Batgung - Hong Kong daily life

Cold at Chinese New Year?

Mr Tall — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:27:23 +0000

You’ll hear it this week (if you haven’t heard it already): Chinese New Year is coming up, so it’s going to be cold!

The assumption that Chinese New Year (CNY hereafter) invariably brings a cold snap is deeply-ingrained in Hong Kong culture, among natives and expats alike.

But is it true? Yes, it’s winter, so it’s not going to be in 30s, but is Chinese New Year really likely to be colder than normal? My perceptions seem to run the other way: I remember finding any number of CNY’s unpleasant because of the need to wear dress-up clothes in unseasonably warm weather, and ending up uncomfortable and sweaty.

Well, these days, it’s never hard to find an answer to this kind of question, so that’s what I went ahead and did. I looked up the temperatures for the first three days of Chinese New Year for the past 21 years, since that’s how many years I’ve been here for CNY. I averaged out the daily highs and lows for those 63 days.

I then compared my average with the average winter temperatures for January and February in Hong Kong, which should apply quite neatly to Chinese New Year, which falls between mid-January (January temperatures average 14.5-18.6) and mid- to late February (February averages 14.4-18.6).

Let’s just assume the February average, because the two months’ temperatures are nearly identical, and since CNY is slightly more likely to fall in February than January. A table with my results follows.

	Average low	Average high
February normals for Hong Kong	14.4	18.6
Average for first three days of CNY 1991-2011	13.6	17.6

What do you know! I have to admit it: the average temperature for a CNY day over that period really is colder than normal, by a full degree for daily highs, and almost that much for daily lows.

It’s interesting, though, to take a closer look at the actual year-by-year CNY temperatures over that period. A longer table with those follows. Scan through it as you like, but don’t skip down to the next paragraph without having a look at 1996.

Year	Dates of first three days of CNY	Day 1 temperatues		Day 2 temperatures		Day 3 temperatues
		Low	High	Low	High	Low	High
1991	February 15-17	15.8	20.8	15.7	17.9	15.1	18.3
1992	February 4-6	17.8	22.8	15.5	18.0	14.9	16.2
1993	January 23-25	7.9	12.1	7.4	13.2	8.0	15.1
1994	February 10-12	15.4	17.5	16.4	22.3	16.2	20.7
1995	January 31-February 2	9.2	14.3	11.2	15.1	11.9	15.3
1996	February 19-21	6.9	9.3	5.9	8.4	5.8	8.6
1997	February 7-9	12.4	16.8	12.3	16.0	14.1	16.5
1998	January 28-30	13.0	17.8	12.2	14.4	13.9	17.0
1999	February 16-18	18.1	22.5	18.3	21.3	19.1	25.2
2000	February 5-7	14.9	20.6	13.8	18.3	14.3	19.5
2001	January 24-26	17.7	20.2	16.0	21.0	11.4	16.2
2002	February 12-14	15.1	18.6	15.9	20.2	16.7	20.5
2003	February 1-3	17.7	22.2	14.9	17.8	14.7	15.9
2004	January 22-24	9.1	13.7	9.0	13.8	9.0	12.7
2005	February 9-11	17.6	21.2	16.6	24.1	14.8	17.5
2006	January 29-31	15.2	19.9	17.3	21.4	18.3	23.6
2007	February 18-20	21.3	25.3	18.4	21.7	17.9	20.2
2008	February 7-9	8.2	11.2	9.8	14.3	8.1	15.0
2009	January 26-28	12.7	16.3	11.4	13.1	13.1	17.6
2010	February 14-16	14.6	16.3	10.8	15.2	9.1	11.2
2011	February 3-5	13.2	18.6	13.5	20.9	14.6	21.7
	Averages	14.0	18.0	13.4	17.5	13.4	17.4

I remember CNY 1996 with particular clarity. Mrs Tall and I had wed just a couple of months previously, so we were heavily obligated that year to do a full round of bai lin, i.e. the formal visiting of relatives at CNY. So around and around we duly went, in some of the most miserable weather I can ever recall in Hong Kong. Not only was it extremely cold and windy, I recall it being wet as well, with an almost icy-feeling drizzle. My look back at the temperature records confirmed that there was indeed measureable precipitation on all three CNY days that year.

Actually, if you take out 1996, the remaining 20 years in our survey average out at an almost-normal 14.0-18.1. That year really was exceptional, which is ironic since it’s also the latest CNY in the period we surveyed, falling in late February, which is usually when the weather HK starts to warm up a bit.

If you don’t mind, also go back to the table and have a look at the years 2005-2007. I think it’s these years that have fixed in my mind the image of warm CNY weather. Daughter Tall was a kindergartner in that period, and was very excited about wearing her adorable – but also substantial and warm – CNY outfits. I remember her little face all red and sweaty on those days in the 20s, as she begged to keep wearing her quilted jackets while her mother and I tried to pry them off her.

What about this year’s CNY? The forecast from the Hong Kong Observatory is for much cooler-than-normal weather. I guess if I’d just accepted the conventional wisdom, I’d already have known that!

Life in Hongkong for Indians

THEWALL — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:44:37 +0000

Hi,

I will have to move to Hongkong in the month of June for an onsite assignment for my client DFS.

I would like to know the cost of living in HK, accomodation in a decent apartment and it's monthly Rent (not luxurious) and cost for other basic necessities. I know this is a very vague question and depends on the way you lead your life but still would like to know the ground realities.

Consider that i am an average spender would not go into too much luxury.

Can you please let me know your thoughts on the queries above.

Thanks in Advance,

Naveen "THEWALL"

Hong Kong's Urban Heat Island

Mr Tall — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

The theme of my first Hong Kong climate change article was simple: average yearly temperatures here have been going up more less steadily since the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) starting keeping track of them, but they have skyrocketed in recent decades. Yet over the past 60 years, essentially all of this warming has occurred at night, i.e. the average nighttime lows are much higher than those in the past, while daytime highs are just the same.

This pattern is in fact the signature effect of a phenomenon that has been termed the ‘urban heat island’, or UHI, as we’ll call it throughout this article. Simply put, a UHI is a bubble of air over an urban area that’s hotter than the air in the surrounding rural areas. This effect has been identified scientifically for many years, and it’s certainly obvious anecdotally to anyone who’s watched or read a weather forecast in Hong Kong – how many times are the forecast nighttime lows something like ‘17 degrees in the urban areas, and a few degrees lower in the New Territories’?

If you are interested in learning how a UHI forms and looks, resources from the EPA and NASA in the USA provide plenty of clear explanations and visuals.

