5 September 2011
Kowloon
No visit to Hong Kong is complete without visiting the endless neon of Mong Kok at night, with the gold fish shops, computer shops, kitten shops, 'saunas', hourly hotels, food stalls, suit salesmen, stinky tofu etc.
I have shown over 9000 photos of all that before, so you get none today, still it is mind boggling how busy it is on a Tuesday night. One thing I like is the parks where people just sit around and socialise, presumably until they go to bed. Completely different from Australia where we shut the gate and close the curtains and wait to go back to work tomorrow.
One thing thats mildly disturbing is fat asian men who feel the heat. Its a very common site if you are fat to fold your tshirt up under your man boobs so that you might air your heaving belly. This isnt just restricted to old guys who might have lost their minds, I have seen some young hipster guys with polo ralph lauren t-shirts and black rimmed glasses and man bags doing it as well.
Catching a train from Tsim Sha Tsui around 6pm is an experience. Theres a lot of people with signs that look like ping pong bats that bat you into the train, then blow a whistle when no more people can fit.
It took 3 trains before I was able to get on, which is OK when trains come every 60 seconds.
Onboard the train and you cant really move, you dont have to worry about falling over.
After touring up and down the streets of Mong Kok for a while, I crossed over Nathan Road and found this awesome new shopping centre / movie multiplex / restaurant / music venue which is a huge glass atrium built between 2 existing buildings.
Looking back down (this is only half way up, but harder to photograph from the top), I dont normally get vertigo but I was looking for something to steady myself on. The ceiling is a projected sky.
My dinner, grilled pork with tomato rice and salad. It came with a drink which I politely said no thanks to. This angered the lady serving me, 'drink included, you choose drink!', so I got a cardboard bucket full of flat pepsi I didnt drink.
Walking further towards the harbour, I came across the underground temple street market. The real temple street market is a few streets down, and sells I heart hong kong t-shirts and angry birds cushions.
This part of the temple street market sell mainly vibrators, replica hand guns, lasers and pornographic dvd's.
An offshoot of the main area has a row full of fortune tellers. Little do they know I have a time machine, and all of them are wrong.
This woman selling vibrators and various other battery operated latex contraptions really did not want her photo taken.
I told her I was putting her on the internent within the hour. If you are going to sell your sinful products then you will be exposed as a sinner!
One day someones going to chase me I think, there were 30 shops like this one, most had guys who looked like they knew kung fu. This one was a soft target for a photo.