Si in Hong Kong, May 2007
Simon Lockington

Here I am in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is good, up until recently when they (along with every other airport I’ve been to lately) bought in these idiotic communist style security checks, it’s one of the best airports to be in. Nice and efficient, very clean, the toilets are clean, it’s all good.

Because of the communist measures about no liquids at all in carry on bags, I’d had to check in my clothes bag (that Calvin Klein Escape is dangerous you know especially when used with Skin Moisturizer. That doesn’t imply that I use moisturizer though, I’m from a farm, it just fell in my bag). Normally waiting for checked in bags sucks terribly because the bag is never there when you arrive and it always takes ages.

What a breath of fresh air it was when I saw my bag on the carousel as I strolled up, I didn’t even stop as I picked it up. I could get used to this business class action.

I had considered taking the train to the hotel, trains in Hong Kong are very good indeed. However when I looked at the train map I couldn’t recognize which train station I would need to get off at and I really didn’t feel like going round and round Hong Kong on the train.

I took a taxi instead.

The drive from the airport into Hong Kong is really quite nice. You travel over valleys and over the islands that make up the Hong Kong area. You can see the ships in the harbour, the mammoth container port and the HUGE skyscraper apartment buildings.

THE CITY BUILT WITH BAMBOO
Hong Kong is one of the most heavily built up cities in the world. There’s no land so people have to build straight up, and they don’t muck around either, they’re at least 60 floors up I reckon.

The first time I came to Hong Kong I did a double take when I saw one of these skyscrapers being built. Instead of using metal scaffolding like everywhere else I’ve seen, they still use bamboo, 40 stories up!

Anywhere you go in Hong Kong, if you find construction going on, you’ll find bamboo, and most likely, you’ll find it’s just tethered together! Incredible.

I was staying at a hotel on Nathan Road. Nathan Road is great, it’s right in the center of where you’d want to be. A heap of electronics shops, clothes shops and any other shop you might want is within easy walking distance. Which was lucky, cause I had one particular shop to visit. Urgently.

SAMS THE TAILOR
Qantas were passing me around like a hot potato and I was beginning to lose hope of finding my suit jacket. I expect some airline steward found it and is showing it off to his boyfriend.

Luckily, I was staying only a couple of blocks up the road from the tailor who made the suit in the first place. As soon as I got checked in I ran down the road to Sam’s the Tailor.

People who read my first ever email from Hong Kong a couple of years ago might remember Sam’s the Tailor. Sam is a big man on campus when it comes to tailors and boy is he proud of his reputation. All over his walls are pictures and letters of thanks from politicians and celebrities all over the world who come and get suits made by him.

High profile men such as Helen Clark, George Bush (both of them), Bill Clinton, Little Johnny Howard, Prince Charles, Tony Blair etc.

There are also fine upstanding people such as Colin Powell, U2’s Bono, General Peter Cosgrove, so it is appropriate that Sam makes my suits.

It was Saturday afternoon and the place is very busy. Sam’s shop is really no bigger than a normal bedroom (as is the case for just about every shop in Hong Kong). There were many, many people in getting fitted up for suits.

Sam is very protective of his reputation and insists you are looked after by his staff and woe betide those who are slack with their service.

I explained my situation to Sam who summoned a minion to tend to me. They looked up my personal ID number and found my details but didn’t think they would be able to get my new suit done in time for me to leave (if I’d been there two days it would have been no problem). Oh well, I knew I’d been aiming high. They would build my suit and send it to me. “Do you need to measure me again?” I asked.

“No, we just send”

Ok, I thought and paid my money (about AU$400 for a fully tailored suit delivered!) and turned to leave.

Sam saw me leaving and yelled “Sir, have you been fully catered for?” (Sam is an Indian dude with old skool British heritage – when you fill in your name, he asks for your Rank for if you’re in the military).
I said “Yeah mate, she’s going to make the suit and send it to me in Australia”. Most of Sam’s clients are international people who stop by, while I was there, people from New York, London and Berlin were having suits made.

Sam had seen that the minion had not taken my measurements and was livid. “I will not risk you having an ill fitting suit which you are unhappy with Sir, I must insist on taking your measurements again” and he jabbered on in Chinese at the minion who went pale and ran off to get me a drink. Soon, other minions appeared and measured me up under the supervising eye of Sam whilst I supped on the drinks provided.

Soon Sam declared that he had enough information to create a suit I would be delighted with and I went back to the hotel for a bit of a nap.

Later on I would be having dinner with my mate Stephen who is car mad. Those who read my first email from Hong Kong a few years ago might remember him as having the crazy modified Mini that would frighten most V8 sports cars that I can think of. Stephen has had many sports cars come and go since then (big, flash Euro sports cars of which I can only dream about), but the Mini still stays because it is so much fun to drive.