But if you're happy with a quick overview, then we can just say that a UHI forms when the sun heats up man-made structures such as roads, masonry, buildings, and so on. This heat builds up during the day, and it's then gradually released after the sun goes down. This keeps the surface temperature from dropping as much overnight as it would in an area covered with natural vegetation.

Some scientists who have studied urban heat islands also believe that heat-generating machinery, e.g. vehicles and big air-conditioning units, contribute to higher temperatures in urban areas. It's hard to judge how big an effect this would be, but if it's a real factor, Lord knows Hong Kong is a place it would make plenty of impact.

So the obvious question for us now is, how much of the warming in Hong Kong is due to the heat island effect? And then, if we can identify that number, how much background, or ‘global’, warming has really taken place in Hong Kong?

Fortunately, the busy staff of the HKO have adressed these very questions. A 2006 paper titled 'On Climate Changes Brought About by Urban Living', by C Y Lam, pretty much has the goods we need. He conducts a simple comparison that's typical of attempts to estimate the magnitude of individual UHI effects: he compares the temperatures at the urban station in question, in this case the HKO headquarters (which we'll call 'HKO-HQ' for short) itself, with a nearby location that's still rural. In fact, Lam chooses two such locations, i.e. Lau Fau Shan in the NW New Territories, and Ta Kwu Ling in the far northern NT, very near the border with mainland China. Lam limits his comparisons to the years 1989-2005, which are the years for which data from Ta Kwu Ling are available.

That period is of course also the time in which the HKO-HQ has recorded its sharpest increases in average yearly temperatures: Lam notes that the HKO-HQ's average yearly temperature has risen at a pace of 0.37 degrees C per decade during this time. This is a very steep rise indeed.

So how does that compare with the two non-urban stations? In Lau Fau Shan, from 1989-2005, the temperature increased by 0.25 degrees per decade. That's still very fast. For Ta Kwu Ling, however, the increase is significantly lower, i.e. 0.08 degrees/decade.

What does this tell us about the UHI effect at the HKO-HQ? Keeping the math simple, we can conclude that the UHI effect at the HKO-HQ in recent years is somewhere in the range of 0.12-0.29 degrees/decade: that is, 0.37 - 0.25 = 0.12 for the HKO-HQ/Lau Fau Shan comparison, and 0.37 - 0.08 = 0.29 for the HKO-HQ/Ta Kwu Ling comparison. Lam himself, interestingly, does not derive even this simple range of difference in his paper, nor does he speculate on how great the UHI effect at the HKO-HQ might be. He simply notes:

'That the urban area has been warming up much more rapidly than the "countryside" is thus evident'.

Now the range I came up with range is very large: which end of it is likely to be most accurate? I suspect the UHI effect is at the higher end. For one thing, Lau Fau Shan is not exactly a rural area; it's fairly built-up. Several researchers from the HKO note this themselves a later paper, i.e. 2007's 'Temperature Projections in Hong Kong Based on IPCC Fourth Assessment Report':

At LFS (i.e. Lau Fau Shan), changes in the environment were observed near the site in the past few years. The grassland in the vicinity of LFS was converted into concrete surface for stacking up cargo containers. Also, there had been continuous new town developments at Tin Shui Wai which is about 1 km away.

If you'd like at look at the area, I entered the coordinates for the Lau Fau Shan station provided by the HKO , and you can see where it's situated on Google maps:

View Larger Map

The Ta Kwu Ling station, on the other hand, seems to be near a village, but it's situated in somewhat more open territory:

View Larger Map

The HKO confirm TKL's better fit as a rural comparison to the HKO-HQ in the 2007 temperature projections paper:

There is no significant change in the immediate environment for TKL although the rapid urban development in the nearby city of Shenzhen cannot be completely ignored.

So we've made some progress. It's obvious that the urban areas of Hong Kong comprise a textbook urban heat island. We now also have at least a broad sense of how much effect this may have had on the HKO-HQ's sharply rising temperatures. The HKO, to its credit, does not shy away from discussing the UHI effect, nor does it try to understate its impact on Hong Kong. C Y Lam concludes his paper with a rundown of some the harmful outcomes of a hotter city -- e.g. more very hot nights, stress on people who can't afford air conditioning, etc, -- but he in no way tries to imply this nighttime heating is purely the result of global warming.

Still, it would be nice if we could find way to nail down the scope of the UHI effect in Hong Kong more definitively.

The HKO make their best attempt at estimating the UHI at the HKO-HQ in the 2007 temperatures projection paper I've cited above. The authors first examine the same comparison Lam made in his paper, i.e. between the HKO-HQ and Ta Kwu Ling. They then run a linear regression on the differences recorded (i.e. they attempt a far more sophisticated statistical analysis of the yearly data than the seat-of-the-pants business I did). They reject the trend that they identify as statistically insignificant, however, because the data sample is small (it's not even two decades' worth of readings) and because of large yearly variations.

So the HKO writers then adopt what they call a 'differencing period' approach, which I'm not going recount in detail (it's explained on pages 4-5 of the 2007 paper if you're interested). In brief, they assign the temperatures at the HKO-HQ from 1885-1902 as their 'base', since at that time they claim the HKO-HQ was in an essentially rural setting, i.e. paddyfields, then compare it to the current gap in temperatures derived from the HKO-HQ/TWL comparison. They come up with an 'urbanization' rate of 0.08 degrees/decade, i.e. this means that every decade since 1902 the temperature at the HKO-HQ has risen 0.08 degrees strictly because of urbanization, for a total of 0.81 degrees' worth of UHI.

The HKO authors then compare this number to studies of UHI done in other places: for example, a study in London identified an effect of 0.11 degrees/decade; a study in Beijing 0.16, a study of large cities in China 0.05, and so on. Given this range, their number looks reasonable.

We can now do a very simple comparison to estimate just how much of the warming in Hong Kong is likely due to the UHI effect. We've got our 0.08/decade number, and we can quite easily determine the overall warming the HKO-HQ has recorded over the years. The 2004 'Climate Change in Hong Kong' paper I referenced in my previous article states it clearly on p. 8: temperatures at the HKO-HQ have increased by 0.12 degree/decade over the period their records cover.

So, 0.12 - 0.08 = 0.04.

In other words, by this estimate, Hong Kong has been warming by 0.04 degrees Celsius per decade when we eliminate the UHI effect. Put another way, the UHI effect seems to account for about 2/3 of the warming Hong Kong's urban areas have experienced.

Climate change in Hong Kong

Mr Tall — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

The message from the Hong Kong Observatory is unequivocal: global warming is real; it’s affecting Hong Kong’s recent and current weather in obvious ways; and future trends for the world, and perhaps for Hong Kong especially, are ominous.

