Advertisement
Published: January 9th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Coming back to Hong Kong is never a chore, and with Christmas fast approaching I was looking forward to taking advantage of the island's superb shopping opportunities. The crisp temperatures, ubiquitous Christmas decorations, and first five thousand playings of Wham's "Last Christmas" put me in a Yuletide mood, not to mention having to battle through crowds of fellow shoppers in scenes reminiscent of all my previous big city Christmases. I also had the pleasure of being served in one store by an assistant called Chilli Lam.
I'd elected to stay in a budget hotel with a shared bathroom and kitchen, reasoning that I'd be spending so little time in the room that staying somewhere even half-decent would be a waste of money. Though conveniently located steps away from Causeway Bay MTR station, it was as basic as I could have imagined. A set of rooms mysteriously numbered 901, 908, 905, 902, and 903 branched off the common area, with my room (and presumably all the others) a windowless cell twice as wide as the single bed in it and roughly 6 inches longer, and apparently not decorated since the end of the Ming Dynasty. The ancient water heater in the
kitchen had the interesting design feature whereby the auto-cut-off was disabled if the temperature was turned to the max - so on my second day there, when the heater boiled dry due to someone forgetting they'd turned it on, the fuse blew, knocking out the lighting in my room and the bathroom.
My next door neighbour was a strange fellow, whose friendliness was initially welcome but then came across as plain creepy when he gave me a hand-written poem and box of teabags as a present. He'd been living in the hotel for months, and the couple of glimpses I had of his room revealed a dwelling heaped high with bags and papers, with insufficient space in the bed for anything other than the foetal position. In fact one morning I found him eating his breakfast while sitting on the loo reading the paper, as there was more space in the bathroom than in his bedroom. When I subsequently used the shower, he'd left a mug of cold water containing a sock in there, whose purpose I can't even begin to guess at. He said he was doing research into investment strategies, which I can only assume had not
yet been very successful.
Though my days were taken up with shopping and finding more dim sum restaurants to try out, my evenings involved visits to the 2 main nightlife areas of Hong Kong, namely Lan Kwai Fong (aka LKF) and Wan Chai. Unfortunately both aren't particularly traveller-friendly, with after-work groups being in the majority. Wandering around Wan Chai also involved running the gauntlet of assorted madames attempting to lure you into their hostess bars. Hong Kong was also an unwelcome reminder of the UK in that smoking was allowed in bars/restaurants (though I think that will be banned in 2007) - on that subject, I went to an Internet cafe where the non-smoking section consisted of 2 machines (out of about 60) separated from the smoking section by about 2 metres of air.
With most of my Christmas shopping complete, I could look forward to a couple of days in London catching up with friends.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.068s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0472s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb