Sham Shui Po Food safari!

Sham Shui Po, discussed previously on the blog here and here is one of the most rewarding areas of Hong Kong for exploring on foot, at least for those interested in the gritty, grimy “old Hong Kong” of bustling street markets, cheap and exotic restaurants (and cramped, slummy housing blocks).

One of the city’s poorest and old neighbourhoods (as in, it has the highest median age), it has resisted the glitz and glamour that has swept up much of the island and increasingly, Kowloon, in the wake of the continuing Chinese mainlander tourist boom. Instead it offers blocks of hawkers selling underwear, electrical cables, jade, pirated mainlander DVDs from the 1980s, tatty T-shirts and much else. Stores sell beads or zippers or costume jewellery. The pavements hum with jostling crowds. This is where working class locals,the unemployed and the retired, impoverished new arrivals and  maids on their day off come to shop and eat.

Not surprisingly then, it is home to some of the city’s best loved “street food”. This weekend I went on a tour of some of SSP’s most famous eating establishments – all cheap, no-nonsense, plastic stool-and-formica joints with queues running out the door.

Foremost of these is the Wai Kee noodle cafe, famed for its French toast and its pork-liver-with-ginger noodles (above, unappetizing looking but tasty).

We also stopped by another store, around the corner for its locally esteemed handmade, bamboo-pressed noodles with pork knuckle.

The area is also a stronghold of snake restaurants, like the female-helmed Snake King Yip and Snake King Shan, decked out in stuffed reptiles and snakeskin handbags for sale.

All of this was topped off with a local dessert of hot sesame soup, almond milk and kiwi-juice, although I skipped the frog’s ovaries.

The Northside

Quiapo and Bindondo, north of the weed-choked Pasig River, are Manila’s gritty, teeming market districts. Since where I was staying in Malate seemed quite gritty and teeming enough, I wasn’t sure if I really needed to make the trip. But on my second day in the city I worked up my confidence and hopped on the train. I’m certainly glad I did.

I saw so many interesting things on the streets that day – but took photos of none of them. The pressing crowds, gun-toting security men outside stores and general air of dilapidation made it clear this was not a neighbourhood for taking casual happy snaps. When a train rumbled above on the old elevated track and hip hop blasted from a parked motorbike-taxi, I felt the urgency of the beat like never before. It was like “this is what hip hop was supposed to sound like”. It made sense in a place like this.

Among the stalls of clothes, vegetables, live pigeons, flowers, folk medicine and bras was the Church of Quiapo, home to a sacred black image of Christ that is paraded through the streets every Easter. It stood in a cluster of vendors selling creepy Catholic saint dolls in elaborate lacy robes,  with big unblinking eyes. A golden-domed mosque nearby, meanwhile, was built for Muammar Gaddafi in an attempt to dissuade the old despot from funding Muslim separatists in the country’s Deep South (it didn’t work).

From Corriedo train station I wandered to the Quiapo church at Plaza Miranda, then back, through a neighborhood that reminded me powerfully of Sao Paulo – same once-lovely, now dirt-streaked 1940s office blocks, crazy traffic and hole-in-the-wall shops. In one corner of this district is Manila’s Chinatown.

The main Chinese legacy in this part of the city though is farther North at Abad Santos station. Here a cemetery spreads out amid flowering magnolia trees in a sprawling walled compound. I had heard rumours of the lavish crypts within built for the deceased Chinese tycoons – some with airconditioning, electrical applicances, functional plumbing, all empty but for the spirits. The dead here lived better than many of Manila’s living.

But as if to underscore the odd divide between this place and the rest of the city, I trudged for ages down fume-choked roads on narrow, broken  footpaths covered in mucus and mud, looking for a way in. Sometimes the cemetery would appear tantalisingly through cracks in barred gates – silent avenues of marble “mansions” and shady trees and pagodas. But I could never find the way in.

It felt like a metaphor for something…

Kowloon with my iPhone

  

Brunch in Tai Hang: a photo essay

It was a rare blue-sky day on Saturday so to celebrate the blazing sunshine – so often lost in Hong Kong’s cloud cover or smoggy haze – I headed out for brunch to its cutest neighbourhood, Tai Hang.

  

A very overpriced salad.

  

A big part of the area’s charm – oddly – are the many auto mechanics, adding a pleasant grittiness to the summery streets. Interspersed with the garages and the flaking, period apartment blocks are  rapidly increasing yuppie cafes (which, admittedly, was the reason I was here). I wonder how long the old panel beaters will last now the area has been ‘discovered’?

