My grandma’s apartment is in Kowloon City, a very old area of Kowloon, characterized by dirty buildings and slummy areas. There’s so much character here. It seems like every shop has a story, and every street a history. My dad told me that since it’s so hard to find parking, some restaurants have a valet park your car for you if you go in.

Since it’s a long-established area, there’s pretty much everything you need within a couple blocks, or a few minutes walk. This includes:

• fruit stands
• car dealership
• restaurants of many ethnicities
• Chinese medicine shops
• snack and pastry shops
• a toy shop
• a modern shopping mall
• butchers
• a famous park
• a shopping mall
• electronics and appliance stores
• magazine stands
• grocery stores
• dentist
• scrap metal stores
• coffin shop
• tire shop

One of Hong Kong’s famous real estate agents said that living in such high density is a habit, and that Hong Kongers could expand outward (instead of upward) if they wanted to. I can understand why this is true, because everything is so close and convenient. When you live in the middle of all this, you really feel like you’re part of the city’s pulse.

Everyone carries an Octopus card in Hong Kong, because it’s used everywhere. When you take the bus, you pay the fare by tapping your wallet (with Octopus card in it) on the scanner; the fare may change depending on whether you take it before or after crossing the harbour. Subway fares aren’t flat-rate either, so shorter routes are cheaper. The distance you travel is tracked by scanning your card when you get on and again when you get off, and the appropriate amount is deducted.

Even vending machines, parking meters, convenience stores, and restaurants have Octopus scanners used to pay for their services. It’s also used as an identity system, where students sign-in to class by tapping their cards on door scanners, or residents enter their apartment buildings without needing a key.

The Chinese name for the card is “eight arrived pass”, because eight has special meaning in Chinese, especially when it comes to directions. The English name comes from an octopus having eight tentacles, and the logo is an infinity symbol that’s also in the shape of an eight. So clever.

Grandma loves her parrot. We carry it around for her, and she sleeps with it on her bedside table. Whenever she talks to it, I can never really tell if she really is talking to her parrot in an act of senility, or whether she does it to humour us.

A note on the translation: The name “Fat Bird” is really “Fat Woman Parrot” in Chinese. The word “parrot” is a homonym for the last part of grandma’s name, so “Fat Woman Parrot” sounds like it’s referring to her as well. That’s how she got her nickname as “Fat Woman”.

This is grandma on a good day. I love to see her smile and laugh.

(This is a 360° panorama that pops up in a new window. Be warned: it’s big.)

 

The best place to see Hong Kong’s skyline is at Victoria Harbour. Along the walkway is the Avenue of Stars, Hong Kong’s version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, as well as a bus terminal, and the docking area for the Star Ferry.

The world’s largest permanent light show is here, running every night at 8:00, where many buildings across the water time their lights to music. I recorded it, but my footage didn’t turn out so well with the fog. So here’s someone else’s awesome recording, that does the show justice.

 

I had the chance to take part in some apartment hunting, and saw two suites in a new sky rise. The smaller was $1.3 million CAD, the larger $1.8 million CAD. Which pretty much means that I could never afford them, even if I won the lottery, but I still dream of living here one day. A cozy space with a nice view and modern trimmings. Mortgages go up to 30 years in Hong Kong. If you’re buying a place that hasn’t been built yet, you get to design the layout of your condo like a house.

Space is so expensive here that offices are often combined with bedrooms, unlike Canada where there’s a separate room for each (unless you’re a student). Furnishing a place would be much cheaper though, since empty areas get filled quickly. I imagine that it’s hard to be a pack rat when storage areas are at such a premium.

 

I just happened to be here during the Hong Kong Flower Show, a demonstration of various flower cultivators and appreciation organizations. Each group had their own little sections to present their areas of specialization. It’s amazing to see how creative people can be with flowers; living things, no less.

Grandma was born in Hong Kong, but she fled to Chiu Chow during the Japanese invasion by climbing a mountain with her only son slung on her back. For some reason, she feels a lot of pride about Chiu Chow even though she wasn’t born in that city, and always points out people from there¹. As a result, she can speak both Cantonese and the Chiu Chow dialect.

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1. She says she recognizes them by their faces. [↑]

Tung Choi Street (or Ladies’ Market), as seen in my Hong Kong: Markets video as the area covered with blue tarp, is for the ladies, and opened all day.

Temple Street, on the other hand, only starts to come alive at night, and is also known as Men’s Street. There are no stalls out during the day. This is the street that one of my favourite Stephen Chow movies, God of Cookery, is based on, so it was awesome to be able to see it in person.

Instead of handbags, clothes, and posters sold in Ladies’ Market, they sell cheap men-oriented trinkets like batteries, lighters, baseball caps, electronics, camera gear, and sex toys. There’s also a section with rows of stalls for fortune telling (at 2:12), offered in both Chinese and English languages, and European (tarot) and Asian (face, palm reading) flavours.

