The blue people of Kwun Tong

Kwun Tong represents a bygone era for Hong Kong. Its a big, unpretty industrial and business centre in the Eastern part of Kowloon, and in many ways feels like a city apart from the rest of the city, a city in itself (or on the mainland).

It was here that Hong Kong’s last porno theatre operated, here that Communist sympathisers blew up a cinema in the 1970s and here that gunmen hit a street of gold stores in the 1980s in broad daylight. It is hard to imagine any of these things happening in Hong Kong now.

The streets of Kwun Tong are crowded and pressed, squeezed claustrophobically by ten-storey concrete industrial buildings. It is gritty and grimy and people push and shove. There are flyers and posters everywhere for cheap-looking restaurants and whenever I go there, it always seems to be hot.

But like Wong Chuk Hang (and Chai wan) it is this very industrial heritage which makes Kwun Tong an attractive place for local hipsters to set up slightly left-of-centre businesses in big and relatively cheap lofts. It is home to urban bee farms, roof-top farms and (until recently at least) underground rock clubs. I paid a visit over the weekend to see what else was brewing.

My first few destinations were a bit of a bust – the vegetarian restaurant I had been recommended turned out to be a tasty food stall in a mall. It was nice, but not worth crossing town for. The independent bookstore I had caught wind of, Bleakhouse Books, turned out to be open by appointment only. But I hit the jackpot with my third destination, the How cafe (below) as well as these pieces of street art in the area’s otherwise grim alleyways, before heading to the quiet ferry terminal with its lapping waves and peeling paint, to wait a full hour before the next ferry came to take me back to the island.

  

 

A night on Le Than Thon

An article titled A nocturnal crawl through Saigon’s Japanese ghetto on the fun district of Le Thanh Ton, previously reported on the blog here.

Localized

Saturday was pleasant for what I did, and remarkable for what I did not do. I saw a great art exhibition. I ate vegetarian Japanese food in a hipsterish cafe. I lounged at home, cleaned up a bit, bought a plant at a lush arcade-like little plant shop tucked into an alleyway. Got a foot massage, ate seafood pizza and swam in the clear water of the local swimming pool under the bright moon.

And I didn’t leave my neighbourhood. I was in Wong Chuk Hang all day. After three years in the neighbourhood something has well and truly clicked in the last few weeks. I have started to feel that this is my little village.

Wong Chuk Hang is certainly not the most immediate of neighbourhoods, not an outward charmer. To most other Hong Kongers – even on the island – its a single, traffic fume-choked road lined with grimy industrial buildings. For some time this is how I saw it too.

But there is so much more to WCH than meets the eye, as I have grown to appreciate. Listing its merits mentally over dinner, after my fulfilling day in the area, I was a bit stunned.

• A secret waterfall
• Ancient rock art
• Beautiful hikes
• A profusion of art galleries hidden in old industrial blocks
• Cafes like 3 3rds
• The Jumbo floating restaurant
• My busy local shrine, heaped with offerings and lit with candles at night, flanked by a long-time-present local herbalist
• A village, with Hong Kong’s oldest house and even a few farms
• A theme park
• A sports ground
• The best swimming pool in Hong Kong (with a view of the Jumbo restaurant)
• Street art murals (see above)
• Access to a beautiful beach at Deep Water Bay
• A canal, along which I walk to work every day, nodding good morning to the local heron
• A cooked food hawker centre
• The beautifully lit tower which streams LED lights at night
• Wild boars
• A glamorous high fashion outpost (in the Lane Crawford headquarters)
• Until recently, but sadly no more, a super-cool club.

Impressed, I resolved to spend more time in the ‘hood.

Sunday afternoon on Sau Wa Fong

One of Hong Kong’s quiet corners.

 

Dark side, and the living is easy: Prince Edward

After the revelation of Mum’s Not Here, last week, we decided to head back to Kowloon this weekend for some more hipster-hunting, at “Feed your Nerves” near Prince Edward Station, where locals lunched with their adorable shiba inu and artwork was exhibited in the upstairs shop/gallery space, at White Noise records tucked inside a tenement building on Shanghai street and finally shopping for oolong ice cream and succulents at the flower market.

