Been waiting for this for a while
I'm on my way to see Stardust this evening, with a friend. It's not a high-profile film here, and although it officially opened yesterday, I haven't seen any noticeable advertising for it. I read the book years ago, and have re-read it a couple of times since, but unlike, for example, the Lord of the Rings, I don't have much in the way of expectations. I do consider myself a fan of Neil Gaiman, as well as a regular reader of his blog, and he's been - understandingly - hyping it for a while. It's been out for a while in the US, but it's not out in the UK or a bunch of other places yet, so we'll see how it is. Review below...
It was... good, not great. It's good to see Neil Gaiman's writing making it to the big screen, but it seemed to miss a certain fizz. If I was a cynic, I'd say it was toned down by Hollywood, but I didn't get a feeling of a great quest, or of being in a weird and fantastic land. Robert de Niro came across as a man enjoying playing a rather different role for him, Michelle Pfeiffer was a little one-dimensional, Clare Danes didn't feel grumpy or snarky enough, rather than just whiny, and Charlie Cox playing Tristan did pretty well as a slightly-bumbling but otherwise good and brave young man. In all, worth seeing, but not necessarily in a rush. One thing I should admit is that I managed to book the wrong cinema, so my young lady friend and I were a few minutes late and missed the start of the film - entirely my fault.
Am now on the train heading out for dinner and a movie. Two nights running! On the other hand, this train-blogging thing seems to work...
One year on
A year ago, in the Chinese calendar, I was on a plane, coming back to HK from 6 weeks in Europe. I know it was a year ago, because tonight is the Mid-Autumn Festival, and last year I arrived to find an email from a friend inviting me to join them to celebrate the festival on the beach at Shek O. I got in, dumped my baggage, had a quick wash, and headed out - as far as I remember, what we saw on the beach was largely groups of friends and families, barbecuing and lighting candles and lightsticks. I had been in HK for the festival the year before, but since I didn't have much of a social life at the time, I'm pretty sure I just marked it as a random day off work.
So what's the Mid-Autumn Festival all about? I don't know - and I don't think a lot of my Chinese friends and colleagues are all that bothered. They'll be able to tell me what the traditions are, but I doubt most of them care that much about the origin of the festival. Modern Hong Kong has a slightly odd connection to traditional Chinese festivals and superstitions - people here, in general, are very pragmatic, but they also tend to stick to traditions. As an example, a lot of shops have a visible shrine next to their door, and/or a waving cat in their window or behind their counter. Another tradition - which I'm not quite sure about - is allegedly a feng shui thing about putting a step at an entrance to stop bad spirits (dragons, luck, etc.) from getting in. I don't know if that's actually the reason, but it's pretty uncommon to see a shop or building entrance in Hong Kong without a step.
Anyway, back to the festival. The actual festival takes place at night, under a full (if cloud-covered, this year) moon, and mooncakes, candles and lanterns feature heavily in the activities, along with a large extended-family meal. As well as the public holiday, technically 'the day after the mid-autumn festival', it's common for offices and at least smaller shops to close early to allow staff to get home for the festive meal - my office officially closed at 3pm, and my local laundry closed at 5 rather than their usual 8. The MTR will apparently run all night tonight, as it does at Christmas and on both New Years ('secular' and Chinese), but I don't know what might be going on at, say, 2am to make it worthwhile - if it's particularly exciting, I'll report back.
In the meantime, I'm waiting at an MTR station to meet a friend to head over to Victoria Park to see a lantern, uh, thing. Dunno if it's big or small, dunno if there's anything like the New Year Market alongside it, dunno much - but that's a lot of the point of doing this 'living in Hong Kong' thing, do do things I don't know about, without expectations. Oh, and this entire entry was written on my Treo, on a train or at the station...
I should probably blog more often
First, a personal update, for anyone who cares: Not really anything much changed since the last post. I'm still working in the same place (for now, at least), still living in the same place, still hanging out with (mostly) the same people, still single and trying not to be. Not much else to say about that stuff, really.
