Haiku

Empty hotel room,
Loose change left for chambermaid,
Farewell spring moss.

You know I said that I wasn't going to go to Wan Chai

... well it turns out that I lied because after a a couple of beers after work when I was thinking "maybe I'll call it a night now" my host's i-Phone (everyone has one here it seems) gave a ring like some piece of laid-back chill electronica you would normally hear in some painfully modern drinking establishment called something like "Bar Bar Black Sheep" (they do have a bar here called the i-Dragon - don't think they served dragons though) and we get invited to meet up at somewhere called Laguna in, yep, Wan Chai.

OK so I'm prepared this time and also on a good position on the sober - rat-arsed axis so I figure what the hell.

I thought the Neptune II was a one off, nah, every bar in Wan Chai is stuffed to the gunnels with scantily clad Thai and Philippino women, quite a few of them hanging off the arms or sat in the laps of balding, tubby, 50-something year old white blokes including one guy in a flat cap who was, and I swear this is true, the spitting image of Bill Oddie. All kind of sad really but I'm not sure for who. It was the same in the other two clubs we visited as well, balding guys and Asian birds looking downright bored. After a while I made my excuses and left, I wanted to check on my moss which I had strategically placed at a very particular angle and place.



It had not moved! The moss was no longer mobile!

I did try making a tree out of it later on with the orange pencil for a trunk but that didn't work out very well. I just hope I've put the moss back in it's little white pot correctly or I'll probably be in trouble with the Hong Kong Moss Police.

Tai chi with weapons

In the great tradition of my last visit to HK I seem to be managing not to actually eat anything remotely Chinese.

Tonight I found there was an curry house called the "Koh I Noor" round the corner so popped in for some very lovely samosas and a passable chicken dopiaza (I keep forgetting that in Asia "chicken" means "scrawny bird that stopped laying so we threw it in a pot"). Afterwards I took a stroll through the park and came across six or seven people doing what could only be described as tai-chi exercises with swords, those flexible Chinese ones you saw in "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" with sensei occasionally stepping in and correcting a pose or movement. Can you imagine that in the UK, they would have been practising for 10 seconds before thirty armed plod would have shown up to arrest them for having offensive weapons.

Later on in the evening I spent an entertaining hour up in the open air rooftop bar where I'd gone to indulge in one of my duty free Montecristo No. 2's having a chat to a Korean chap called Roy about the UK premier league despite me knowing the square root of sod all about football. Mind you fully half of that was taken up with describing where Burnley was in relationship to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.

I have returned to my room to find...

... someone keeps moving my moss.

More about moss

The mystery that is the moss deepens.

On returning to the hotel this evening I discovered that the moss has been moved 40 degrees clockwise.



and on venturing to the first floor restaurant (do try the sea-bass on tomato and olive, it's very nice) my moss has a friend but it's red and lives next to a glowing steel mushroom.



Strange things are afoot in Taikoo Shing Road!

But in other news, I do like the desk I've been given for the week, here's the view.



which kind of beats my normal desk view of "lots of other people and if I jump up and flap my wings really hard I can see a bit of window 300 metres away" into a cocked hat quite frankly. However one thing I do not have to do in my existing London office is swallow to stop my ears popping in the lift which climbs faster than my old PA28 Turbo Arrow.

Anyway this evening after communing with the moss I managed to accidentally gatecrash some rugby drinking club's party who had taken over the hotel bar (couple of free beers - woot!) and then went for a walk over to Quarry Bay park by the East Channel to walk off the food and beer a bit. All very nice and warm, people jogging, the occasional kissing couple and even a couple of old men doing their Tai Chi exercises.

I came across this too, I think it's an offering to the ghost of someone as I heard that in Chinese and Japanese beliefs there is no food where ghosts go to so they have to come back to this world to eat so their relatives leave food out for them. I don't know what happened here as this was right by the sea wall but I guess the dear departed must have liked Sprite and biscuits.



(apologies for pic quality - these were all done on my camera phone)

Moss. I has it.

So here I am in HK. If you follow the Twitter feed you'll know that my hotel is brand spanking new (in fact the taxi driver said something about "only two months") and all the staff wear t-shirts and use Apple Macs to check you in. I think if the cleaning staff come into the room and see my beat up Thinkpad T60 they'll chuck it out as "not trendy enough".

Now I've been upgraded to a twin on the 29th floor which has a view, of sorts



apparently I was originally assigned the 8th floor which would have probably given me a view of someone's laundry hung outside their apartment window.

For some reason this room comes with a complementary small pot of moss on the desk.



I do not know why the management felt it necessary to give me some moss. It's probably lucky in Chinese tradition or something.

Anyway as I arrived on Sunday I thought I would take a little sightseeing trip up to The Peak where you get a good view of HK. So I took the old tram...



... there it is, very old and a rather fun ride as it climbs at a 48% gradient at one point but unfortunately by the time I'd queued up and ridden to the top it had cooled down enough for the clouds to reform so what I was supposed to see was this...