  

Wong Chuk Hang walls

 

Two days in Sham Shui Po

 

I spent the weekend in Sham Shui Po, eating delicious bread at the Xinjiang Muslim restaurant and shopping for toys and vinyl at Paul’s Records.
  

Along the way I stumbled upon a local recreation of the Sistine Chapel, worshippers making offerings of fatty pork to the White Tiger Spirit at a local shrine, a pawn store, herbalists selling dried snakes and turtles, a woman sitting on the subway with acupuncture needles stuck in her head, street vendors selling floppy discs and 80s porn outside the Dragon Centre and a bizarre rundown mall in neighbouring Mongkok selling only coins and stamps.

  

But the highlight was undoubtedly the musty and cramped Paul’s Records, where local icon and former street market seller Paul presides over his precious stash of “musical orphans.” We spent an hour or two in the cramped one-room store listening to Paul’s thoughts on Wong Kar Wai and Hong Kong’s historic resistance to Latin music, his memories of a Jackson 5 cover band being killed in the Vietnam War and his complaints about mainland money inflating the value of Teresa Teng records. Amazing stuff.

Tai Ping Shan: street

  

Le Than Thon

The Japanese and Korean enclave, which starts by the river and spreads down Le Than Thon, is one of the city’s nicest places to wander, with its bakeries and sushi bars. Small alleyways branch off the main strip, into grids of tiny, self-contained streets, maze-like and filled with tucked-away bars, jazz clubs and cafes. Some of the streets are decorated with paper Japanese lanterns, and others with street art.

 

Ainu for dinner tonight?

Its always fun to spend a lazy afternoon hanging around in Thonglor. One such day I wandered up past the Thonglor Art Space to 1979 Vinyl and Unknown Pleasures to flick through some vinyl and pick up a local indie CD. I met a friend at the Roots Farmers garden, where an expat childrens’ birthday party was in progress and I sipped kombucha in the onsite bamboo hut by the goats and the chickens and then we headed to the Commons for dinner (see above), followed by pandan yadong (Thai hard liquor) cocktails and Cuban music at Studio Lam. And wandering the backstreets, as the late afternoon heat settled and the sun set over the palm trees, as ever in Bangkok, unearthed a few unexpected sights. There was a hipster bar made from shipping crates, a Korean youth hostel, the cute Okinawan restaurant I always mean to try and a restaurant/bar with an Ainu (indigenous Japanese minority) theme. And valet parking. Very Thonglor.

The mysterious East

 

Heng Fa Chuen is probably the least distinguished station on Hong Kong island’s MTR line. In the four years I have been in the city, I am pretty sure I have never heard anyone mention it. Located in the Eastern stretch of the island, just before the Chai Wan terminus, it is a no-mans land of middle class housing estates and old industrial buildings around a working harbour, overlooked by hills covered in graves.

But its also home, I discovered this week, to a bizarre “Paradise mall” with faux-Roman interior and “suicide angel” art work. Even more surprising is that a little walk away, about half the way to Chai Wan, hidden away in the port district is one of HK’s cooler stores, from Japanese brand Undercover. Featuring some cool (and I thought, reasonably priced) designer gear, a canopy of lightbulbs and a door made of a photo-collage with eyes cut out crazy style, it provides a hip edge to what is still a quite a rough and ready part of town, with its looming vacant blocks and windowless canyon streets of concrete industrial silos.

  

Backstreets of Kagurazaka

 

Yanaka

The Eastern suburb of Yanaka has recently become fashionable for its old-skool Shitamachi atmosphere. It is littered with shrines, and its Twentieth century-style shopping streets along the Yanaka Ginza and Hebi Michi (the winding “snake road”) have now been augmented by cafes and galleries as well as, in some places, tourist shops.

We went to find Maruhi, a pocket-sized gallery and cafe located in a 1920s house only to find it closed for the new year, as was the popular SCAI Bathhouse – a contemporary art space located in a repurposed sento.