Climate change pops up in all corners of the HKO's website. From their extensive package of climate change resources for the general public and education, to the HKO Head's blog, there’s a consistent focus on forming public opinion and changing people’s behavior.

Frequent reminders of the implications of climate change also appear in their other publications. Take as a recent example the HKO’s year-end round-up of 2009’s weather. It begins by stating that the World Meteorological Organization expects 2009 to be among the top 10 hottest years on record. And, in line with this, the report notes that Hong Kong’s 2009 temperatures came in at 9^th place in our own list of hottest years, and that 30 very hot days were recorded in 2009, which was the most since 1963.

Next, the 2009 round-up reminds us of Hong Kong’s warming trend by providing a little table highlighting the top 11 hottest years on record here; if you have a look at it (by using the link above), only one of those 11 years precedes the 1990s, and six of them occurred in the 2000s.

So it’s getting hotter, and the HKO sees this as the most salient fact to report about 2009’s weather. But are there any other patterns to note, any other helpful angles we might find in these numbers?

Given the recent dust-ups in the climate change arena (see for example here, here and here , just to get the smallest taste of the vast controversy that is currently roiling the entire ‘science’ of climate change) I decided to launch my own little Hong Kong-specific investigation.

Since I’m no climate scientist – and since I’m pretty lazy – I thought I’d better keep things simple at the outset. So I kicked off by conducting my own informal survey of temperature averages in HK over the past 13 years (mostly since those numbers are so easily available on the HKO website).

I’ve made up a table that sets out the yearly deviations from normal in overall average temperatures, plus the deviations from normal average highs and lows, in the years since 1997. I’ve also highlighted how those years ranked (at the time they were reported) in the all-time records.

	Yearly average vs normal	Nighttime lows vs normal	Daytime highs vs normal	Historical ranking for temperatures (at the time)
1997	+0.4	+0.6	–0.2	4th warmest year
1998	+1.0	+1.2	+0.6	1st warmest year
1999	+0.8	+0.9	+0.5	2nd warmest year
2000	+0.3	+0.6	–0.2	8th warmest year
2001	+0.6	+0.9	+0.1	4th warmest year
2002	+0.9	+1.2	+0.3	2nd warmest year
2003	+0.6	+1.0	+0.1	5th warmest year
2004	+0.4	+0.8	–0.1	9th warmest year
2005	+0.3	+0.5	–0.3
2006	+0.5	+0.8	+0.1	8th warmest year
2007	+0.7	+0.8	+0.7	5th warmest year
2008	0.0	0.0	+0.2
2009	+0.4	+0.5	+0.7	9^th warmest year
Average	+0.53	+0.74	+0.19

Do we learn anything new from this additional data?

Well, the first thing that struck me is that yearly temperatures in HK are remarkably uniform. 1998 averaged just one degree Celsius above normal*, and that's Hong Kong's all-time heat record. A mere 0.4 degrees above normal (as in 2009) merits a spot in the top ten. Many places in the world have much wider yearly variations. So clearly we’ve seen some warming, but we can’t be talking about a big number, at least not yet. But of course it’s the rate of warming that’s important, so we can’t jump to any rash conclusions.

*We do need to keep in mind that the HKO uses a rolling 30-year span to establish their ‘normal’ temperatures. That is, the current ‘normals’ are the averages from 1971-2000. Every decade, therefore, the period for the averages is moved 10 years ahead. And since Hong Kong is getting steadily warmer, the deviations from ‘normal’ in recent years will be smaller than they would be if they were compared to temperatures from the whole span of the HKO’s records. This paper outlines this trend in much more detail. For example, it notes that the 1961-1990 daily average high/low was 25.7/20.9, whereas from 1971-2000 these numbers changed to 25.6/21.1.

Second, you can see that, according to the HKO, all recent years have recorded above-average yearly temperatures – save for 2008, which was right on normal – and that 11 of the past 13 years have been top-10 on record for heat at the time. This is certainly in line with the HKO’s warnings about climate change.

But now let’s look a bit more closely at the average highs/lows.

First, take a peek back at 1997, 2000 and 2004. According to the HKO, these were all among the top ten hottest years in Hong Kong history (and the records go all the way back to 1884). But those three years all recorded average high temperatures that were actually below normal. How can that be?

If you look at the ‘Nighttime lows’ column, you can see that almost all of Hong Kong’s recent heating has been at night. Every year – again, except for 2008 – the average nighttime low has been at least 0.5 degrees above normal, and over the whole period our nighttime lows have averaged close to three-quarters of a degree above normal, which is noteworthy. Hong Kong’s nights are clearly warmer than they used to be.

The daytime highs tell a somewhat different story. In four of the past 13 years the daytime highs have averaged below normal, and over the whole period, our daytime highs have averaged less than two-tenths of a degree above normal. This is a much smaller number, especially since a record El Nino event in the late 1990s pumped up temperatures world-wide.

Never the less, at least at first glance, it looks like Hong Kong is a poster child for climate change, and the HKO is right on in sounding the alarm.

Now, just to prove that I’m not that lazy, and to add a bit of depth to these initial observations, I went and had a look for some more detailed resources on the HKO website.

And I found plenty. In fact, the HKO provides a very accessible and comprehensive set of material on climate change and its implications for Hong Kong. There’s so much that I’ll just get started on working through it in this article.

Let’s first take a look at an HKO paper from 2004 that’s very helpful indeed: HKO Technical Note 107, ‘Climate Change in Hong Kong’.

This document traces out historical trends in Hong Kong’s weather, with a focus, naturally enough, on temperatures. The HKO’s records go back to the 1880s, so that gives us a pretty good longitudinal sample. Let’s see, in graphical terms, what’s been happening to Hong Kong’s average temperature in the past 125 years:

Yes, just as we might expect, there’s a steady upward trend, with an ominous spike (the red line on the graph) in recent years. The graph ends at 2002, but as we’ve already seen, nothing in the past few years is going to alter these lines by much. But since we noted above that there are big differences in recent years between daytime highs and nighttime lows, let’s see how those numbers look over a longer time frame:

These numbers are only provided post-WWII, but they’re certainly striking in the way they uphold the trends we noted earlier: Hong Kong’s nighttime lows have been increasing sharply, while its daytime highs are flat (they’ve actually declined just the tiniest bit over the past 60 years, although not to a statistically significant degree).

We’ll discuss what reasons might lie behind this discrepancy in the next installment, but for now let’s round things off by looking at temperature trends from one other angle. It’s a tenet of climate change proponents that temperature extremes are on the increase, along with rising average temperatures. Has this been the case in Hong Kong? One way to assess this is by having a look at the HKO’s data on the number of very cold and very hot days each year. They’re set out the next graph, which again covers the years from 1947-2002.

