Author Archive for cecilie

Poo and Literature

Published
by
cecilie
on August 10, 2010
in Cantonese, Environment, Eyesore, Home, Piles, Pollution, Travel, food and language
. 12 Comments

You know I’m not squeamish (because I’ve said so many times) but when the woman in the photo started stirring a cauldron full of intestines, holding them up and letting them drop back down, while the unmistakable smell of POO started wafting through the restaurant - well, I couldn’t bring myself to turn around and take a photo, but sort of quick-snapped it backwards over my shoulder.

I think I’ve only really seen nice, orderly fish intestines up close before, because these (pigs’?) intestines, brown, snarly, irregular and with lots of stuff sticking out, weren’t my idea of good intestine action. I’m glad the only contact I have with food is all broken after I’ve swallowed it.

Talking of poo, this morning there was a bit of a to-doggie-do in sleepy backwater Pui O. In my village there’s a dog rescue centre/vet, and at all times they have about 20 dogs living there, with more coming in every week.

The dog walker is a middle-aged Chinese woman who doesn’t seem to like dogs, but then neither would I if I had to take six or seven of them for walks at a time. She lets the dogs poo everywhere; on the footpath and on the beach, without even sometimes carrying newspapers around for show, unlike many domestic helpers in the village.

The first time I saw her let three dogs shit right in the middle of the beach, I asked her in a nice way and in her own language if she wouldn’t mind picking it up, as children play there. (they do.) All I got was a torrent of “English”: “Where is your plastic bag! Where is your plastic bag!” When I showed her the not inconsiderable amount of plastic bags I carry with me every day for the very purpose of being my dogs’ lavatory assistant, she sniffed and walked away, muttering loudly to “herself” about how dirty I was.

The second time I saw her, the same thing happened. This time it was me asking her where her plastic bag was, knowing well she didn’t have any. Oh yes, I can be cunning and evil! I got some vicious stares and mumbles but not much abuse - and of course she didn’t pick up the rather large and steaming mounds. You can say what you want about the dog shelter in Pui O, but they don’t let their dogs starve.

This morning she had seven dogs, four of which, upon hitting the beach, immediately set about defecating like they had been promised a nice side of beef for producing the largest mound. There are only so many ways to say “pick up your dog poo” in a diplomatic manner, I find. “Pick up your fucking dog poo” is one of them. This time she took action - by shoving a few grains of sand on top of the quivering heaps.

Nice! Now people who might have spotted them out in the open before, wouldn’t know they were there before they lay down in the fragrant knolls. When I pointed this out, not declining to mention that this sort of behaviour carries a $1,500 fine, (yes! I’m truly sick of stepping in crap and will resort to anything!) the true nature of her dog poo picking resistance manifested itself. In Cantonese this time. She let loose a stream of invective which I, not a mean invective-ist, couldn’t have done better myself.

It was all about me fucking off back to Central, it was after 1997 so i should shut up, who did I think I was, go home, dirty whore who not only lets her dogs shit everywhere but probably does it herself and, most importantly: I didn’t know how to teach Cantonese. This went on for about ten minutes, for she made many of the points again and again in case I missed them. There was no mention of the Opium Wars but then she may not have heard about those. And here I was, really only interested in discussing dog poo and the removal thereof!

I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t control myself but had a right giggle and some spurts of heartfelt laughter. This didn’t make things any better but - did I give a shit?

So! Scratch the surface and the whole stinking history of … the British? comes out. Oh those British. So much to answer for. How was she to know I’ve never lived in Central? After all, those fastidious notions of mine about not enjoying wading around in dog shit and about the beach not being a gigantic dustbin - that kind of thing just reeks of stuck-up Central-dom, doesn’t it.

So now you’re probably asking: Where does literature come into this? Mark Twain, innit! East is east and west is west, and you’ll never meet the Twain.

But the intestine photo, taken blind - not bad, eh?

Art … Schmart?

Published
by
cecilie
on March 30, 2010
in Cantonese, Government, Hong Kong and Media
. 0 Comments

Saw in the paper that Hong Kong will now be a vibrant … an international … a lively … a sustainable … well, you fill in the right word. The point is, it must end in hub.

And to achieve this, there will now be wild and spontaneous street things happening in the street and things. Wildly and spontaneously. You know, singing, (Canto-pop) painting (Helly Kitty by numbers) and edgy street performance such as Chinese opera. And to ensure the wildness and spontaneity of this - wait for it - the government has set up a committee to vet the performers.

