First Night

I'm located right near the place where US sailors used to come for R&R. So there are a number of "discos" and strip clubs. The strip clubs have older women outside cajoling you, and from the pictures outside I suspect most of the places are populated by South-East Asian women. (Philipino's are the largest group of foreigners in HK, roughly 130,000, with the US and UK coming in 2nd and 3rd at over 30,000 each.) There are also a number of normal clubs. I went into one disco, which seemed the most decent compared to the others, club-pop type stuff, the best song was a remix of no doubt's "don't speak." There was this one woman who was dancing up to me crazily, so I shifted away, then she was dancing up another white couple; I don't know if she's a prostitute or not, but there are a fair of them around here and I feel seedy just being a white male walking about. There are a fair amount of English and Australian accents about. On the street, there is an intriguing form of advertising, tons of handbills that looks just like money, scattered all over the place.

Saturday, I walked, and walked, and walked. I explored both Admiralty and Central (which are the business like sections), as well as Causeway Bay. Central has the large sky scrapers, Japanese departments stores, and designer shops. HK is a truly 3 dimensional city, the roads twist, turn, dive, and soar amongst themselves, and to move about Central you must use the sky-bridges, or walk through the endless upscale shopping centers and malls that connect to each other. I must say that in terms of shopping, I don't really encounter anything exceptional other than the magnitude of it all. There's no sale tax in HK, and I can imagine how officials from other governments must envy the amount of retail sales that happen here. If they had this much business and could tax it, there'd be billions.

I often took the subway back and forth between these places, and it is quite a nice system. Also, all the cars are connected (without a door) so you can walk from the front to the back car easily. The interesting part is that you get a real breeze as you accelerate and decelerate. Also, the line of site is perfect for "subway skating." (I usually don't hold on, but flex my knees and watch the next car for signs of the bumps and turns.)

Saturday evening I was determined to find a real dance club. I went back to central, to Lan Kwai Fung. This area supposedly has the densest amount of bars in the city, and in the past tended to be a "Western ghetto" though the amount of Chinese there is increasing, and was significant when I was there. Maybe 60/40 (Chinese/Western). I was not really interested in the bars/discos here, very main stream and yuppie. I was in search of the CeTop, which supposedly had drum&bass on a couple of other Saturdays, though I didn't see any much of an event tonight in the HK magazines I found. Unfortunately, I couldn't find CeTop, though I found the road it was supposed to be on, a very quiet and dead street off the main way of party go-ers.

Accidentally, I also stumbled across the famous set of stairs up Victoria's peak. I actually had seen this in the tourist guides, and forgot about it, but when I saw it I remember reading about it elsewhere. The small mountain is populated just as the areas near the water is, the only difference is that the roads are narrow, and the incline steep. At some point, the government built a huge series of outside escalators up the peak, and I'd say it'd be hard to make the journey without it. On the later half of the trip up, there was a "cop" standing right behind me which I though was odd, but once we got to the top, he spoke into a mic, and the escalators stopped, so I guess I was the last person to make it up that evening, around midnight. At the top are the huge apartment buildings that look so pretty from below against the green mountains, and this is where the wealthy people live. The car parks and garages are filled with Mercedes, BMW's, Jaguars, and the like. So I walked back down, encountering locals walking up without the benefit of the escalators and thinking what a pain in the ass that must be. (The wealthy people at the very top obviously drive.) I looked again for CeTop and return discouraged to Lan Kwai Fung. I think what they say about the commercial, consumeristic, and cell phone mentality of the people here is true. People all over clutch their cell phones in their hands, just to show they have one. In the back of the "milk bar" there were these two dudes with long hair, with funky framed glasses, just sitting there like statues. I think this long hair look is kind of creepy on Asian men and they were dressed from head to foot in designer clothing. I sat nearby sipping my cranberry juice and watching the people. Eventually, the two dude's girlfriends returned from dancing, and the first thing they did was grab their cell phones out of the little designer back backs their boyfriends had and sat their clutching them in their hands.

I danced a little here, and left and went to a nearby pizza shop to grab a slice. In the store I encountered a good "cultural/events" magazine, and yes, CeTop had jungle tonight. So I set out again with a better address and asking directions every block or so, returning to the spot I first went to. However, CeTop is on the 9th floor of one of these skinny apartment buildings and has no sign. Paying a cover, and climbing the 9 floors (supposedly the elevator was out) I finally got to see what the inside of one of these buildings looked like: tiny. The DJ was playing hard break beatz and this black dude with a French accent was MCing. There were two small rooms, one for dancing, and a lounge, both about the size of my hotel room. So I did in fact discover the HK jungle scene, as small as it might be. I only stayed about an hour, being very tired and sore from all the walking and took a taxi home at about 3a.m.