So it’s again a case of ‘yes and no’. Yes, the number of cold days, i.e. with lows of 12 degrees or below, are far less frequent, dropping from an average of about 30 in 1947 to 13 or so in our current decade. But perhaps surprisingly, no, the frequency of very hot days (33 or above) has not risen at all – in fact, it has also dropped, although far less precipitously, from about 13 to 10.

But those numbers are a bit old, and the weather in last few years may be sticking in your mind. It sure was hot late last summer, wasn’t it? And wasn’t there a cold spell in early 2008? Are the ‘extremes’ in Hong Kong getting more extreme this decade – especially the heat?

To answer this final question, I did another little seat-of-the-pants survey of the daily highs and lows over the past few years in order to extend the data in the graph above. (And may I emphasize the extremely casual nature of this survey; I will not guarantee the numbers below, but they should at least be pretty close.

Year	Cold nights	Very hot days
2003	8	14
2004	21	6
2005	27	11
2006	14	3
2007	9	23
2008	32	12
2009	22	30
Average	22.2	14.8

The number of very hot days in Hong Kong – fueled by a truly infernal streak of sweltering days in late August/early September 2009 – has indeed increased a bit, i.e. averaging 14.8.

On the other hand, there has also been a noticeable uptick in the number of cold nights. If you look back at the HKO’s graph, you will see that the last period in which we averaged over 20 cold nights a year was the mid-70s. And it was back in the mid-80s when we last had over 30 cold nights, as 2008 did.

So the last few years were indeed a bit more ‘extreme’ than usual, at least in terms of cold nights and very hot days. But although this may fuel a bit of speculation, remember that a sample size of just six years is not really very significant.

On the whole, therefore, this initial tour through the temps has revealed a couple of salient facts. It has been getting warmer at the HKO for the past 125 years – and this warming is happening because in general (at least until the past few years) it’s not getting as cold at night as it used to. The differences we see between Hong Kong’s daytime and nighttime temperature trends are so obvious that I think they deserve further attention. We’ll give them just that in the next article.

The black sofa

Mr Tall — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0000

If you’ve lived in Hong Kong for any length of time, and gotten to know a few local people well enough to visit their homes, you’ve likely seen it: the black leather sofa.

It’s not too big – there’s not enough space in the flat for that – nor does it encourage slouching, lounging, or the general slightly hung-over semiconscious sports viewing I associate immediately with my favorite sofa. Ah, that would be ‘Grandma’, a sofa my college roommates and I procured via dumpster diving, and installed in pride of place in our dorm room. It’s an interesting story, how we named her as we did: not only was she soft and comforting – [Editorial alert! Editorial alert! Tangents of this sort are not only irritating, but embarrassing in the extreme. Cease and desist immediately.]

Anyway! Back when I came to live in Hong Kong, now almost two full decades ago, the Black Leather Sofa was ubiquitous. I’d guess that a majority of the local households I visited had it in more or less the form pictured.

Why, you ask? Then oh, let me sing of the Black Leather Sofa’s virtue!

It’s cool. There’s nothing better (well, except perhaps for an icy mini-keg of Sapporo beer) on a hot Hong Kong summer day than having a seat on the smooth, slightly chilled surface of a leather sofa in an air-conditioned room. And black even looks cool.

It’s durable. Leather wears well, is easy to clean – just a good wipe with a damp cloth does wonders – and it hides dirt if you’re too lazy to accomplish even that.

It matches everything. When you’ve got a tiny flat, as most of us do, and you’ve got to squash in a sofa and a TV and a table and some shelves and maybe one or two other things (like sometimes a fridge!) into your living room, there is no latitude available for ‘conversation groups’ that can have their own ‘themes’. Everything in your living room is right there in your face, so it’d better look good together.

It’s unpretentious. Okay, well, once upon a time a sort of minimalist black leather sofa might have been associated with hip Italian interior design, but even by the time I reached Hong Kong, that day was way back in time’s rear view mirror. Whatever cachet the Black Leather Sofa might have once held had been ruthlessly eliminated by the local furniture shops selling knock-offs slapped together in the mainland that often turned out to be even more coarse and basic than the model you chose in the shop (I speak from experience here).

This is in fine contrast to the kind of furniture that White expats would be expected to buy. They’ve got to worry about the quirkiness and authenticity of their furnishings, and as this (I assume intentionally) hilarious article from Salon magazine shows, these are not easy standards to reach:

From the Brazilian handcrafted cowhide rug for $720 (Serena & Lily) to the 19th century Salerno Streetlight Pendant for $2,695 (Restoration Hardware) to the Bewick Cabinet hand-papered with detailed images of birds for $3,998 (Anthropologie), these things are expensive because they're just so real. They look like heirlooms handed down from generation to generation, from ancestors who milked cows on rambling farms in Tuscany or handcrafted wood furniture in Brazil or wove deliriously lovely fabrics in Indonesia. These things trumpet their own authenticity and hint at a connection to the earth and an appreciation for craftsmanship and artistry and the untold charms of the world's foreign peoples -- you know, the ones who squat in mud puddles, sewing embroidered birds onto 350-thread-count Egyptian cotton crib bumpers so that Serena & Lily can include them in their Crib Set Collection (Heirloom quality, $969 each).

If you felt a little tingle of personal recognition upon reading that last paragraph, I do have help to offer. There are plenty of stores in Hong Kong that can help you sate your authenticity urges – you won’t ever need to resort to a black leather sofa. I suggest you start here -- or, even better, here -- but I’m of course open to suggestions on this topic!

The Ecofriendliest Place on Earth?

Mr Tall — Thu, 21 May 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Allow me to offer up a hot proposition to anyone who may be thinking about coming to live in Hong Kong.

(No, no, Mrs Tall – I assure you – not that kind of proposition!)

Ahem. Yes, times here are bad economically, and life in Hong Kong has its challenges. Yes, Hong Kong is a crowded and sometimes-crazy city. But here’s my offer: moving to Hong Kong gives you the chance to live what is likely the most ecologically-correct lifestyle you will find anywhere in the industrialized world.

That’s right! If you’re really concerned about the environment; if you really believe the apocalyptic pronouncements on climate change from the IPCC and Al Gore; if you really think that you are called to ‘make a difference’ in the battle against habitat destruction and the spreading human stains on Gaia’s face – here’s your chance. Come to Hong Kong!

This might strike you as counterintuitive. Okay, okay – it might strike you as certifiably insane.

But it’s not, for two extremely good reasons.