That’s right, only performers found to be up to scratch by the Hong Kong government will be allowed to perform spontaneously in the street, which is not the street at all of course but a little corner outside the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui.

HK’s government: Those connoisseurs of art! Those arbiters of good performance! Now at last we’ll see some real vibrance-age here.

Charming Mist

Published
by
cecilie
on March 23, 2010
in Beauty, China, Environment, Government, Pollution, communism and politics
. 2 Comments


So I was so happy on Sunday, right? The dense fog had finally left the beach and there was some kind of sun in the sky. So what if it was a bit misty?
Then I received this email yesterday forwarded from Anthony Hedley, chief of … air or something, at the something university. You know.

“This is a north / easterly air mass impact on Hong Kong’s air quality following several days of intense exposures to mainly HK and PRD pollutants.The air movement appears to have brought in fine particles ( as they register in the PM10 meters) but pushed local pollutants away presumably in a westerly direction.

The last few days will predictably have had a major impact on local health; many of those who have not so far become sick will have
sustained significant injury and now have to contend with a new intense insult to cardiopulmonary systems. Unfortunately there is very little one can do for health protection apart from (i) avoidance of lifestyle risks such as tobacco smoke and low antioxidant diet
(ii) avoidance of increased exposure through vigorous exercise (iii) indoors may be marginally safer and certainly roadside exposures potentially lethal for some.”

Damn! I thought the picture above of three fishermen fishing for three centimetre long fish was a bit, well, picturesque. Then it turns out they’re not only fishing out the last of the lead-ridden future fish from a toxic soup, they’re also sitting around in a toxic soup!

Disappointed? Not half! Then I read in the paper today that the particles, crashing through the pollution index meter at a hefty 500 (with 100 being the limit for people (with lungs) to go outside or whatever) are in fact a sand storm from northern China.

Yes, because the Chinese want to emulate the Americans in everything but everything, they have now chopped down what few trees they had left in the north, to accommodate more and more cows for their burgers and because of some wild notion that milk is a health drink. Chopping down trees leads to desertification (of course this has been going on since probably before the US was even a running dog lackey revisionist enemy of China’s) which leads to longer, harder winters and hotter summers with less harvest, less grass for the hungry cows one must assume, but who cares; they can always import wheat and other cow-feed from other countries, countries willing to chop down their rain forests to keep China and the world in food and furniture.

And so it goes on.

Nobody is willing to give up anything and why should we? We’re the 21st centurions! We have the moral right to everything that exists! Soon it’ll be gone, but who cares? I won’t be around and what happens to my nieces and nephews and my friends’ children - well. Not really my concern.

Still, so much better than fog!

Tracking Tax Money … Creating Jobs … Part … ? Don’t Know. I’m Losing Track

Published
by
cecilie
on January 28, 2010
in Beauty, Environment, Government, Hong Kong, corruption and politics
. 4 Comments

Not long ago I was poking a little gentle fun at a certain fence.

I said - in jest, right? In jest, that a fence almost as tall as me was a weird thing to put around bushes, flowers and stuff that’s meant to beautify the place, because what it did was hiding everything in the beautifying spot. And it was made of plastic, that goes without saying.

Therefore imagine my joy yesterday when I walked past said beauty, or beautifying, spot, in a parking lot as it happens, to find it completely fenceless!

Apart from the inevitable sign complete with its own little roof saying this beautification spot was selflessly planted by the urban … yeah. some kind of department, I thought it looked not bad, now that we could actually see it again.
Alas, I spake too soon. This morning I saw the reason for the un-fencing, and it was that they (presumably the same people) are removing all the plants.

I naturally asked why, to be told: They are ugly! We will put new plants instead.

Hm. I’m not a plant expert but the old ones looked perfectly all right to me - green, standard HK government issue sitting out area kind of plants.

I’m only saying this in case you’re ever wondering what your tax money is spent on.

Thank God! Civil Engineers Rescuing Us From Nature Menace Again

Published
by
cecilie
on January 26, 2010
in Beauty, Environment, Eyesore, Government, Hong Kong, Newspaper, Pollution, corruption and politics
. 4 Comments

It has been touch and go for a while on Hong Kong’s so-called green lung Lantau Island. After pressure from some misguided, evidently brainwashed individuals, HK’s civil engineering, drainage, concrete, railing, transport and environmental protection etc. departments, were forced to plant bushes and trees, as well as some grass, on dangerous slopes along the South Lantau road, to cover - wait for it - CONCRETE!  a few years ago.