... and what we all at the top saw was this...



Not quite the same.

So I retired to Lan Kwai Fong for a beer or two... apparently it is traditional to get your picture taken by the road sign so here are some people taking a picture of someone by a road sign.



Work tomorrow.

Ni Hao Gweilos.

Well here we are in Cathay Pacific's business class lounge. As I'm travelling on a Saturday the biz lounge seems to be full of trendy young people in very expensive fashionable label clothes tapping on aching thing laptops or gabbling into the latest iPrat device but it does make a change from the usual middle aged businessman in the obligatory casual travelling dress of a Timberland shirt and Chinos*.

Because of the BA strike on at the moment (drove past some pickets on the way in, other people blew their horns, I gave them the finger and yelled "get back to work you idle bastards") the flight is very, very full and the lounge is filling up even though there's two hours before we leave. All I can say is they better not run out of Carlsberg Export any time soon.

One nice plus is the free wifi - nice and fast, downside is that my mains socket isn't powered which is annoying (it will be even more sodding annoying if my power adaptor is fecked.)

And as this is my blog it would not be complete without a grump at the world. Now I like the occasional cigar and glass of scotch so what better to stick two fingers up at Gordon the Gorgon by picking up some duty free. I believe I'm allowed fifty cigars to bring back and as T3 had a nice place called "The cigar house" I drop in to stock up on H Upmanns and Montecristos.

"Ah" says Abdul the till numpty when he checks my ticket, "Hong Kong's got a lower limit."

"What, fourty or something?" says your slightly dissapointed dragon.

"No, fifteen"

"Arse"

Just have to pick some up whilst I'm there I guess. I realise I left my cutter at home so I'll have to swing by Mr Wang's Lung Death Emporium in Kowloon anyway.

Right. More free Carlsberg.




* being middle aged but not knowing one end of a business plan from another I am travelling in my going up hills trousers and a t-shirt and fleece - hey if it's comfy and stretchable enough to get up Helvellyn via Striding Edge it'll do for a 12 hour flight to Honkers.

Tonight's front page of the London Evening Standard.



My first thought. "Nom nom nom... tasty baby"

Hakuna Matata, Joka

OK so I get the "we're going to put all your medical records on a big central computer" letter through the post and buried away at the bottom is the "How to opt out" link, so not wanting Big Brother to have the information about my wierd knee problem when aged 12 at their fingertips I go online and download the form. Of course said form is two pages of "No really, don't opt out, it's perfectly safe from hackers (yeah, right) and the government doesn't have access (yeah, double right)" but it gets filled in and I'll get Mrs Dracunculus to drop the forms in at the GPs surgery when she next goes up for her collection of pills and potions.

Then I see you can get the form in Turkish, Urdu, Arabic and another 20 languages including this one...



Guessed what it is yet? No? OK it's Kiswahil. I kid you not. My fucking taxes are going to have this fucking jolly form plus go knows what else translated into the fucking language they used in "Daktari".

Jesus sodding Christ on a pogo-stick. There's no fucking wonder that Calais is stuffed full of people trying to paddle across the channel on li-lo. Don't worry, you don't have to have contributed a single cunting penny boys, we'll treat whatever you have and here's a bunch of stuff in your own language so you don't need to even trouble yourself learning ours.

And the icing on the cake... take a look who gave the form a seal of approval:



The Plain English Campaign... I swear you could not make this stuff up.

Chung Kuo

Whee... Dragon is off to Hong Kong again in a fortnight courtesy of my employer who is stumping up for a nice business class seat on Cathay Pacific and a room at some swanky down town hotel. Better dig out my copy of Cantonese for Dragons I guess. For those of you who remember the last trip I will this time (a) be blogging more as the room comes with as much 10Mb broadband as you can eat and (b) not frequenting the "Neptune II" bar in Wanchai.

Whispering bin, don't tell the dump truck...

... because the dump truck don't need to know.

Privacy campaigners claim increasing numbers of councils are gearing up for "pay as you throw" rubbish charges by installing microchips in wheelie bins.

The Big Brother Watch group says its survey found 68 UK authorities with the technology at their disposal - up from 42 last year - with chips in 2.6m bins.

but it's OK because...

Councils say the chips simply identify to which house a bin belongs and may be used to offer incentives - not fines.

Nothing to see here, move along and we will only ever use these chips to make sure we've emptied your bin, well, right up to the point we start weighing it and charging you per kilo over your 100kg a year allowance (allowance reduced by 10% year on year to "encourage you to be efficient in your waste) all on top of your council tax, natch.

Oh and thanks for stumping up the cash in your council tax so we could buy the "007 Spybin" in the first place, suckers!

Anyway should you get one of these, here is some handy advice on what to do: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-blockkill-RFID-chips/ Or you could build a simple portable EMP device like these people: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/static/r/f/i/RFID-Zapper%28EN%29_77f3.html

We don't have to bend over and take it, we can fight back.