First, there’s density. If you move to Hong Kong, and find a nice little flat in a typical 40- or 50-storey block, you will be committing yourself to living at a level of density that’s proven to be environmentally more sound than living in suburbs or other low-density arrangements. As this article from the invaluable City Journal shows, high-density urban living is the most eco-friendly way of passing your stay on this mortal coil. Your ‘footprint’ is physically much smaller; your living space is likely to be compact and hence more efficient to heat and cool; and your centralized location means you burn less fuel getting around – especially if you live somewhere dense enough to support public transport (more on this in a bit).

So any good eco-warrior should embrace the urban:

. . . if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete. Americans who settle in leafy, low-density suburbs will leave a significantly deeper carbon footprint, it turns out, than Americans who live cheek by jowl in urban towers. And a second paradox follows from the first. When environmentalists resist new construction in their dense but environmentally friendly cities, they inadvertently ensure that it will take place somewhere else—somewhere with higher carbon emissions. Much local environmentalism, in short, is bad for the environment.

….

Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.

Keep in mind, of course, that the typical Hong Kong flat is smaller than the typical American apartment, and that Hong Kong’s overall urban density is greater than anywhere in the USA. So the benefits of urban living expounded in this article are only amplified in Hong Kong.

And it gets even better.

Hong Kong’s density is also the foundation of my second big selling point. Hong Kong is so dense that it can support – I think without much dispute – the most comprehensive and efficient public transport network on the planet.

This means you don’t need a car to live here.

Ah, the car! Is there a wedge issue that more neatly separates White People from the rest of us? Is there a hotter topic in the overheated rhetoric swirling around the topics of pollution, global warming, sustainable lifestyles, and on and on? Does the leering maw of the Demon of Earthly Destruction closely resemble the grille of my first car, i.e. a 1969 Chevrolet Chevelle with an absolutely maniacally wonderful 350-cubic inch V8 under the hood? We know the answers.

I’ve written about the issue of buying a car in Hong Kong, and about commuting without one. I’m actually an agnostic on the issue. But I’m also a small, petty sort of fellow, so I can’t help but feel great warm waves of schadenfreude and self-satisfaction when I browse through organs of Whiteness such as the New York Times to find extensive, anguished commentary on the question of car ownership.

See, the thing is, Hong Kong people who want to live car-free face virtually none of the disadvantages that people in many other urban areas must (very legitimately!) deal with.

Public transport in Hong Kong is excellent because:

It is frequent. In many places, if you miss your bus or train on the way in to work, you’re in the soup. That’s very rarely the case in Hong Kong. Most people have no need to plan their lives down to the minute to make sure they get ‘their’ bus or train. MTR trains at peak times run almost continuously, and even at the slowest times they have gaps of just five minutes or so. Buses typically have 5-10 minute waits.

It is cheap. Since Hong Kong’s density permits the overlap of transport networks (i.e. you frequently can choose between two or more forms of public transport to get from A to B), there’s at least a rudimentary market effect. Also, since ordinary Hong Kong people depend so heavily on public transport, the government has always been very careful about allowing price increases – this dates all the way back to the Star Ferry riots in the 1960s. So prices for all forms of public transport – including taxis – are very reasonable indeed by world standards.

It is clean. Although you may find yourself on the occasional dingy minibus or older double-decker big bus, most are in good shape. The trams are a bit hot and sweaty, but they’re cute and your ride on one is usually just a few minutes’ duration. The MTR and KCR are amazingly tidy and well-maintained, given the incredible daily crush of commuters they handle. And even the island ferries, once Hong Kong’s bastions of public transport squalor, are now comfortable and pleasant.

It is safe. There is virtually no street crime in Hong Kong, so public transport is worry-free. By contrast, in many urban areas (e.g. in my homeland, the USA) lots and lots of people claim to support public transport in the abstract, but you just try to get them on a city bus at 11:00 pm on a Saturday night.

It is (mostly) respectable. There is not too much stigma associated with taking public transport – although that is not to say there is none. No, you’re not going to likely to run into Hong Kong’s upper class on the MTR, but lots of quite upper-middle class types here will still take buses or the train, especially when commuting.

Finally, when I was reading through some of the hundreds of comments on that NYT car article, it was interesting to see how many of those arguing for keeping a car mentioned their need to have one to carry away the fruits of their weekly supermarket shopping expeditions. Yes, indeed. Well, in Hong Kong that problem is easily solved as well – almost all urban housing is within easy walking distance from at least a small supermarket. And even if you don’t feel like making lots of trips to one, you can simply hire a domestic helper to do it for you.

Let me close on a slightly more serious note. My sometimes-snide tone here notwithstanding, I do want to stress how remarkable Hong Kong is as a potential model for eco-friendly, post-industrial-age life. You may not like everything about it, but you can’t say it’s not a viable alternative.

Pace

Mr Tall — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:00:00 +0000

The Talls have recently returned from a highly satisfactory trip to New Zealand. I won’t bore you with the tedious details, but I will expand upon one cultural comparison that came to mind as we enjoyed our visit.

I can sum up the constrast in one word: pace.

That is, on this trip I thought again and again about how much easier the pace of life is in New Zealand compared with Hong Kong. This contrast makes a trip to New Zealand so refreshing to someone like me, who’s from a small town, but who’s now lived in Hong Kong for many years.

But saying this is just repeating a cliché; everyone knows that mostly-rural places such as New Zealand are slow-paced, and cities like Hong Kong are fast-paced. In day-to-day situations, where do these varieties of pace show up? And what effects do they have on new arrivals in places such as Hong Kong?

First, let’s dispel a common misconception.

It has to do with walking speed out on the street. The conventional wisdom assumes that people from big cities like New York, London and Hong Kong stride smartly down the pavements, driven by the urgencies of their highly varied, wildly exciting lives. Small town folk, by contrast, saunter, stroll, amble and mosey, stopping altogether at points to hitch up their overalls and to insert fresh blades of straw in the gaps between their teeth.

Well, I missed a down-home memo somewhere along the line, because I find my walking speed is about double that of most Hong Kong people. I’ve explained elsewhere how this gets me in trouble in Hong Kong’s steamy summers. It also frustrates me no end in the crowds in Mong Kok, Causeway Bay, and various shopping malls.

But the pace of life in Hong Kong really is fast in other areas.

One obvious example, especially noticeable on trips to places such as New Zealand and Australia, is the pace in restaurants – both in the service you receive and the way in which you’re expected to behave.

In Hong Kong restaurants, the speed at which you’re served typically starts at fast, and ranges right up to amazing. I can recall the first few times I was taken to huge Chinese seafood restaurants here, with dozens upon dozens of tables, sound levels through the roof, waiters glaring at everybody – but excellent food appearing on the table in an uncannily brief interval after we’d ordered.