 

Naturally, this has irked all those gallant and hard-working engineers no end. How can anyone see the fruits of their incessant efforts to put food on the tables of engineers and create work for local company Yick Hing when it’s all covered up?

The whole of the South Lantau road would, by rights, have looked like this:

if it hadn’t been for the moans of those insane greenies, who rambled on about concreted hillsides being an “eyesore.” That’s right, they were talking about beautiful, pure, no-insect harbouring concrete.

Now that particular tide is thankfully turning. Only last week there was a complaint, yes, a complaint in the SCMP about rocks on Lamma Island being covered in concrete, with that misinformed moaner saying the rocks had been there “since the beginning of time.” What - he’s never heard of statistics?
If they’ve been there since the beginning of time, it can only mean that they will start not being there any moment.
And now the lunatic green fundamentalists are finally getting their comeuppance. Last week the engineers from the various departments, encouraged by their success on Lamma, started taking back the South Lantau road, restoring it to its former splendour.

Removing trees, shrubbery and other growths in which all sorts of animal and insect menace inevitably will lurk, engineers, assisted, as always, by tireless Yick Hing, have brought those rocks clinging precariously to the cliff-face out in daylight anew, and covered them in concrete - only in the nick of time. In only another
20 000 years those rocks would have moved several millimetres, leading to untold misery for motorists and other civilians.

Concrete. Your vanguard against nature.

Overcast and All Is Well

Published
by
cecilie
on January 25, 2010
in Beauty, Environment, Government, Hong Kong and food
. 5 Comments

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Nay, because in sleepy backwater Pui O, a “winter’s” day can be just as temperate and with more nuance. I was just thinking that when bovine hardman Max hove into view, eating his way through a large swathe of grass, throwing innocent shrubbery behind him.

I was thinking, how can they stand to eat all that bloody grass? But they probably have a good life, those water buffalo i Pui O. Enough grass, water to swim in, fights to be fought and poo to be reflectively dropped (Gardening enthusiasts - if you’re looking for good manure you should take a trip to Pui O; there’s enough ready dried manure here to last you a lifetime.) And all that without the spectre of the butcher’s knife on the other side.

The only enemies the water buffalo have are villagers and government officials, but as the latter so far just look at the buffalo as a nuisance and not as food, my horned friends should feel relatively safe. I said relatively.

Pui O Beach At Dusk

Published
by
cecilie
on December 16, 2009
in Beauty, Environment, Home and Hong Kong
. 8 Comments


“Do they know it’s Christmas time … la la la la, do they know it’s Christmas time …at all”

Sloth

Published
by
cecilie
on November 27, 2009
in Hong Kong, Injustice, Media, Movies and language
. Closed

One thing I really dislike is busy people who don’t think other people are busy.  You know the ones: Keep you waiting forever without calling to say they’ll be late; tell you half an hour after they should have been there that they’re not going to turn up, never answer your emails or text messages for weeks, then suddenly call you saying yes, let’s go ahead in half an hour! That kind of thing. 

I try not to care too much and not take it personally (although I do have rejection issues) - after all, this is Hong Kong. Right? But I have to say the Four Seasons Hotel really takes the cake. 

I wrote them a polite email two weeks ago asking if I could film a Cantonese teaching video for 15 minutes in their lobby at a time of day when it’s not busy. (Probably never but that’s what I wrote.) Low moustache ratio (one) - nothing heavy. 

After a week I got an email from a PR geezer saying he had received my request but needed to discuss it with three other people. 

Four days after that again, I emailed him asking if they could tell me as soon as possible because if they said no, I would have to ask other hotels (that little segment of the film should be set in some kind of up-market venue) and that I’d only approached the Four Seasons so far - it being the most beautiful in HK (and my “local” hotel, i.e. closest to my ferry pier. I believe in supporting your local enterprises whenever possible.)

This morning, 16 days after my initial request, I received a phone call from the hotel. 

“I want to thank you for your kind interest in our hotel, we really appreciate it” etc.

Great!

“It’s so good of you to choose us … blah blah..”                

BUT?

“We receive so many requests of this type and we say no to all of them.”

So why not tell me at once? Why not have a standardised email saying thanks but no? Why go through the rigmarole of pretending to be discussing it? Why did they think that wasting my time was okay?

I can assure you that I wasted no time in saying thanks a lot, goodbye.   

If we could have gone ahead with the filming we would have had lunch in the coffee shop afterwards, spending shitloads of money. Now I can never go to my overpriced local hotel again. And I won’t waste my time asking to shoot Cantonese - The Movie in any other five star hotel either. They will all say no after three weeks. I know, my loss, not theirs, but I can’t be arsed.