And here's a collection of bits and pieces:
- A few weeks ago, I went back to the UK, and to Spain, for a few days. My cousin got married, and they decided quite sensibly to do it on a Mediterranean beach, rather than in the UK. It was a lovely wedding, and a good trip, even if it was a little too short - largely due to the shocking low amount of leave time I get at work now. I managed to stay at both my sisters' flats in London, while they weren't there, and saw a lot of old friends, as well as getting some financial stuff sorted out, and while it was good to be back, it was good to be back as a visitor.
This trip has confirmed for me that London is no longer home, HK is, at least for a while - part of the reason being that this is the first time I've been in the UK since I rented out my flat there, so I no longer have my own place in London - but more of the feeling is that of being a foreigner in London, and feeling like I was home when I got back to HK. My phone worked properly... my Octopus card worked... the money (and the prices) made sense... I am far better at getting around HK on public transport than I am in London, where I always had a car... I just feel more comfortable, more oriented, on the streets.
Spain, in the other hand, felt as much home as it always has done. I was reliably informed - by my Mum, who quite frankly should know - that the first time I visited that part of Spain was some time between being conceived and being born, and I've been visiting regularly ever since. I've been in Hong Kong for almost two and a half years, and I've been to Spain three times in that period. I have an almost Pavlovian reaction to being there, even when seemingly hundreds of my family are there at the same time - it's just so relaxing and so comfortable for me that I can't help but enjoy being there. As I said, the wedding was lovely, and it was one of those times when months of preparation came together, and on the surface at least, it all went very smoothly - in fact, the main complaint people had about the actual event was that the weather was too hot and one or two of the more elderly guests had to pop inside and get some shade and something cool to drink! I am very proud of my little cousin, and impressed by her giant Canadian bloke and his family/friends...
- A little snippet of life in HK: my parents bought a video camera for their wedding present, and suggested I throw in a spare battery as my contribution, as well, of course, as schlepping thousands of miles to get there for which I was cited in one of the wedding speeches. It's quite a common setup in HK, but I work on the 24th floor of an office building above a large mall, and there are a number of electrical stores in the mall, so I went into Fortress, which happens to be the closest to my office. I asked the staff for the battery by model number, and they found a similar one, differing only by capacity - but then told me that although they had a drawer-full of them, they couldn't give me a price and couldn't sell me one! It is very common practice in Hong Kong, and probably the most widely-spread form of haggling, when selling electronics, to throw in a bag of extras (e.g. batteries, cases, memory cards, etc.) to sweeten the deal. They only had the spare batteries available as freebies when buying a new camera, and wouldn't sell me one by itself.
- Another snippet: We are currently under a so-called T1 signal, also known as "the standby signal number 1". There are a number of weather signals published by the Hong Kong Observatory - the government agency which does weather forecasts and warnings - but the only interesting ones, really, are the rain signals (which run from amber to red to black) and the typhoon warning signals (which run T1, T3, T8, T9 and T10). The really interesting ones are black rain, remembering that Hong Kong is just about tropical, there is some serious rain here, and T8 or above, which means there's going to be a near miss (T10 means direct hit) from a typhoon. For any Western Hemisphere-based readers, what you call hurricanes in the Atlantic are what we call typhoons in the Pacific...
Last year, there was a pretty near miss from a relatively strong typhoon, but because the heavy weather only grazed some of the more isolated areas of Hong Kong, they only raised the T3 signal, and were strongly criticised for it. There is understandable reluctance to raise a T8 signal, as it effectively imposes a close-down on the city - schools, the financial markets, ferries and most companies stop operating. There was a T8 signal raised a few weeks ago, from a typhoon which had passed HK, getting close enough for a T3, but which then turned around and came straight for us - but by the time it reached us it was pretty weak. The observatory was then strongly criticised for raising the T8 when it wasn't really necessary, so those guys can't really win. I did see one very cynical suggestion that since it was at the peak of the recent instability in global financial markets, someone may have thought that having an excuse to close the HK market a few hours early was rather convenient...
And I'm going to stop there for now - but there is probably more to come at some point.