of want is much harder to accomodate.

Our new apartment. We’re on 32 floor. You might see the Brompton bike in our terrace

Another option to become fit I am seriously considering is eschewing the use of lifts. That’s not as dumb as it sounds. My office is on the 8^th floor and my new apartment is on the 32^nd. Quick maths tests – how many floors would would I climb everyday if I abandoned the lift ? Wrong. It’s important  to understand floor numbers here are ordinal rather than cardinal concepts. Most blocks miss out floors ending with a “4” (deemed unlucky). My office block misses out 4, 13, 14 15, 24; what would Fibonacci make of that? My apartment block starts counting floors at 7. There’s a story about a developer getting into trouble for selling a 68th floor penthouse in a 46 storey building. Floors 40 to 59 were missing – I presume because there were insufficient buyers and he had some high rollers on his back itching to sue if they didn’t get their pre-paid penthouses pronto.

The other way of keeping fit is hiking on the trails. But in May with the temperature hovering around 30ºC from dawn to dusk this is getting hard. The last time I walked up Victoria Peak from Kennedy Town I took this photograph of Lamma Island. I am currently mainly working on Hong Kong’s electricity market reform. The weirdest thing about the energy policy here, for a Londoner, is that 80% of Hong Kong’s electricity is generated within the territory. The island of Lamma just off the Hong Kong Island and easily visible from the Peak provides a quarter of the territory’s electricity. The balance between fossil fuels and renewables is all too visible in the photo. The 800kW wind turbine is barely visible next to the  4GW coal and gas plant. There’s also a small 550kW solar PV also on the site which is near invisible in the photo and equally absent in the output statistics.

Keeping fit watching the dragon boat race at Tai Tam

Maya and I were glued to our phones on the Friday of the UK elections. Being six hours ahead the results came in over the course of the day. Maya was working in the British Consulate and she and her colleagues were all crowded around the TV, I was in my office patiently explaining about the UK election process and why was there a Green Party. Hong Kong will be holding its district elections in November this year, but few of my colleagues are registered to vote. When the districts were last contested, in 2007, only 1.1 million votes were cast from an adult population nearing 6.2 million. Everyone in Hong Kong is allowed to vote except foreigners, prisoners and the small garrison of the PLA. There are 412 district councillors in HK’s 18 districts councillors. They have similar powers to those in UK– bread and butter issues: local bus routes, social housing, waste collection. The noisy pan-democrats that are lobbying so hard for changes to the election for Chief Executive, got 40% of the vote compared to 55% for the pro-Beijing parties – mainly in the wealthy and westernised districts. It will be interesting to see whether this shifts in a few months time.

The Cantonese are major foodies. I mean this in the sense they really care about the food they eat. They scour the globe for the choicest foods: live crabs from Cornwall, rock lobsters from New Zealand, sea cucumbers and abalone (sea snails) from South Africa and the infamous shark fins from whoever will sell them this illicit delicacy. (WWF has just persuaded the government to outlaw serving shark fin soup at its receptions).

Frozen seafood retails at a fraction of the price of live food so where possible these items are flown in, chilled but alive, at tremendous carbon and financial cost and then presented in restaurants, supermarkets and wet markets. Customers either select the fish at the restaurant or bring their own. The chef despatches the animal, then serve it a few minutes later gutted, and stuffed with rice and spices.

It’s not just fish. The Cantonese are proud of their reputation of eating absolutely anything. My colleagues delight in taking me to restaurants and serving me some harmless looking piece of meat and proudly identifying it afterwards as chicken’s feet, pig’s cheek, or squirrel’s testicle (I didn’t know squirrel’s had testicles, I didn’t even know they had gender).

Every neighbourhood has its wet market where you can buy these delicacies. These towering multi-storey Government inspected markets are laid out so the live and butchered animals are on the ground floor, the dry goods and vegetables on the floors above and the crowded cooked food centres sit at the top. One of Hong Kong’s top websites – openrice.com – which is packed full of user reviews, food photos and detailed price comparisons of eateries often showing the cheap and cheerful food courts, with their cracked formica tables, bric-à-brac plastic chairs and all the feng shui of a car crash with gushing reviews. And to this day the second best curry I’ve had in Hong Kong has been at the North Point wet market.

Pig snouts

Chicken Feet

Dried squid

But just because Hong Kong people are into their food – it doesn’t mean the food is necessarily all that good. Or even edible for that matter. At least thirty per cent of Cantonese food is off-bounds to me either because it uses gross parts of animals (feet, snouts, intestines), inedible species (crickets, sea cucumbers) or endangered species.

