Stranger in a Strange Land
I looked like the locals, I could to a certain extent converse with them, even fluently, but it took only an excursion to shen zhen’s Sai Ge Guang Chang to confirm that I am, afterall, a stranger in a strange land. By the way, Sai Ge Guang Chang is huge. It has about six levels of commerce floor, and each level has at least 400 different stores set in little cubicles. That’s like one sim lim square compressed into one floor. The scariest thing isn’t this; it is that they have many other buildings in Shennan Road dedicated to the same thing, selling electronic goods. Altogether there must be at least 10,000 individual stores selling electronic goods… if they all came here, the point of competition is moot.
Anyway, I was looking to buy an mp3 video player. I wanted to ask about the specifications: the resolution of the display screen, the capacity of the player plus extension card type, the type of battery, etc, when I realised that I could not do so. All those chinese lessons about weather and history served me not here. When the acid test came, it was a complete washout. I now know that resolution is called “mi du”, they call 1 gigabyte “1 G”, but I still don’t know what Li-ion is in chinese.
It was an eye-opener in that languages are constantly evolving. If you do not keep up with it, you’d miss out on all the new terms, which are what you really need if you want to survive, and not just subsist, in a place. We are too prone to assume that just because Mandarin is our mother tongue, we can assimilate seamlessly into wherever part of China we go. Without knowing these jargons, you cannot ease into the culture, and without that, you’d merely be a stranger in a strange land.
The Kowloon part of Hong Kong was as I expected – dirty buildings, crowded place, not a place that I like at all. However, the district of Tuen Mun and other New Territories brought certain surprises. I liked the Tuen Mun town centre a lot, because it has about 10 shopping centres all connected together at the 2nd/3rd/4th levels. It is like a maze, but also like a super-large shopping centre where you can just keep walking and walking, and encountering new shops everywhere you go. However, when making your way back, it may sometimes be necessary to navigate from the ground floor outside the malls, bcause it is so confusing.
Another confusing aspect about Hong Kong is their labelling of floors. 2/F is actually third floor, basement is a G, while first floor is UG (upper ground)? Wtf?! The more confusing part is that the chinese equivalent is different. 2/F will be paired with “San Lou”, further confusing the heck out of you.
I met Ivan at Olympic, and we walked through the olympic mall, and visited his school from the outside. It was rather small, though, but very tall (for a school). I suppose that’s typical for Hong Kong buildings : developing height-wise rather than length and breadth-wise. After that we crossed a park (nice, but part of it is being converted into another train station. The sacrifices demanded by urbanisation) and had dinner at nam cheong centre’s mcdonald’s. He had to rush off for tuition; I suppose that’s a familiar fact for all city kids.
So its back to singapore. Did my previous forecast of what the hk trip would be like? All I can say is, sorta.
No tag for this post.