There is a story here about China’s latest animal trend – a vast improvement on the keyholders with live turtles. This one is painting pets to look like wid animals. Reminds me of Thailand’s panda craze or Banksy’s elephant in the room installation, below.
and the Elephant in the Room. Its an ironic commentary on world poverty. Obviously.
Four hundred kilograms of tiger meat have been found in an illegal exotic animal abbatoir. Slabs of freshly cut zebra and “elephant sashimi” were also recovered from the slaughterhouse in the Northeastern suburb of Khlong Sam Wa. Ewww. The clandestine bush meat butcher was only sprung when police followed home a man from a local 7-11. Their suspicions were raised because – get this – his hands were dripping with blood.
Only in Bangkok.
Several private zoos are under investigation, suspected of selling tigers to slaughter illegally to make money on the side. So far none have been charged.
In Sheung Wan
… the new Samsung ad, currently towering at an awkward angle over the entrance to Causeway Bay from the Aberdeen tunnel.
A puppie dog accomplice to the “Giant Rat Legitimacy” mentioned a few stories below, (scroll down). Both creatures – made of silicone with hairs individually injected in for added realism – are on show at the Wellington Gallery on Wyndham Street. Its next to the gay bar, Psychic Jacks.
Look what the rain brought out (photographed next to my hand for scale). In Quarry Bay.
Currently on display at the foyer of the IFC shopping mall, Hong Kong’s de facto town square, is “Lyuba”, a freeze-dried fifty thousand year old baby mammoth. Incredible.
Fresh from the icy wilds of Siberia and a tour of major US natural history museums, Lyuba can now be seen for free right here in Hong Kong.The enthralling exhibition easily bypasses a platick-y ‘garden’ by photographer Mika Ninagawa, an appearance by a Kate Middleton lookalike and even a singing humanoid robot to become my favourite shopping mall novelty attraction of the last year.
There are also videos, illustrations and a few remains depicting the remnants of other hulking mammals of ancient eras, like this elephant with tusks as long as its body, the dinotherium with its savage downwards-pointing chin tusks and the sabre-tooth tiger.
The Kadoorie Farm is a kind of horticultural park and wildlife refuge stretching over one steep hillside between Tai Po and Yuen Long. The air is fresh and fragrant, and the windong pathways are lined with all kinds of extravagant tropical plants. There are lotus ponds and fruit orchards, aviaries, reptile enclosures, wild monkeys by rushing streams and a small model farm.
There are eagles in a large enclosure, stick insects in glass cases, a camply-painted “zoo” enclosure with local species like deer, bats and boar, ponds of imported alligators and flamingoes and various reptiles rescued from the pet trade like a tortoise discovered, pathetically, in a public toilet. Or snakes captured after public complaints ( the king cobra is native to Hong Kong)
Just a few metres from the restaurant sits another of Stanley’s attractions, a charming little temple to the sea goddess Tin Hau. Although it is modest in scale, the temple stands out for two reasons. The first is its age. Dating back to the 17th century it is one of the oldest buildings in Hong Kong (although it has clearly been fairly recently reconstructed, on the exterior at least).
The second point of interest – other than the usual colouful altars and effigies- is the pelt of a tiger hanging on one wall. Blackened by the billowing incense smoke it is barely recognisable but a plaque handily explains that this is the skin of the last tiger shot in Hong Kong – an even that occurred, stunningly, as late as 1942.
Little more than fifty years ago tigers roamed the wooded hills of Hong Kong island, sharing it with one of the most densely populated cities in the world! The tiger was short right here in Stanley.
I saw an intriguing news item recently, all the more shocking because I was at its unlikely setting just two years ago: the Paris cats and dogs cemetery. I even took a photograph of the VERY GRAVE that concealed, little did I know, a now-stolen fortune (see my photo above)! Its like a particularly camp Tintin comic. If only I had thought to dig…
Tipsy was buried in a marble tomb in the world’s oldest pet cemetery in a Paris suburb in 2003.
