On flight to Jakarta...

Until today, I had never really thought of why some countries choose to group their names as FIRST and LAST and others as GIVEN and FAMILY or SURNAME...

The flight attendant hands me the customs declaration and the arrival card to fill in. I pull out a pen and find myself mulling over the FULL NAME field unsure whether the given or family name should come first. Then it strikes me: Hartono and Tina had told me: INDONESIANS DON'T HAVE FAMILY NAMES.

Yup, no last names, only first. Now, imagine you have no last name and you are applying for a passport for international travel? You just come up with one. Your last name is given and sometimes given by... yourself! I remember when Hartono's daughter was born and he needed to get her passport immediately to take her to Poland with his wife. They had a double task of coming up with and agreeing on two names for her: first and last! He was concerned about all the paperwork the Europeans would require and I remember recommending that he better give her the same last name as his, or else paperwork trouble was guaranteed.

How funny is this: I am sitting wondering whether FIRST name should come first or last. What a dumb question! So, back to the form: first name first. Except the field says: AS APPEARS IN PASSPORT. Take this: more often than not, in your passport your LAST name appears FIRST! He-heh...

Now, imagine an Indonesian filling out a form wondering which of his names to put as GIVEN! He-heh. And guess what, their second given name is not necessarily LAST! They can give themselves more than two names, if they need or want to, so very often they have three or four. Kind of like those Portuguese kilometer-long full names. And trust me, on an Indonesian form, the Portuguese would have all the space they need for their FULL NAME: the field was reeeeeeeeeeeeally long.

P.S.
The flight attendant was a true beauty. That face of an unmatched proportion and harmony that just strikes you at first sight, that would come out in any crowd and just draw your attention and leave you with your eyes helplessly glued to it. She probably noticed me staring at her as I was diligently looking for the fulfillment of the golden rectangle rule in her face or any other rule that could provide the key to the mystery of this remarkable harmony. And not surprisingly, I was absolutely unable to place her face geographically, although she reminded me a lot of Sayuri, Stephen's wife, half Japanese, half Sri-Lankan. Certainly, she was not Chinese like, surprisingly, most attendants on this Cathay Pacific flight.

No, I didn't dare ask if I could photograph her. If she agreed, I knew her face were going to end up here. Would you ever want your face published on the Internet by a stranger?

P.P.S.
You must have noticed: Asians are not only short; as a rule, they are also very slim (unless your stereotype is dominated by Sumo-fighters). My Cantonese colleague once proposed a theory that it must be in the genes, which sounds quite sensible.

Well, the Cathay seat belt, unlike the American-sized seat belts I am used to, certainly would not fit a Sumo-fighter. It was hardly long enough for me!.

Co-opetition?

When I was about 20 and the Georgian economy had taken its post-Soviet slump, I remember seeing women on the sides of the road to Tbilisi selling fruit: a few grouped re-selling import bananas, next group selling local apples, then another group selling persimmon and pomegranates, then you saw three identical mountain sized piles of watermelons or melons. They never mixed. My minibus passed them every weekend on the way home and back to Tbilisi, and the grouping by product seemed as natural as anything else, a given... Until my Down Under colleagues commented on how weird it was, and that they'd probably sell more if only they regrouped to lure an apple customer to also get the bananas. All these years later, it does seem weird: isn't it natural to target your clientele away from your direct competition?

Given my background, it is only weird for me to be noticing and commenting on the following peculiarity of Hong Kong: stores do get to come in groups, in LONG STREETS of same produce.

On my second day in town, I was desperate for a quick replacement for my crashed laptop. The Google Almighty said there were quite some computer stores in Wan Chai. The map said Wan Chai was one subway stop away. I said, Off I go!

A good two hours later, after I had figured out the subway ticket (Octopus, rather than Oyster, in this part of the world), that Wan Chai is not the same as Chai Wan and is in the opposite direction, I was walking the streets, which supposedly had some 300 (!) computer stores. Except, what I saw was a loooooooong street of nearly identical stores selling bathroom tiles. I've seen streets lined with clothes or jewellery stores, but bathroom tiles?! I don't believe that all the stores of bathroom tiles I had ever seen in my life altogether would come to half the number of stores I passed by in 15 minutes that afternoon.

