Fush!

I just remembered this before jumping into bed & felt compelled to blog this for no good reason other than the fact that if I don't write it down it will be gone forever lost to the yawning abyssopelagic hole that is my memory: I saw a dude kill my supper the other night! First time ever!

Sho we were schitting at the table in this reschtaurant ann we wannded fish...hot p*hic* breuuf, shorry, fish hot pot.

So anyway yeah, we'd had a few & wanted a fish hot pot. So we order & blah blah blah we keep talking away & then, dong dong dong. We keep talking for a bit more & then, dongdongdongdongdong! We realised slowly we were dealing with a window-based donging. We turn around & the waiter is standing outside the restaurant window with his gap tooth grin hovering over a freshly murdered fish in a little wok basket. Where the f*ck did that fish come from? Oh well.

Guess they don't pour a little bit of your fish in a glass for you to try before you eat it here, so we just kind of gave him the thumbs up & nodded & off he went.

To somewhere...

Kitchen I hope.

Anyway, it was really tasty.

Can't believe I nearly forgot about that. Anyway, night.

The language barrier

Nothing happened today except a monstrously large Italian dinner. So, today's interior dilemma: What the hell am I going to do about language? Mandarin or Cantonese?

I'm definitely going to learn Chinese while I'm here, but what to do about the Cool Canto vs Mainstream Mando condundrum? I can't learn both. I'm neither smart nor motivated enough & I've technically only got two years.

Let's analyse.

Pros for Mandarin say it is:

1. Useful in the extreme
2. The medium through which the world will be taken over in the next 50 years
3. Easier to learn than Canto

Cons for Mandarin are:

1. It's useful everywhere except Hong Kong
2. It's nowhere near as cool as Cantonese (anyone seen Young & Dangerous?)
3. Wong Kar Wai speaks Cantonese. So does Jackie Chan. Those guys are awesome. Li Na speaks Mandarin & she lost the Aussie open. Fail.
4. I won't be able to practice it around town (unless I'm in a Macao casino or a Rolex shop)

And now, facts in the form of pictures:

Li Na - Mandarin speaker.

Jackie Chan - All Canto

Might put something up on Facebort to see who's got an opinion on this topic, be interesting to hear what people have got to say. But from that little list up there, I'm thinking the only reasons I want to learn Contonese is so I can order Yum Cha easier, understand what that lady on the corner of the road is yelling angrily at me, & watch Kung Fu movies. But Hong Kong is way cool. I just can't help thinking that yeah, Contonese is the way to go. Call me old fashioned.

How do you say 9 1/2 Weeks in Chinese?

Just a quick one concerning the burger place I went for lunch today.

It's called 'Shake 'Em Buns' & is a pseudo-sex themed, not wholly convincing burger joint around the corner from me. Kind of bored staff & a cow-brown wooden furniture interior don't do a lot to add to the risqué vibe they're trying to hit. I did think the menu was kind of a cack though:

Hilarious. Surprised there wasn't a "Meat & Two Veg" or something.

Functional. Not exactly sexy though...

Another highlight was the 'Doggie Style' section. Hot dogs of course.

Oh, & for anyone who's wondering, the burgers are okay. Nothing special. And no; there is no happy ending...

Space.

I don't got that.


The only space one can generally find in Hong Kong is vertical. The wide open air is just about your only respite if you're looking for a bit of elbow room. Unfortunately, going for a walk out in the balcony farm that is most people's backyard can often be a bit...well, fatal. Love to go for a stroll out my back door, but I'm not hugely keen on the idea of plumetting to my death in order to get a few seconds of 'me' time.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah *splort*

So, until I get the opportunity to head out to the countryside for a bit, I'll just have to contend with the high-speed zombie apocalypse that is street level Hong Kong. Remembering back to my days in Beijing, & given that I'm such a gifted whiner, I'm taking the bustle with really good humour as comparatively the denizens of HK are a polite, slow-paced lot when held up against the insane human tsumanis that bash through the doors of the bus at every stop on the 3rd ring road. Wow, I'm turning into an old man. Grumble grumble grumble. What's the bet when I next visit my parents in Darwin I go into some kind of reverse culture shock & have to spend half a day rocking back & forth in a restaurant kitchen or the emergency room of the hospital just so I don't go into a slow pace-induced coma?


The crowding makes sense though considering how tiny this city feels. I'm finding that both direction & my sense of scale are completely useless here so far. The city really looks like a megatropolis (I mean just look at the sexy background pic to this blog), but I can almost walk it end to end in around an hour. I think...more to follow on that later...Hong Kong I think is just vastly different from what I had expected. What did I expect? No idea really. Maybe like Mexico City, but hanging all zably out over the water? Japan with looser manners & better dumplings? I'm not a big thinker, let's be honest.


