Halfway down the Danube

Monday special guest balikbayan blogging!

We have a guest blogger this week! Noel Maurer is travelling to the Philippines for arcane work-related reasons, and he is sending his observations on to me, who in turn am sending them on to you, one of our thirty-seven remaining readers. Here he is in Hong Kong. Enjoy!

... Cathay Pacific is a very nice airline. Of course, I was flying first class [bastard. -- CY] — but the automatic upgrade when seats are available is part of why it’s a very nice airline. You’re greeted by these hostesses wearing spray-painted green evening gowns. Then, at your seat, a tall fellow in a shiny purple suit and a petite woman in a bright red miniskirt give you pretty much whatever you want. It sort of felt like a Prince video. (Well, whatever you want that can be mentioned on a G-rated blog, so don’t ask for **** ** * *******.)

Chep Lap Kok really isn’t the best name for an airport, but it is a very good airport. The moving sidewalks are broad. And the police wear these bitchen uniforms, the height of 21st-Century neofascist chic, black suits with a belted jacket and baggy slacks that make ‘em look cool instead of like bus drivers. And unlike Great Britain, they didn’t feel the need to carry intimidating and utterly useless automatic weapons on slings.

Of course, the poor Ethiopian couple in the immigration line ahead of me suffered from a rather intimidating interrogation by these guys; me, I just got waved through. Customs doesn’t seem to exist. There were some more extras from V for Vendetta sitting at their desks, but they didn’t stop a soul.

Past customs, the airport is also a shopping mall, but unlike Heathrow the designers seem to have thought things through and not set up the shops to deliberately gum up the airport’s function. Crowds, huge crowds, but things flowed. I bought a ticket on the MTR and headed downtown. But first, I reset my watch for Hong Kong time, which seems to be about 25 years ahead.

The train, the Silver Line it ain’t. It whizzes past modern high-rises and swooping expressways and is full of shiny modern people wearing everything from business suits to indescribable Japanese fashions. Three stops, 20 minutes, and right to a train station where the airlines will check in you in.

Unfortunately, my cabby to the hotel wasn’t very talkative. I mean, it’s a union rule that cabbies are supposed to say eminently quotable things to foreign tourists. You can’t go ten blocks in Buenos Aires without hearing either a long philosophical disquisition on the country’s sad sad decline—or the similiarly sad decline of La Boca soccer club, which is almost as tragic to your typical porteño cabbie—and the Mexico City hacks love to complain about crime, AMLO, and how unfair it is that you need to know English in order to get a good job these days. But this Hong Kong fellow? Nada. So either he only learned a few stock phrases of perfectly-pronounced British English and had no idea what I was saying, or he just plain didn’t like me.

After 25 hours on airplanes, he probably had reason not to like me.

So, Hong Kong. Neon! Buildings! Cool-assed overpasses! Bridges in the sky! Bridges in the sky! Unlike, say, Boston, Hong Kong looks the way the future is supposed to look. Which is to say, like Minneapolis, only with brighter lights and far better fashion sense.

No, let me be clearer. Hong Kong Island looks the way the future is supposed to look. Kowloon looks like downtown Brooklyn. But with far more colorful people. And lots of kids. Little girls playing what looked like rock-paper-scissors in Cantonese, little boys running around and yelling at 9:30pm.

I know, the statistics say that Hong Kong has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, the Hong Kongers apparently having decided to solve the dilemma of immigration from the mainland by going extinct. They seem to make up for it by letting the kids run around wherever they want, unlike the way us rabbit-like Americans have high fertility, but make it so you’d never guess by wrapping our 2.1 kids in a protective cocoon and never letting ‘em out without full body armor.

Now I’ve got a plane to Manila to catch, so I’ll be off. More on Hong Kong, real Chinese food, and (assuming I get there safely) the Philippines next time.

Noel, if you end up sleeping on the concrete floor in the outside alcove to the domestic wing of Manila International Airport, don't forget to tip the men's room attendants. They'll let you wash up. Also, there's Dum-Dum Airport, outside Calcutta, not to be confused with Wack Wack Golf Course, outside Manila, which you could land a plane on.