li

Work hard, Play hard... et un peu de déconne!

Quand il n'est pas occupé par son herbier, le petit P sème des pierres blanches dans la forêt... Adepte de vieilles séries policères allemandes, il n'est pas peu commun de le trouver en train de manger la choucroûte devant la télé!


04 février 2009

RTW III - HK - January 24th to 27th

Aaaaaaahhhh, a week-end in Hong-Kong with Lam!

Splendid...

After a plane ride to Beijing and two first taste of chinese behaviour
i) In Moscow at Shermentievo: pushing and shoving and disrespecting queues...
ii) In Beijing, where an airport employee clearly just doing his job went on a rant that I needed to pay him "ten dollars" (about as much english as he knew) for his services, i.e. cabbing me around for 300m as I was the last passenger the flight was waiting for! Oh unfortunately for him, I had no money so I gave him 8 roubles in coins...

These two themes ended up being recurrent so I won't really go into it any deeper. I'll just state that you always have to fight, bargain, push, claim, ask twice or more, and and and... Pfff!

Then again, Hong Kong was fantastic with a couple highlights:
- The flight attendant coming to tell me I'm "golden" and she'll take care of me [read: I have an airline gold status and she's responsible for my satisfaction with this flight]... Then coming back a couple minutes later and asking me with a shy smile "have I seen you on television?"

- Very good nightlife in Kowloon and in Lan Kwai Fong

- Shopping and visiting HK with Lam: Where we ended up being little "Victoria Beckham"s (thank you Vince for the nickname) "Lam? Maybe a pullover?"


- The food was fantastic, especially the Thai with Brad, an american golfpro met in aforementionned Lon Kwai Fong (and also especially after Moscow - Wink to Nico)


- Chinese New Year on Sunday was impressive...


- I loooooooooooooooooooove asian kids, they are the cutest... At some point, i had to stop taking pictures, because I thought I might come off a little politically uncorrect**!


If I was a bit let down by the attitude of some chinese people and really liked the one of native HK people, the attitude I come to disrespect most nowadays is the expat attitude, but that will be the topic of another article. And don't mistake me: It's not expats per se, it's people behaving like archetypical expats/colonialists that make me nauseous...

As ever, for more and spicy comments, enjoy the facebook album

Cheers,
P

** or to quote the movie "In Bruges" (quite good actually):
"What two things is Belgium know for?"
"..."
"Well, chocolates and child abuse... And they only invented chocolate to give to the kids..."

Libellés : , , ,