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Published: June 14th 2017
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I read an article that says that Hong Kong is the world's most expensive city to live in, but its citizens are relatively well paid, so they can generally cope with this. This probably goes some way to explaining why the hotel dining room was jam packed last night with people willing to fork out a hundred and ten Australian dollars, plus drinks, for a buffet, while we were filling ourselves up with sausages at the much cheaper German restaurant down the road. There are four other Chinese cities in the top 20 on the world's most expensive cities list, and other featured metropolises include Tokyo, Singapore and most of the larger cities in Switzerland. The list also includes a bunch of dangerous places in Africa. It seems that the list is based on the costs associated with sending expats to live there, in which case I assume that the African cities get on the list because you need to hire an army of security guards to make sure that your employees don't get kidnapped, shot or blown up. I hope this is the reason, and it's not because a cup of coffee costs twelve Australian dollars, which is what the
article says it costs here in Hong Kong. I'm not sure that the average resident of the Angolan capital of Luanda , which is number two on the list, could quite afford this. I wonder why some things here in Hong Kong seem quite cheap when others are so expensive. You could cross the harbour 24 times in a Star Ferry for the price of a cup of coffee.
We wander along the waterfront where there is again a large collection of fishermen plying their hobby in front of the "no fishing" signs. The only freshly caught fish in evidence are no more than about five centimetres long, so I hope they're not relying on their catches to get a decent meal. The harbour again looks filthy, which leaves us wondering what diseases you might develop if you ate anything you caught. At least the ones we saw only seemed to have one head.
It looks like today might be the public holiday for the Mid Autumn Festival. The traffic seems to be lighter than usual and there are lots of people picnicking along the waterfront. We head towards the new SS Whampoa shopping mall, which is in
the shape of a ship surrounded by a token pond a few inches deep. We briefly considered eating around here a few nights ago until we nearly tripped over a couple of rats scurrying across the footpath into the pond, and then squashed a small army of cockroaches as we fled across the road.
We catch the bus and train to the airport. The terminal's very busy, and we struggle to find anywhere to sit. Issy says that she wouldn't mind a can of Coke Zero and a snack. The queues in front of the takeaway restaurants stretch into the distance, so I give up on getting anything there and trudge up and down the many kilometres of concourses in search of her elusive requests instead. Hong Kong apparently has a reputation for having one of the best airports in the world, so we suspect that availability of seats and shops selling cans of Coke Zero probably don’t feature too highly in the ratings criteria....
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Issy Sheehan
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Dave wasn't taking a picture of me at all. He was waiting for something funny to happen in the pool which he nailed haha