Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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Month: Dec 2004

  • The news doesn’t get any better

    It’s hard to escape from the aftermath of Sunday’s earthquake.  Today’s newspaper is full of grisly photographs of dead bodies, and for once it seems appropriate (though I am sure there will still be complaints).  As feared, the death toll is still rising, though it’s a sobering thought that (as Harry reminds us), it will…

  • Mother Nature

    I suppose that, if we’re honest, many natural disasters are easy to ignore because we have no real way to relate to what happened.  Somewhere a long way away, thousands of people we don’t know have been killed and a foreign country has been badly affected. For me, Sunday’s earthquake off the coast of Indonesia…

  • It’s just not Christmas

    Since it started broadcasting in the UK 23 years ago, Channel Four has shown "The Snowman" every Christmas Day.  I remember Jeremy Isaacs saying that as long as he was controller of Channel Four it would be guaranteed a place in the schedule, and in fact it has long outlasted his involvement with the channel.…

  • The mall the merrier

    Shopping Centres have been in the news recently, with the government’s attempt to sell off the ones it (somewhat inexplicably) owns and manages. Seems like a good plan to me – most shopping centres on public housing estates are rundown and unattractive, and new management will surely bring about some improvements. Shopping Centres play a…

  • Martin Booth: Gweilo

    Martin Booth approached the task as a novelist, and happily he succeeded in creating a work that is absorbing, evocative and funny. The reader gets a real sense of Hong Kong in the 1950’s, but from the perspective of a young boy. It’s a good read and a fascinating insight into life in Hong Kong…

  • A reit mess

    Most idiotic comment on the Link Reit fiasco must be from Secretary for Housing, Planning and Lands Michael Suen Ming-yeung. He is quoted as saying: "It’s like a 9/11-style attack … No one can be blamed because you can’t expect this to happen." This rather neatly sums up what went wrong. The government employed a…

  • How the other 0.05% live

    I am not sure whether they are supposed to be funny, but some of the articles in the Sunday Morning Post about other people’s homes can be quite entertaining.  This week we have a small family that have two adjacent properties on Lantau, each one a modest 2,000 square feet.  One for them, the other…

  • Slow down

    Travelling by minibus is one of the more, er, interesting public transport experiences in Hong Kong. The main advantage is that they (usually) get you to your destination quickly, but unfortunately this is only because the drivers are contractually bound to break at least one traffic regulation for each kilometre they travel. Usually it’s speeding,…

  • In case you were getting bored waiting

    The latest brilliant idea from the advertising industry… I guess we all spend time every day waiting for a lift to arrive.  Well, now you can spend that time watching advertisements.  There is a company in Hong Kong installing LCD televisions in lift lobbies, and their slogan is "Reaching business executives in a captive environment".…

  • Asia Blog Awards (2)

    Well, that wasn’t quite what I was expecting! I mentioned last week that I felt somewhat indifferent towards the Asia Blog Awards, and one reason was that I felt fairly sure who the top five or so would be, and reasonably confident that I would be somewhere around the bottom of the top ten. Nothing…