 

Stanley

This week, I ventured the first time to the “village” of Stanley, a well-known tourist trap at the ‘extreme’ (ie 25 minutes from Central) Southeasernt tip of Hong Kong island. A friend had invited me there for, of all things, tapas and other people had mentioned to me how nice it was. Still, I was quietly blown away by its beauty when I got there.

Stanley is approached by a “To Catch A Thief” style winding corniche above the lapping waves, with villas and apartment blocks and palm trees and bright pink bouganvillea along the way.  You pass by lovely Deepwater Bay, the wealthy haven of Repulse Bay with a forest of gargantuan and oddly-shaped highrises backed by lush green hills, and then descend to Stanley itself, on a narrow isthmus with the sea on two sides (like Manly in Sydney, of which it seemed a frankly nicer version).

There is a mini-Chatuchak market of stalls selling tourist junk in winding alleys, a waterfront promenade, little shady beaches, a well-healed “lifestyle mall” and an impressive colonial looking building by the waterfront. This had been cut up, brought from the other side and reconstructed, and now houses the very tapas restaurant where we were to eat (very well!)

Saphan Khwai

Saphan Khwai is a little-discussed neighbourhood in Bangkok, wedged between the higher-profile Ari with its glitzy “in” restaurants and the monster that is Chatuchak. But over the last week, while I have been staying here, I have quietly come to love the place. It is a very down-to-earth Thai neighbourhood. It is also super-lively. The two main drags, along Pradiphat Road and Phaloyothin are home to bustling, and exotic, street markets selling food, amulets, wooden carvings, old magazines and paper backs, cheap batik-print clothes for grandmothers from the provinces (I bought some shorts), flowers and even Arabian-style shoes –  all kinds of other wonderful things, all dirt cheap.

On weekends the stretch of road outside the local post office becomes an amulet market, dedicated to the sale of magical talismans and divine images. From here, a few blocks north brings you to a cluster of hippie-ish middleaged men with long hair and feathers in their headbands selling statues of Buddha next to Jar Jar Binks, army surplus gear, and bones and horns.

 

In addition, there are old-skool open-fronted Thai “mom and pop” stores, filled with unbelievable clutter – rubber crocodiles and bronze busts, statues of gods, old calendars from the 80s, Blu-ray players…

There is also a 50 baht (less than US1.50) retro cinema:

  

..and a pair of grand dame retro hotels, the Liberty Garden and the less flamboyant but equally old fashioned “Pradiphat Hotel”:

Plus, I was surprised to find, something of a local gay scene, with the subway and Skytrain and Chatuchak market and its adjacent park all within a fifteen minute walk. Its a great place to stay if you want to get a slightly more “local” slice of Bangkok life.

Sukhumvit street scene

  

Blue hearts

♥ Itaewon

Itaewon is one of the most amazing neighbourhoods in the world. In the heart of a huge yet strikingly homogenous city, sandwiched between a US military base, a river and a mountain, Itaewon is a law unto itself.

It is almost like a ghetto (in the strictest sense of the word),  the place Seoul sends all its outcasts, its “other”: US marines braving the sometimes hostile city around them, Japanese tourists, gay men, horny straight men, Muslims, African immigrants. The strange, the curious. They all come together here, and by and large, get along.

Many ‘PC’ Western expats are dismissive of the area. Many Koreans are afraid of it (and just as many intrigued).

Because for all its global economic clout, Seoul is not a cosmopolitan city. At least it wasn’t when I lived in it (has this changed?) To me it seemed inward looking, closed-off. Stifling even.

Itaewon is/was the sole place where the “outside world” permeates through, with Bulgarian, Paraguayan and “Dubai” restaurants, Latin clubs and most startlingly, a hilltop mosque.

The main street is crass. Despite a recent swing upmarket at the Hannamdong end, its lower stretches are still lined with burger joints,  sports bars, and shops selling hiphop clothes in Western sizes. This is the tacky “Little America” of Itaewon’s critics. But it is also just the beginning. Winding away from all of this are tiny streets lit with red neon crosses, climbing up the hillsides, full of blind corners and dead ends.

There is a street of boisterous hip hop clubs for the overwhelmingly black American G.I.s, driving by in jeeps blasting Lil’ Jon, and neon-lit strip clubs. There is an alleyway of food vendors selling pigs jowls and Korean noodles that transforms every Sunday into an “African street”  with Nigerian immigrants in sweeping robes, conversing in Yoruba (although for how much longer?) There is a street of prostitutes and and one of gay bars, known respectively as  ‘Hooker’ and ‘Homo’ Hill. And in the sloping backstreets are chic, luxurious drinking dens and luxury apartments for ambassadors.