A friend from WWF told me the street in Soho close to where I lived was one of the top spots for buying illegally traded ivory artefacts, cunningly labelled as mammoth ivory. (The difference can only be discerned by looking at the material’s grain so take a scanning electronic microscope next time you go shopping for ivory!) It seems CITES is relaxed about using species that are already extinct, its disapproval is reserved for species on the brink of extinction. As an economist I do worry about the sort of behavioural signal this sends poachers.

The commonest food eaten by HK people, as per everywhere else, is McDonalds. Their zillion restaurants, serve 1.5 million meals every year – which I calculate to be around 5% of all food eaten in Hong Kong. This shouldn’t surprise anyone – according to The Economist’s McDonalds price index HK is one of the world’s cheapest places to consume a Big Mac. McDonald here tastes exactly the same as it does in UK. The same can’t be said of KFC or its Yum! stablemate Pizza Hut which serve insipid copies of their usual fare.

The one species that is safe from HK people’s chopsticks is the dog. I am used to being less groomed than the typical HK citizen but I have to admit it riles a bit to see dogs better turned out then me. Soho has several dog spas to pamper Fido and a dog crematorium to send him off to the great kennel in the sky. One of the big scandals running in the papers is a story about a Vietnamese restaurant accused of killing and serving dog meat. The photos of the purported dog carcass have gone viral.

Maya arrived a fortnight ago and almost the first think we did was go off to Taiwan. Colleagues at work gush about Taiwan. The island is located just 100 km off the coast of China. Inevitably it’s been colonised by wave after wave of Chinese refugee fleeing some political or climatic Tsunami. The most recent wave of colonisation took place in 1949 when the nationalist KMT led by Chiang Kei-shek fled from Mao’s communist hordes to establish the Republic of China. The bizarre double-think of the Cold War meant that until 1971 the ROC (population 20 million) was recognised as pukka China instead of the commie People’s Republic of China (population one billion). PRC’s first action was to blackball Taiwan from every international institution apart from the Scout Movement. Taiwan’s a hauntingly beautiful place. Taipei itself is a sprawling city with rice paddies alongside state of the art semiconductor factories (Taiwan is one of the world’s largest producers of solar PV panels), towering mountains, and national parks with jungles and hot springs within the city limits. Earnings spread, according to the gini coefficient, are less iniquitous than Hong Kong’s or indeed UK’s. Prices, especially of property, are a fraction of HK’s. But the country has been in relative decline compared to the other Asian tigers this last decade. Even though political ties are tetchy, familial links between Taiwan and the mainland are close and Taiwanese capital has been invested in the mainland, most infamously Foxconn, rather than the island which is less tolerant of the company’s murderous sweatshop work regimes.

Taiwan was colonised by the Japanese for fifty years before their defeat in WWII and they’ve left their imprint on the street layout and architecture. Its also inspired some great movies like The Crossing which is a collaboration between the Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese film industry. The film is basically War and Peace but set in China. The three-way war between is as much a national trauma to the present generation as the Napoleonic Wars were to Tolstoy’s.

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

Longshan temple

Wulai in Taipei

Ending on an uplifting note, and sorry if this starts off like a bad joke. A couple of weeks ago I sat next to a Buddhist priest with a bag of dead frogs. I looked at them disapprovingly, wondering where they would be served-up. One of the animals croaked. The priest gave me a beatific smile. “Where are you taking them?” But he spoke no English. He took an iPhone out of his tunic and started to play around with it like everyone else on the MTR. Five minutes later, as I was about to get off when he touched my sleeve and pointed to the screen and then the bag of frogs. The screen had the word “release” written on it. I got off the tube gob smacked it could take him so long to use Google translate.

You can be forgiven for never having heard of Shenzhen. Before Deng Xiaoping created this Special Economic Zone at the doorstep of Hong Kong in 1979, it was just a series of sleepy fishing villages known as Bao’an County with a population of 300,000. Now it has a population of 10 million. Below are a couple of photos shot from the same vantage point shown by Jeffrey Sachs in his excellent recent presentation at LSE about the challenges facing the world.

If you’re a sucker for this sort of thing here are some more before and after photos.

Made in China could almost be translated as Made in Shenzhen. The city’s economic output – US$260 billion in 2014 – exceeds that of Ireland. And it’s not just low-end textiles and consumer electronics anymore. The HQs or major production sites of Huawei and ZTE (ICT hardware), Tencent (online markets/social network), TCL (manufacturer for Samsung), Foxconn (manufacturer for Apple), BGI (gene sequencing) are all scattered around Shenzhen.

