This evening, I'm going to the pub quiz at Bulldogs in LKF, as I've done a few times recently, hoping to regain the form we showed the first time we entered, when we won - we've been mid-table most times since. While searching for their site, I came across a post on a tourist site describing someone's visit to Hong Kong in 2004 - they were apparently here for 3/4 days and a little underwhelmed. Incidentally, and as an aside, should, by a random chance, anyone from Upstart wander by, you might want to have a little look at the Google-friendlyness of that site - having the homepage come about half-way down the second page ain't great, I think, particularly when most of the hits above it are mentions of events which took place there. Anyway...

So, to be fair, the full paragraph the title of this post comes from is:

However, compared to other Asian cities I have visited (such as Seoul, Hanoi, Bangkok, Taipei, Fukuoka), Hong Kong really lacks the Asian character I have grown to love. Except for the the markets and temples, Hong Kong could be any Western city. The food, despite many different varieties, was somewhat bland. There is very little history beyond the last 150 years. The nightlife had a few great spots, but on the whole was a little disappointing.

I do understand the point being made, but I disagree with it - or at least, it's not a fair point. The post goes on to describe walking around Tsim Sha Tsui, eating in the mall next to the hotel, going to Temple Street Market, various bars in Wanchai, Lan Kwai Fong and TST, walking around Sheung Wan, going up the Peak, and for a walk around Hong Kong Park. In London terms, I would consider that similar to spending time in the West End, going to one or two of the city centre parks, and wandering around Soho and Leicester Square, both during the day for local colour, and at night for drinking - and then complaining that London doesn't feel like the country of Shakespeare and the Beatles.

This is not meant to be a complaint against the original poster. Hong Kong is a major world city - it calls itself "Asia's World City" - and is the direct result of 200 years of British control and development of a city which is, and was always, essentially Chinese. The first thing to say, therefore, is that yes, the tourist and and expat-heavy parts of town do feel very 'Western' (being, of course, a completely non-geographic term), because, in a feedback loop, they are the areas designed for and frequented by the tourists and expats. Going a little outside those areas does, quite quickly, show somewhere a lot less western - almost all of Hong Kong is a fusion of western and Chinese, with the feeling dictated by the amount of each in the mixture.

I work, for now, in Tsuen Wan. Going back to the start of this blog, I said that Hong Kong wasn't a city, and mentioned that things in Tsuen Wan are a lot more 'Chinese' than in town, and it's still very true. Walking around today at lunchtime, I looked for a simple thing - the amounts of English and Chinese on shop signs, price tags, shelf displays and so on. It's very clear, very quickly, that with the exception of big chain stores (banks, phone network stores, electronics places, etc.) almost nothing is written in English - apart, slightly strangely, from shop names themselves, which are commonly in both English and Chinese, and not uncommonly in just English. I suspect - although I have no real way of knowing for sure - that until recently, and possibly even still now, there was a certain cachet associated with an English company name, in the same way that the use of a little Latin in the UK gives an air of sophistication. Tsuen Wan is very Chinese - but in a Hong Kong way. I, speaking and reading effectively no Chinese, can still get around quite happily, even if my shopping is a little constrained by the language gap and, importantly, I don't feel like a foreigner. Yes, I'm in a bubble, simply because I can't understand the conversations or signs around me, but a lot of people know a little English, even if it's just enough to say 'hello', name a price, and say 'thank you' - and even if they can't, their cash registers or calculators still use regular ('Arabic') numerals, not Chinese ones. I've been in places - Soweto comes to mind - where I felt like an outsider, a foreigner, and that's simply not the case here, even in Tsuen Wan. Maybe that's a sign of it not being hardcore 'Asian', being too 'Western' - maybe I've been here long enough to feel comfortable in a heavily Chinese (albeit urban) area - but either way, it's not a bad thing, I think. Yes, in the evenings I go out to areas which are mainly expat/tourist areas, but I know that, and I know I can always jump on a bus, tram or ferry and be in 'Hong Kong' in a few minutes.

"If the point of terrorism is to inspire terror, the terrorists have won again."

