Last night / this morning, Thumbs Up Theatre Toronto (TUTT) hosted a virtual walking tour of the old town of Hong Kong! To be clear, this was a real-life walking tour, live, in English, with a local guide.. cool! 3am my time, but what the hey.. A part of the world I've never been in, and I was delighted to visit virtually! Lockdown is good for some things.. and kudos to the group for reaching out to faraway places for ideas!
As they say, if you can get over the initial wave of tiredness, you get a second wind, and can stay up that bit later. The second wind hit me about 2am - I'm well used to it. Doing something else, I ended up logging on just in time, to see our masked guide - masks are compulsory, outdoors there. A bubbly young lady, it turned out her parents emigrated to Australia, where she grew up, moving back to Hong Kong later. She encouraged us to ask questions if we felt like it - or we could type in the chat. She was also delighted with the people that chose to turn on their cameras.. didn't include me..
She started the tour stood beside the escalator, the longest in the world apparently, which connects the middle levels of town and the lower levels. As she explained, it travels in one direction only - down in the morning rush hour, so people can head down to work, up from 10am to midnight. The staircase beside it allows for travel in the opposite direction. And she lives at one end - but she didn't show us her house!
So, we saw some street food vendors. She warned us that a lot of businesses were closed, today being the 1 May, the international workers' holiday. Mind you, for all that she kept telling us how expensive food is there, the prices didn't sound unusual to the people on the call, most of whom are from Toronto. Nor, indeed, to me. I'd have trouble eating there though, with all the menus in Chinese..
It's just as well she showed us the correct way to sit at the tea stall (picture taken pre-Covid). Oh, and the thing to ask for is "Hong Kong Silk Stocking Milk Tea" - made with three different kinds of tea leaves, milk in first, and filtered through something that looks like a silk stocking:
She took us to a wet market - but explained that not much killing of animals goes on there, since Covid. And, moving up in the world, she showed us a filming location:
Finally, beside the colonial courthouse, an interesting sight - QR codes around town alert authorities to who's been where, and when - so, if there's a Covid occurrence, they can track people who've been in the vicinity. Now, that's how you handle a pandemic:
Well, that was Hong Kong. No sign of demonstrators. I don't think I'd be that pushed about visiting in person - I'm well familiar with crowded city streets, that's not that exotic to me. But I'm delighted to have been given a window to it! and the walk was well-organised - during the bits where our guide was walking between locations, someone back at the office was telling us snippets of a 19th-century love story - a Western captain, dealing in opium, took a fancy to a young lady from the area.. in a Capitalist twist, the upshot was that he left her a great chunk of Hong Kong as her personal property! Nice..
And so, straight to sleep - Cultureseekers, a couple of days ago, advertised another quiz, which I had to be up for, and get breakfast sorted in the meantime! This was an odd one out quiz, based in London - pick the picture that doesn't connect with the others. And I have to say, it was well-organised - some debate, of course, about whether you could have got a different answer. But I didn't do too badly - got most of them right.
For tomorrow - well, a while ago, TUTT were watching Our House - a musical about the band Madness. So, I could catch up with that..
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