For years there were rumours the dog’s wealthy owners had buried treasure with it, but this had never been confirmed.
But police told AFP news agency that when the grave was desecrated earlier this month the collar, worth 9,000 euros (£7,500: $12,000), was stolen.
They said the grave in the cemetery in Asnieres-sur-Seine was vandalised on the night of 4 February, the tombstone pulled down and Tipsy’s skeleton left strewn over the ground.
The site is now surrounded by yellow police tape and the cemetery closed for repair work while police investigate.
The mayor of Asnieres, Sebastien Pietrasanta, said he was astonished the jewels had been buried with Tipsy, AFP reports. But he stressed: “Treasure is not hidden in the tombs of all the dogs and cats.”
I love that last, pre-emptive statement to head off a rush of diamond-seeking dog-grave robbers!
For more on my trip to the cemetery read here, “Where the Dead Things Are”.
On my trip to the Hong Kong Museum of Art to see the “Fantastic Creatures” exhibition, I was surprised by the quality of the little-mentioned permanent collection. The pieces that stood out above all were the lavish pins and headdresses made from turquiose and, amazingly,kingfisher feathers cut into incredibly delicate forms with a lustrous, gem-like blue sheen.
From the Yomiuri Daily:
A dead shark was found near an entrance of Yoyogi Park in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, on Sunday morning, police said.
The 1.5-meter shark, which weighed more than 100kg, was found wrapped in a blue sheet by the entrance that leads to JR Shibuya Station.
According to the police, a security guard found the shark during a patrol of the popular park at about 6:30 a.m.
I love these kind of stories, which crop up in Tokyo with startling regularity. The city is a surreal concrete jungle populated by all manner of surprising creatures, from monkeys rampaging through Shibuya station, an alligator in a river in suburban Ebina and piranhas in the Tama, to a dead great white shark that was once found floating in a stinking canal in a Kawasaki industrial park. But a shark in Yoyogi Park? Even by Tokyo’s bizarre standards, that is unusual.
Apparently Twitter detectives have been on the case. It most likely originates from a Shibuya sushi store that was displaying a giant shark last week (after it proved too big to fit in the kitchen door). When it started to rot, the carcass was given away to an “artist” for his private use….and from there it is all murky.
The slogan: Don’t let these animals into parliament!
Picture: Bangkok Post
An alert reader of this blog recently tipped me off to this story. Since I was heading back to Bangkok, I decided to follow it up.
In 2005, the New World department store building in Banglamphu partially collapsed, killing one woman. The building had been constructed in violation of the building code, aiming to cash in on the roaring tourist trade on nearby Khao San Road. After the tragic incident however, the building was closed and slated for demolition. But as so often seems to happen in Thailand…nothing has happened. Almost ten years later the shell of the building is still standing over an intersection of Sam Sen Road, literally 100 metres or so North of the end of Khao San a block past the thronged footpaths of the Banglamphu market.
The New World, true to its name, has not died however. It just has taken a strange and unexpected turn. The building’s basement flooded (I am not sure whether from rainwater or burst pipes), and a large, dark pool of water has formed in the building’s lower floors, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Until, at least, one resident decided to release some fish who would keep the mosquito population down. Over the years though, with nowhere to go, the fish have multiplied to fill the dank lake.
Recently several Thai newspapers ran stories on the dangers of the site, which was attracting more and more people to come and feed the fish. I of course, immediately decided to join them!
Finding the department store was not too difficult. By brushing past the street market at its back door, and stumbling down a rubbish-filled alley (next to mysterious sign “Gay Cuts!!”) I was able to peer in through a wire fence – and there it was, the dark and mysterious lake, lapping against concrete pillars, up staircases and onto beaches of rubbish and building construction materials. And sure enough it was filled with koi carp, pale from lack of sun (or did I imagine that?).
