Foreign Correspondent's Child.

Tonight, as part of my quest for professional clarification I went to meet a lady called Diane Stormont, up until the day after the handover of HK she was the beaureau chief of Hong Kong Reuters. The last article she wrote was the Reuters article describing the handover. She's hardcore journalist history.
She invited me for a drink in the Foreign Correspondent's Club, yet another Hong Kong instituation that outdates democracy. The weird thing about all these formal clubs that I've gone to is that you can't pay for anything with money, it all goes on your tab. As such since money is useless in the FCC but it's also a club for clapped out Journos who are suffering from several types of alchoholic addiction, several types of stress disorder and every type of financial destitution, I imagine you commonly see people attempt to get a last drink on their already ludicrously overloaded tab. The bar itself is so fucking cool, long, loaded down with old wood and good taste. It's like walking into a room full of well dressed people yet knowing that every one of them has earned the right to scoff at the fact that you're not in a suit. They have, through their professional endeavours, earned the right to wax lyrical to impressionable young go-getters who want advice on their chosen career, hence my presence. I suppose that might just be my impression of the place, for all I know they're all sell-out pigs who masquerade as the real thing but for me the effect was the same.
The reason I was going to meet Diane was because she obviously knew much about Journalism and could give me an insight I lacked. The thing is that I'm still trying to make my decision about whether to go for Advertising and Lies or Journalism and the Truth. I'm effectively wondering whether I should sell out for the Ad agency's big bucks or keep my soul but become a self-pitying alchoholic.
Talking to Diane gave me an insight that I lacked because she was so matter of fact about it and she had a total right to be. Others ahve been like that but because she was who she was, I listened. It was pretty much, "Journalism is a job, you work and you get paid" and as such I should try to keep professionalism in mind and the fact that it was as competitive as the rest. Also I should keep in mind that everyone I contacted was really busy and that they get a million e-mails a day. Now I knew all this before I met Diane, but she really drove it home. There is no way in Hell that anyone is going to respond to an E-mail I send saying "Hi, My name's Rory! I'm really like smart! I want to write because I'm really deep and inspired!!", not when they have hundreds of people physically knocking at their door. I have to go out to these papers and physically, personally demand that they give me a job.
I also met a guy called Luke Hunt, I think he was her fella. He was really cool, really hardcore. He works for Agence France-Presse or the AFP, which is a news wire like Reuters. He told me that I'd need some sort of economic background or at least an ability to understand finance to go anywhere in HK journalism. Apparently it's a good time to come out because the economy here is bouncing back and as such many of the papers and such are expanding again, they might need staff. I might try with the International Herald Tribune in the next few days, that might be cool.
They also introduced me to a guy called Herbert, who I later found out was the photographer who took the iconic "Last Helicopter out of Vietnam" photo. You know, the one off the roof of the US embassy showing the last helicopter out of Vietnam. The one that he later told was actually off an apartment block, thus amicably illustrating the confusion that was endemic of the time. This photo has been published a thousand times, it was the photo on the cover of Time magazine to mark the 25th anniversary of the Vietnam war. Herbert got about $250 because he was working for AFP at the time and as such, they owned the rights. What a fucking fucker.
All in all, the FCC was a really cool place, I met more new and genuinely interesting people there in two hours of drinking than I did in six months at home. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Hong Kong rocks the fucking house.

Kung Fun.

FIST OF FURY
Originally uploaded by ruadhraigh.

I wrote this about what I got up to on Sunday night, I'm posting it because I'm not writing it out again when I have a perfectly good explanation just sitting around gathering virtual dust.