KOREAN BARBEQUE
Stephen picked me up from the hotel in one of his Porsches and we blasted through the streets of Kowloon frightening pedestrians and taxi drivers whilst trying to work out what we wanted for dinner. People here don’t seem to mind if you give cars a bit of a hiding here. It seems that the thinking is that if you have enough money to buy these things, then you are entitled to own the road anyway. It’s not a big thing for them. Stephen told me that Hong Kong has the highest Ferrari ownership per capita than anywhere in the world.

We eventually decided that we would have Korean barbeque for dinner. You basically pick which raw ingredients you want and then cook it up on a big hot plate in the center of the table. I’ve had this before and always enjoyed it.

One of the things you build is what I called the ‘Korean Enchilada’. You get a big lettuce leaf, then stuff meat, garlic, spices and various vegetables that I couldn’t identify into it, then roll it up and chow down. It was very nice.

NO SMOKING
After dinner we went for coffee at the local Starbucks. Stephen, like many Hong Kong Chinese people I know like a smoke, but it seems that the Hong Kong government have cracked down on smoking and have declared many places off-limits for smoking. Nowadays most have to go outside to smoke much like in Australia and New Zealand.

Surprisingly, Stephen was in favour of this rule and said that it had made him cut down to one pack a day because he couldn’t be stuffed going outside. What did spin his wheels though was Starbucks had an outdoor area which he wasn’t allowed to smoke in either which provoked a lot of “Goddamn it!”, so off he went outside for a smoke.

After a spirited drive back to the hotel I said goodbye to Stephen and off I went to bed, I was still tired after my Filipino adventure.

HOLY CRAP
Literally. I woke up at about 3am and my body was sending off alarm signals. Signals which had to be taken care of. Immediately.

My digestive system seemed to have taken exception to something I’d eaten. Normally I’m extremely careful to take precautions about what I eat, only drinking bottled water, washing my teeth with bottled water, don’t have your mouth open like a guppy when having a shower etc to try and minimize the chances of food poisoning,

But somewhere along the line, something had gotten past my procedures and now I was in the sh!t.

I drank lots of bottled water and tried to go back to sleep and pretend that maybe it was just a once off, but I knew better.

I had to get up three more times before 7am. It wasn’t looking good.

I looked up on Google the causes of what I thought I had and the general response was that it was something that would clear up over time (4 days), but to be sure to keep yourself hydrated. I had thought about perhaps heading back to Australia rather than continuing on to the States, but thought better of it. I didn’t seem to have any of the symptoms of a serious case.

SHOPPING, RAM RAID STYLE
I still had to get some shopping done. As I hadn’t expected to be away from home for more than three days I’d not packed many clothes and I was already running out of clean ones so I had to plan a shopping mission.

Normally I hate clothes shopping. I never know what I want, what looks good or if I’m paying too much. It sucks. I swear that shop assistants back home can sense this and offload all sorts of crap on me.

My ideal method of shopping is to scout out a place that has 75% of what I need, buy everything from that shop, very quickly, and leave. Very quickly. The remaining 25% of stuff that I thought I needed that the shop didn’t have either wasn’t important or can wait for another day.

My idea of a crap day is spending all day walking around all sorts of different shops to find just one thing. That’s just not me. I’ve got things to do.

Luckily, in most cases, you can find a shop in Hong Kong that caters for needs such as mine and the shop assistants are very keen to help.

Clothes are also severely cheap, in most cases 50% or less of the price in Australia.

I strutted about Nathan Road with a bottle of Powerade (got to keep hydrated thanks to my newly arrived illness) looking for a suitable shop upon which to launch my mission. Nothing much opens in Hong Kong before 10am, but similarly, they don’t close till about 10pm or later.

It’s customary for shop assistants to greet you as you walk into their store and farewell you as you leave. It’s very important to them and in one case I managed to get most of the way out of the door before anyone spotted me, but as I got out onto the street, I heard from across the other side of the shop a high pitched, desperate “Bubye!”.

Eventually I found a store down a side street that had a lot of business shirts. All the stores in Hong Kong are absolutely packed with stock. Packed. Because the stores are so small, they get really creative with their storage. Seeing a store packed literally floor to ceiling with stock is every day commonplace, if this means the shop assistants are cramped and have very little room to move and no where to sit, then that’s fine too.

Once the small shop assistant had finished with her greetings she asked if she could help me. I needed shirts I said, but don’t know what size I am. Instantly out came a tape measure and had me all worked out in a few seconds. She chirped something in Chinese and suddenly two other assistants appeared out of no where (I literally couldn’t work out where they came from) and started producing shirts in my size which I might like.