My gut was telling me that computer stores were unlikely to congregate in this community. So I came up to one of the owners and asked him where he thought I could buy a computer. He surprised me with good English and explained that there were two (only?!) places: Wan Chai Computer Center and a place a few subway stops away. I preferred the place close by.

The Wan Chai Computer Center turned out to be a 'congregation' of at least a couple of hundred vendors (the Almighty was not lying!) crammed on the space of a medium sized department store. I must give them credit: no shop had exactly the same produce as others and the variety was impressive, however the presentation, like anything else in Hong Kong, was pretty crowded.

But wouldn't you agree that it is quite convenient to only have to go to ONE part of town to choose your bathroom tiles when you are fixing up your bathroom? Especially when the variety is just enormous.

The reason I decided to share this today is because on my way to the airport, we were driving through a street on the Mainland, which was lined up with... sewing machine repair shops! How many sewing machines would you expect to break down in one city on a given day? I guess I must add in a city of 7 million, for it must be quite some: although quite dusty, the shops did not at all seem out of business.

Does this phenomenon reflect the local culture, I wonder? If you google 'competition culture' and Asia together, you'd come upon a multitude of Western projects centered around "promotion of competition culture" in Asia, support to Asian competition officials, etc. You also get to come across a very interesting study on Culture and Competition, which does not at all place Asian cultures as least competitive, yet does link competition to cultural values.

Public transportation

Your options are plenty: trams, buses, minibuses, MTR (subway), taxis, ferries...

MTR is very efficient, has an extensive and far reaching network and would take you across the waters from the Hong Kong Island to the Mainland and back. Every station would have 5 or 6 exits marked with a letter and such lettered exits would have two or three exits each. So, that means you can actually surface from an underground station in up to 15 different places. Luckily, local maps tend to reference the lettered exits, so, chances are, you would get out fairly close to where you need to. But do not be surprised if you show up from down under in a different place every time. Yet, if you exited from A and saw a store you wanted to stop by at on the way back, be sure you'll end up checking out exits B, C, D, E and F before you eventually find your way to the desired A with the desired store... The good part is, you get to explore the neighbourhood!

MTR may well be the fastest way to travel across town, but it also has its downsides: you can freeze to death or get squeezed to death or filed off on the sides to blood by the dense crowd. Oh yeah, and as soon as you surface at one of the 15 exits, you'd soak in own sweat and would feel like a defrosted chicken pulled out of a microwave. If you have an important meeting on your schedule with an important suity someone and the etiquete dictates that you wear a no less suity something, be sure your full attendtion during the meeting will focus on wondering what odors the defrosted chicken in your suit emits and what your important suity interlocutor would think.

Next time you have a meeting with the suity someone, you'll know better and will take a taxi. Taxis are cheap and very safe! Dressed up to the nines, made up and perfumed - the incarnation of self-confidence - you take the elevator down and ask the security guard to call you a cab. You observe identical red-and-white Toyotas whooshing by the glass entrance of your apartment building and start getting impatient as the security guard hungs up again, dials for the third time and utters into the receiver these unrepeatable abrupt sounds that you would never be able to understand. When he dials for the fifth time, you wave your hand at him to give up and not bother, make it decisively onto the hot street, confident that stopping one of the dozens of red-and-white clones by a mere wave of your hand will take far less time. Surprisingly, no one is impressed by your hand. Maybe you are on the wrong side of the street? You cross the street and resume waving. You start losing patience, your buffer time is up and if one of these red-and-white empty-seated bustards does not stop RIGHT NOW! you'll be late to your very important suity meeting...