I am and have been for most of my life an obsessive purist about watching movies. I am all about the purity of the movie experience, about the lack of outside interference. I am that guy who testily tells loud strangers in cinemas to shut up. I am that asshole who tells his friends to keep it down when they’re having a conversation in their own house because he’s trying to watch Aliens for the four hundredth time. The truth is that in a world so devoid of appealing edifices of spirituality, the movie theatre has become my church, it’s where I worship. So I take my movies very seriously and I resent people trying to distract me from my chosen theology.
As such, I’ve always loved the cinema’s themselves; I love their simple bland objectivity. I love the way that filmmakers can project so many different stories into this generically empty space. In a large expansive rectangular room with red walls and a big, eye-filling screen there is nothing that comes between you and the story. Until recently I couldn’t conceive of anything being better than the simplistic purity of this delightfully objective delivery system. I thought that when it came to watching movies the lack of outside distraction was paramount.
Then, on the night of Easter Sunday, as part of the 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival I watched Kung-Fu Hustle and Bruce-Lee’s Fists of Fury in the middle of Hong Kong’s Financial District on the biggest outdoor screen ever erected in Asia, a scene that was admittedly heavy on the distraction. Over the next few days the festival is showing outdoor screenings of various movies including some experimental animations by Astro Boy’s creator Tezuka Osamu and Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea.
I have to say that all in all after weighing up the pros and cons and given due consideration to both options that on the whole the outdoor screenings of the two movies I saw were better than the cinema; they were much fucking better. In entertainment stakes they made watching movies in the regular cinema look like you were watching a movie on a melting two-inch screen in the deep-blackness of the bottom of the ocean when you’ve just had your eyes sewn shut.
Let me set the scene for you, the Tamar Site that the screen was erected on is in just in front of the mouth of a vast canyon of beautiful Hong Kong landmarks, each one of them belonging to a huge financial giant. Bank of America, HSBC, The Lippo Building, The China Bank, every one of them architecturally unique and covered in a characteristically Asian light scheme that shines into the night like some kind of constant electronic fireworks display. Neon company names shine out of every surface; Chinese characters that look like they’re on fire permeate the night’s sky. This area of Hong Kong is where Ridley Scott obtained the look of Blade Runner; the Corporate East meets the Corporate West, on Super-Hyper-Techno-Acid from the Future!
I hadn’t seen either movie before, Kung-Fu Hustle has had rave reviews and Fists of Fury is by all accounts a Kung Fu Classic so I have to say that I was probably more excited about finally seeing the films than the novelty of the setting. I was somewhat apprehensive that we wouldn’t get good seats or that it would rain, two things that were very possible. Although I knew it would be good I wasn’t absolutely sure if it was going to be that great.
Driving there in a taxi, the screen emerged on the horizon a good two minutes before we actually approached it. When I arrived at 7:00 there was vast crowd of people, who were mostly Chinese although it was peppered with the occasional Western Gwai-lo standing around with a conspiratorial look of mutual recognition on their face gained from having lucked in a bit of an inside-secret. It’s not often these days that you see anybody who is really, truly impressed about anything, but on everybody’s face and in everybody’s eyes you could see the disbelief at the scale of the screen and the magnificence of the background.
The weather was pretty usual for this time of year in Hong Kong, sticky and humid. You could taste the need to rain in the air while helpful festival staff were busy handing out white plastic-macs with a level of foresight that later proved to make the whole evening possible.
