Hong Kong: Nights

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. [↩]

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  1. I only found one. I feel hood­winked :(

    • Okay, maybe for one of them it’s debat­able whether she’s a hook­er or not.

  2. 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”. :)

  3. 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.

  4. Oh ya? You did­n’t notice the “la-lala, I’m just stand­ing around play­ing with my beau­ti­ful hair” atti­tude on the white one? ; )

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