"What's wrong with them?! Don't they want to earn?!" - you reel with anger, as you walk to the parallel street, hoping you'd have a better luck there. Ten minutes later, you are seen on yet another street. Another five minutes later, sweat dripping from your forehead - reincarnation of wrath - you re-enter your apartment building and helplessly ask the security guard to call you a cab. He looks at you compassionately and starts his patient hung-up-and-dail routine all over again. Hopelessly late to your meeting, you eventually spot a cab releasing a passenger by your door and spring out onto the street barely thanking the guard for trying to help you.

Once on the road, you try to relax and strike a conversation with the taxi driver:
   - Do you speak English?
   - A lital. You speak Canton-easy? Canton-easy easy! You know “jo sun”? You know “koon mo lan”?
   - (enthusiastically) Yes, I know “jo sun”! Jo sun! but not the other one… "koon mo lan"?
   - Yes, koon mo nan! Jo sun! Goon monan!
   - Ah, good morning, jo sun! ... Coud you tell me... How can one call a cab here? Could you give me the phone number?
   - Happy Valley eigh to tan - no taxi! Monan - no taxi. Many forenahs, all take taxi.

When you eventually make it into the office, you spot the defrosted chicken staring at you from the mirror door of the elevator with two bruises of sweat-dissolved maskara...

So my preference goes to trams. Their slow crawl makes them too unpopular to be overcrowded, which leaves you with a pleasant warm breeze on the open upper deck, and guarantees you a calm 40 minutes of good read every morning and evening for just $2! These doubledecker trams are a relic leftover of the British rule and their ancient wooden fragility gives them a very romantic look.

Fruit

Today's visit to Wan Chai market has added a few exotic tropical fruit to my experience. To illustrate it, I turned my insurance leaflet over to get the white background and got a few shots of my today's purchase:

Rambutan
Hairy little red fruit, similar to lychee, quite reminiscent of grapes in texture, quite pleasant in taste.









Custard apple
Have not yet checked out the taste, but am much looking forward to it tomorrow.

And I got VERY excited by getting a pack of PERSIMMON - sweet and not at all tart, hard and shiny, just like the ones in Georgia that I have missed so much for the past 8 years!

*** Update on Aug 24: turns out I am fairly apprehensive of new tastes: I kept postponing the custard-apple for several days. Which helped it ripen and sweeten. I was a bit unsure about the smell, when I eventually cut it up, but when I tried it, the taste was divine! Reminds me a lot of a fruit from my childhood vacations on the Black Sea coast: fejhoa, also known as guava. Guess what? They are same family, although they look totally different and compare in size as Earth to Moon! Love custard-apples.

Pace of life

I'd been warned a lot that the pace of life in Asia is a lot faster than in Europe and have been wondering what this actually translates into. When we speak of pace of life in Europe (I'm thinking, let's say, London vs Cannes, or even closer to heart, Warsaw vs Krakow), it is often about the speed: more is going on, people rush rather than walk, there's stress in the air. At end of day, Krakow has always compared to Warsaw as slower, more laid back, relaxed, pensive.

So, should I expect Hong Kongers to be harder workers, always in a hurry, stressed? I guess... except what about yet another stereotype about the Orient: its religions and medicines, its image of balanced, body-conscious meditation guru?

Well, what I see, seems less controversial than I expected. Although some do work late hours, not too much stress is in the air. They walk just like we do, occasionally you'll see someone running to catch a departing bus, but in general, people seem no more or less in a hurry or stressed than what I am used to.

It eventually got to me... IT IS NOT ABOUT SPEED! Or, at least, not about individual speed, anyway... Come think of it: has an ant ever seemed a fast paced animal? Hardworking, true, but fast paced? Well, by the same token, has an ant colony ever come across as laid back or relaxed? That's it. It's about numbers...

Sundays

Domestic help is very common here - nannies, maids, cooks. Exorbitantly expensive as rental space is here, upmarket apartments would normally have a maid-room. As Rita was explaining recently, the locals prefer to hire Indonesians as they find Cantonese fairly easy to learn and can communicate with the family quite well within a year. That's rare with others - Cantonese is not an easy language. Conversely, foreigners tend to hire the Filipinos, as thanks to their American education system, they speak very good English and so communication works out well from the start.