The closest I can come to describing the feeling I had when I saw the set-up, the massive screen, the stacks of speakers is that it was like when I got the Millennium Falcon for Christmas when I was eight. There were at least a thousand seats, all lit up by floodlights with the massive bulk of the inflated screen fronting the whole endeavour. As soon as we got in, my girlfriend and her brother and I all raced around like the eight-year-old kids we felt like and finally found great seats right at the front just it started raining, which it continued to do for most of the night. Once we had the seats and right through Kung Fu Hustle and Fists of Fury I hardly noticed the gathering wetness down my back, I was that blown away by the scenery, I was that excited by the prospect of the movies.
While I was struggling into my mac the place quickly filled up to absolute capacity and the floods dimmed to a kind of hazy half light, the red and blue neons on the side of the skyscrapers illuminated the mist and rain, giving the whole place a weird glow, like seeing the possibility of coloured headlights in fog.
First there was a short and nicely put together montage of film clips celebrating a hundred years of Chinese cinema, which was one of the themes of the festival. At the same time the Hong Kong Symphonette played the music for the short live, it was our first exposure to the screen’s sound system, which was immense. I had been so concentrated on my anticipation of the visuals that the quality of the sound didn’t really occur to me. Then Kung Fu Hustle started and it blew me away, almost literally. Thankfully both movies were in Cantonese with Mandarin and English Subtitles but it was in the fighting that the sound and the visuals really showed what you can do with volume if there’s no restricting walls to cause the deafening of the crowd. Once the movies actually started and the kung-fu styleee punches were a-flying you could physically feel every blow in your chest, it was like being beaten up by a movie.
You could see people on the street behind the screen stop and stare, cars slowed down and pulled over, the crowd roared along with the movie. The Lion’s Roar in Kung-Fu Hustle was so loud that I could see the windows of the cars and the skyscrapers reverberate. As the action of the movies got more and more serious, so did the weather, the rain really started pouring down but safely ensconced on our macs and bathed in the warm night’s air we braved the whole thing with hardly a thought for the conditions. Every couple of seconds you’d look up, see where you were, see the amazing background, the fantastic enthusiasm, you’d realise that there was no where on Earth that would be a better place to show these two films and look at the person beside you in true “Oh My Fucking Christ” amazement, even though neither of you spoke the same language. It was so eerily beautiful it was like we were in the movie. When Bruce Lee came on there were shouts and cheers, every one of his fights were filled with cheesy point of masterful ability and quality sound effects. I think it would have made him happy to see himself still looking like a god, projected in the open air of modern Hong Kong.
In terms of the experience, all in all and out of the two Kung-Fu Hustle was the better because it was better able to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that the setting offered. The booming sound, the sharp visuals, the magnificently choreographed fight and CGI sequences, it was like what Tarantino was trying to achieve with Kill Bill but put in the perspective of KFH spectacularly failed to pull off. While Bruce Lee’s fighting was extraordinary in Fists of Fury and the in-story theme of racism towards Japan was hilarious to watch, especially in the company of so many Chinese and Japanese people, the quality of the sound wasn’t up to the former because recording standards were obviously much lower back then. Also and with a sad predictability when it was compared to the CGI enhanced battles of Kung Fu hustle it looked pretty hokey.
As we left I kept talking about Kung Fu Hustle and the amazing differences it had made to me as a cinema-goer, you could see everyone trying to get to get to grips with seeing the end of four hours of such an amazing experience.
I have to say, after that I’m not sure I can go back to my cinema’s treasured bland objectivity. I think I might now need a bit of drama to my backdrop. I realised that the distractions of a locale can definitely contribute to the experience rather than detract from it, like watching Jaws in a lie-low floating in the sea or watching Alive on the peak of Mount Everest. The only problem I foresee is that it might have been too good, that I might now have an unrealistic expectation of what a good cinema-going experience constitutes. Hopefully before I die, just once, I’ll be able to sit in a throne on a huge Imperial space station and get to watch Star Wars projected on the surface of the Moon before I have it blown up. Is that too much to ask?