Sometimes these disparate elements merge in the most surreal ways. I remember the almost dreamlike sense of horror (and excitement) on turning around in a thumping club to find a US military raid in progress, with armed and uniformed soldiers searching the dancefloor for marines and demanding ID of all Westerners. They were checking for soldiers frequenting “black listed” venues (this was in the days of don’t ask, don’t tell). Other times I met glamorous transsexual pop stars. Or got dragged out of a gay club at 4am – sparkly top and all – to the ghetto fabulous hip hop joint around the corner, where despite my misgivings I found the guys friendly and ended up chatting in a corner with girls called LaShonda and Ebonique.

But my best memory of all is of  Chu-seok, Korea’s most revered national holiday. Little girls dressed in ceremonial hanboks and their mothers were trudging happily back up the hill at dusk, and the Pakistani brothers who owned the halal butcher on Homo  Hill had dragged a sofa outside to sit and chat to the passersby on their way to the clubs. The straight clubs were all closed, so lots of US servicemen had decided to brave the “dark side” as had Korean boys no doubt ready to blow off steam after a day of family bonding. That night we all partied on the sweaty dancefloor (to Danii Minogue’s “Put the Needle On It” no less) and emerged in the morning to find the city had been devastated by a typhoon – of which we had no inkling.

Despite these rose-coloured glasses, it has to be said that Itaewon is not always so idyllic. It can be sordid.  It has a carnal energy and in parts, an undeniably dodgy vibe. Sex is in the air. Every doorway holds a promise or a secret. Yet it is also the freest place in the city.

When I lived in Seoul, I spent every Saturday night in Itaewon, on the dancefloors of the city’s wildly hedonistic gay clubs. I loved it, unhesitantly and unashamedly. I have wondered since if it was really as beautiful as I had imagined. But on this trip back, as I got off the subway at Itaewon and walked up the hill I sensed that old magic immediately; there were black American marines flirting heavily with white American girls, while African men watched on giggling, a beautiful Japanese girl wearing a “Daniel Boon” raccoon hat, with her equally handsome and bohemian boyfriend, a group of  biracial-looking guys conversing fluidly in Spanish-cum-Japanese and Koreans in cornrows. When I got to the club itself, everyone – Korean or otherwise – broke into an ecstatic, elated party.

I found this in an old email I sent out when I left Korea:

“All those nights under the neon crucifixes and minarets and mirrorballs of Homo Hill, with a yellow-white-black-transsexual-hooker-hiphop-Muslim-military crowd, united for one brief moment in its desire to dance to “Crazy in Love”. Or bless em, Dannii Minogue. Then retiring for breakfast to the cafe between the mosque and the “In and Out Pretty Girls Massage Service”, where you can order pickled cabbage and boiled silkworms in Korean, Russian or Japanese. That has been truly magical.  I’m going to miss this.”

And I have.

Muslim pilgrims on their way to the mosque, trudging past a Russian strip club called Manhattan.

The Mosque on the Hill

The mosque on Itaewon hill, for many years the only one in Korea, presides over the whole neighbourhood, punctuating its strange otherness.  It squats, imposing and mysterious, above a ramshackle, very Korean-looking neighborhood. Amid the usual red brick houses, neon crosses and snaking alleyways, stores sell “halal ramen” or hangul  Korans and parties of white clad pilgrims drift by on their way to prayer, while hookers saunter past in cut-off denim shorts.

Although some Muslims might object, I have always felt a strange affinity for the building – imagining its minarets lit all through the night as a beacon to the gay, the black, the Muslim, the other (for whatever reason,) calling them into Itaewon’s comforting (yet musty) embrace.

I remember at the end of many long Itaewon nights, sitting in my taxi as we glid down the hill and out of Itaewon back to the “other”, everyday Seoul,  looking up at that comforting light in the night sky, thinking of the Smiths song:  There is a Light That Never Goes Out.

Itaewon: night and day

  

Walk of shame

Hookers Hill is, of course, seedy. With that name how could it not be? Even so, the little crooked street is not without its charm – not least in the creative names of its various establishments, where dowdy-looking middleaged women catcall you as you hurry by on your way to the nearby gay bars.  Last Chance, Starbutts (now sadly gone, I notice), Hard Rain, Russian Rio – all promising a world of glamour, escape and excitement starkly at odds with this tired little street in the hard light of morning.

