Trash

I love my picturesque Cheung Chau.  I repeatedly tell people that it's my favourite place in Hong Kong.  It's a place that makes me feel happier and more relaxed.  I've walked around the island so many times now that there aren't too many places I haven't wandered past at least once.  It's given me a familiarity to the place.  I now have a visual memory of most of the areas which helps me to explore and also to find the places I want to revisit.

The flip side to that knowledge and memory I have of the place is when I see it in a less than ideal state.

Some recent storms and the flow of the currents meant that certain parts of Cheung Chau had become filled with trash.  The oceans had brought in all the detritus floating around straight into all of the little coves on the South West of the Island.  It was disgusting and upsetting to see the normally clean beaches turned into garbage dumps.  I had seen other beaches of Hong Kong covered with trash on different occasions, but this was my first sad experience with this on Cheung Chau.  The tides and currents would eventually changes push a lot of these rubbish out to other areas, but it was still disappointing to see.

Thankfully my favourite beach was clear.  The currents carrying all the junk were on the other side of the island and so today was still a day for a swim.  After hiking around the entire Southern section of the island, I had arrived at the beach drenched in sweat.  I quickly changed and dove straight into the water.

From my vantage point in the middle of the water, I looked back at all of the umbrellas and deck chairs.  It was an inviting sight and I soon swam back for a cool drink.

Coronavirus and tourism

I was off to visit my grandmother who lives out in the New Territories when I saw an incredible sight out of the bus window.  I pulled my phone out as quickly as I could and tried to take a photo as best as I could as what I saw quickly flew out of view.

Inside one of the container terminals along there harbour, were dozens of tour buses all mothballed away.  The combination of protests and coronavirus had first reduced, then completely eliminated the need for these tour buses.  Normally, they would spend their time constantly ferrying mainland Chinese tourists in and out of Hong Kong.  The spending habits of the Chinese tourists had driven the Hong Kong economy for years and these buses had effectively been the arteries which let their money flow.

The buses have disappeared from our streets for a while and I like most, had assumed they were all parked somewhere in China.  Seeing all these buses now parked and out of use in this container terminal, I could only imagine how many more were now sitting unused in some parking lot somewhere in China.

Coronavirus and no one cares

My concerns about the death of Hong Kong's nightlife were clearly premature.  With the relaxation of the restrictions on bars, the party restarted very quickly.  Things weren't meant to be back to normal as there were meant to be some limitations on how everyone was meant to be behaving, but by and large it seemed like a return to normal.  Peel street in particularly has roared back to life.  As I was walking past one night, I saw the cops had pulled up to enforce some of the social distancing measures.  They weren't doing a great job.  The sirens were blaring and they were on the loudspeakers telling people to observe social distancing, but no one seemed to pay them any attention.  They walked around and asked people to behave, but most people ignored them completely.  After a while, they got back in the police car and drove away.

It's been incredible that Hong Kong has escaped most of the worst parts of the coronavirus, but it seems incredible that this has been the case at times given how little people seem to care at times and how poorly the officials are able to enforce anything...

90s night

Everyone has been entranced with the Michael Jordan documentary "The Last Dance" lately.  With most of the world in quarantine, the binging on different documentaries and series has gone into overdrive.  It seems like there couldn't have been a more perfect time for this Michael Jordan propaganda piece to come out.  I like most others was also interested in it, so I had been following it closely.  I was a child of the 90s, so I watched the battles that Jordan had against everyone closely (though I was a Phoenix Suns fan as a kid and loved Charles Barkley).

With the final two episodes on air, a friend and I decided that we would turn this into a true "90s night".  We set up the two episodes and then we ordered out Pizza Hut pizzas.  There didn't seem like anything more 90s than Pizza Hut after all!

We didn't just get any old pizzas though.  We go one stuffed crust and one cheese bite.  Both of them were shamefully delicious.  I can't remember the last time I had eaten Pizza Hut, but it hit a spot that neither of us realised we had.  We had looked at the two pizzas in front of us and thought that there wasn't a chance we would be able to finish even one of them.  Yet as the second episode started to come on, we both looked down and realised that we had almost finished both pizzas.  Gluttony it seems knows no bounds.

By the end of the second episodes we both felt terrible.  The combination of beers and Pizza Hut left us feeling bloated.  The documentaries were good though and it was a trip down memory lane to see the Bulls playing at their peak.  Still... the pizzas were probably a mistake.