I went to my usual watering hole for lunch today. While there, it was invaded by a group of about a dozen Kiwis, all in town to watch the 7s. I knew they were Kiwis because most of them were wearing rugby shirts that said “100% Kiwi.” They were loud but polite, having a good time and, most importantly, spending a ton of money in the bar.

It occurred to me as I was sitting there that March is one of the few months that Hong Kong gets right. With the HK International Film Festival and the 7s (not to forget HK Filmart), we have two international events that are both enjoyed by locals and attract a large number of tourists (who spend a lot of money while they are here). Why do the other months seem so lame by comparison? Why can’t those responsible come up with similar events the rest of the year? Why does it seem that the HK Tourist Board, when not busy lining their own pockets with our tax dollars, seem intent only on attracting people from the mainland – not that I have anything against mainland tourists but they mostly come on these cheap package tours and don’t spend much money once here (aside from those few who bring sacks of cash to buy Rolexes and gold).

And that also reminded me about how sometimes I don’t like Hemlock’s blog. Granted, those times are few and far between, but his post for Thursday, making fun of the 7s and those who enjoy it, is one of those times. I don’t like the 7s, I don’t much understand or enjoy rugby, and I intend to steer clear of Wanchai and Lan Kwai Fong this weekend – but I do appreciate that a lot of people do enjoy it and that it brings a lot of revenue to the territory.

One thing I do enjoy, only Buddha knows why, is articles on food history and here’s a great one in the NY Times on “yoshoku” – the Japanese reinterpretation of western cuisine that is so popular in Japan but virtually unknown outside the country:

In New York or Los Angeles, fans of Japanese cuisine can rattle off orders for uni and o-toro, or urbanely express a preference for soba over udon. But what about “Napolitan,” cooked spaghetti that is rinsed in cold water, then stir-fried with vegetables in ketchup? Or “menchi katsu,” hamburger covered in bread crumbs and deep-fried? Or “omu rice,” an omelet lying over a mound of ketchup-flavored rice?

At once familiar and alien, these dishes may make Americans feel, with some justification, that they have wandered into a parallel culinary universe. All are standards of a style of Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or “Western food,” in which European or American dishes were imported and, in true Japanese fashion, shaped and reshaped to fit local tastes.

I recall that on my first visit to Tokyo, in 1994, I was taken to one of these places. I ordered pizza. It was served on top of a bowl of spaghetti, with a fried egg. I said, “Lesson learned, only eat Japanese food in Japan.” But it turns out one of my favorite Japanese dishes, ton katsu, is considered yoshoku cuisine. So there you go.

I also loved this bit from the same article:

Shocked to discover how much shorter they were than Westerners, Japanese determined that they would catch up not only economically and militarily but also physically, by eating their food.

That desire survived at least until the 1970’s, when a businessman named Den Fujita established McDonald’s in Japan and claimed that its menu would make Japanese as tall and attractive as Americans.

“Japanese are poorly built because they eat rice,” he said at the time. “We’ll change that with hamburgers. After eating hamburgers for a thousand years, Japanese will even have blond hair.”

So they have that to look forward to.

And I didn’t know this bit of history:

For 1,200 years, an imperial edict banned the eating of meat because of a Japanese Buddhist belief that it was unclean. Fish was central to the Japanese diet, and meat was consumed furtively, only for medicinal purposes.

Then in 1872, the emperor lifted the ban.

“To catch up with and overtake the superior culture of the West, Emperor Meiji believed that eating habits had to be changed first,” said Tetsu Okada, an expert on Japan’s culinary culture and an author of a history on tonkatsu. “He told everyone to eat meat, and to get the ball rolling, ate it himself.”

And it turns out that Japanese curry tastes the way it does because it was brought over from England, not India, and is considered western food.

The unpacking goes on … and on … and on ……..

Since I don’t have closets to simply toss boxes into, I actually have to go through everything and deal with it. Not a bad thing. Two things found today:

* My ex-wife’s IBM Thinkpad 600 laptop, circa 1998. It has a Pentium II chip and 128 meg of RAM. It does not boot due to failures with the system board and the memory. This thing cost at least US$2,000 ten years ago. Now it’s junk. What’s the point of trying to fix this? Sigh.

* My mobile phone from the US from 1993 or 1994, a Motorola Star-Tac. A CDMA phone, one of the very first flip phones, with a two line LED screen. In its heyday it was the epitome of cool (at least if you were a geek). It’s small. Maybe I’ll hold onto it.

Original of the above can be found here.

On the right, the man who lied to the American people and has systematically attempted to dismantle the Constitution. On the left, the man who would continue the same policies.