Homo Haven

Korea is not always an easy country in which to be gay. A puritanical Christian streak layered over Confucian ideals of duty and family honour ensures that. One gay friend, when he came out to his mother, was asked to commit suicide. Not surprisingly then, most gay people in Korea have lived secretive double lives.

While homsexuality is legal, there is one important exception: it is a punishable offence in the military where gay sex is coined, bizarrely, “consensual rape” and punishable by two years in prison. Since all Korean men have to join the army, this effectively makes it illegal for gay men to have sex between the ages of twenty and twenty two (if ever there was a law to be broken!)

Against this bleak backdrop, it is no surprise that gay Koreans have created and sought out their own places of refuge, some literally ( a Korean gay man was recently accepted as a refugee in Canada due to the military issue), but most in the familiar form of gay bars.

Itaewon, of course, is the epicentre of gay Seoul.

A block from Hooker Hill on the same hillside snaking up to the mosque is a small but pumping stretch of five or six lively and vivacious gay bars. It is known – whether with affection or disdain – as Homo Hill.

I was always amazed by the party spirit on the hill. People would quickly shed their inhibitions and expode. The parties there were – regularly – amazing.

Yet things are changing, and as ever in Korea, quickly. Acceptance is growing and the tiny scene is getting bigger and more confident. Homo Hill is  not the only gay strip in town and the more traditional, closeted Korean scene in Chongno is opening up too – a little. As in Japan, many of the bars here have little appeal to foreigners. They are expensive and intimidating, more a cadre of regulars convening in a space the size of a living room than a place you can breeze in and out of. But there is now a more “Western style” gay bar in Chongno, Barcode, as well hiply-named joints like  “Grindr” and “Shortbus”. And of course (this is Korea) the internet, with hook-up sites like ivancity (“ivan” being the Korean equivalent of “fag”.)

But I will always remember those nights on Homo Hill, when the outside world would seem briefly suspended and the beat on the dancefloor would unite a heaving crowd into a community, single-minded in its pursuit of joy. I hope Korea (and its gay community) won’t lose that as it forges forward.

Dongdaemun

 

Dongdaemun is Seoul’s, well, soul. It is noisy with the sound of tinny music and excited chatter, always crowded, concrete and congested, and smells of hotdogs and diesel exhaust. But it is also fun. Dongdaemun is not so much a market (although if it were, it would surely be the biggest in the world), as a whole city district of interconnected markets, mind-boggling in its vastness.

The action fills up several mini-skyscraper multilevel buildings, burrows underground into arcades that snake out of its two subway stations, and flows into surrounding streets in all directions. Merchants, wholesalers, intellectual property pirates and shoppers converge here to buy and sell clothes and fabrics in the main part of the market, as well as a whole range of highly specialised and shadowy ‘side markets’.

It is a round-the-clock phenomenon that has to be visited at least twice – once in the day and once in the night – to do it justice.

The market is named after the famous “East Gate”, one of the city’s most iconic landmarks although currently under wraps for renovations. (This is a shame because the other famous city gate at Namdaemun is not on display either at the moment, having been burned down by some arsonist asshole in 2008).

From the old Dongdaemun city gate on warm weekends, a plant and flower market spreads up the shabby main street of Seoul, Jong-no, with stalls selling rhododendron plants in pots, orchids and bonsais, herbs and occassionally squirrels in little cages or glazed ceramic pots. When I was there though, in the dead of winter, it was much diminished.

Walking in the other direction is the pet market with its streets of goldfish and snapping turtles and occasionally cute little hedgehogs, and then the stationary market with its mounds of wholesale stickers and glittery pens.

Here, the market is dissected by what was once a freeway and is now the Cheonggye stream (see below) . Crossing over this, the crowds thicken and the commerce reaches a screaming climax in the ApM and Migliore malls, towers packed full of stalls and boutiques, with 24 hour cinemas and customers around the clock.

On the corner of the Cheonggye stream and this main strip is a little magazine market. A couple of stores sell an amazing stash of fashion magazines from around the world – Japan especially but also Europe, the USA and of course Korea. I used to come here all the time for a touch of glamour – so often missing in grey, gritty Seoul – but in my youth I never realised its main purpose. Fashion pirates come here to flick through magazines and choose pages to show to their Dongdaemun suppliers, ready to whip up low cost immitations of the latest trends as factory samples.