So does anyone know of any other beautiful, upmarket venue that reeks of new money but doesn’t look like some EU bureaucracy headquarters on the outside, where we can film  for 15 minutes without the risk of some self-important security guard coming up to us going: “LO KEM AH LA!!!” (No camera)

New Party Etiquette?

Published
by
cecilie
on November 10, 2009
in Injustice and food
. 1 Comment

Last Friday I went to a, well, a little bit up-market party, where  the speakers addressed some of the guests as “Your Excellencies.” I couldn’t really work out what was so excellent about them - they were just geezers in suits who left early as far as I could see. Anyway, it was that kind of party.

The unsuitable venue was Grappa’s where there are lots of tables for four people squeezed together on two sofas in … enclaves? Alcoves? It will come to me. The excellencies and other notables sat at a long table with freedom of movement whereas I was stuck in a corner with no escape route. And here is the thing: When did it become good party etiquette to seat couples together? 

The fourth person at our table, a man presumably intended for me, didn’t turn up, so I had to sit there for several hours listening to this married couple bicker mercilessly and without stop. One couldn’t say a single thing like “Oh yes, it was last Friday we went there” without the other going “Ooooh, you always get it wrong, it was Saturday”  etc. 

Because I was also giving a speech (without notes) and not until after dinner, I had to spend three hours without wine listening to this and frequently being used as a foil in the bicker wars.

These people had met before, and not only on a few occasions, but virtually every day for the last 27 years. If they had wanted to meet only each other and one wine-less woman, they might as well have stayed home, no? If it had been my party I would have seated them on different floors. 

All around the room it was the same; couples and couples, seated together. 

After I could start drinking the excellent white wine it turned into quite a good party of course, and I was sad to have to leg it for the ferry at 11.15. 

But people: Couples go to parties to meet new people, not each other. They have met before.

Everyday Exercises

Published
by
cecilie
on October 6, 2009
in China and Travel
. Closed

Strolling up Star street, no, Square street, on Friday night, I saw a man with a good idea for getting some exercise into his daily life: Running with shopping. Yeah, holding four  Wellcome bags (price, $2)full of stuff, he legged it up the gentle slope at a brisk trot. 

I was thinking about that much later that same night as I with three geezers hit the latest (?) addition to Shenzhen’s night life: The Lily Marleen Bar. As soon as we walked into the heaving cavernous hall, I found myself standing by a table with two guys playing liar’s-dice while dancing. Here was everyday exercise not only for the hands and arms (the vigourous shaking of cups, the holding up of fingers to indicate the numbers as the music was too loud to hear a word) but also plenty of action for legs and feet as the music was just too, too infectious to stand still.

And so we grooved around the table using every muscle group including that of the brain, as liar’s dice is as challenging as … understanding a paper on the “development of measures to ensure the cleanliness of pedestrian-style outdoor roadage traffic implements” from the HK government, say. 

Did I make that up? Yes! To get more exercise for fingers and arms. But they could have written it. 

The Lily Marleen bar is near Marco Polo Hotel in Shenzhen, a good hotel; yes, so good that it feels it necessary to slap an extra 15% on the room price. This they mention in passing as you leave. 

Leave yes, I couldn’t wait to get out of the area because it’s the worst, most sterile cityscape I’ve seen in China so far. Grandiose, towering, menacing light grey, dark grey and steel grey buildings decorated with fascistically trimmed bushes and hedges; all the shops had doors and not one of them sold fruit or snacks. All the signs were in English - in fact the place looked like downtown Oslo/Sydney with a dash of Singapore crossed with Hong Kong’s Techno City. (What’s it called? Near Tolo Highway.) Grey, grey and grey. Streets so boring you can’t walk down them without falling asleep, but that’s okay because everybody has cars.

This is the future as envisaged by science-fictionists in the 50’s. 

But the Lily Marleen was great! Hopping. Beer 50 yuan a small bottle though. What an insult. The waiters are dressed in combat gear, ready to flatten anyone who complains about the beer prices. I’d go back there if it wasn’t for its location, but it should be a good destination for people living in Discovery Bay - it’s just like home for them only more expensive. So: Recommended in a half-arsed sort of way - if nothing else so for the guaranteed everyday exercise.

But next time I’ll be checking into the truly excellent Railway Hotel again. From there I can walk everywhere I need to go, and that beats even snapping my fingers at music, for exercise.