Day #142: Hong Kong at night

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Hong Kong is a real 24-hours city - many people staying at my hostel have come primarily for the nightlife, and keep night owl hours, sprawled out on the common room sofas ready to go to bed just as I am getting breakfast. Tonight I tried - with a temporary friend from the hostel where I am staying - to go to a bar at the top of a skyscraper in Hong Kong, promising amazing views over the city. Unfortunately it transpired it closes on a Monday, so instead we ended up in Lan Kwai Fong, the small bar district covering a couple of small streets near the city centre where practically every shop front is a bar. It is almost entirely patronised by Westerners, so it is all English drinks menus featuring cocktails familiar from student nights (Sex on the Beach, Cosmopolitan, White Russian), London prices, and grotty interiors.

As the evening wore on the street began to look more and more like an encapsulation of the high street of any small town in the UK on a Saturday night: women in tiny dresses and stilletto heels and men in jeans and A&F t-shirts stumbling drunkenly around, raucous shouting and blaring dance music (the bars seem to pit their sound systems against one another, so over the course of a couple of hours the noise level steadily increases from quiet to having to shout in one another's ear to hear each other). It must be quite something on an actual Saturday night here.

The next night I took the Star Ferry, the harbour area looked much like Shanghai's Bund. There is a sound-and-light show, A Symphony of Lights, every night on the waterfront, which was boring, just the skyscrapers lighting up in formation to music (the first 15 minutes or so were tediously taken up with every "participating" skyscraper being introduced over the loudspeaker: "The HSBC Tower! One Exchange Square! Two Exchange Square!").

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Photos

Ad in Lan Kwai Fong bar
Demonstrating typical clientele of Lan Kwai Fong