The popularity of those jobs fills the city with Indonesian and Filipino women. Their husbands are apparently leading a fairly lazy lifestyle back home, unable to find jobs and subsidized by their wives. These women don't normally travel home to save the airfare and don't get to see their children often. Sometimes, not in several years.

For the most part, they work 6 days a week and get Sundays off, when their employers are off work and enjoy family time. Sundays is their opportunity to congregate. The HSBC building in the center is the congregation spot for the Filipinos. Indonesians get together in Causeway Bay's Victoria Park.

I did not know all that just a week into my stay, when I got out on my first longer walk around the neighbourhood on a hot Sunday afternoon and, overwhelmed by the crowds, set my feet towards the largest green spot closeby according to my map - the Victoria Park - in search of shadow, quiet and solitude...

The Park turned out to be the same as the one I have been passing by every morning in a tram to work, but on this hot humid Sunday afternoon it looked very different...

Already on approach to the park, the sidewalks were taken over by women sitting on the ground around picnic tablecloths lain with home made foods, watermelon, fruit, or simply with bags of chips or snacks. They were so many, that walking without looking under your feet was impossible: you could at any point step on someone's shoe, or hand, or stumble over their feet.

I assumed them to be the Filipinos until I noticed that quite a few were praying muslims. Romina had earlier told me that Filipinos, much like Poles, are over 90% Catholic. Although my next guess was Indonesians, I did not recognize the faces as similar to my two Indonesian colleagues that worked together with us in Krakow. Maybe Malaysians?

But talks to colleagues at work the next day confirmed, this was the common congregation spot of Indonesian domestic help workers.

These gatherings are a subculture of its own. I've seen two sports teams in identical tee-shirts resting from pratice, a group of young girls learning a dance together, a group of a bit elder women rehearsing a song with notes in hand and that was an impressive choir performance!

Concrete jungle

No words could describe it... Or maybe, I am simply lost for those that could.

Idę na latwiznę:

No building is shorter than 15 floors and most are 30 and over. This city houses 10 times the population of Krakow on a territory only three times as big. The city has continuously grown - up and up and up...

Most construction from more than 10 years ago, would have all the piping and air conditioning exposed on the outside and would neighbour blue glass concrete sky scrapers more often than not. 

You'd see a slum next to a luxury hotel, a maze of piping and a bright collection of drying laundry reflecting in the blueness of the energy efficient glass, a mozaic of old AC units hanging over a Rolex or Cartier store, dusty bamboo scaffolding covering up Ermenegildo Zegna's chic wndows, etc, etc, etc.

Laundry and old AC units "raining" down on you as you walk on a sidewalk is a normality and the skill of diving the drops - after less than a week here - is merely a reflex.

First impressions

Contrasts. This is certainly the first thing that catches the eye.
Or, should I say, DIRT and TRASH caught my eye first?

Then, BLUE GLASS & CONCRETE modernity slowly glided into the picture, shaping word "contrast" as a justification of that puzzling feeling... I was scared. Scared to get scared: I'd come here for A YEAR! Will I last?!..

My subconscious knew better and shut the fears away immediately. Next thing I find myself doing is buying a plant from a street vendor in a dirty little street for what is to be my home for the next 12 months just a block away. I am here, and I am settling down... Her young but tired, wrinkled face lights up with a SMILE. She explains in accented but fairly good English how often to water the plant as she carefully places the pot into a plastic bag for me and disappeares to break my very first HKD 500 note for change.

I move on to explore the exotic fruit at the next stall and get completely put off by the STENCH. I walk away, wondering what the smell is and suddenly discover a new meaning of "stench". It does not necessarily mean "bad", it is enough for it to be an "UNFAMILIAR" smell to put us off! I simply had no idea of the origin of the smell and it alerted me, made me worried. Was that discovery my first step in opening up? Probably...