Fortune tellers & Hong Kong dreamers (by Elisa Routa)
All right, it’s nothing like California’s frozen landscapes or everything tourist guides could show us since decades, as they feel like sending us to get a gold skin on the other side of the Ocean. White isn’t mainstream anymore and it just suits to anorexic models of Lagerfeld parades.
Honk Kong doesn’t really sound like the sweet call of a road trip in Australia, where economy offers to its citizens the permanent luxury of deciding if they’re going to work, or just not.
When I announced to my family that I was about to spend some time in Honk Kong, the only reaction I was given was uncontrollable but unanimous: “be careful”. Anyone would think that an Asiatic person will be craftier then a crazy Norwegian extremist or more violent than a video games fanatic teenager who believes that shooting on students in a school will make him earn some good points. Checkpoint. He was wrong. Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, the only fear I couldn’t hide was about the dubious name of the airline company, “Aeroflot”, that for a French person seems more like a boat company rather than an air one.
Landing not forced, at all. I would even have paid more money to live again this landing into unknown territories; I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone with aerophobia though. The track must be around 70 meters wide and when you know that the plane takes already 60 meters, you wonder about how much precision this must require. Fortunately, the landscape underneath our wheels blows anxiety away. Palms are wider and more beautiful than the Andalusia’s ones; forests are dense and as tropical as the forests in the Reunion Island; the mountains are as green as a green lime washing-up liquid. Without chemical additives. I’ve passed into a parallel world as crazy as unexpected. Then nothing can remind me of where I’ve came from, leaving out maybe this kind of physical difference that makes me feel a stranger for the very first time.
Then towards Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood, in the middle of Kowloon, where bamboos have replaced scaffolding and the smells transport me to a France Asia real size. Of course, what I hate above all when people tell me about their journey is making comparisons. Like “You know, over there people don’t even get to have normal toilets or to eat with flatware. It’s not as in France!” But I have to face facts: here everything’s different from what I’ve already seen and I get surprised buy every slightly indecipherable sign, tons of advertising boards, storefronts where “facing” is not really on the agenda, bicolor minibuses that can carry three football teams, a camel and his whole tuareg. Chinese letters look like delicate graffiti that make sense. But not for me.
I’ve booked a room in a large building on Nathan Road, where the hall hosts 24/24h-opened grocers. Close to them, there are mobiles sellers, betting on horse races cabins, space Pakistani sellers who are desperate to get us to buy “high quality watches”, so they say. Fortunately, my Flick Flack watch hasn’t left my wrist since I was 10, it’s serves as an alibi to my refusal to comply. Some of them play mafia style a bit, like actors straight out of a Tarantino movie, coke in the trunk, marijuana in the pocket. Plus this eastern accent that makes Jackie Brown much less gloomy.
My film rolls start heating up and my belly growing. To believe that frying smells that are constantly tickling my nose have an immediate effect on my appetite and my curiosity. Then lunch break at Macau restaurant, where Chinese traditions are going to surprise my European’s habits. Is the hot water glass standing in front of me on the table before even ordering supposed to be drunk or wash my chopsticks? No matter how hard I spy on every single move of the people sitting next to me, they don’t give me any help. I chose to ignore the glass. Whatever, chopsticks look clean and I’m not thirsty. When she realizes I got a bit lost checking the menu, my neighbor informs me, with no words but right moves, of the fact that her dish is good. I agree with her choice. How do Chinese manage to stay slim when I am served the fattiest noodles on fatty noodles’ history? Whatever, my love for fatty food isn’t breaking news; my saddlebags may convince you of it.
In 15 minutes there’s a ferry boat to the Honk Kong Island. I’m going to spend the afternoon in the antique district, where great age has no age, not only for the furniture but for the people carrying the stands as well. Everything over there is antique, starting from their toothless mouths or their wrinkles, as deep as a war time ditch. That makes me think that, in the main while, people in France fight for retiring at 60… Here, it seems like the cave of Ali Baba, with no turbans but with eyes as pleated as an aristocratic dress. As passionate as I am on books I don’t understand a word, I find what I want.
It seems that Lamma Island is paradise, the kind of paradise you can only reach by boat and where you can only move by bike. The kind of unrealistic stuff that apparently is close at hand. I run, I fly to get there. This is even more wonderful than a postcard form Tahiti, minus the crowed and plus the “coffee”.
NB: Never ask for coffee on Lamma Island or you could be confronted with one of the few things that can spoil and traumatize your day. We should tell them one day: that white, thick, bitter tasting frost which is swinging in my mug as cellulite in a fat leg, is NOT coffee.
Anyway, I could talk for hours about Hong Kong, about these people who made my journey an unexpected success and their benevolent generosity that makes you feel uncomfortable or their humility that makes them richer than any trader making fortune on the financial market buying chickpeas. I could tell you about the flower market, able to awaken the senses of the bitterest ones, the fortune-tellers in mythical mystical temples or the tiny photo shop, stuck in a dingy basement, with silver cameras that would have made dream Mark Oblow. I could as well spend hours describing the vintage shops that have understood that selling overpriced unique peaces it’s just useful for the rich to be richer and for widening the gap between real passionate ruined guy and the ones that, fool of money, just follow a stream. I could tell you about thousand things that put me upside down. But I’ll keep it for me, certainly not for selfishness. Just to make sure that I make you feel like going over there and have a look.
No, I haven’t met any crazy, bloodthirsty extremist in Hong Kong, mother.
Elisa Routa
http://inabunnysuit.blogspot.fr/
