That's right, Hong Kong is the... well, the Hong Kong of Asia! The rest of the cities can only aspire to the kind of place they have forged here. Some observations after 4 days in urban paradise:
Coming to a Metropolis Near You!
Some ideas that HK has nailed and are too good to stay put. Watch for them:
- fastidious restaurant service, facilitated by the servers wearing in-ear speakers to keep track of food.It arrives promptly and piping hot (sadly, the "no need to tip" policy here will not make its way to Canada!);
- impossibly delicious, simple menu items like perfectly braised gailan stems topped with parma ham, or crispy duck with a hoisin dipping sauce. To pull off a meal this simple, you have to be fresh and precise in the flavour balancing. HK, or course, does it!
- streets that teem with life, enticing signage (and yes, video signage), colour, noise, and variety. The roadbed is narrow and the sidewalks wide.
- a transit system that allows you to pay by tapping your card against a reader. (Compare this to Vancouver's system in which we insert a ticket inside a machine, wait 3 seconds to get it back while the queue grows longer!)
- audible pedestrian signals that do not sound like chirping birds! Enough said.
- laser/light show featuring... the whole city! 44 buildings participate nightly in a Chamber-of-Commerce-organised show of lasers, lights and music. A major attraction that highlights the city's extraordinary skyline to onlookers for free! Of course, the cocktail lounges still charge for the drinks...(see below)
No Need to Export
- $30 cocktails and $50 entrees. That's Canadian dollars. Ouch.
- Macau: what a hole. Ben Johnson warned me but I went anyway. It's as if someone designed a place to be exactly what I like least: auto-oriented, inward facing buildings, filled with luxury handbag shops and casinos. The best thing about the whole place was the famous egg tart. It was.... good. But I've had better in Vancouver from Keefer Bakery.
- Constant luxury shopping. Do people need a Rolex watch so badly that they must be made available for sale in every street and mall, including the one at the top of Victoria Peak?
On balance, though, HK delivers what any visitor could hope for: a lively, exciting destination that is easy to navigate. I will miss it,as usual.
2 comments:
Glad to hear that you are having such a good time in one of my favourite cities. Not only can the Octopus Card speed you on to transit (and lets you pay according to the distance you've travelled), you can also pay for your groceries or your Slurpee with it.
And yes, Macau. So sad. It was one of the most beautiful cities in Asia for nearly 500 years until the Mainlanders got their hands on it. Fortunately you can still get a sense of what Macau was like in places like Cochin, Diu and Goa in India.
Happy travels!
You love Hong Kong more than anything else in the world, I think! If I ever get around to visiting, I will think of you the whole time :)
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