I could not find a way to get in, but in the end I decided that was OK. Just gazing in at the strange lake in the bowels of a doomed building (the rest of which might come crashing down at any minute) filled me with a vague but powerful sense of unease.
I felt sorry for the fish.
On a bitterly cold morning on one of my last days in Korea, I decided to get out of the city crowds and head to somewhere low-key and relaxing. Picking up a bag of mandarines from a street vendor, I took the subway to Seoul Grand Children’s Park. This large, rather unfashionable complex was constructed with the Socialist ideal of providing a “playground” for the people, with fair rides, a second-tier zoo, various “culture halls” and an ice skating rink. These days, with Seoul serviced by whizz bang amusement parks with celebrity endorsements and huge wave pools, it feels charmingly outdated. In fact there is even a newer, bigger municipal “Seoul Grand Park” stealing its thunder. This leaves the Childrens Grand Park with the distinct, and appealing, atmosphere of a pleasure garden past its prime, drifting lazily into irrelevance. It is the kind of place where local families of modest means take their too-young-to-be-cynical children to eat corn on the cob and ride on the teacup rides, or local neighbourhood teenagers hang out on first dates. True to form, it is decorated with poorly rendered sculptures of various (unlicensed) Disney characters and animals, and studded with appealingly brutalist 1970s “pavilions”. I loved it.
I was coming partly out of nostalgia too. I had once had a date here at the reptile house.
The zoo contained lots of bare concrete pens painted with murals of exotic rainforests, waterfalls and Angkor Wat. It was depressing to see the animals shivering in their icy pens. Most of the monkeys had retreated indoors and visitors could enter the heated “monkey house” to see the “backstage” of their cages. Inside it was stuffy and hot and creatures shrieked and scurried. Tropical birds flew in indoor aviaries and weird, ugly animals like the nake mole rat and the tree-climbing porcupine (!) were on display. There was also a newer, comparatively high-tech “ferocious animals village” where big cats lazed right in front of glass panels, on cunningly heated pads.
In the tropical greenhouse my camera lens misted up with the sudden change in humidity. It was filled with old people chatting under the palm trees, out of the cold. It looked like they had been there all day.
I wandered around a bit, past the central Korean-style pagoda, over the frozen rink and past a statue of the sphinx, before getting the subway home.
One of Seoul’s amusement parks, Everland, contains a startling and unlikely attraction – the world’s best-documented talking elephant. Kosik the elephant speaks (in Korean) by putting his trunk in his mouth and uttering statements like “hello” and “that is good”.
It is a bizarre and little-known fact that elephants are capable of speech. But Kosik is not the first. In the 1970s a Russian elephant became famous after swearing on live Soviet television.
Kosik was brought to Korea as a very young infant and raised alone from other elephants. Having had no contact with his own species, he may believe that he is a ‘human’ giving rise to his attempts to communicate through speech. It is unclear to what degree he is aware of the meaning of his statements, or if he is merely mimmicking sounds like a parrot.
One of Seoul’s specialities is its charming little teahouses. These are especially thick in the area around Insadong, the city’s main “antique and art gallery” street that has developed into one of its biggest tourist traps. It is painfully crowded on weekends, full of shops selling Koreana to visitors (or at least out-of-towners), but the winding alleyways that snake off the main drag still have their charm in places. One of the most charming has always been the “Yetchatjip” tearoom. This is famous for its elegant, fruity (and expensive) Korean teas and its cluttered, grandmother’s attic-style interior but also for the birds that fly (or flew) freely around its interior, chirping away in the rafters.
When I went back this time though, I was disappointed to find the upstairs “aviary” section closed – seemingly permanently – and the finches firmly in their cages in the (still-charming) downstairs. Gone too were the turtles and goldfish that once lived under the glass-topped tables.
Seoul once had teahouses with iguanas, peacocks and monkeys as pets, but animal liberationists will be pleased to note those days seem to have ended now. Even the canaries that once so charmingly flitted around Yetchatjip are now kept under lock and key.
