The Markets

On both evenings, I sampled the variety of local street markets, most of which were nearly walking distance from my hotel in Kowloon. Fast, loud and overwhelming on all sides… In a word: awesome… Also very similar to markets anywhere else in the world. Though I spent a long while getting lost amidst the chaos, I didn’t buy a single item: having no use for chosen dog meat delicacies nor Louis Vuiton ripoffs on the cheap.

The Pit

I really wasn’t planning on hitting Hong Kong’s infamous expat ghetto, even less after Justine’s flaky friend in Hong Kong (with whom I was kinda supposed to hook up, never did, all for the better, most likely… friends of friends… remind me to write about the topic one day…), strongly urged me to go entertain myself there, touting it as “Hong Kong’s very own Roppongi”… Yea, that was a big selling point.

I knew exactly what to expect when on Friday evening I decided to go for a drink in Lan Kwai Fong: not feeling like hitting the sack at 11pm leaving me with few alternatives, by myself, in a city I knew nothing of… I certainly wasn’t let down in my expectations: while undeniably lively and more densely crowded than moribund Roppongi, it features the same congregation of sorry expat losers drowning their bitterness and the vacuousness of their life into whatever alcohol-laden cat piss they can get in a western-labeled bottle.

In fact, the comparison to Roppongi is completely unfair to the average garden-variety moron that can traditionally be found in Tokyo’s foreign watering holes: Hong Kong expats rank in a whole different scale of aggressive stupidity of their own. I can see where the model for the quintessential patronizing Asian expat came from. Describing them as a bunch of overweight, balding, racist, chauvinist, uneducated pigs is probably a little mean to our oinking friends too. A few conversations were enough to help me understand why every single non-expat female in a two mile radius was both Filipino and working. I have no difficulty seeing why a local wouldn’t want much to do with the neighbourhood.

I suppose the fact I managed to bump into people-who-knew-people-I-knew from elsewhere in the world, should send me cooing about how small a world it is… Frankly though: the level of inbreeding of the Asian expat’ community would frighten any Habsburg on a good day, so little surprise there.

I ended my evening by arm-wrestling some drunken prick, whose unhealthy yet annoyingly insistent questioning of my sexual orientation seemed to call for some reaffirmation of virility. Just for the sake of pretending afterward that he had just gotten his ass dispatched by one of them cocksucking fag… Life and its simple pleasures… And as a future reference to fat homophobic assholes the world around: I may be a third your weight, but that’s 99% less Cheetos and German lager, so hit the gym a few times before you take on stupid challenges. I swear I don’t usually give into that sort of pseudo-macho bullshit… Guess I was really bored.

On that brilliant final note, I hopped on a cab to Kowloon, where I had one more chance to marvel at the wonders of linguistics, when confronted to a cabbie whose only foreign language was, I kid you not: Japanese, or a basic version thereof, yet enough to conversate and laugh together at the situation.