 

The main stretch of Dongdaemun is a cacophony of pressing bodies, gaudy clothes and the smell of Korean snacks. There is nothing classy about it – its cheap, fast fashion. Although you do find occassional gems, for the most part the clothes here are fun and more or less disposable.

My favourite part of the market was tucked away in a little corner of Dongdaemun. In my day it was behind a second-rate baseball stadium, lined with stalls selling 1970s Korean motorcycle jackets. Now, in a sign of Seoul’s upgraded aspirations, this has been converted into a Zaha Hadid “design centre”, currently under construction.

Here is a smaller pocket of multilevel buildings,  the nocurnal wholesale malls. These operate from 10pm to 10am. Inside, all night long, the cramped floorspace is subdivided into stalls and the floor littered with plastic wrapping. Piles of garments block the fire exits, and vendors chat or sit wearily while eagle-eyed shoppers circulate. One of the malls here, ApM (not to be confused with the larger Hello ApM mall on the main strip) was my favourite place for cheap, funky mens’ clothes; it had lots of cute Tshirts and interesting Korean-designed tops. I would go every week before clubbing, buy a Tshirt, wear it out and more often than not, watch it fall apart in the wash the next week. Yet some of my most treasured Tshirts, to this day,  I got here.

 

I have no recollection of how I discovered the place, it is not exactly easy to find.

On the way back to rediscover the mall, I looked out for a familiar landmark, the blue neon-flashing Nuzzon building. For many years this was covered with a billboard of Kate Moss and played the 1980s Ghostbuster theme at all hours of the night. Yet for all its eagerly projected fun and glamour and flashing lights, the building always struck me as sinister, an Orwellian Ministry of Style. Its harried, tired-looking vendors, trying to warm themselves with their instant noodles under harsh fluorescent lights at 3am, were a reminder that for most of its employees, the global textile industry is nothing but a hard, thankless slog.

I searched around here for the junior ApM; only to find it gone, or at least renamed. Most of the malls here no longer sold mens’ clothes at all.

Another interesting branch of the market follows the Cheonggye stream Westwards. If you follow it, you come to a neighbourhood of super-specialised shops that sell not fashion, but individual components for the fashion trade. There are whole shops full of buttons, or zips, or ribbons and mounds of mannequins, and streams of fur fluttering out of street trees where they have been left to hang. After this you soon come to a cluster of lighting stores and then, in a dank warren of alleyways under a freeway, a Blade Runner-ish electronics market. Circuit boards and semiconductors are traded in scruffy,dimly lit family businesses totally at odds with their high tech gleam.

Dongdaemun had one last surprise for me too. A new immigrant district, named Russiatown, has sprung up in an alleyway near the former stadium. Here, a despondent-looking community of Russian-speaking traders gathers. Some are from Russia itself but most hail from the Central Asian republics – Uzbekhistan and Kazahkstan. They are in Seoul to buy for their import businesses. There is also a ten-storey building of small shops and businesses aimed at Mongolian traders. Cyrillic writing peeps out of signs for “Mokba mart” supermarket or shashlik restaurants.

Dongdaemun’s tentacles are spreading ever further.

Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched

I was disappointed to discover hat my favourite Seoul museum, the Eros museum of Asian erotic art had closed – its collection of ancient Indian sculptures of men having sex with horses, and gruesomely tiny slippers for Chinese concubines with bound feet, vanished from public view.But little did I know that my next stop on the museum trail would to be closed too.

The Museum of Chicken Art, in Samcheongdong right near the Bukchon Hanbok village and not far from Gyeongbukgong,has relocated to one of the country’s poultry-producing provinces, taking with it its collections of chicken-related world art.

Obscure though this might sound I was actually really excited to visit, hoping to find a work by favourite classical Japanese artist, Ito Jakuchu. He was an eighteenth century nihonga painter who drew lovely pictures of sea creatures and exotic birds, but reserved his best work for incredibly vivid portraits of chickens.

When I arrived at the museum, it had been freshly vacated. A colourful chicken banner was still hanging and the mark left by the old name plate was still visible.

I had better luck though – eventually – with would become my favourite new Seoul museum. The museum of African art was closed the first time I went, but I caught it open on my return from the Gyongbukgong (it is located in a prime, though hard-to-spot, location right across the road!) The curator  – an enthusiastic Korean woman – showed me around the collection of sculptures from the Dongon people of Mali, Congo and coastal West Africa and explained lots of interesting facts that I had never known about African art. It was great. But best of all was the rooftop cafe, a tiny terrace with a table and bright painting in the South African Ndbele style, looking over a compound of tiled hanok roofs. An African art museum, here in the old imperial heart of Seoul – what a beautiful surprise!