This is not the case in antipodean countries (and, frankly, most other countries in general). Service is casual. In NZ, I found myself checking my watch plenty of times as food seemed (according to my spoiled sense of timing) inexplicably late in appearing. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, my ‘Time to Eat Now!’ clock goes off just minutes after I’ve ordered food.

Ordering itself, however, is the exception to this general rule. The odd thing about Hong Kong restaurants is that no matter how busy they are, no matter how stressed your waiter looks, it’s fine to take a good long time placing your order, complete with a long conversation about the evening’s specials, the freshness of the scallops, the suitability of a particular combination of dishes, and so on. But beware: you may be lulled into thinking that your waiter really wants to lavish time and attention on you, since you’re such a discerning and generally worthy diner. You are not. Once your order has been placed, good luck in tracking your waiter down ever again – at least until it’s time to pay the bill!

Even in fast food places, Hong Kong wins the service race hands-down. I submit as exhibits my own local Fairwood in comparison with the world’s dirtiest McDonald’s. For whatever reason, fast food restaurant staff in Hong Kong work hard and quickly, and simply don’t let things get out of hand, even though many fast food places here are utter madhouses.

So a fast pace has some obvious benefits in some areas – but maybe not so much in others.

For example, one of the things I enjoyed in New Zealand, and that I miss about my homeland, is the brief, but friendly and chatty encounters you can regularly have with service staff in supermarkets, gas stations -- just about anywhere. In Hong Kong, there's not only a language barrier for us expats, but so many businesses are often so busy that I feel a bit guilty making a transaction take any longer than necessary.

There's also a deeper sense of 'fast pacing' in Hong Kong that's initially hard to put a finger on, but that manifests itself in many ways. It's a sense that you must be doing something, that you must improve yourself, that you must make more effort to get ahead.

It shows up on weekends, when almost no one in Hong Kong would think of just staying home for a couple of days and not really getting much of anything done. It drives people to keep studying for advanced degrees long past the point at which acquiring another qualification will do their careers much good. It lights a well-stoked fire under parents whose children seem to be lacking sufficient motivation in pursuing their schoolwork and extra-curricular activities.

This high-octane pacing is a big part of Hong Kong's frenetic charm, but it can also wear you down like a high-pitched background noise if you let it get too deep into your psyche.

Trips out of Hong Kong to slower-paced places do serve to remind us expats that life can indeed be lived on different terms elsewhere. And although on most days I go right ahead and mainline Hong Kong's lifestyle amphetamine, it's also good to go cold turkey once in a while.

Surviving the Financial Tsunami

Mr Tall — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Mrs Tall and I are hopelessly old-fashioned. When we bought our current flat, times in Hong Kong were bad: we signed our purchase agreement just a couple of weeks after 9/11. Property agents were desperate for business, as were the developers themselves. We could therefore get not only an ordinary mortgage covering 70% of our flat’s price, but also (since our building was new) a loan from the developer covering an additional 25% (at a higher interest rate, of course). We had to come up with just a 5% down payment.

But we decided not to take the easy 25%. Instead, we scraped together every cent we had, cadged short-term loans off several relatives, and just barely came up with 30% down.

In light of recent lending practices in my homeland (i.e. the USA), Mrs Tall and I were obviously deluded, since everyone now knows that the government should pay your mortgage when you don’t feel like it, but being the young, idealistic, crazy kids we were, we just didn’t know any better.

Anyway, after making our down payment, we faced a stretch of real austerity. We had to pay back our relatives, plus pull together even more cash for decoration and other moving expenses. So we cut our ‘lifestyle spending’ down to the bone, living as cheaply as we could.

In that period of living on the edge (it lasted for a year or two) we learned at least a few tricks that allowed us to spend very little money, yet not feel like we were suffering too much.

And now, after some reasonably fat years, things are looking dark again on the financial front. For some of us dinosaur types, the urge to rein in spending and start living cheap is becoming stronger every day.

So I thought I’d get back to the topic of living cheap in Hong Kong, and maybe seek out some new ways of living simply but enjoyably.

Eating out – One habit Mrs Tall and I really nailed down in our austerity period was eating cheap. We didn’t stop going out – that would be tantamount to giving up on life altogether when you reside in Hong Kong – but we did eliminate expensive outings to nice restaurants, moderately costly outings to decent restaurants – well, pretty much everything except cha chaan tengs and street food. And as my recent soppy tribute to fast food places proves, it’s a habit that’s stuck with me over the years.

Entertainment – Hong Kong has plenty of cheap options for entertainment. In addition to the ubiquitous window-shopping, there’s of course hiking, watching cheap DVDs, visiting the very reasonably-priced museums, and going around to show flats at new property developments being sold into the teeth of a collapsing market.

Coffees – The proliferation of decent coffee shops in Hong Kong is a Good Thing. But unless you want to start assembling your own poor man’s lattes, a decent coffee at one of the fancier schmancier type coffee places is not coming to you south of 30 dollars. That’s rich people coffee. So where does Your Humble Batgung Cheapskate recommend? McDonald’s, pure and simple. Not only have their reasonably-priced McCafes spread to many Hong Kong locations, even the grimiest McD’s outlet now seems to have one of those machines back behind the Service Counter for the Masses that puts out coffee that’s just the same as the McCafe stuff. And it’s a great deal, with most of their coffee drinks coming in under or around 20 dollars. I also think it’s just as good or better than Hong Kong’s big coffee chains’ products.

Groceries – Saving money on day-to-day food is also extremely straightforward in Hong Kong. As our cost of living comparison articles show (here and here), if you just stop going to a handful of expat-oriented grocery stores, the main proletarian grocery chains and the wet markets are reasonable, especially for good fresh food that comes from China, or from other nearby Asian countries. If you want imported Western stuff or certified organic, costs rise dramatically.

Beer – For bars/pubs in Hong Kong, saving money is tough. We’re unlikely to see the almost-across-the-board drop in prices we saw in the early 2000s, so a big night out is still going to be costing you plenty. It looks as if the Batgung happy hour hunt will continue for the foreseeable future.

At home I don’t drink much, just a beer with dinner some nights. Since Chez Tall features an eclectic fusionesque kind of menu, I like to stock an all-purpose lager that tastes good with both western and Chinese food (I like ales and bitter on their own, but not so much with food). My very best dinner beer buddy is Boag’s, from Tasmania, but it’s pricey and not available in my local supermarkets. So I’ve tried a variety of other options, and have settled on a couple of Japanese brands, i.e. Sapporo (my fave) and Asahi, that seem to me the best combination of dry crisp taste, suitability with different varieties of food, and reasonable price. I like Kirin, too, but maybe a little less. These beers are still not exactly cheap, however. Even on sale, six-packs run 40 dollars or more, and Sapporo is almost never on sale these days, meaning a six-pack rings the register at almost $70.

