I finally found a place to live.
Yes, it is true. My time as an even bigger nomad than usual is drawing to a close. Again. For at least 14 months. I fina-frigging-ly managed to find myself a place that wasn't in a building full of cigarette-smoking gangster snakeheads physchos, doesn't smell like chinese medicine that's being boiled inside a chicken, doesn't smell like someone has just blocked the crapper with a boiled chinese medicine chicken, isn't on an island only accessible by magic carpet or 80 US dollar luxury ferry, has not one, but two apparently working lifts, isn't being constantly buffeted by neon lights, crowds of billions of shoppers, or the sound of 72 jackhammers, 8 thousand cars, nine cranes, a cement mixer, two fire engines & a partridge in a pear tree at all hours of the night, & that a cat could probably be swung within at full arm extension if one was inclined to get ones jollies in that sort of fashion. In short, it's not entirely awful.
So, what have I got from the A-List?
- A roof (excellent)
- More than 500 square feet (just, at 540)
- A bedroom that isn't a bed that will never get out again in one piece
- A built in wardrobe
I'll give you a second to deal with that. I know, right. Whoa. Okay, ready? Let's continue:
- A kitchen that it's technically possible to cook in
- a wall-mounted flat screen tv
- decent sized couch
- a little, weeny dining table
- reasonable(ish) views of the city
- other furniture that is necessary but too GD boring to list
- a non-skanky bathroom
And almost as importantly, what have I missed out on (mostly also from the A list):
- Proximity to a train station (this blows a bit, but it really does take 5 mins to battle into & out of the train stations, so whatevs, there's a bus. I'll cope)
- A rooftop. Sadness.
- An in-house gym (moderately common in a city that is 98% apartment living)
- An oven (only a stove-top)
- Power outlet in the bathroom (this is evidently more luxurious than Liberace's underwear in Honkers for some reason. And why do I care? Why do you care? What?! Fine, so I blowdry my hair. You got a problem with that? Take it up with the style council. See if I care...)
Take a number ladies.
So let's muse for a tick on apartment living shall we? This is something I'm not hugely accustomed to coming from Australia. I mean, we've all seen apartments, we've all got some friends that live in one, most of us have lived in one. But Hong Kong really is a whole different tin of soup when it comes to apartment living. You know when you're a kid & there's a certain toy that is just the be all & end all? It's all you want & you're all like 'hell yes! Gotta get that Barbie', or GI Joe or whatever? Then one day you see the dude that works at Toyworld shlepping an entire crate of them across the floor & just tossing them on the shelf & that's the first time your little brain ever says to itself, with crystal clarity: Holy Shit. That's alotta Barbie. Well, that's the kind of feeling I got when I first started to take in the number of apartment buildings on this little island.
What I'm trying to say is that everyone here lives in an apartment. Seriously. If you live in Hong Kong & you live in a house, then you could have probably bought Antigua for about the same price & you most certainly do not live in the city. There's a lot of really, really nice apartments here built (& costed) for the ultra wealthy. But they're still apartments.
Check this little glob of photos out that I've taken from my boss' balcony of his 'hood. Imagine an episode of neighbours in this joint. By the time you'd reached the end of character intros, it'd be time to introduce the grandkids. I wanted it to run left to right, but I'm too lazy &/or inept to get it to happen here.
That's a whole bunch o' peeps.
And not one of those buildings is commercial. They're all someone's houses. Daaaaaaaaang. So next time some dreadlocked jerkoff starts mouthing off about how apartments are killing Brunswick just give them some photos of Hong Kong & tell him or her to lodge them firmly, but cautiously, up their arse.
Which is a fantastic & almost hypocritical segue into my next topic: Gentrification. There's a lot of very shitty old buildings being pushed down in Hong Kong & replaced by new ones. This way, if you could get a time lapse camera over Victoria Harbour, rather than see the city grow outwards, American or Aussie style, you would see it slowly sprouting like a freaking neon pot plant. This is partly a way of keeping the place looking nice & attractive, but more than anything is all about a) squeezing maximum benefit out of the same square mileage, & b) being able to build an apartment block where there is already water, sewage, phone & electricity. Evidently - from the piddly amount of research I've done on the topic - getting essential utilities to a new site on Hong Kong island (a bit that isn't protected by National Park status) would cost a developer around about the same kind of money that they could sink on feeding Africa three times over. The end result of this is of course that developers erect these monstrous structures that reach some 50, 60 or 70 stories into the sky to house the ever-growing Hong Kong population over the top of ever-shrinking tracts of earth.
Now some might say this is not a bad thing. And as opinionated as I am, I'd be inclined to agree to a certain extent. Old buildings that look like massive toilets go, new buildings that look like massive...well, buildings, arrive. It is at the very least, almost certainly the greenest option. But there is however, one thing that I can't abide about the kind of modern structures that are so often built to house a very generic swathe of people from across the globe. One of those things that architects, town planners, designers landscapers & all those other twats seem to think is the essential finishing touch to any new structure. Corporate bloody art. Some of the *rubbish* that you see around this place sometimes even puts Melbourne (A dedicated corporate art fetishist - don't believe me? Just get on the Eastlink) to shame. My personal favourite though. The pièce de résistance. Is this:
W. T. F.
I don't know what it's called, but I've dubbed it 'Man about town'. And it's clear that whoever commissioned it is now picking up rubbish on Lamma Island for the rest of their career. Enjoy that image until next time.
Also, next blog. I think I might get all crazy & actually put some photographs of my self doing things. You know, instead of just putting up two page diatribes about stuff with a photo of a tree. Anyway. Talk then.
No comments:
Post a Comment