 

One museum that I regret missing is the Gahoe Minhwa Korean Folk Art Museum – not far away – which specialises in minhwa, a kind of very two-dimensional, naive Korean traditional painting, often depicting animals and especially tigers:

 

New Years Eve – Seoul parties

Seoul has some of the wildest gay clubs in Asia.  Tokyo might be “cooler”, but going out in Seoul was always more fun. When I was working in the city, I lived for the weekends. Every Saturday night you could reliably have a great time on the dancefloors of Itaewon. You could go out alone and by 3am be dancing with a group of Peruvian, Brazilian, Italian, German, Japanese and Korean party people to “One More Time” (as happened to me this past weekend), or (in the old days) dodge the US military police patrols which would burst in and check for AWOL attendees, or hang out with glamorous drag queens and Korean celebrities on the down low. Most of all, you just knew you were going to be surrounded with an incredible positive energy and joy, people would be laughing and drinking (and smoking), flirting and most of all, dancing.

The community here is relatively small and many gay Seoulites live very closeted and buttoned-up lives. Perhaps this is why, with that no-holds-barred all-or-nothing Korean spirit, many would let loose a huge sigh of relief on the weekend and release their pent up frustrations. There is none of the awkwardness or inhibition of the nightlife scene in so many Asian countries – Koreans like to party.  

On the dancefloors of Itaewon (at Club Pulse on New Years Eve) after a long absence, I experienced that same old feeling once again – and it still felt great.

Gaemi Maul

   

True grit: Causeway Bay backstreets

  

Breakfast in Tai Hang

Tai Hang is possibly Hong Kong’s cutest neighbourhood. It is also quickly coming up in the world. Even a few months ago the peaceful little pocket behind Causeway Bay seemed pretty quiet when I passed through. But this weekend, a sunny blue-skyied Sunday, it positively bustled with expensively dressed people prowling for cafe tables. Apparently rent here has doubled in a year. It is easy to see why.

It has a sense of style and continuity – and a laidback vibe – unlike anywhere else on the island.  New bakeries, cafes and even oyster bars are interspersed among legit, old-school panel beaters along a compact grid of quiet streets. These are lined with matching period apartment blocks. There is no through-traffic (many people were strolling down the centre of the streets), no neon, no clogged footpaths and you can see the sky – a very different experience from the CB shopping heartland, just ten minutes walk away.

  

Hot undercover ‘hood: Kwun Tong

If Hong Kong were ever to develop a gritty, underground street art and indie rock district (and that is a big “if”), Kwun Tong might be where it would happen. The neighborhood, across the harbour from North Point on the Chinese mainland, feels very different from the overly commercialised districts of Soho, Central or Causeway Bay.

It is gritty, industrial and in places, quite bleak. A giant raised freeway roars overhead above the harbour, and a bare, little-publicized ferry dock connects it to the island. Yet the partly because of this, the neighborhood has a – very discreet – buzz. For one thing, it has the best grafitti and street art I have seen in Hong Kong. There are also moody blocks of derelict flats (one of which was busted last week for housing an illegal brothel) and warehouses that would make an ideal location for artist’s studios, or even loft apartments.

The neighborhood is already home to “Hidden Agenda”, Hong Kong;s most respected ‘underground’ indie rock venue, housed in just such a former industrial property.

And already some development is taking place, the local government has installed a new oceanfront “promenade” and the Swire Properties group have a shiny “Landmark” office tower (which is where I had to go on business when I “discovered” the neighbourhood).

Best of all, adjacent to the station is aPM, my new favourite Hong Kong mall. It is named after, and with a similar concept to, Seoul’s famous 24 hour shopping centre, ( their slogan is : “sleep less, play more”). Brightly decorated and youthful in outlook, it is a bit less sterile that the conspicuous cash-flashing of IFC or Pacific Place and also does a fun line in celebrity promos – everyone from Japanese “Non-no” models to Princess Kate lookalikes! Of course to Western sensibilities a shiny mall and multiplex might seem the antitheses of “counterculture” but in Southeast Asia just such a development – with a fun, funky edge – could be just what is needed to kickstart something of a local “scene”.

I wonder what else is brewing behind closed doors and in grotty corners of Kwun Tong? Judging from this website, Kwun Tong culture, maybe a fair bit. And at only four stops from Quarry Bay on the subway, I really should hang out there more often.

Wanchai street market with my iPhone

 

I need to get down to this more often.