That is very true - but also completely wrong, and I'm quite shocked to see people still writing things like that at this point. If the point of terrorism - but that is no longer the point of terrorism. If one is, say, an Irish terrorist, and one's goal is to unite the Emerald Isle under honest Catholic rule (or alternatively to keep the clean Protestant counties of Ulster away from heathen Papist rule), one is fighting for a cause. I absolutely deplore the indiscriminate targeting of innocents, but a rational mind can understand and respect their cause, and argue that if they lay down their weapons - as has largely happened in Ireland now - honest men could get around a table, debate the issues, and come up with a compromise. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying it would be a solution - but it's possible to come up with something which everybody is capable of living with, as opposed to dying for. Incidentally, and without wanting to bring Israel into this, I would put a large majority of Palestinians into this group - they have a largely just cause, and although they are fighting for it in the wrong way, there are possible - painful, torturous, but possible - routes to a compromise which would, on a day-to-day basis, make it possible for everyone in the region to get on with their lives.

The people who blow themselves up on trains in London, Madrid and Mumbai, and in clubs in Bali, who fly planes into skyscrapers and try to destroy 10 planes on the same day leaving Heathrow are not the same people. In the past, the old chestnut that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" did have a kernel of truth. Terrorists - or freedom fighters - were fighting for Palestine, Ulster, the Basque country, Tamil Eelam, for freedom from foreign or oppressive rule. In general, while their methods may have been condemned, they were fighting for a relatively popular cause, at least within their own circles, and so they enjoyed some support, usually have a 'political wing' (or constitute the 'military wing' of a larger political group). They could be negotiated with - and in the case of all 4 examples given above, have gone at least as far as a 'cease-fire', which has held for a while, allowing some people and businesses in their areas to get on and start making something of their lives - to help the people for whom they are supposedly fighting to gain some level of normality.

The new breed of - let's be frank - Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are not like that. Their goals and motives are so alien to a rational, 'western' mindset, that there can realistically be no negotiation, no cease-fires, no compromise and, I am coming to believe, no beating them. For what it's worth, when I say 'western', I do include countries like Russia and China, although the Islamic terrorist groups acting in and around those countries fall more into the older mould, fighting for freedom for Chechnya or East Turkestan, for example. It should also go without saying, but probably wouldn't, that when I say Islamic terror, I am not talking about Muslims in general, or Islamic belief in general. While Islam may well be a more militant religion than Christianity or Judaism, the mainstream thought does not condone mass murder. Most Muslims are, in my experience, like most Jews, Christians, Buddhists, whatever - they want to live their lives, make a living, fall in love, bring up their kids right, and so on - they are sane enough to believe that mass murder is wrong, however many virgins you're promised in heaven afterwards. They know the difference between being willing to put their life on the line for a cause, and desiring to die for a cause - one is sane, the other is not.

These people - and the groups which fund, supply and provide ideological support to them - are non-rational. The older 'freedom fighters' were fighting for a recognisable cause, and as such, in general, were after attention ("Notice our cause!") and fear ("It'll be easier to give us what we want in the long run!"), but they were also aware of their reputation and support. They tend to restrain themselves, to some extent, because they understand that they can easily go too far and start acting against their cause, they care what third-party groups (e.g. US, UN) think of them. The newer groups simply have different methods, different goals, and do not care what people think of them. They are effectively anarchists - their goal is to destroy societies outright.

In other words, "If the point of terrorism is to inspire terror, the terrorists have won again." - I honestly believe that the point of modern fundamentalism Islamic terror is not to inspire terror - it's to destroy and kill on a massive scale. I think a more correct phrase for today's world is "If you die, the terrorists have won again."

None of this - hopefully obviously - is to condone terror, be it Irish, Tamil, Basque, Zulu, or Arab/Islamic. It's to point out that terrorism and terrorists have changed - and so attitudes towards them have to change as well. I currently have a flight back to the UK booked for a couple of weeks from now, and I fully intend to be on the plane - and if the authorities still believe at that time that safety demands that I carry nothing but my passport and a wallet, so be it. When I get to London safely, I will have beaten the terrorists.

