Hong Kong: observations

The city is all high-rise, like some huge subtropical Manhattan. In fact more so, because Manhattan does have low parts. Rumor has it there are a few one-family houses in Hong Kong as well, but they are somewhere out there far away and I have not seen any. In Kowloon, in the north of Hong Kong island and in some parts near the sea the houses stand very densely together, but most of the Hong Kong island is mountains with forests on them.

Life is everywhere, day and night, and it's not scary anywhere.

Air conditioning is your friend, and is everywhere. History books say people used to live here before the invention of air conditioners, but I don't believe them.

Seven-eleven is your friend too. Seven-elevens and K-stores (probably not the sames ones as in Finland) are everywhere and open all night. You can buy condoms and beer and green tea ice cream and other necessities. The real supermarkets are called Wellcome and Parknshop and tend to be hidden inside shopping malls and department stores.

There is a lot of shopping malls. They usually have somewhere near the entrance a list of what's inside. In Chinese. At first I thought the city has no bookstores, nor internet cafes, but later I found them upstairs in the malls.

The public transportation is the best ever: The subway runs quite often and fairly late, the buses run night and day and there are a lot of them. But they really do need a some routing application (like reittiopas) or at least a good map with the routes. I have not seen any map with all the bus routes, although the maps of individual bus routes are at every bus stop. The subway map is all over the subway, too. All the maps are in Chinese and English, which is nice. The prices are low but quite unpredictable: subway costs depend on where you get in and where you get out, bus costs depends on the bus route and where you get in, Star ferry cost depends on whether you are on the upper or lower deck, and the regular tram and peak tram have each their own fixed cost. All of the above has to be paid for in exact change, unless you get an Octopus card. This is like the HKL card, except that you can't load time on it, only money. You can unload the money too, so don't worry about loading too much. The transportation is fairly cheap, with the cheapest being the Star ferry's lower deck (0.17 euros) and the most expensive being the peak tram (2 euros), with most costing 0.30-0.40 euros.

Almost every window has an air conditioner unit sticking out of it. Also, every self-respecting Hong Kong apartment has a balcony decorated with garlands of underwear. The purpose of this display is not quite clear to me, because it is always raining anyway - they can't possibly expect the underwear to dry there.

The people are small and Chinese. Lots of cute guys. People are fairly friendly and seem to be quite accustommed to foreigners. Apart from the recent immigrants from the mainland, they speak English like Finns speak Swedish: about a fourth of them speak it well and almost everyone speaks it somehow. There are a lot of mainland tourists. Hong Kongers seem to like them about as much as Finns like Russians, and probably for the same reasons.

There are signs everywhere telling people not to litter, not to spit, and sometimes also not to piss or spray graffiti. The violators are threatened with fines of 1000-1500 $HK (100-150 euros), and during my stay I did not see anyone actually do any of the above. The no-smoking signs also tend to be obeyed.

Unlike most other cities that urge their residents not to litter or piss in public, Hong Kong actually provides toilets and trash cans for citizens to piss and litter into. This wonderful city is surely blessed with more public toilets than all of our great nation. All of them, mind you, are clean, free and equipped with toilet paper. Trash cans are everywhere, too.

The streets are, surprisingly, not very congested. Not even during the rush hour.

The people get overexcited if you try to speak bad Cantonese to them. They tend to summon other salespeople, etc., to look at the talking wonder.

Hong Kong is, surprisingly, not the best place to buy Hong Kong DVDs, due to the fact that the locals seem to prefer the VCD format for some reason. I bought some VCDs too but I prefer DVDs.

I think I am in love with this city already.