I can’t say yet if I’m for Obama or Clinton or someone else. But I think I’d vote for a bowl of Campbell’s Soup before I’d vote for McCain.

As a friend put it, of course since we have a 4 day weekend it’s raining. And to top it off, I’ve got a cold.

Did a bunch of shopping for the house on Thursday. Price Rite and Ikea. Happened to be doing some online banking today and noticed that my Ikea shopping shows up as Dairy Farm. Dairy Farm is owned by Jardines and in turn owns Wellcome supermarkets, 7-Eleven, ThreeSixty and a variety of other brand names across southern China, south east Asia and Australia/New Zealand. Jardines also owns Hongkong Land, the Mandarin Oriental hotel chain and others…..

Anyway, catching up slightly, I see that Brian Donovan’s Descriptors blog and the more recently established (and very similar to BD’sD) Ring of Gyges are both gone.

I’ve had several nice meals at Cru in Sai Kung and Hebe 101 in Pak Sha Wan/Hebe Haven. Cru is always busy, justifiably so. Huge salads, the thinnest thin crust pizza I’ve ever seen (and more pepperoni on a pizza than I’ve seen in ages), and a very friendly staff.

Hebe 101 is rarely busy, perhaps due to some bad word of mouth right after they opened or an inconvenient location. But I had a really nice braised lamb shank there the other night, their ground floor bar looks comfortable and their rooftop bar is relatively unique in HK – roof of a village house, nicely decorated, open air, overlooking a marina, what’s not to like?

After all these years finally tried the Main Street Deli at the Langham Hotel in TST. I thought the kosher pickles on the table and Dr. Brown’s on the menu were a good start. But … the potato knish was triangular, deep fried, served with some salad and two dipping sauces on the side – Yonah Schimmel wouldn’t have recognized it. And the pastrami was, well, vaguely pastrami-ish but far from the real thing.

My company pays Xmas bonuses at the end of March – go figure that one. Anyway, I’ve decided my one indulgence will be to replace my current a/v amp with one that handles the newer uncompressed Dolby and DTS that one finds on blu-ray discs, as well as having HDMI inputs and outputs. A recent UK magazine article tested 5 of these beasts in the mid-range level and liked Pioneer the best. Question is – if I need to sell my own amp, I don’t want to deal with Craig’s List or eBay or Geo Expat or similar, are there shops in HK (somewhere in Mong Kok?) that buy and sell used stereo equipment?

Interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times on the current situation in Tibet. Not what you’d expect, not least of all this question (which, when you think about it, seems to make quite a bit of sense):

The question that Nancy Pelosi and celebrity advocates like Richard Gere ought to answer is this: Have the actions of the Western pro-Tibet lobby over the last 20 years brought a single benefit to the Tibetans who live inside Tibet, and if not, why continue with a failed strategy?

You may have seen ads for a new HK music service that offers unlimited downloads from a library of 600,000 songs for a flat fee per month. I took a look at the web site.

The service is through SmarTone Vodafone. Download to your PC for HK$56 per month or to your mobile phone (if you’re a SmarTone subscriber) for HK$96 per month.

The FAQ makes no mention of file formats or bit rates. But since they say that the files can’t be played on an iPod, you can bet they’re not MP3. And since it says that a 256 meg memory card can hold up to 125 songs, at 2 meg per song you’re getting bullshit audio quality.

And you’ll also be getting a healthy dosage of DRM. Yep. You can only play the tracks you’ve downloaded for as long as your subscription remains active. If you stop paying, you can’t keep playing. If you change your computer or mobile phone, you have to call them to enable your music to play on the new device.

This business model already failed in other countries. And when one of those online shops went bust (was it Sony or Nokia? I forget but it was within the past 3 months), you also lost the ability to play the songs you downloaded and PAID FOR.

So is anyone really going to pay for this? Why?

While it’s nice to have a music portal with an English interface in Hong Kong for legal downloads of music, this low bit rate high DRM crap is bound for failure.

Yes, I haven’t been posting quite as much the past few days. I’m exhausted. I look around the house and see how much work remains to be done and am paralyzed into a state of inactivity. But with a four day weekend coming up, hopefully no excuses and I’ll emerge out the other side with most of this stuff completed.

I’ve had this idea that I should head into town and have a beverage or two in the bars, but that has yet to happen. There’s this new Van Morrison album out called “Keep It Simple,” and there’s a track on there called “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore,” which is basically a rework of the old “I Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” song and what’s funny is that he mentions by name some of the people he doesn’t see now because he’s not going out, and I know people by all those names too! (Well, it was funny to me.)

In the past week I’ve had the lights out by 11:30 most nights and staying in bed till 8:30 or so each morning, which would be great if I didn’t suffer from OSA and don’t like using my CPAP machine. Well, again, I’m hoping for a return to normalcy by next week.

