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?
I only found one. I feel hoodwinked :(
Okay, maybe for one of them it’s debatable whether she’s a hooker or not.
For some reason I would have picked different music for that video. It screams “nightlife” to me and the music seems a bit serene. Neat stuff though! A lot of the merchandise does look like useless nicknacks but I would definitely be all up in that if I were there lol.
P.S. did you purposely make a French tag for that post? or was that a fluke :) ?
I was thinking about using some more moving music actually, but none of it really fit in during the quiet parts. It’s especially hard because most of my music has English words, which doesn’t go with all these Chinese people. I thought the soft piano became a nice counterpoint to the buzz that was going on in the visuals.
As for the French tag, it was supposed to be “Chinese culture”, but WordPress didn’t auto complete it, so it came out as “Chine”. :)
My walk along the fortune tellers was overshadowed by a an event for which they’d set up chairs in the street alongside. They’d arranged for all the seniors to attend a Chinese opera karaoke sing-a-long with cranked amplification. Karaoke is bad enough and Chinese opera is an aquired taste (I actually like it) — but this was like perusing fortune tellers with a bunch of mating cats in the background…pretty funny. It seems like anything can go on in the streets there.
And Servant yes that second one (the green one) was probably a hooker too.
I miss the ding dings. Awesome views.
Karaoke can be fine when it’s a decent person singing, but I’m certainly glad that there was no Chinese opera playing during my walk because I have yet to acquire a taste for it.
I believe the green one was the more obvious hooker, and it was the one in white before her that was harder to pick out.
The chick in green was the one I saw, but at a (few) other goes I noticed that one chick in white just leaning against the wall.
Oh ya? You didn’t notice the “la-lala, I’m just standing around playing with my beautiful hair” attitude on the white one? ; )