They adjusted their selection based upon my comments (too green – looks like Kermit the frog, too old school – look like granddad, etc) and I was impressed at how they refined things. Soon they were producing shirts that I liked and all within four minutes of me walking in the door.

Soon I had four shirts I liked, all unwrapped, neatly folded and ready for me to take that cost a total of HK$420 (AU$70) and I was out the door in less than 10 minutes. That’s more my style.

I still had some more things to buy, I needed some socks, boxers, t-shirts and a jersey cause I always associate cold with Colorado.

So I conducted another reconnaissance mission to find a store to cater for these things and found one.

I was a little bit unsure of the sizing information for the socks and boxers cause I have relatively large feet and the socks didn’t seem to indicate what shoe size they were suitable for. They were more indicating that it was a one size fits all type deal and I’ve had those before and they suck.

In situations like these where I am stumped in a clothes shop, I tend to default to just getting whatever is close to my hand so that I can get out of the shop as soon as possible. So I grabbed four pairs of those. Turns out I chose quite well on the sock front, they’re a fraction on the small side, but they stretch alright.

The boxers had me stumped also. They had various sizes out of the packet so you could look at them and try and work out which size you were. I didn’t want to look like a goose by holding them up to my waist to see which size would be better, but I was torn because this was an important decision. You don’t want your components to be uncomfortable, especially on a long haul Qantas Cattle Class flight.

Once again I couldn’t come up with a reasonable decision quickly enough so I defaulted for the medium size.

Grabbed all of that, some random T-shirts and a jersey and I was done. Another successful shopping trip that didn’t take too long.

$24,000 ROLEX FOR $100
After dumping my clothes bounty at the hotel, I had to go get my postcards to send back to mum and dad.

In Hong Kong there are a tonne of slippery looking Indian dudes on the street offering ‘copy watches’ and ‘tailored suits’. Generally you just ignore them like you would a non-profit fundraising collector. However earlier in the year I broke my watch and it seems it can’t be fixed, so I was in the market for a watch. I had bought my postcards and I had some spare time so thought I’d go see what the story is with these watches.

I should have known better. Actually, I DID know better, but still went anyway – like a dumbass.

The slippery Indian let me into a back alley where he passed me on to his slippery cousin who took me into an unmarked room where I found a large jolly American dude who was being worked by another slippery cousin.

Here you could buy ‘Prada’, ‘Versace’ and ‘Calvin Klein’ handbags as well as any watch you could find, and not the normal watches either, big flash, pimp daddy Rolex, Bulgari ones etc. Soon a catalogue was thrust in front of me and I begin sifting through the pages thinking that this was all a stupid idea, so I go up and began leaving.

Slippery sees this and starts bleating about how he’ll give me extra special deal and would I like a handbag? No I don’t want a handbag mate, I’m not a teletubby.

Meanwhile the American guy is having a grand old time picking out watches and we both laughed when his slippery dude told him he would give him a lifetime warranty on any watch he bought. Seriously.

I relented and sat down again looking through the catalogue and pointed at two watches that I liked. My slippery dude said something to another one who disappeared. After five minutes of no slippery dudes, I should have just left, but I didn’t.

Eventually I told one of the crooks that I was off, I had stuff to do, he bleated again, but I was off. I got out into the corridor and all of a sudden the dude who had been sent to get the watches materialized and they called me back in. I should have kept walking, but I didn’t.

The watches really were pretty superb upon first inspection, one of the crooks said he wanted HK$2400 (AU$400) and I just laughed. I offered him the equivalent of AU$100 and he took it.

The problem was, I should have checked the watch that he gave me. It certainly seemed to be working, it was just reading the wrong time. That’s ok, I’ll set it later, I had to get to the airport.

NO AISLE
I always make a point of getting to airports early, as early as possible. That way I can negotiate my way into a decent seat. I arrived at HK International verrrry early, fully expecting to be able to negotiate my way into an exit row seat or at the very least, an aisle seat.

I arrived 3.5 hours early only to find all the good seats taken and I would have to take a window seat, and believe me, that was an upgrade from what Cathay had given me!

I was pretty wild. Given the current state of my digestive system, there was a good chance I’d be up and down out of my seat a lot during the 13 hour flight to LA. Now, I would have to trouble some poor bastard to get up every time.

I was starting to become less and less enthusiastic about Cathay, Qantas are hardly my favourite airline, but at least I’m able to purchase some respect from those guys.

So I cruised around Hong Kong airport, and I had to sit in the departure lounge with all the common people (see previous email regarding why I like Airport Lounges).

The flight to LA was normal, while laying over in LA waiting for my Denver flight, I decided to play with my new watch.

All the hands on the clock face had fallen off. I burst out laughing.

Si