Bikes and trikes in Hong Kong
Not surprisingly, I have't seen anybody use bicycles as a mode of transportation here in Hong Kong. In such a small space of a city with over 6 million people, there is definitely not enough space to sequester a bike lane let alone wide enough car lanes for the dense traffic! In addition, it's more hilly here as I can see buildings perched on top of not so distant mountains from my granny's flat.
I, however, did take time to go bike riding away from the city. Chris' cousin from Sydney is teaching English here for a couple years and he lives in the New Territories, a huge part of Kowloon that is considered to be more countryside than city center. There is a section we rode on by the water, the bike path reminding me of Stanley Park's seawall and the path along the Ottawa River all at the same time. I saw less people and the whole atmosphere was so laid back, I was in heaven. We ended up doing a "Hong Kong" barbeque, we had to start a fire in an area full of tar pits just for this purpose. (Yes, Mike. Even though it took us half an hour, we ended up starting a fire since we are all university graduates. . .) We were spearing chicken wings, sausages, fish meatballs, mushrooms. We ended up biking alongside the Plover Reservoir with green space, water and mountains all in the same area. From far away we could barely see the city highrises.
Local paper features consumer research
From the South China Morning Post (main English newspaper in Hong Kong), I read an article on consumerism. By the way, I really like this newspaper and I find that I can take hours reading news that only mentions a certain country (our 11th southern province) in a couple articles. This interesting article said that people (mostly women) between the ages of 30-50 have a shop till you drop mentality because they grew up when Hong Kong was experiencing a booming economy in the 70s. This is not a positive thing right now as Hong Kong's economy has shifted into suffering mode.
After-effects of the Handover (aka. Return to the homeland)
Although I've said that China is not as bad as I might have thought it would be in terms of governing, it can not be compared to what Hong Kong has been used to in the past. Right after being returned to China, people who have immigrated for fear of a sudden change to communist dictatorship started to return to HK because things did not seem to have changed at all. However, the economy is now starting to suffer and the governing is law is starting to turn its evil head.
China had promised that there be no changes for 50 years, but with the new bill section 23, people here are getting uneasy. This article states that citizens will be punished if they express or do anything inappropriate. What does that mean? Nobody knows, because it seems that the government refuses to go into more details, causing some Hong Kongnese to erupt in demonstrations.
Recently, at a music awards ceremony, a famous HK artist from a rock band gave a small speech before accepting his award. He was concerned that musicians and artists cannot view their sentiments after this bill is implemented, that the bill would be detrimental. However, this segment of his speech was cut off in the television broadcast. (The radio captured the entire things.) In defense, the TV station programmer states that the sole reason is that the show had to be shortened and that other performer's songs have been shortened as well. Is this already the start of censorhip? Nobody can prove it for sure.