Temple street is also known for it’s roadside dining, where you can order pots stuffed with meat or deep fried delicacies. I was warned not to eat anything on temple street though, as the standards are too low now¹. One might get away with an upset stomach at best, and end up with a trip to the hospital at worst.

Since Temple Street is notoriously shady, where there’s more open prostitution, drug dealings, and other unsavoury activities, I limited my filming on the off-chance that I may have captured something I shouldn’t². Can you spot the two hookers?

1. Even my dad won’t eat there anymore, which is saying something. [↑]
2. During the walk through the stalls, I was yelled at once by a vendor to put my camera away. [↑]

Victoria Peak is the highest mountain on Hong Kong Island, offering an otherwise unavailable view of Hong Kong, including the Kowloon side. On clear days, you can see the horizon go on into the distance.

 

To get to the peak, you can a tramway train, which is about a five minute ride. On the other hand, waiting to get on the tram took me about 30 minutes on a good day at a good time. The tram actually has stops like a bus, because some people actually live on the peak, though these are considered luxury estates.

At night, the lights of Hong Kong’s famous skyline start to turn on, and the view changes dramatically. The skyline is normally seen and photographed from the Kowloon side, so this is a different perspective from usual Hong Kong photographs.

 

There’s an entire little village at the peak, with lots of touristy areas selling overpriced memorabilia.

Occasionally, conversations around the dinner table turn to psychotherapy — someone knows a co-worker, or a friend, or a relative who sees a shrink — and my family would talk about it so disparagingly.

They’d say there’s something wrong with people who go to therapy; not the fact that they have mental health issues, but the fact that anyone who needs to pay someone else to feel better is foolish. They think psychologists are bad, or of no use. That you only need to go to therapy if you don’t know how to “find a hobby” or “blow off steam”, or don’t have any friends to talk to. Their ideas about it are so naïve, simplistic, and stereotypical; a perfect reflection of their minds and the way they see the world.

I’d always stay quiet. How could I explain the damage done, when it was some of them who damaged me in the first place?

But when the conversation turned to me, I mentioned that I had a therapist. Perhaps to change their minds about it, to defend something that has helped me so much. After all, I might not even be here talking to them if it wasn’t for my therapy.

Now they know.

But they still don’t understand.

I found this picture at my uncle’s house. It is:

1. Hilarious
2. Hilarious
3. Hilarious
4. All of the above

How weird is it that I didn’t even recognize myself. And look at those glasses! They were my first pair, which probably means I was around 14 or 15. Apparently, I was still wearing my calculator watch at that age.

Grandma appears to be suffering from memory loss. Although maybe suffering isn’t the right word, because she doesn’t even remember that she has memory loss.

She’ll ask us the same question several times in a row. Or she’ll introduce me to someone, even though we not only met two weeks ago, but I’ve taken pictures of them together and showed her. Yesterday, she looked at some nicely wrapped cakes, and after unwrapping one for her, she forgot she was hungry.

Sometimes she speaks in endless cycles because she forgot what she said 10 seconds ago: “I know how to pick real-estate. Look at this place…it’s in an upper-class neighbourhood. I bought it 40 years ago, and it was one of the first places with elevators. That’s because I knew how to pick real-estate. Look at this place…”

It makes me wonder what it must be like to live like this. John says I don’t forgive people because my memory is too good, especially when it comes to emotions and experiences, where I can relive things to the smallest detail.

In a way, we’re relieved she doesn’t remember anything. It may be the only the reason why she doesn’t know what’s going on with her illness.

And to be honest, I think I’d be better off this way too.

Hong Kong is commonly divided in two — Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula — by Victoria Harbour. One of the most iconic ways to travel between the two sides is by Star Ferry. It’s a popular and picturesque method of transportation, because it’s inexpensive (about $2.2 HKD or $0.30 CAD for a one-way ride) and allows for a great view of Hong Kong’s famous skyline. A fleet of 12 ferries carries 70000 people a day, even though there are many cross-harbour tunnels and bridges that have been built to allow for automobile transportation. The ride takes about 10 minutes, including boarding and alighting.

When I tell the taxi drivers here the name of the street I want to go to (pronounced from memory because the names are too complicated to understand), they don’t always know how to get there. That’s why I always have the name of a popular landmark in close proximity memorized, and when I mention this, it usually gets me where I want to go. Sometimes I get a part-time cabbie though, who doesn’t even know where this landmark is. That’s when they ask me how to get there, or what else is around, or if it’s close to such-and-such-a-place adjacent to such-and-such-a-street. Somehow, they assume that I’m a local.

Which is odd, because I know I have an English accent when I speak Chinese, so I assume most people can tell I’m not from around here. When I was here five years ago, most people said they knew I wasn’t from Hong Kong before I even opened my mouth. Something about the way I looked or dressed or acted.

Guess I’m fooling someone now.