I’ve also been wanting to reward myself with a serious massage but keep putting that off, in part because I can’t think of where to go to get one. (Last one, at Sauna Lotto in Wanchai, was okay – but the best part was the free ice cream.) Any recommendations? (And no, I’m not looking for a happy ending.)

It’s also occurred to me that while I used to make an average of two trips per month, I haven’t been out of Hong Kong in two months (not counting one day trip to Shenzhen). I think this is the longest I’ve ever remained in town. Two trips coming up in April though (Tokyo and Manila).

Of all the searches that have led people to this blog in the past few days, I think the strangest has to be a google search for “hsbc atm map costa rica.”

Ah well, lunch time ….

Arthur C. Clarke died, aged 90. Recognized globally as one of the great science fiction writers of all time. Best known, I suppose, for co-writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, still the greatest science fiction film. I interviewed Sir Arthur in 1971 or 1972 (don’t think I still have a copy of that article) and found him to be gracious and charming and especially patient.

Anthony Minghella died, aged 54. The Academy Award winning director of English Patient, Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain and others apparently died from complications caused by surgery for tonsil cancer.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

Since I’ve slammed them many times, to be fair, I should note that today’s “The Standard” commits a fair number of pages to coverage of the current events in Tibet, though most of what’s there is cobbled together from agency reports. Oddly, their editorial makes no mention of any of this. The editorial is on the potential impact of the Olympics on inflation in China. And they are the only daily newspaper I know of willing to sell full page ads on their front page.

I’m just wondering if there is any connection between Bjork’s on-stage pro-Tibet outburst in Shanghai a couple of weeks back and the start of these demonstrations. Probably not, but this whole thing started pretty soon thereafter. I suspect Patti Smith won’t be doing any concerts there in the near future.

One of the related stories in The Stan is of a Hong Kong tour group that has decided not to cancel a planned trip to Llhasa at the end of the month since everyone who has booked the tour still wants to go. Let’s see – the city is shut down, foreigners are not allowed to leave their hotels, rioters are targeting Chinese businesses (and presumably Chinese people) – perfect time to go?

Also, today marks what I believe is the debut of “The Standard Page 3 Girl” – in this case a photo of one of the two prostitutes murdered over the weekend, taken from the web site advertising her services, in sexy lingerie but with face pixillated out, with a caption of “see page 4 for details” (and a larger version of the picture). In case you haven’t read it elsewhere, three prostitutes were murdered over the weekend, two in Tai Po, one in Yuen Long, both found strangled with shower hoses, leading police and the press to wonder if there might be a serial killer at large and if Edison Chen will star in the film version. Both women were in their 30s, one was married and had an eight year old son and was doing this work to support her family.

I have reproduced that picture below (snagged from The Stan’s web site) because I find it fascinating that the “newspaper” did not obscure the name of the web site on which she advertised her services! A two year old with a pirate copy of Photoshop could have blanked it out in half a second. Since this picture appears twice in the newspaper itself and once on the web site, were they paid to run this ad?

Hang Seng finished down 1,152.50 today. Wonder what tomorrow will bring?

With the collapse of Bear Stearns and other horrible financial news from the US, news this morning is that Asian stock markets are tumbling. I see that as of 11:30, the Hang Seng index is down more than 1,000 points. That means it has dropped by about 1/3rd in the past 3 months. The US dollar is tumbling too – 96 yen to the dollar in Japan is the worst exchange rate for the US dollar there in 13 years. (As just one example, it means a Big Mac meal in Tokyo now costs double what it costs in HK.)

Among many other things, I wonder how this news will impact local real estate prices, which have been skyrocketing in the past six months. Will continued financial setbacks bring HK prices back down to earth again? And if so, why couldn’t this have happened when I was looking for a new place, instead of right after I’ve moved into one.

Over the weekend I was able to contrast two different HK landlord styles, my previous landlord and my current one.

I met my old landlord on Saturday at the old flat to hand over the keys. He and his wife walked through the place in two minutes and then he pulled out a check and asked how much he owed me. He wrote the check and then said I should call him if the figure is wrong and he owes me more. His wife apologized about ten times for them returning to HK from Shanghai, saying if they hadn’t decided to return, they’d have been delighted to have me continue as a tenant.

There are several major repairs that my new place needs. The new landlord agreed to these and they have been written into the lease. Two weeks after lease signing, the repairs have not even started. My gf spoke to the landlord over the weekend and the landlord attempted to weasel out. “Well, you know, I didn’t need to say yes to these, I did it out of the goodness of my heart.”
Goodness, schmoodness, they’re written in to the freaking lease that she signed.