Luckily the graveyards with their napping taxi drivers and squawking crows, and Nezu Shrine, one of Tokyo’s most beautiful with its Kyoto-like arcade of red torii arches, were still there.

  

 

Daitabashi

In addition to two of Jon Vour Caux’s buildings, Daitabashi contains another surprise – Okinawa Town, a shotengai of bars, restaurants and stores, opened by and catering to migrants from Okinawa. Its a slightly down-at-heel, meandering street, where many of the restaurants are adorned with ceramic dog guardians and faded 1980s posters.

I could just imagine sauntering down this street on a hot Summer’s evening, to sample goya chanpuru and black pork, washed down with awamori and accompanied by the twanging of Ryuku music.

 

The Southeast

Tokyo’s Southeastern stretch, between the Tama river and the Yamanote stations of Shibuya, Ebisu and Meguro, is little-visited by tourists. It is mostly quiet and residential, made up of tony suburbs with big houses and leafy gardens. Its shopping districts – Jiyugaoka, Den en Chofu and Futako Tamagawa – are similarly upscale. In other words, this is the home of the Tokyo Good Life. With its mostly  unhurried pace and good shops and restaurants, the area actually has a surprising amount to recommend it, including some interesting low-key sights. From Futako-Tamagawa, home to the  monstrous new Rise mall and the Tamagawa Daishi temple with its secret underground tunnel, the Tama river runs South, dividing Tokyo from the looming towers of neighbouring Kawasaki.

You can jog down along the wide grassy bank towards Tamagawa station proper, where another temple stands on a small rise looking over the river, and from there hop into Jiyugaoka, one of the city’s most sought-after residential areas with cafes, bakeries, boutiques, a pocket-sized Venice called La Vita and on its outskirts, the quiet Okusawa-jinja. The shrine’s torii arch is wreathed in a straw serpent to commemorate the banishment of a medieval plague by villagers dancing with a snake/dragon effigy through the streets.

Also nearby is the pretty, hidden-away little gorge at Todoroki.

But for us this time, the destination was Toritsu-Daigaku, or actually a fifteen-minute walk from it, where you can find the modern Japanese restaurant Yakumo Saryo. Built by a well-known Japanese designer, the remodelled suburban house marries traditional elegance with modern technique in a sunny white room, and a dim tea room facing the garden.

 

The biggest surprise of our set here was the seasonal specialty, shirako, something I had never tried: the semen sacs of the cod fish. It was warm, creamy and tasty.

The last stop before heading back into central Tokyo was at Daikanyama. Here, the DVD and CD rental store Tstutaya has opened a sprawling bookstore/cafe complex called T-Site, where the area’s beautiful people come to flick through magazines and books, sip on their ( Starbucks, sadly) lattes or enjoy the striking architecture. We went four times.

 

Check out the surrealistic rimpa “gold screen” in the sophisticated yet warmly womb-like upstairs lounge.

 

Under the overpass….

I discovered a little Hong Kong secret this week. Underneath a twisting overpass, where a road on stilts soars down from Pok Fu Lam on the slopes of the Peak to the sea ( one of HK’s greatest marvels in my opinion) sits the quiet neighbourhood of Shek Tong Tsui. Wedged right between the red-hot ‘hoods of Kennedy Town and Sai Ying Pun, Shek Tong Tsui is today strangely overlooked, at least by the expat in-crowd. Perhaps it is due to its confounding lack of access ( that freeway again.)

This wasn’t always the case though. In the first half of the Twentieth Century the area had boomed as the seedy redlight district of Hong Kong, ablaze with theatres and brothels, before cleaning up after the war and then fading to relative obscurity.

In my nearly five years in Hong Kong it was a place I had rarely ventured to – the name only familiar from tram destination boards (where it would always prompt me to wonder “Can I get this one? Where IS that?”)

