Health And Technology Save Lives

Published
by
cecilie
on July 2, 2009
in Beauty, Beer, Travel and food
. 0 Comments

Back in Hong Kong to temperatures slightly lower than those of Norway?!?  The world is turned upside down!

 As mentioned in an earlier post I had packed for the usual 10 to 15 degrees, light drizzle and not a little wind, which my Nog friends and Weather Underground had confirmed up to the day before I left. In mid flight this normal June situation changed to: HEATWAVE. Up to 34 degrees with no aircon, no fans. The Norwegians look at fans like the British at snow ploughs: Why invest in something we’ll need only for a few days a year? The result in both countries: Total chaos when respectively snow and heat slam down on those unprepared countries like a combine harvester.

I understand that it owuld cost London quite a lot of money to buy dozens of snow-clearing machines, but a table fan? $300, tops. So I spent my holiday (sojourn) in Norway listening to people complain about heat. Those people are never satisfied. Eleven months a year it’s all: “I wish the rain/snow/sleet would stop” “Oh how I’m looking forward to some sunshine” and when it does happen: Complain again!

To withstand or counteract the incessant drinking during days whose sun never set, I tried to drink a health drink each morning: Orange, banana and berries churned to a pleasant sauce-like consistency. To this effect i bought a huge bag of frozen rapsberries, blackberries and some berries whose names I can’t remember now, and put it in my friend’s freezer. The day before I left Oslo I needed to recharge my Mac and duly hooked the charger cable up with the adaptor. POOF! Went the power point, yellow flames spurting out. Ouch! The Hong Kong plug on the charger had melted at the tips and on advice of an electrically savvy friend, threw it away. Oh well, at least I could go to some beautiful parts of Oslo and take photos.

On my way out I remembered the health thing and nipped into the windowless freezer room for some berries. Yi? Why wasn’t the light working? In fact, why couldn’t I turn on the lights anywhere in the house? I wouldn’t have noticed that the lights didn’t come on in the house seeing the sun shone relentlessly almost 24 hours a day. It was my Mac, or rather, the damned adaptor I had bought in the airport two years before, which had blown the whole gaff. If I had left the house at that point we would have come homw to a freezer boiling the food instead of freezing it.

So you see how important it is to live a healthy life full of berries? I think you do.

If You Ever Get Pissed Off About Living In Hong Kong …

Published
by
cecilie
on July 1, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

… think of the alternative. Friday night I took a taxi up a hill because I couldn’t be arsed to walk. I kept the bill just to check exactly how long you can travel in Norway for the equivalent of HK$ 163. The answer is: 4 minutes.

So yeah, next time you complain about the cretinity (new word) of Donald Tsang (I know, that’s me) - think about that!

Bizarre Natural Phenomenon: Sunrise and Sunset in Same Place

Published
by
cecilie
on June 30, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

The old hometown, longest day of the year … and I have a room without curtains. Talk about using the time well!
“Shall we have another drink?”
“Why not, it’s only 7pm.”
“Actually, it’s 2.30 in the morning.”
“Whatever.”

The sun does occasionally go away, then immediately rises again in more or less the same position as that in which it set! How can this be?

Norwegians call nights of 20 degrees and above “tropical nights.” The front pages have been dominated by “Another day of sunshine” reports for a week. People talk of nothing but this: It’s “hot.”

It’s getting quite tedious.

We live in wooden cottages with grass growing on the roof (for goats to gnaw on.)

There are meadows with chomping horses, pints of beer are HK$70. Nobody has air conditioning or fans (because they can’t accept that global warming is really happening?) so after the first day of 27 degrees and blazing blue skies instead of the 5 degrees and drizzle they were promising on Weather Underground leading me to pack the normal jumpers, scarves and jackets thereby forcing me to go and buy new clothes suitable for heat, everybody is now complaining about the heat.

Norwegians are strange. Kind but strange.

Feather-light Happiness

Published
by
cecilie
on June 22, 2009
in Media and Travel
. 0 Comments

Today there’s a photo in the SCMP of a couple who love each other so much, they decided to get married in weightless conditions inside a flying tube of metal. Fortunately the bride’s hairdo “was kept in place by wires,” so didn’t come apart during the ceremony. I couldn’t help but noticing both bride and groom wearing extremely inelegant grey woollen socks though. Tsk tsk, and exactly in the place where their faces should have been, kissing!