Anyway, it's Sunday & I'm trying to save a bit of money until work starts paying me next month, so I'm going to stay indoors playing video games, like a real adventurer. Enjoy the photos.

To the left. Off to Causeway Bay.

To the right. Off to Midlevels & Central.

Straight ahead. THE VISTA!

Yar! Walk the plank!

 Granted, this looks like the kitchen of a slob, but I made toast here. Toast!!! 

Kitchen: Destroyed.

Hong Kong: Week One. Welcome to my blog.

Hong Kong makes me very confusion.

Arriving in a new city is always a bit crazy. I've managed to fall into the work environment pretty easily, so nothing to report there. That's boring away. The most important thing that's happened to me this week, is the beginning of the journey I need to undertake to come to terms with my status as an expat. Hanging out in douchebag, bogan bars that play 'Land from Downunder' with the kind of frequency that Irish sailors say 'fook'; buying a whole new life (new toothbrush -> new clothes -> new fridge); joining Facebook after 10 friggin years of total recalcitrance, hanging out with all white people, & eating Italian, Vietnamese, Aussie, barbeque, burgers, pizza, bacon & eggs (pretty much anything that isn't Chinese); etc.  It'll be a while before I truly accept my position as that loud nimrod with the disposable income that just drank four pints of Hieneken on a Tuesday night just because...

Actually, put in that perspective, all I've really done is changed the background...

Shit.

Oh well, other than the normality that has evidently followed me here, my life has been reduced to a handful of streets, my desk, & a rapidly growing number of restaurants as I begin to very gingerly expore my new adopted home.

Monday I get my Hong Kong ID card, the unimaginatively named HKID. What's wrong with 'HellaHonkerTicket'? Or 'China - the Good Bit' card? Or maybe even 'Human Jenga Permit'? As this card will allow me to get a phone, and a fixed address, I'm now being given the right to pay a small chunk of the Count of Monte Christo's booty to live in a space that most Australians would use to keep their outside shoes, car washing supplies & that spare thirty pack of cokes....well, at least I hope to. Perhaps they'll refuse to ID me. That'd be awkward.

Ah, this is a crappy first post. Essentially all you, the reader, needs to know is that I'll be updating this thing semi-regularly & detailing my exploits over the next two years as my life in Hong Kong unfolds. You can share with me the ups, the downs, the sideways, all that good stuff. Let's do a test post shall we?

Ahem.

Woke up this morning & immediately felt as if the right hempishpere of my brain was attempting to stage a coup. I'm fairly certain that the after-vitamin pee coloured 'beer' that I drank last night caused a vindictive little gnome to grow out of my forehead during my sleep who then proceeded to hack open my melon & belt the living crap out of my frontal lobe with a hot frying pan. Yes, I'm talking about a hangover people. A real nasty one. If I was George W Bush's administration I'd be bombing a small republic right now to make myself feel better about being attacked by unseen forces. Bastard beer lives here.

So anyway, I made a somewhat hamfisted attempt at combatting my agony by frying up some bacon & eggs. Had to prepare:
1. Make coffee
2. Sigh
3. Get dressed & head downstairs to the supermarket across the road to buy bread that isn't full of raisons like the raison bread I accidentally bought the other day & ate with scrambled eggs. It was labeled in english: "Raison bread". Brightest window on the floor I am most certainly not.
4. Go back upstairs.
5. Pop my ears & scoop my brains back up of the carpet after reaching the 26th floor in a gut-heaving 0.01 seconds.
6. Open the two doors leading out onto the balcony (a dizzying concrete plank jutting out of my apartment about 100 metres above the street) to avoid creating a stinky bacon fog.
7. Cook & create a thick, rich bacon fog.

Ate at my little side table for want of any other flat surface that isn't a floor. Found an incredible talent that I have for being able to complain audibly to myself while simultaneously groaning & chewing. Amazing. I'm like the Rahzel of hangover breakfasts. So anyway, being able to cook in a space that could pass for a queen-sized coffin is probably not a skill that will transfer very usefully back to Australia, but for now it's number one on the list of things to learn. I feel that the jerky, bleary-eyed cacophany of burns, curse words, elbows bashing into walls & tiny flying assassin grease blobs skidding through the air on a light-speed collision course with my eyes or nipples could have been better managed. The 'Tardis Cooking Project' begins.

___________

Yeah, that's I guess an idea of what I'll be talking about over the next few years. Maybe I'll even be sentient & capable of real emotions for some of my stories. Only time will tell!

Next episode: What the hell am I going to do with my time in Honkers?! Also, an internal monologue on the competing desires to learn Mandarin or Cantonese.