When I asked my colleagues for recommendations about where to visit they looked at me with baffled disbelief, as might a Londoner asked to recommend a itinerary  in Thamesmead (“Isn’t that where all the BNP-types hang out.”) Many of them hadn’t been to the Mainland for a decade. Hong Kong’ people’s disdain towards the Mainland has the weirdest manifestations. There are running riots in the North of Hong Kong because poor mainland shoppers and wholesalers cross the border to pick up safe, non-counterfeit goods from HK, while Westerners like me skip over to do the opposite. On Chinese social media wags urge are urging Chinese shoppers to be noisier and trashier and awarding bonus points if they can reduce HK’s sensitive souls to tears.

Shenzhen is jammed right against the north of New Territory about 25 miles away from central Hong Kong. You get there on the MTR and walk across the border to catch the Shenzhen tube on the other side. And it is a proper ‘border’. You have to go to the bank and convert your Hong Kong dollars (pegged to the US dollar and issued by the private sector banks like HSBC) into Yuan notes from which Chairman Mao’s face beams at you. You buy a visa (price varies with nationality so avoid using US/UK passport if you have the choice), clear immigration and find your phone and bankcards either crash or charge foreign usage fees.

The shot on the left, taken in Shenzhen’s OCT quarter, shows the absence of the city’s dark satanic mills. The sculpted waterfall sits in a boulevard with decent cycle facilities a ‘local’ market selling curios like impossible Rubix cubes with 25 cubes per face, retro radios and freaky T-shirts.

Shenzhen’s not all like that, the sprawling Lianhuashan park was visibly poorer – it was crammed with young workers flying kites, courting, playing ball with their 1.1 kids and generally taking a break from their gruelling six day working week. Everyone speaks in different languages since they had flocked to the city from all corners of China. I seemed to be the only Cantonese speaker here (I wish). But so much of the city is either being built, or taking a pause from being built, while the property development company’s hyperventilating balance sheet takes a breather, that it lacked any sense of place. It doesn’t seem to have a proper centre. I wondered around for over an hour for someplace to have a coffee.

The photo to the right was taken in Citizen Square in the middle of the afternoon. The huge open space had occasional clumps of people gathered around un-Chinese street entertainers. I watched a twenty-something wearing a ‘Punk Girl’ T-shirt, but looking anything but, play folk guitar. The biggest crowd (though modest by HK standards) was in a shopping mall housing the three-storey Book City. That sort of says it all. Hong Kong people had written Shenzhen off as somewhere poor where you go and have a massage, buy cheap furniture or knock-off electronics (they’re already selling iWatch lookalikes; though sporting an Android OS) while Shenzhen this city of swots is quietly reinventing itself as the high end manufacturing / services hub of China.

My flat’s TV has just four terrestrial channels. Not much is broadcast in English and I am one of the five or so people that still watch ATV’s World channel. (A pollster tells me in typical pollster fashion that when offered the option 93% of his Hong interviewees prefer to respond to telephone questionnaires in Cantonese, and the remainder are split between between Mandarin and English.) Because of the collapse in TV viewing figures there are hardly any adverts, despite it being a so-called commercial TV channel. Perhaps, as a consequence, the distinction between advert and programme has all but vanished. My favourite programme is a travel show presented by two Chinese-Australian bimbos. They waltz around Southeast and South Asian countries. Each episode has them sampling food, experiencing some mildly extreme sport, checking out the wildlife before being exposed to some existentialist dilemma: “Should we try the ‘erbal all-over body rub or the Ayurvedic treatment.” The results are invariably – “totally awesome.” There is a fantastic world devoid of Pol Pot, Agent Orange, Tsunami and the Myanmar junta – an Asia I’m so looking forward to exploring.

A couple of people have been concerned about my safety and darkly muttered about the triads and crime. They’ll be relieved to hear that there were just 27 homicides in Hong Kong last year – a number ‘Godfather’ Al Pacino could cheerfully despatch and dismember over lunch. (Two of last year’s murders in HK were by an English banker.) This compares favourably to UK’s 600 murders last year. More distressingly there were 1000 suicides last year in Hong Kong. So dear family, the greatest threat I face is probably myself, followed by other English people. Hong Kong feels an incredibly safe place to live….unless you’re a construction worker. Check out the 10 storey bamboo scaffolding to the left. And it’s all held together by plastic ties and duct tape. The cost of installing solar PV in Europe would plummet if we did the same thing. Now there’s a thought.

It’s my fourth week of learning Cantonese. There are two schools of thought about how easy it is to learn Cantonese. There are some people (my Cantonese tutor) who say it’s easy to learn. There are others (the rest of the world) who say it’s very hard. My tutor explains: “The grammar is easy. The future tense is the same as the present tense so no need to learn different verb endings.” That’s nice to hear but there is a good reason why English has the future tense; it’s actually quite useful being able to tell her whether I have done my homework or will do my homework.