But here’s my question: I wonder if these marriages which start under the sea in wetsuits, plunging off bridges tied with elastic band, running through a pigsty, lying down while doctors sew the couples’ arms together or whatever, last any longer than those with more traditional beginnings? Is there a statistic on this? We deserve to know! If the couple on the brink of divorce suddenly comes to their senses by remembering how much fun it was to get married while being pulled down the Hudson behind a rubbish barge and decide to give it another go - for years and years - it may very well be worth one’s while to exchange rings and vows while hanging upside down buried in cement. If not … well at least you’ll have the chance to get your picture in the SCMP (South China Morning Post, South East Asia’s biggest outdoor sitting bronze English-speaking newspaper. That’s something.

Revenge Of The World City

Published
by
cecilie
on June 21, 2009
in Cantonese, Environment, Government, Hong Kong, Injustice, Movies, communism, corruption and language
. 5 Comments

I think everybody will agree with me that there are not enough signs (signage) in this town. Too many things are allowed and there’s far too little cracking down upon of perpetrators. Well, here’s a man who will put that right, Mister Public Security Uncle!

 

Nasty Nature Take-over Attempt Nipped In Bud

Published
by
cecilie
on June 20, 2009
in Beauty, Environment, Eyesore, Government and Hong Kong
. 0 Comments

Hoi hoi what lovely day! I feel particularly splendid today. Therefore I’m not going to write about pilots, Sir Donald Tsang EXCRE, gay guys with wives, dating plonkers or any other group. No, today’s post is an ode to the beauty of the day … and development.
 Ages ago I wrote about this photo, tut-tutting about the ugliness of cars, how they mess up my photography etc. Ha ha, I’m thinking now. Because look what’s happened to that car in just one year:

 

And do you notice another thing: The tree behind it has grown much bigger. It’s almost as if … dare I say … nature is trying to take over Pui O? (Possibly the world?)

 

 

 

Fortunately, not just yet. For only a few steps behind the pathetic little car wreck, this vista unfolds:

This place used to be a river surrounded by trees you see, but now civic-minded people have put paid to that. Whew!

Another nature take-over threat was here:

Scary, no? So many trees, etc. But again valiant members of the public have stepped in and the result is much more pleasing to the eye:

Funnily enough this last improvement of Ham Tin’s (Pui O) environment is actually on government land:

No dumping, it says. No, mustn’t dump stuff in this lovely idyll! That would seriously mess things up.

I don’t know if this is going to be a road  leading to private houses, or if private houses are going to be built on this piece of government land. Whatever it is, when it comes to improving on nature, you can trust the government to lend a hand!

Whoops, I wrote about them again. I just can’t help it sometimes.

Sir Donald O.B.E (Overpaid Bow-tied Emperor)

Published
by
cecilie
on June 16, 2009
in Eyesore, Government, Hong Kong, Injustice, Media and communism
. 2 Comments

I keep thinking about yesterday’s session with His Donaldness at FCC. The more I think about it, the more outrageous it seems. People paid money to go and see (hear) the fcuker speak about heritage preservation, and he chose to use one third of the speaking time to talk about making sacrifices for a drug rehabilitation centre in Mui Wo?!?

It wasn’t an impulse thing either, because he read (and read) from a script. It must have been planned days before!

It’s like … people paying me to teach them Cantonese and me spending the last 20 minutes of the lesson talking about Norwegian death metal. In Norwegian.

The more I see of the squirrel, the more I think he’s not really the sharpest corkscrew in the bar drawer. This time he said “we should all make sacrifices for our young dispossessed people whether it’s near government house, Mui Wo, wherever.” So how could he not think that somebody would say, as she immediately did: So why don’t we build the drug rehabilitation centre in the garden of Government House?

He smiled like a headmaster who’s just about to shove a particularly naughty student out the window. “Ah ha ha, but that …erm,erm, is a protected monument,” he smirked. Oh yes, not in his back garden, not even on the same island as him. That’s a hard sacrifice to make!