• This article at Haaretz, an openly leftish, peacenik Israeli newspaper, covers some things I've been thinking about for a couple of weeks. To sum it up: if we want to show that this is a war against Hizbollah, not Lebanon, we need to put our money where our mouths are - a stable and financially successful Lebanon is far less of a threat to Israel, and far less of a breeding-ground for extremists than is Lebanon as a pile of smoking ruins. We, paradoxically, have an opportunity to prove that there is compassion, not hatred, for the Lebanese civilians (but see below) caught up in this, and back that up with humanitarian aid, starting about the point where the bombs stop falling. I'm not sure I quite agree with every word of the article, but I agree with the point - even if it's only a symbolic thing, a joint Jewish/Arab reconstruction fund should be put together, maintained by as close to a disinterested third party as we can find. It may not achieve a huge amount of actual reconstruction, but the point should be made.
• Israel, for better or worse, and for real or imagined, has been living under siege conditions for about 58 years now. Every building is built with security in mind - most apartment/office/institutional buildings have a bomb shelter, and pretty much all buildings have a 'security room' or 'safe room' - a reinforced room, with metal shutters on the window, pointed away from whatever the nearest threat is expected to be. Netuah, which has individual houses, has communal shelters, maintained by the regional council, and the dorm buildings I lived in in Jerusalem all had shelters in the basement. In my main school, I worked in a shelter, underground, for a few months, which was good in terms of the weather (cool in summer, warm in winter), but it was slightly odd to go in every day, open the heavy metal door and go down under the strongly-fortified roof. I wonder to what extent - if any - things are similar in Lebanon? Would some of the victims of the violence be alive or uninjured if they had communal protection because they have expected attack for years? It's not a nice thing - as I said in my first post on this subject - that people live like that, but maybe it's more realistic.
• Israel has a conscript/reserve army - most able-bodied non-Arab (Druze and Bedouins are the only Arabs groups which volunteer in large numbers for the army) citizens are members of the army. That does not mean - as suicide bombers have claimed on occasion - that all such citizens are valid military targets. When Israeli authorities announce casualties, they make a separation between civilians and soldiers, and most of the Israelis who have died so far have been soldiers - meaning they were on active service, in a uniform, at the time. Most of the Lebanese who have died have been civilians, meaning that they are not members of the Lebanese armed forces. Unfortunately, that may not mean very much, since the Lebanese armed forces aren't particularly participating in the current violence... So the question is, do the huge, tragic numbers of Lebanese civilians include Hizbollah soldiers/terrorists/militants/activists - whatever you want to call them? A quick look at the current BBC headline story shows:

  More than 900 Lebanese, most of them civilians have been killed in the conflict, the Lebanese government says. More than 80 Israelis, most of them soldiers, have also been killed.

  But yes, very few Lebanese soldiers have been killed because they're not attacking Israel. I don't know the answer to this one - again, just a wondering.
• I've been getting emails from an old friend in northern Israel - the one who organised the program I did there in 1995. At some point, I may write more about what he's been saying, but one quote - the end of an email from last week - does pretty much sum up the point:

  ...it is our duty to ensure that we don't just survive and continue, but we create a society based on Justice and Righteousness so we fulfill the dreams of two thousand years "that from Zion the Torah will go forth and the word of G-d from Jerusalem" despite the current reality we must be strengthened by our belief that the day will come that "no nation will raise its sword against another nation, and the art of warfare will no longer be taught"

  The quotes there, of course, are from the Bible, from the book of Micah. My friend is more religious than I am, but that is a pretty clear definition of Zionism and of mainstream Israeli thought. Yes, it's a bit messianic, but it really is the point. I don't particularly want to argue the nature of Zionism here...

I needed to get out of Hong Kong for a little bit - somewhere further than Macau. I do like it here, but it can get a bit claustrophobic, and most people seem to like a weekend away every now and again. Me being me, I spent days comparing every possible option online, at Singapore Airlines' site, Cathay's site, Zuji (Travelocity's Asian affiliate) and various random local travel agents. In the end, I walked into Travel Expert, a retail travel agent, a few minutes walk from my flat, and sat and discussed it with them, finally coming up with a plan with was a bit more expensive than I'd planned, but seemed to do the job. In summary, it was flights on Singapore Airlines, leaving Hong Kong Friday morning, returning Sunday afternoon, staying at the Furama City Centre hotel in Singapore, with breakfast thrown in, airport train tickets for Hong Kong, and some travel insurance. So, come Friday morning, off I went

I did my usual paranoid packing on Thursday evening - it was just a weekend away, but I had to make sure I had packed everything I'd need, right? - so by Friday morning all I really had to do was get up, have breakfast, get washed and dressed, pack my toiletries, and walk out. Wandered down the escalator, jumped on the train, straight through check-in - which is very easy when you've only got carry-on - straight through passport control and security, and I was in the departure lounge about an hour after walking out of my front door. I think that's pretty good - I doubt there are many major cities where that sort of thing runs so efficiently.

The flight was pretty much a non-event - got on the plane, sat down, read a bit, watched some of a movie I had compressed onto my Treo, listened to some music, chatted to the Australian sitting next to me, landed, got off. Decent entertainment system, marred by still having a silly pseudo-proprietary plug for the headphones - I have far better headphones than the one they provide, so I'd prefer to use them, thank you - I'm not going to steal your crappy cheap'n'nasty things. I wouldn't say the airport was as nice as Hong Kong to land at, but it wasn't bad, and I was out and onto a mini-bus pretty quickly.