And then there are the tones. To give you some idea about their perverseness listen to this exposition of the six tones. Or you could listen to this one instead, espousing Cantonese’s nine tones. (Hang on, didn’t the other chap say there were just six.) I have a theory: there aren’t actually any tones and they’re just a concoction to make Westerners sound stupid. The Chinese instead use subtle smiles and winks to separate homonyms.

I’m not trying to learn the script. But it fascinating when you walk around and look at the beautiful traditional Chinese calligraphy. Each character depicts a single syllable. This is a terrible way of coding data. This means an educated Chinese reader needs to commit to memory several thousand characters to read a newspaper. Characters are by necessity complex because they have to cram all the different permutations of theoretically possible syllables: a starting consonant, a vowel sound, a tone and an ending consonant into a single character. We’d have never won the second world war if Turing had had to hack Japanese language codes, instead of German.

As a result you need an awful lot of strokes to depict relatively simple concepts. The characters for London need 11+14 strokes in classical Chinese 倫敦. In English we can write it with just 12 strokes. And as a bonus we can pronounce it from just looking at the letters and knowing what sounds to make even if you had never seen the word. One of the reforms made by Mao was to create simplified Chinese so that (伦敦 is London with 7+14 strokes) words are easier to write, but not much easier to read.

My progress is painfully slow. At my last class my tutor remarked something to the effect of: “I have a suspicion you are not significantly less intelligent than my other students. But you seem to know so little, I can only assume you are not putting the time in to between lessons to learn the vocabulary and tones.” Not the most motivating of conversations but she’s right. Even cramming half an hour each morning before work I’m still forgetting the most basic of words. Just one more week to go before the course finishes!

One thing that has changed in my life is I’m not cycling everyday to work. Very few people commute by bike on Hong Kong Island. Partly this is just people being economically rationale. Hong Kong’s underground system – the MTR is outrageously good and jaw drop-ingly cheap (my daily commute of four miles costs the equivalent of 55p each way). And partly it’s the Hong Kong people’s extreme intolerance for any type of hazard or discomfort. My colleagues all drink bottled or boiled water, despite the measured drinking water quality being one of the best in the world. And they use the MTR because the experience is so civilised. The photo shows people queuing for the MTR during rush-hour. I’d like to draw your attention to three things: first off everyone is patiently standing in the assigned space waiting for the MTR to arrive, secondly staff (in the friendly yellow MTR colours) are there to help and thirdly every single person on the platform is looking at their smart phone. Yes, they have the phone reception underground. And I wish they’d get rid of it. No one speaks to each other on the MTR (except on the phone). Instead they can manifest an extreme HK solopcisim – they wear filters over their mouths and nose, earphones shield their ears and smartphones screens restrict their field of view. Only the inner world exists. The main theme of my job currently is sustainable consumption. But what hope has the environment got if it is no longer being perceived.

Instead of cycling, to get some exercise I walk the first two MTR stops to Admiralty through the botanic gardens and zoo which houses a whoop of gibbons, the noisiest and most agile monkey in the world, and watch twos and threes of people practising Tai-Chi near the gurgling fountains. Then I swerve around the old Government House which serves as the residence for CY Yeung the city’s chief executive, and finally cross the gorgeous Hong Kong Garden which has become my favourite park in the world. It’s a tiny oasis of nature amidst the downtown skyscrapers. This can’t be the same park that inspired Siouxsie & the Banshees to write their similarly titled song. I walk past the aviary with hundreds of species of bird (nice to see such variety flying around and not just in the canteen being eaten), squads of impossibly thin western women-that-workout-&-then-lunch racing up and down steps with the femininity of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 being megaphoned by their Australian trainers, behind a manufactured waterfall that must have served as the backdrop for a million wedding photos and finally through the obligatory shopping mall to Admiralty MTR.

The other thing I missed coming here was decent coffee. Maya awarded herself custody of the Nespresso machine despite my protestations she also had the TV, car, house etc too. But luckily the IFC shopping mall in Hong Kong harbour has a Nespresso outlet for capsules that I presume are couriered from Italy in judging by their cost. In combination with my office’s Nespresso machine I can get good coffee.

I was getting a little nervous I would forget how to cycle. It’d been six weeks since I’d last got on the saddle. This is the longest period I’ve not cycled since I was fifteen when my leg was in plaster. So, instructed by my Lonely Planet guide, I headed to the Tai Po Market in the New Territories where you can hire bikes and cycle off into the near-by national parks. Tai Po has a pretty extensive and heavily used system of bike trails criss-crossing the town. Within half an hour it’s possible to get to the Wilson Trail and walk to the most idyllic series of waterfalls and pools. See the selfie.

Anyway till next time…when I can tell you about my trip to Shenzhen. Happy New Year & Joi-gin.

Prashant, February 2015