Monthly Archives: September 2012

This afternoon I ventured out to get a haircut. This trip was preceded by considerable research on the various expat forums, reading up on the suggestions for barbers. There is no shortage of women’s beauty salons in HK—there are a least two in the mall we live next to—but not a huge number of barbers, even in Central (which is the most Anglophone and clearly formerly-British area of HK). There are, evidently, very nice barbershops in the super nice hotels downtown, like the Mandarin Oriental, where they will clip and trim and wash and shave, all in a classy wood-paneled, leather-upholstered paradise, and oh by the way it’ll cost HK$700 (about US$90).

This is not where I got a haircut.

My haircut today cost HK$50 (less than US$7) and took less than 10 minutes, as they promise. Continue reading →

So since I’m probably going to be writing a lot about places in Hong Kong, allow me to present a short overview of Hong Kong geography. With a touch of history.

The name “Hong Kong” is usually rendered in English as “fragrant harbor,” though what exactly was so fragrant is not 100% clear: possibly the Pearl River delta, possibly incense stored for shipment in Aberdeen Harbor on the south side of Hong Kong Island, on which see more below. Here is a link to Google maps for your zooming-and-panning pleasure.

Now for an awesome older map, from ca. 1900 (via Hong Kong’s First). Continue reading →

Nice, right? Yes, in the lower left that is a portable Weber grill taped to a file box. But don’t worry, the file box has a charcoal chimney in it, so it all makes perfect sense.

This is what it looked like when all was said and done: once we had packed everything, loaded a bunch of it into a van and had movers load the rest of it into a truck, and crammed it all into Paul and Rodda’s basement (generously donated for a year of housing our too-many-books et cetera).

And this is what it looked like in our condo, once we had packed everything we thought we wanted and needed to bring to Hong Kong into two big-but-not-super-big bags. It turned out that two of them were, despite our meticulous use of Brett and Alicia’s bathroom scale, overweight, so we started our journey with a nice overweight baggage charge. But you amortize that over ten or eleven months, well, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. (Until you arrive and learn that a bunch of the things you thought you really needed to pack because there’s no way you could find it in Hong Kong, at least not with a huge amount of effort and expense that you don’t want to have to worry about in the first few days after a long flight and a new job and a new place to live and all of that… are in fact readily available. Alas.)

This is what it all came down to. Balancing the passports on top is an especially darling aspect of this photo.

Is there anything worse than packing? It is my considered opinion that there is not. Just over one week ago, this is what our condo looked like. But here’s the evil, insidious part of packing: I always think that we’re about two hours from being done. So at 10am, I’m thinking it should take about two hours to finish. Fast forward to 6pm, when I’m sure that in just two more hours, the kitchen will be completely packed. Repeat as necessary.

About two hours of packing should finish this off. Har.

Actually, there’s another evil part of packing: the visual change effected by one’s packing efforts does not correlate with the time required to complete that packing. So, for example, we can pack all of our books quite quickly, and it looks like we’ve done a lot of work. The bookshelves are empty, there is a fresh mountain of boxes—heavy boxes, too, which surely means that some serious packing occurred—and mild exhaustion has set in. Great! Time elapsed: two hours.

Then you start packing the kitchen. Oh lordy. Unlike books—which, despite their tendency to accumulate more quickly than seems reasonable, are at least all orthogonal, fairly sturdy, more similar in size than they are different, and rarely something one needs to consult multiple times a day—kitchen stuff is oddly shaped, either very heavy or very fragile, and stuff you use every day. So there you are, assembling box after box, each of which can contain a few pans or a single Dutch oven, leaving a couple of cubic feet of space you either need to stuff with packing paper or fill with “sundry items” that aren’t too heavy and will fit, Tetris-like, in the available space.

So that’s how, 12 hours later, you end up with boxes labeled “KITCHEN: Dutch oven, measuring cups, Ziploc bag of dog food, novelty Simpsons bottle opener, take-out soy sauce packets.” But of course you don’t actually label the boxes this clearly. That’s just a surprise treat for when you unpack.