Yet here, on hot and slumbering streets one adventurous Sunday morning, I found a small Tai Hang-like grid neighbourhood with a gem-like little surprise. The elegant and spacious Teakha II cafe, just as cute as its Tai Ping Shan original branch but without the annoying crowds, sat on a little sidestreet, serving up houjicha lattes and delicious sandwiches and pancakes, while indie hipster music played. It was sunny and hip and …peaceful! Gratefully, we settled in there for a few hours. Nearby one or two hipsterish-looking stores poked out amid old dry cleaners and tuition centres, and suspiciously well-dressed locals wandered in for their chais. A bamboo-and-plate-metal shed stood right under the freeway, ready to host Chinese opera for the visiting ghosts, in this, the month of the dead, while traffic thundered overhead, blissfully unaware, and a ridiculously flashy yellow Porsche sat louchely on a nearby kerb.

How many times have I driven right over all of this, never knowing it was here?

But if I’m reading the signs right, Shek Tong Tsui might be ready for its second act.

The Hidden Star

Star Street is one of Hong Kong’s most exclusive enclaves, a monied mini-district of little boutiques and expat restaurants. It terminates in a small, dead end grid of streets bounded by the quaintly named Moon and Sun streets. But what I hadn’t realised until this weekend, is that after a flight of stairs on St Francis Street, it continues along another sleepy pedestrian-only terrace called Sau Wa Fong. Here, you can find the graphic arts/print store Odd One Out which sells artwork like the piece above, and a couple of interesting homewares store. These are located along a street of charming lowrise apartments with abundant potplants and a Rio de Janeiro-like sheer jungly cliff at one end. Quite a discovery!

The most beautiful street in the world?

Rua Goncalo de Carvalho has recently popped up all over the internet, breathlessly introduced as the “most beautiful street in the world.” It certainly looks pretty special, shaded by green Bolivian rosewood trees planted in the 1930s and now enclosing the street entirely from the air in a green, leafy tunnel. The street is located in the Southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, noted for its progressive politics and (relative) wealth. The city is also a powerful cultural force in Brazil, home to artists Henrique Oliveira and Bruno 9Li and singers like Adriana Calcanhoto (below) and the great Elis Regina.

More Sheung Wan street art

The Happy Valley

Happy Valley, tucked away from the MTR and cut off by the vast swathe of the main Hong Kong racecourse, is an insular, upscale and rather self-satisfied little neighbourhood, rarely visited by those who don’t live there. Before today, I had only been there once or twice. But after coming down the mountain from yesterday’s Aberdeen to Causeway Bay hike I had passed through, and decided to go back and take a look around. It was a grey and gloomy day, but the area, it turned out, had a few places of interest.

It was, for example, home to Hong Kong’s first ever 7-11 which opened here in April 3, 1981. Perhaps it was this one? Despite some internet sleuthing I could not find the exact location. I did find this however – a “cafe” tucked away on a second floor away from prying eyes which I strongly suspect to be an undercover gay bar…I’ll have to go back another time to find out.

But an even greater find was a store I saw advertised on the mains street on a banner: “Chameleon Happy Palace.” The store – complete with colour changing electric signs – sells exactly what you would expect: chameleons. Starting at about 2000 HKD, they range up to 20,000 for a “Parsons Yellow Giant” speciment, complete with little Triceratops horns, zapping tongues (I saw one in action) and swivelling eyes.I was pretty tempted to pick one up (I have always had a soft spot for the creatures) but had hesitations on two fronts: one, my boyfriend who hates reptiles had said he would never come to my place again. And two – many of the species here come from Madagascar which has banned their export, so I would need some reassurance that they had been ethically sourced.

In addition to the chameleons there were iguanas (like the one pictured) and some much bigger, a full-size water monitor lizard and a clump of what looked like juvenile Aldabra tortoises in a heatlamp-lit pen.

Just a few blocks up from here (Happy Valley is compact after all) I found the Tung Lin Kok Yuen Temple, a Buddhist complex built in 1935 in “Chinese Renaissance style” (see below) with a Buddhist primary school attached.

Finally, I stopped into the Sheung Hing coffee house. Here since 1951 but recently renovated, the coffee house thankfully retains the features of a postwar cha cha teng – tiled walls and booths, ceiling fans, a menu of butter pineapple buns and yuangyang (milk tea mixed with coffee) and a sign saying “No Spitting.”