Not to mention the fact that when I gave her the mail sitting in the mailbox a week ago, there was a disconnection notice from the power company. This Saturday yet another disconnection notice received. I went to the realtor’s office and told him to tell her to take care of it that very day. He said he would but I didn’t get confirmation on that. Power was still on this morning so ….

Considering that I’ve handed her a huge sum of money two weeks ago and all she has to do is make a couple of phone calls to get all this done, I’m feeling bushwhacked by her lack of responsibility.

Well, the answers are simple.

Next month’s rent will be withheld if the repairs are not complete before then.

And unlike with my last landlord, where I paid every month’s rent and waited for him to refund my security deposit, I know the only way I’ll ever get my deposit back from this one is by following the time honored HK tradition of not paying rent when it comes to my last two months there, whether that’s two years from now or more.

==========================

If you haven’t tried it already, you can probably guess that highly touted video streaming site Hulu.com, a joint venture between Fox and NBC/Universal, doesn’t work in HK.

And four Japanese ISPs have announced that they will start shutting off internet service to users who are using file-sharing software – so much for net neutrality but presumably there are other ISPs there who are a bit more open. I don’t think the question is if this will happen in Hong Kong, I think it’s when will it happen.

So things are slowly coming together.

Found a guy in town who does electrical and plumbing handiwork cheap and have had him doing all sorts of minor repairs around the house. (As one example, I wanted to replace the crappy shower in here with something a bit nicer, the rain forest type. The shop I bought it from wanted $1,000 to install, he did it for $400.)(These rain forest shower sets seem to go for as high as $15,000 but walking in and out of every shop on Lockhart Road, I found one shop with a sign on one “last one! special” just $1280. Replaced the exhaust fans in the bathrooms, replaced the rotted out light bulb sockets, fixed the screen doors. Now I still need to figure out the drainage ditch that runs around the house (filled with mud and overflowing regularly), dealing with the mosquitoes and black flies, covering the gate (need some kind of fabric or vinyl material that is about 4 feet high and 30 feet long) on one side so that the yappy dogs on the other side can’t see up to here, which has them barking constantly. Those dogs start barking at 8 AM, my new alarm clock.

Something was on my mind all week. Putting it into words on Thursday night talking to someone finally crystallized it for me. The house is very run down. The owner didn’t want to put any money into fixing it up. And that’s why the rent is so far below current market rates. “I’ve got a million dollar view and a $20 house.” Actually so much of the things that need attention here cost very little but there are a few that would cost a lot; need to see if I can just live with it.

Curtains are sorted. I called the shop in Shenzhen and said, “the curtain sizes are all wrong.” “All long?” “No, wrong! Incorrect! Not right!” “Long?” So my girlfriend called back and sorted it out for me – I will have to pay a small amount for couriers but they picked it up today, doing the alterations tomorrow, deliver again on Monday. (At least my gf approved of the fabric, color, patterns I selected.)(Replying to an earlier comment, it’s quite difficult for her to go to SZ, not worth the hassle.)

Also got the lowdown on bars in town from someone who should know, a guy who manages one of the bars in Wanchai but lives nearby. So important stuff all sorted!

And what some of what I suspect will be my new normal Saturday. Buying bread and pastries at Ali Oli. Getting meat at Butcher King. Buying whatever furniture electric stuff I need for the home from the small shops in Sai Kung – not needing to go to Fortress or Ikea. I feel nice about that. Not just because these small local shops have everything I need but also because everyone who works in these shops is helpful and friendly.

A Sai Kung seafood dinner Thursday night with my team, since we had an out of town guest. Service was horrendous, some of the food overcooked, no wonder I only do this on “special” occasions. The night was only saved by us walking over to Honeymoon Dessert to top off the dinner – I had the mango sago and I think I’ve found a new addiction.

Yeah, I know, this is all boring stuff but it’s what’s consuming me at the moment. Would like to blog about the riots in Tibet, the Spitzer scandal, the HK school closings, movies, music, the usual but well, I guess you can say that you are being spared my commie liberal leftist opinions for the time being. If this keeps up, my next BC column will also be about the move because I certainly haven’t had time to watch any movies or listen to much music lately.

Except that Season 4 of Top Chef started! Yeah!!!!! (Except that one of the chefs is named Spike – don’t know if I should root for him or hate him.) And there was actually one song on American Idol this week that didn’t suck eggs – Chikezie, the round soul singer in a Luther Vandross mode, started off a Beatles song by sitting in a pit with guys playing banjo and fiddle, really old timey country style, then midway through jumped up and turned it into a James Brown rave. Within the context of what you normally get on AI, this seemed quite decent.