I must say I haven’t been involved much in this drug rehabilitation centre thing. This is now about to change. Anything Sir Blah-blah begs people to do out of the goodness of their hearts, must be something sinister and be resisted with all our might.

Sir Droll-nald

Published
by
cecilie
on June 15, 2009
in Cantonese, China, Environment, Eyesore, Home, Hong Kong, Media, communism and corruption
. 0 Comments

A fellow blogger was kind enough to invite me to the FCC today, where the attraction was none less than the Mighty Donald himself holding forth for a packed dining hall (and televised to the bar downstairs) about heritage preservation.

How we laughed when he suggested that some of the people propping up the bar in FCC, (the building apparently saved from demolition by him personally) should be considered save-worthy monuments themselves!

And oh how he smiled when we obediently laughed! He looked like a frog being tossed a particularly tasty insect.
He praised the crusty panellists for their sartorial taste (bow ties) and got another chuckle out of that. Thus spurred on (They love me!) he launched into the main part of his speech, which, unlike the jokey one, hadn’t been written by a 12 year old editor of a school newspaper, but, one suspects, the Secretary For Propaganda In Beijing anno 1972. Or possibly himself. For a more fulsome praise for the government’s “heritage policy” has seldom been heard.

“A government working tirelessly and passionately for preserving Hong Kong’s heritage,” “the government’s wonderful preservation of lovely old buildings” and “a government who humbly listens to the voice of the people” were phrases that spewed out between the froggy lips.

For this is Planet Donald: All meaningless destruction in Hong Kong, including that of Star and Queen’s Piers, has been carried out by “previous administrations.”
Indeed the bulldozing of old Star Ferry Pier was a “pivotal moment” for our Don, who has since “done a lot of soul searching.” (It must be during one such soul searching session that he came up with the destruction of Graham and Peel street markets, the turning of Wedding Card Street into Funky Skyscraper Wedding Card Mall and the final nail in the coffin of Wan Chai market.)

Now the government is, according to the awful gnome, totally committed day and night to preservation and nothing but preservation. And, he said, in the last 18 months they have “achieved quite a lot.” I’d say!

As examples he mentioned St. John’s cathedral, the Helena May, Central Police Station and a slew of other single buildings standing forlorn in a sea of high-rises and motorways. It is with the preservation of these, presumably, that the current administration has been busy while giving Lee Ka-Shing & co carte blanche to tear down and build whatever they want, everywhere else.

Then the “fun” speech writer popped up again: Donald started (one expected tears) to tell us about his childhood in Central and how he had hoped that the guys dragging the big blocks of ice up and down Ice House street would go arse over tit. I bet. It was difficult to see where he was going with this particular one, other than appeal to the more schadenfreude - oriented sections of the audience. It eventually turned out that, having grown up in Central, he was totally committed to Hong Kong forever. Is this the same man who once said he’d be buggering off to Britain (possibly Canada) as soon as he retires?

He finished with a bizarre gesture, namely appealing in English and Cantonese to those pesky citizens of Mui Wo who, as we were enjoying our lunch and little Donald-jokes, had been staging a demonstration against establishing a drug rehabilitation centre smack in the middle of town, in what used to be our secondary school.

It’s difficult to see what a drug rehabilitation centre has to do with preserving heritage, but he seemed to be doing the thing at which the big brothers up north whom he admirers so much excel: The veiled threat. Calling on people’s “good hearts,” (surely you don’t want to see your children succumb to drugs?) he encouraged everybody in Mui Wo, whose children must now get on the 6 o’clock ferry to get to some god-forsaken school because the local secondary school “didn’t have enough students to keep going” to put their differences aside and apply some community spirit. One could be forgiven for wondering if this wasn’t indeed the object of the whole heritage charade.

It is well known that The Donald is a “devout Catholic” and in his speech he stressed that the drug rehabilitation centre was “Christian,” therefore, A Good Thing. Recently, in fact, since the “current administration” took over, we’ve seen a lot of “Christian values” sneaking in here and there. Will the next thing be teaching “Intelligent design” in schools?