To the hotel... I'd spent ages looking into hotels, and the advice seemed to be that the Furama City Centre (there is another Furama somewhere else in Singapore) was a nice enough place, in a useful location. To be honest, I wasn't planning to spend too much time in the hotel - it's not like I was going on a resort holiday where I would spend all day beside the hotel swimming pool - so all I wanted was a bed I could sleep in, a bathroom with a nice shower, and some aircon. To be honest, that was about all I got. The hotel is perfectly serviceable, the staff are helpful without being particularly friendly about it, but the location is very good. I mainly had CNN on TV while I was in the room (more mid-east stuff coming later!), the shower was pretty good, but with a fixed head, the aircon worked well, there was a minibar and a safe (which I completely forgot about until I realised I was about to check-out without my passport!), but the beds (2, in a twin room) were very firm - not uncomfortable, but if you like a soft bed, you wouldn't get one. Breakfast was okay - nothing amazing, but a good start to the day, with a variety of eastern and western, hot and cold, healthy and fun foods.

After I got in, I did what I normally do in a new city - grabbed a map and went for a walk, to get my bearings. I didn't go that far, just to the river and over, to Clarke Quay, where I had a coffee and jumped on the very touristy river cruise. The river itself is nothing special - slow and muddy - but the views are good, and the commentary, while very enthusiastic and gushing, was informative. There are two cruises - 30 minutes and 45 minutes - which both run from the Merlion out at the entrance to the river up to Clarke Quay, with the longer cruise extending further upriver as far as the top of Robinson Quay. I then popped up to Orchard Road, on foot, getting quite lost around the start of the road where there are roadworks and various closed or redirected roads and pavements. Orchard Road is the main shopping road in Singapore city centre, and is lined by malls of varying levels of expensiveness. I went into the Plaza Singapura, where I spent a while wandering around, then went onto the Centrepoint, where I was quite chuffed to find that M&S in Singapore do stock me-sized trousers, unlike M&S in Hong Kong...

Headed back to the hotel with my new trousers, by cab - was quite shocked by the price of the cab, having got used to Hong Kong cab prices. The problem in Singapore isn't so much that the rates are high, but that there is a variety of surcharges which apply - for using a cab during peak hours and/or picking it up in town, mainly - which make it significantly more expensive than Hong Kong. One cabbie actually made it very explicit when he offered to drop me off around the block from my hotel, rather than at the entrance, because he preferred to get a new fare than creep along in traffic, racking up small amounts on the fare.

I'd planned to meet up with someone on Friday night, but she'd discovered she had plans, so we'd arranged to meet at about midnight. I started getting ready to go out to the night safari, but she called to say she'd be free earlier, so I popped out to find something to eat - I'm slightly ashamed to admit I ended up with a tuna sandwich at DeliFrance. Met up with Phated (not her real name...), walked for a while to get to a closed Irish pub, walked back a bit to get to a gay bar, went in and had a drink... Then went onto Clarke Quay, walked the length of it, then went into a tapas place and had a couple of drinks, some gazpacho soup (me) and some chicken (her). Then to bed, feeling lumps appearing on my feet - blisters from too much walking...

Breakfast, went out walking, got to the Funan mall (one of the the main tech malls in Singapore), got rather caught up in the idea of buying a new laptop, decided it was a stupid thing to be wasting time on during a weekend away, had a coffee, jumped on the MRT back to the hotel to put on blister plasters. Back at the hotel, I called Rubina, who unfortunately had a busy weekend and couldn't meet up with me - but it was nice to talk to her.

The MRT. Also know, in Hong Kong, as the MTR. Essentially the same thing. The same ticketing system - with one difference, that MRT single-use tickets are re-usable and can be returned at any ticket machine to get a $1 deposit back, which MTR single-use tickets are disposable - the same machines, similar turnstyles, very similar trains - even similar colours on the lines, although the MTR lines are much more interestingly-named. As far as I could tell, the EZ-Link, the MRT stored-value cards, can only be used for travel, as opposed to the incredibly useful Octopus card in Hong Kong, which can be used all over the place for all sorts of different purchases. I did try to get an EZ-Link card, just for the sake of it, but the bloke in the booth told me it wasn't worth it for two days and that I should just buy single-use tickets... I ended up bringing one back with me, so that's a $1 deposit I won't be getting back - call it a souvenier.

