Andre

Poor people of Tung Chung: sweating away in the hot summer temperatures, they are too far on the outskirts of Hong Kong and their place is too young (not taking into account the tiny fishing village it once was) as a town to have a public swimming pool; the nearest public one would be in Tsing Yi. Locals have resorted to play in the CityGate Outlets‘ shopping mall fountain and (most) children come fully prepared with the right swim gear.

To seemingly taunt them even more, each time the Tung Chung population decides to visit the city by MTR, they will pass an Olympic swimming pool mock-up in the Central MTR station:

However, a public pool project is under way for Tung Chung so in just a few years time – eternity for a child – cooling off options won’t be limited to in- and outdoor shopping mall activities anymore (poor parents).

I had a chance opportunity to watch the latest Batman movie The Dark Knight in a Philippines shopping mall theatre. Happy about this and excited to see what everyone’s talking about, the afternoon turned into a nightmare to the point of ruining the movie experience. I shall never set foot into a local cinema again, given I was assured there’s nothing unusual about all that I experienced.

In short, throughout the movie I had to endure:

• Most of the audience were children aged anywhere from 5-10, having a blast like it would be their own McDonald’s birthday party (forget about any movie rating whatsoever);
• People chatting like at a bar on a weekend evening;
• People coming and going like in a train station;
• Mobile phone lights like in a disco (surprisingly no ringtones though);
• The couple next to me was exclusively playing for the first 2/3 of the movie with their mobile phone and then left, not looking once at the big screen;
• People standing up for no reason;
• It was a lot colder than even the freezing Hong Kong theatres with occasional wind blows matching a typhoon.

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Hong Kong‘s relation with grass could be summed up in the widely used line “Off the grass!” despite having a lot of nature – obviously the problem is that people prefer to stay within the city and thus don’t see the nature, even less so actually touch it. So what’s wrong with the picture below?

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