So, with the wolf at the door howling for a cold one, and wholly in the spirit of disinterested empirical inquiry, I bought a basketful of mainland beers to see if any of them could replace my regular evening tipple. All came in at between $2.50 and $5.50 dollars a can. That’s cheap enough! I tried four brands, with the following results:

Pearl River: It's exceptionally cheap -- just $2.50 a can -- but it's swill.

Kingsway: Sub-swill. Just nasty. I wanted to rinse my mouth. I did finish the whole can, though, so as not to disappoint my beer superego, which was chanting ‘waste not; want not’ as I choked this craptaculous beverage down.

Yanjing: Okay. It was tasty enough to evoke vague allusions to my favorite Japanese brands, but then that just made me want one of those instead.

Harbin: Hey, not too bad! I didn’t want the can to end, which is more than I can say for the others.

So for some cheap, non-offensive fridge-stuffing beer, I’d be willing to go with the occasional Harbin, but I’m still open to suggestions.

Travel – The Philippines, Thailand, China and Macau are all reasonably cheap destinations. If you do feel a bit flush, or if Hongklaustrophobia has really got you down, there are likely to be some very good travel deals around in the coming year or two. For example, if you’ve got the time (and the stones) to risk it, prices in Thailand must be looking pretty attractive at the moment. Macau also is experiencing a tourism slide, with lots of empty hotel rooms and quiet casinos, so a cheap trip out of town is definitely there if you want it.

Schools –There was an article in the Hong Kong Standard a couple of weeks ago that suggested that some local Hong Kong people trying to move their kids out of international and ESF schools and into ordinary local schools. This is probably not the greatest idea, in part because of the general life-changing disruption this kind of move inevitably causes, but also because their kids may find it very tough indeed to get along in a local school after spending time in an international/ESF school. I do wonder, though, if there might be a kind of cascading effect as people with kids in the highest-priced international schools start eyeing ESF as a cheaper option.

So that’s a good start on living cheap in Hong Kong. Readers, I’m always eagle-eyed for more tips!

A tribute to the northeast monsoon

Mr Tall — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

This past weekend we saw one of the sharpest and most welcome weather changes I can remember here in Hong Kong. This year’s unusually hot and humid autumn finally gave way to the gloriously Mediterranean-style sun and dry air we expected to arrive several weeks earlier.

What was the problem? Why did it stay so uncomfortably steamy so long this year? We can blame it all on the failure of the northeast monsoon to arrive on time.

In point of fact, we had already had a couple of ‘surges of the northeast monsoon’ this autumn, but they were very weak, with winds barely making it around to the northeast, and quickly changing back to the east or southeast thereafter. This is a recipe for stuffy humidity, and it’s just what we got.

But instead of spending the rest of this article moaning about why the northeast monsoon was late this year, let’s instead focus on being grateful we receive it at all. Why?

Simply because Hong Kong is geographically a tropical city. This indisputable fact surprises many people who live here. I’ve had numerous conversations with other expats who assure me that Hong Kong is subtropical, and that’s why we get a nice mild winter instead of year-round heat. I agree, but then point out that it’s only Hong Kong’s climate that’s subtropical: our latitude – 22’ 15” north – is well within the Tropic of Cancer, which lies at 23’ 30”. (This might also be an opportune time to say that I’m very grateful to MrB and the several other extremely tolerant people who are willing to be known as my friends in spite of my tendency to carry on just this sort of conversation.)

In fact, Hong Kong’s latitude is about the same as places like Havana in Cuba, Calcutta in India, and the USA’s Hawaiian islands. Rio de Janeiro is at similar latitude in the southern hemisphere. Although these places also have some seasonal variations, these are not cities you really think of as having ‘winter’.

It’s the northeast monsoon that makes Hong Kong different. It’s this prevailing autumn and winter wind pattern, in which cold air and high pressure build up over the Asian continent and then spill southwards, that finally gives us a break from perpetual summertime down here on China’s southern coast.

So – mild temperatures, sunny skies, dry air: what’s not to like? There are two potential problems with the northeast monsoon.

The first has to do with what lies to our northeast, i.e. the heart of the Guangdong industrial heartland. The northeast monsoon serves as an aerial conveyor belt, shifting clouds of particulates and other pollutants right down over Hong Kong. MrB has explained convincingly how this pollution affects us.

But then why have the past three days been relatively clear? There are both quantitative and qualitative differences in the northeast monsoons that affect Hong Kong. The big, powerful surge in the past few days was strong enough – i.e. the winds were sufficiently brisk – to disperse and blow much of the polluted air right on past us. It’s the ‘weak monsoons’ that are the killers in terms of pollutants, as this article from the Hong Kong Observatory explains:

In winter and spring, reduced visibility usually occurred in association with weak northerly surges of the monsoon or when the northeast monsoon affecting Hong Kong was subsiding.

A weak monsoon gradually shifts southward the clouds of pollutants that would otherwise hang over Guangdong. And then when the monsoon sometimes fails completely for a day or two (watch out for ‘light winds’ in the HKO’s forecasts), those pollutants are left hanging right on top us here in Hong Kong.

The other potential problem with the northeast monsoon is that it gets a little stronger at points than some of us might prefer. That is, it can get really cold in Hong Kong. For example, if you were in town last February, when Hong Kong endured the longest stretch of cold weather we’ve had in the past four decades, you might have wistfully been wondering what the weather was like in Havana or Calcutta.

That stretch of cold was nothing, though, compared to mid-January in 1893. This contemporaneous article from Nature magazine reports on four-day stretch of extreme cold, at the depths of which the Hong Kong Botanical Gardens recorded a temperature of 31 F, or -1 C.

Even worse, throughout much of this cold spell freezing rain fell on Hong Kong. Trees and other vegetation were coated with ice, ships in the harbor had ice on their rigging, and telegraph and telephone wires became ice-laden, snapping many. There was widespread agricultural devastation, as many tropical plants such as bananas and bamboo were destroyed by the cold. Even the sea was affected, with record low water temperatures killing many fish.

This 1893 surge really was historic in its intensity. It seems to be one of the only recorded instances anywhere, anytime, of freezing temperatures at sea level in the tropics. The author of the Nature article mentions that no temperature below 40 F (i.e. 4 C) had previously been recorded in colonial Hong Kong. And the cold air in 1893 rushed on past Hong Kong to cool off other British outposts, too, dropping temperatures in Singapore below 70 F (21 C) and into the high 50s F (13-14 C) in Sri Lanka.