Back out, in some foot pain, walked down to Boat Quay, which was pretty dead - I guess it's busy on weekday lunches with people coming from the nearby CBD, and in the evenings - for some curry sitting by the river. Then walked across the Elgin bridge and up to the Asian Civilisations museum, which was an absolute madhouse, with a public 'walk for racial harmony' starting there at about that time, and was advised by a member of staff to come back another time. Walked back across the river, over the Cavenagh bridge, down to the MRT, which I caught up to Orchard Road. By the time I got there, I really couldn't be bothered with any more shopping, so I sat in Starbucks, had a coffee, then headed back to the hotel again.

Night Safari! Ended up getting a cab there, since the guys in the hotel pointed out that it would take ages to get there by public transport - a cab was relatively fast, but quite expensive. The Night Safari is one of the major tourist attractions of Singapore, and quite rightly - it's a very well-planned and executed attraction. The theory behind it is quite simple: a lot of animals are nocturnal, partially or wholly, so when you look at them in a regular zoo, you often find a lot are asleep. The Night Safari is open from 7:30pm until midnight - when I got there at about 8:30pm on Saturday night, it was almost dark and very busy. I went to the show which, while entertaining, was largely an old-fashioned performing animal show, complete with a plant in the audience - good, but not what I was there for. After that, I went on the tram, which I'd paid extra for, and which is actually an electric vehicle towing a bunch of carts - quite comfortable, very quiet, and a good way to see the place without having your feet explode. The narration wasn't bad - a bit too lively and not cynical enough, but nowhere near as bad as the river cruise. I got off at the halfway point and did a bit of walking, including into the really cool mangrove habitat, which is where a bat urinated on me. I was standing in there, enjoying seeing and feeling the bats flying around my head, when one of them obviously decided I'd been in there too long, and let fly over my head and a couple of other blokes where were also admiring them. Shortly afterwards, after wiping my head with a Wet Wipe, I got back on the tram for the second half - also very interesting - and headed home in another cab.

Sunday morning, got up, went to breakfast, packed, thought I'd lost my DS Lite, was all prepared to report it to the hotel and/or the airline on the way out, then realised that I also didn't know where my passport was - slightly more important, I think - and went back to get them all from the safe in my room. I honestly can't remember why I put my DS in the safe... I went up to the Asian Civilisations Museum, which was a lot saner than on Saturday, and did their guided tour. Ow, my feet. Good museum, good tour, but the interesting thing was the group. It was just the people who'd arrived at the museum during a particular time period - a few Brits, a few Indians, a fer Malays, and a few Chinese - but a lot of people in the group will have learned as much, if not more, from others in the group than from the tour. Not that the tour was bad, but we had live representatives from most of the groups covered in the museum to hand and feeling chatty - the Indians and the Chinese were comparing religious views and traditions, and I was discussing linguistic differences and similarities between Hebrew and Arabic (and to some extent, how that reflected Judaism and Islam) with a couple of the Malays. All in all, interesting, informative and quite relaxing - a good museum and well worth a visit. In fact, worth a longer visit that I could give it, both because standing and walking around weren't exactly what I wanted to do, and because I had to head to the airport sooner or later.

Left the museum, spent a while wondering if it was worth trying to fit in anything else in the hour or so I had before I had to be heading to the airport, decided not to bother, jumped on the MRT to the airport. It was a good move, both because it meant more time to hang around the quite pleasant (though slightly less efficient) departure lounge, and because unlike the mini-bus I'd taken into town from the airport on Friday afternoon, the train goes through the suburbs, mainly on raised track, so it was a good opportunity to see some more of Singapore out of the city centre, from above. Obviously, I saw the suburbs the train happened to pass through, but it did give me the impression of a calm, organised, relatively low-rise city, which could easily be somewhere in Europe or Australia - I mean that as both a statement of fact and, to some extent, as a compliment - the suburbs of Hong Kong generally look quite Asian, quite Chinese, quite foreign to me, while Singapore seemed a lot more familiar.

In fact, I'd say that goes for Singapore as a whole. The prevalence of English probably has a lot to do with it, and I was mainly in the city centre and Chinatown, but in general, it felt a lot less foreign than Hong Kong often does. I like foreign - it's one of the reasons I like living in Hong Kong - but the people in charge of Singapore have obviously set out to create an organised, 'civilised' city, and have done so. It's not as exciting as Hong Kong, but the people are friendly, it's easy to get around, there's lots going on, the tourist infrastructure is well put together, and the different sides of the city make it interesting. I'm not sure I'll hurry back, but I'm glad I went - all in all, well worth a weekend trip from Hong Kong. Just take care of your feet.

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