That Donald is a creepy little thing, and now that he’s even got someone to write “humour” into his speeches there’ll be no stopping him.

Oh and by the way - that thing about “I represent the Hong Kong people” (in saying nobody cares about the Tiananmen massacre anymore) being a “misunderstanding” because “his Cantonese isn’t so good?”
Nah.
It was good enough to send a Cantonese veiled threat to the people of Mui Wo, that’s for sure. It’s time we applied a “objective assessment” to The Donald! Get rid of the destructive, arse-licking little bastard I say.

Shenzhen Re-re-re-re-revisited

Published
by
cecilie
on June 13, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 6 Comments

Shenzhen lies there like a gigantic huge fat magnet pulling me to it like so much metal shavings wastage. Wednesday I succumbed again. The clothes I was having made, lunch, perhaps a foot massage and some new earrings in what looks exactly like Venetian glass … irresistible.

But the day turned out to be something of a disappointment. Not a nasty surprise disappointment, just … not the Shenzhen I know and love? It started at the border. I should have been prepared for this especially since I wrote about it last time I went to Shenzhen but … there’s something about those officious, jumped up little uniformed tossers with masks sticking their idiotic ant swine flu forms into my face that makes my blood boil. Every time.

The discrimination, (Chinese people can’t catch it, apparently) the waste of time … the waste of paper. I filled in all the questions thus: “None of your business” “I don’t know” “Secret” “Deng Xiaoping” “Born in 1723″ in Chinese on both forms, which were duly scrutinised and stamped. So much for the high alert.

Then off I trotted to famous Hades Lo Wu Shopping Center which I secretly almost like … but not this time. The financial tsunami has driven those who eke out a living there absolutely bonkers with desperation, and the chorus of “Missy missy melicure pelicure you buy DWD mowie OK” was so deafening that I couldn’t hear my own screams for help. They have also really cranked up the little fingers plucking at your elbow action, which is a cause for shoving them into their own lunchbox I reckon.

When I crying and dizzy got to the tailor I found that the dresses I had drawn and shown him a photo of and for which he had duly measured me, turned out to have been made for Dame Edna Everage. Instead of the curve-enhancing little cocktail numbers I had envisioned, they were tents with zippers down the back. A shirt reaching mid-thigh had become an A-line dress down to mid-calf. For this, the tailor blamed me. But of course! I had sneaked into their shop at night, changing the measurements, drawings and photos.

But all was forgiven when I met this geezer:

The photo doesn’t do him justice at all, I have to say. You can’t appreciate the completely see-through … jumper? showing sagging man-breasts and well defined nipples unless you see it live. Then there was the pavarotti-like eyebrows; tattooed or painted on? Hard to tell, but completely rectangular they certainly were. What an apparition!

He immediately launched into mainland pleasantries talk: “Where from.”
“Hong Kong.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No. You’re Russian.”
“Yes you probably know better than me.”
“You can’t be from Hong Kong.”
“OK. Bye.”

I’ve only had that conversation about 10 000 times so far, but every time I wonder: If they can’t accept the answer, why ask the question? Why can they be from all over the world but I not from HK? In all fairness I’m not exactly “from” HK, but I could easily have been born here. Isn’t your birthplace where you’re from?

I divide mainlanders into two groups:

1. When I say I’m from Hong Kong they laugh and think it’s a great joke, then ask me where I’m really from. It is a terrible thing for them if I don’t tell them and they can’t rest before they’ve found out.

2. They get angry and strident, just saying, like the guy above: “No,” then proceeding to tell me where I’m from.

I have to give it to the Maindoes, once they’ve made up their minds, it’s impossible to shift them. Oh, but please, people, go shopping in Shenzhen again! I need the skin on my arms but it’s now all been plucked off by awful little fingers.

Ever Wondered Why …

Published
by
cecilie
on June 12, 2009
in Cantonese, Hong Kong, Injustice, Media, food and language
. 8 Comments

… Caucasians can’t learn Cantonese? Everybody knows they can’t and that it’s genetic. Happy Jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau has researched the reason for this strange phenomenon scientifically and made a documentary about it: (Two parts!) (Both here!)

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