Why was the northeast monsoon so intense that year? The Nature article makes one final useful allusion, to the eruption of a volcano the previous year on Great Sanguir Island (you can find an account here) in what is now Indonesia (it’s now more commonly spelled ‘Sangir’, by the way). The ash and other pollutants really big eruptions pour into the atmosphere commonly result in a year or two of pronounced global cooling, so the 1892 Sanguir eruption may well have been the cause of 1893’s brutal cold.

Given the unusual circumstances in 1892, and the buildup of an enormous urban heat island in today’s Hong Kong, it’s unlikely any of us will witness frost in the harbor. But I do encourage you to enjoy – and appreciate! – the northeast monsoon.

Commuting in Hong Kong

Mr Tall — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:00:00 +0000

I read an article recently that really struck a chord. It’s from the April 16 2007 New Yorker, written by one Nick Paumgarten, and it’s all about commuting. Although it focuses on commuting in the USA, and inevitably spends a lot of time on driving, parts of it that deal with commuting in New York City itself are quite apposite to life here in Hong Kong.

Most strikingly, perhaps, Paumgarten quotes the punchline from a recent academic study on commuting:

Three years ago, two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, released a study called “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.” They found that, if your trip is an hour each way, you’d have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as “satisfied” with life as a noncommuter is.

Wow! Reading this article obviously got me thinking about my own commute, which takes me not much under . . . one hour. I sincerely hope I’m making 40% more money than I deserve.

Frey and Stutzer conclude, however, that most people don’t balance the commute/salary equation with much insight or care. They’re not rational, i.e. they’re much more likely to hang onto a long commute for a marginally higher salary than they are to simply take a pay cut and have a far more pleasant lifestyle.

So I thought about it: would I really take a big pay cut just to avoid my commute? Perhaps I am grossly overpaid, and that’s why I don’t weep spontaneously thought of getting up in the morning and hitting the road for work. But the truth is, I don’t really mind my commute that much at all; I actually find it almost – may I say it? – pleasant.

Here’s what my commute looks like. I live near an MTR station that’s a terminus of the line I need to take, so I can get on an empty train. Sometimes – maybe half of the time – I get a seat. It’s not worth the stress to try to fight for a seat, since I’m only on the train for about 10 minutes. I then get off, and walk out to street level to a bus stop (this takes me three or four minutes, maybe). This bus takes me to a stop just across the street from my office. Since it’s a busy route, I typically wait five minutes or so. And since my stop is just the second one on the route, I can always get a seat. This is crucial when you’re as tall as I am, because many of Hong Kong’s older buses’ ceilings aren’t high enough to allow me to stand up straight.

So although my commute isn’t short, I consider it quite ‘easy’. I find, even after many years of such commuting, that I actually enjoy it.

Paumgarten’s analysis recognizes this possibility, because not all commutes are created equal. Crucially for us in Hong Kong, using public transport for a commute is markedly different from driving yourself. For example, the aforementioned Swiss researchers Paumgarten quotes note that:

Train riding has other benefits. Passengers can sleep or read, send e-mails or play cards. Delays are out of their control.

Well, duh, those of us in HK might say. But I latched on to that last sentence, which I think is the key. When I’m making my commute, I actually like not having control over what happens. It’s liberating. I can read a book or otherwise amuse myself for the great majority of its duration; it’s only that short walk when I transfer in which I actually have to pay attention to what I’m doing. This lack of control isn’t popular with everybody, of course, but if you can see the positive side of it, it’s a big stress-reducer.

Other people’s commutes in Hong Kong of course vary across a wide spectrum. Some are shorter and easier than mine in some ways, but harder in others. For example, Mrs Tall’s got what I call an ‘umbrella-free’ commute. She can stay under cover all the way from our flat to her office, courtesy of covered walkways into and out of the MTR stations she travels between. But she’s got the downside of taking a much more crowded line than mine; when she changes trains, she often has to wait for several to pass by before she can get on board, and then it’s so crowded there’s little chance she can read or do anything else productive.

There are also some Hong Kong commuters whose travels are so extensive that they fall into the ‘extreme commuter’ category the article discusses. I think most belong to two categories. The first includes those who live deep into the countryside of the New Territories, or away from the ferry piers or other transport connections on the outlying islands such as Cheng Chau and Lantau. The second comprises people who live in Hong Kong and essentially commute across the border to Guangdong province – as well as those who do the opposite. There are, in fact, quite a few people who work in Hong Kong but who wish to take advantage of the much lower cost of living across the border; they’re the ones you’ll find on those long-haul buses that run from different parts of the city up to Lok Ma Chau, and then beyond . . .

There’s another advantage to Hong Kong life that may take some of the pressure off us in terms of commuting and generally getting around. Paumgarten paraphrases Robert Putnam, a well-known American sociologist, on the combined effect of our commuting and other day-to-day travels:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. . . . The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had.

Thinking about this, I can really see Putnam’s point: although my home/work commute takes almost an hour, I can walk over to my neighborhood shopping mall in just a couple of minutes. If I had to drive for an hour to get home from work, then pick up Mrs Tall and drive for another substantial chunk of time to get to the supermarket to do some food shopping, I’d be cranky too – or at least crankier than I already am.

Most of us in Hong Kong don’t sleep near where we work. But nearly all of us can shop very near either our homes or our workplaces. This makes for ‘triangles’ that may have a couple of long sides, but then a short third side that makes them disproportionately narrow; they therefore cover very little area.

When I finished reading the article, and started thinking about writing this one, one other thing struck me. I realized that I like my commute because I see it as time I get wholly to myself, and that I can use as I please, at least within the constraints of being on a train and a bus. This leads to me being jealous of that time, which in turn leads to me being – sometimes, at least – excessively irritated when that time is interrupted or disturbed. It also occurred to me that I’m not exactly alone in this. The guy up there in the row of seats in front of me is likely just as pleased to have 30 unbroken minutes in which he can read his book – or play his video game or talk on his phone or whatever – as I am with mine. And he’s likely just as irritated when his bubble is invaded.

Is it possible that this phenomenon, which is an inevitable product of lots of people doing lots of long-term commuting, is at least partly the cause of so many complaints about rudeness in Hong Kong? That is, commuting time for most of us isn’t really ‘public’ time; since we’re so deeply grooved in our commuting patterns, and so anxious to make something personally positive out of that time, the last thing we want to intrude on us is the need to be superficially polite and civil. That takes time and attention, and frankly we just don’t want to begrudge that kind of effort each and every day.

So how about the rest of you: what are your commutes like? Any horror stories? Coping strategies? We’d love to hear them.