It seems Hong Kong is not alone in suffering the Einkaufstourist – or locust – plague:
‘…they make Konstanz’s multiple branches of the DM toiletries chain absolute hell, lining up a half-dozen deep, their shopping carts overflowing with organic toothpaste, name-brand diapers, and pomegranate-scented conditioner.’
Welcome to Sheung Shui-on-the-Rhine. (What – no milk powder?)
A related infestation is the Great Escalator Selfie-stick Menace…
Commuters and other legitimate users of the unnecessarily overcrowded neighbourhood public-transport system are today asking the same question: Your President has finally been impeached – will you all now go away?
Malaysians fearing an inundation are probably breathing a sigh of relief on hearing that Chinese developer Country Garden is suspending sales of its gargantuan and (presumably) ultra-tacky Dubai-with-jungle reclamation/residential/colonization project, Forest City. It would/will be interesting to know whether this is really a (desperate) capital-flight-clampdown, the collapse of an over-extended, hyped-up white elephant, or a sign that the concrete-box-buying frenzy has its limits. The company is using the old ‘office renovation’ excuse – ‘we had a sudden fit of good taste’ would be more convincing.
I declare the weekend open with Eerily Creepy Nighttime Photo (with Enigmatic Use of Proverb) of the Month, spotted near the Botanical Gardens…
Aw come on…you saying you’re against some nubile, young Yobos with uniformly similar features and bleached white skin taking pics of themselves at peak cuteness to show ther kids one day that ahjima looked like ALL the other girls at the time???
Botanical Gardens…as far as I can see that is slightly outside the Soho Triangle. You are clearly branching out. Keep it up!
Walk on the wild side. Within reason.
you had me fooled for half a mo, i must admit — until i read the words “lining up”, and realised it couldn’t be our co-citizens.
should be an acceptable weekend. if only it was foggy every day, hk might be halfway liveable.
鹬 蚌 相 争, 渔 翁 得 利 [Yu Bang Xiang-zheng, Yu-ren De Li]
Enigmatic indeed! Thirty some years ago when the Dalai Lama’s brother used this same well known couplet of four-character phrases with Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping’s father in Beijing, the opportunistic fisherman was said to be the Soviet Union or the USA. In the photo above, it appears to my old eyes that supporters of Carrie Lam are making the argument that the Pan-dems and the Government should stop their uncompromising bickering lest Beijing drop all pretenses, step in and take over everything. Or . . . and this is what makes it enigmatic, let’s stop bickering lest it give evil foreign powers like the USA and Great Britain greater leverage to interfere in Chinese internal affairs. Both schools of thought have constituencies in Hong Kong so such an ambiguous sounding campaign admonition might very well prove to be a useful tool appealing to both these otherwise contrary points of view. It might even matter if we were having a real election.
If you click on the Korean ladies it takes you to a you tube of Emmylou Harris on the Old Grey Whistle Test. Give me S Korea any day.
鷸蚌相爭 – 唔係 “鹬 蚌 相 争”. 我老母!
Write proper, speak proper – this is HK!
But Koreans don’t have bleached white skin no matter how hard they try. Their skin is distinctly East Asian.
Sheng-Shui-on-the-Rhine
So true!
But not only Konstanz. During the summer vacation we regularly went shopping from Switzerland into Austria (Dornbirn), and Italy (Porlezza): Our kids used to say: Here we come, the Swiss Mainlanders!
Hahaha!