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Published: January 16th 2014
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I got the bus from Tai Mei Tuk (the beautiful alpine-looking village where my hostel is) back into Tai Po Market train station. I ran the gauntlet of the Tai Po market stalls in order to get to the Hong Kong Railway museum which turned out to be closed (it opens every day but Tuesday.) Instead I decided to take a local bus from Tai Po market to Hung Ham Long? where there is a famous wishing tree. It was a recommendation from my guide book.
I arrived to find a little market place with a local temple, lots of locals sitting around eating noodles and drinking China milk tea, and incense everywhere. I paid a lady 50 pence and she gave me a fancy scroll and a pen with which to write my wish. I wrote three wishes (as the scroll was bigger than expected) EX and fastened up my scroll. I looked for the tree to throw it up (the idea is the wish is granted if the scroll lands in the branches and stays there but when I found the tree it was prohibited to throw it up. I went back to the lady and hung it
up with the many other scrolls with wishes written on them, and put it under the peg for tiger which is my Chinese birth animal (1986.)
The lady offered me a stick of incense in order to burn my wish in the temple and offer it up to the Gods that way. She was going to charge me about £7. I thought this is typical of Hong Kong you always pay so much more to travel efficiently and now she was going to charge me more so I could send my wishes quicker. I refused. Everybody here is in such a rush but I have time, I am sure my three wishes will get granted even if they aren't offered up by incense, so I just hung it up on the peg. Hong Kong's transport system is efficient enough anyway, I don't need to be that commuter that races to get onto the next train when the next one is in two minutes.
I had a look inside the temple and as in many Buddhist temples here people were praying with incense. Only one man in the café next door spoke English and he helped me communicate with
the waitress and eventually I got a milky Chinese tea (like an English one but instead of making it with semi-skimmed milk I think they make it with cheese.)
Hong Kong is a very curious place. Nobody in this place spoke any English and everywhere I go around here I get stared at as if nobody has ever seen a european before. Yet, half the TV channels are in English, the plugs are English, everything is well sign posted in English, all the signs in the transport system are in English and even the voice recording in the MTR is identical to the one in London.
In so many ways it is like a more developed England. They have the best ipads money can buy, a brilliant health service, they seem even more security conscious than the UK, they have penalties for anti-social behaviour such as spitting, smoking and littering and clean, modern toilets everywhere. Most MTR stations are attached to giant, clean spacious shopping malls. However, lots of people don't speak a word of English, people have no idea how to live in this developed society, people don't seem to have any spatial awareness and don't know
how to keep their distance like people do in the UK, there is very little courtesy, drivers beep their car horns continuously, shopowners instead of articulating verbally,point at people, everybody slurps their noodles loudly in restaurants, they spit in the street and have every part of animal's body on the menu from dog's liver to cat's kidney. They just seem to cook everything they find and put it in the pan.
What on earth is going on?
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