Two Things that are very cheap in Hong Kong

1] Food -There are so many differing ways, manners and avenues to attempt in a culinary sense and the vast majority of it is so cheap that makes you angry. Having lived in Dublin for most of my life I'm really truly realising in a very first-hand and actual sense that every restaurant in town is the moral equivalent of a sweatship that makes bubble-gum flavoured baby poison and is entirely staffed by orphans. Next time you see a restaurant in Dublin colsing down, don't feel bad for the people involved, throw stones at them, teach your children to revile and spit upon them. Irish Restaranteur's are like war-profiteers, they get fat off the misery and sacrifice of others. In Hong Kong, things are as they should be, food is food and it's priced as such. Sushi for example is so cheap that eating it becomes like eating a packet of crisps, you can do it whenever you want because no matter what if you're not actually homeless then it's an affordable option. And it's not just the normal everyday stuff that's affordable, even though some Western food is slightly pricey. As you walk around differing parts of HK you are continually confronted by storefronts maybe two metres in length that's fronted by a glass-fronted counter at which you can sit and eat a wide variety of culturally entrenched grub. One of the more charming things is the weird thing in which they have eerily accurate plastic versions of the meal lying around for your perusal, it's a bit like when you're in a chipper and for some reason they leave all the minging fly-covered unfried stuff behind the glass of the counter where you can see, like seeing uncooked shite it will make you want to eat it? Got a hankering for some boiled Chicken feet? Slightly in the mood for some fermented bean curd covered in a two-inch roll of globulous Pig Fat? If so then I know the guy who does the best, he's this crazy old Chinese guy with one eye and a parrot in acage. I know this because evrytime I pass by him he shouts "You come here! Eat good! Best in Town!! I change money too!!"
If you can't trust a Chinese Pirate who can you trust?
2] Taxis - Getting a taxi here is the fucking business. I get taxis everywhere, every day. Now, it's important that you know, the thing is that on avarage I really am a cheap bastard. I have always had an aversion to casually spending money on piddling little shit that cost more than five euro. This may be because I'm sensitive to the fact that I'm lazy and I'm trying to maximise my money and hence also maximise my lack of overall effort, I don't know, but what I willl say is that when I'm at home I resent taxis, I fucking hate them. I hate the way they're generally either unfriendly or over-friendly and always fucking boring. I hate the way they sit in taxi-ranks for hours staring out the widows when they could be reading a fucking book or performing any number of productive activities. I can count the number of genuinely pleasant taxi-rides I've had on the fingers of one foot. Now you can accuse me of classism or social xenophobia if you want, that I should have made more of an effort to get along with the taximen of Dublin because they are the salt of the Earth, that the reason I detest them is because they talk with a Dub accent and are working for their money. If this is the case, this is how I respond: A: Fuck You.
B: The avarage taxi driver earns four
times the avarage wage of the Dublin
city worker.
They are usurious, abusive motherfuckers who drive slowly on purpose to pump up their fare. I hate paying them their blood money, they can fuck right off.
Hong Kong taxi drivers however are legendary wage-warriors who put up with a lot of shit in the course of their honest persual of an honest days work. I have met more interesting HK Taxi-men in the short time I've been here than I have in my entire run of their Irish equivalent. They are moral giants, dwarving even the most generous philanthropists of our day. I say this because I can get a taxi from Emma's down to the centre of HK and it will cost me about three euro. Three euro. Three of them. The equivalent trip at home would cost about ten if not twelve bills!! That's three times the amount!!! And they don't try to drive slowly so that they get caught by traffic lights, they don't blatantly go at 25 MPH when you're trying your best to hold the vomit down until you get home cause you don't want to get stung by the shitty soiling charge. Of course, it might be the case that I've just been lucky with the taximen I've gotten so far, maybe one of them will detour, drive me into a garage where I will be taken apart by Chinese surgeons and my organs will appear in a little old lady who will swear she's been straining blood through them for years but if that's the case, at least I don't have to have boring, meaningless conversation about either Manchester United or the shitty deal Taxi-drivers have gotten since the government issued all the new plates, because they don't speak English.

Piracy, Adventure and Blogging on the High Seas.

Recently, I have been reading a lot of historical fiction about the sea, Hong Kong being a historically naval place. Master and Commander, Star of the Sea, Shogun, Tai-Pan, in many ways the focus of all these books is to ennumerate the various manner in which thousands of men died in a very slow and painful manner due to ignorance of the importance of basic hygiene, not insulting the French and eating your vegetables. These deaths make for drama, for high-adventure on the high seas, but what they also serve is to illustrate just how huge the world is when all you have to travel it with is a tub of wood and a sail. Today, we do in twelve hours what it used to take people two years to do.
Back in the day, the Far-East was a place of legend, an unseen, unknown universe of unlimited wealth that shockingly took no stock of European interests as it was too far away. Of course to the Orientals, Europe was an equivalent mystery albeit an inferior one because they thought we were all just evil ghosts that flew around bemoning the fact that we had been so evil in our previous lives. Hundred of thousands of men died trying to travel to Asia, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, Magellen's straits, the Laurentine abyssal. Men were press-ganged on to ships, never to see their homes or families again. Boys left home and returned as men, rich beyond the conception of the common man,a full haul of nutmeg or saffron from India could fetch prices equivalent to about five or six hundred million dollars, if you received one percent of that, that's five million dollars.
Storms, Pirates, the French, the Natives, Squalls, Landmass's, Mutiny, Scurvy, Ignorance, Buggery and the Lash. It took people up to two years of traveling to get from Britain to Hong Kong and I just talked to my brother on Skype over the internet and was able to say "God Bless you" when he sneezed. We are roughly 6187 miles apart and I just heard him sneeze. How fucking cool is that??
Jesus, how lucky are we to be around right now? Just you try to explain to a guy from the seventeen hundreds about blogging, about Skype, about mobile phones and how small the world can be. then try to convince him that we were better off travelling at a slower pace. Don't get me wrong there are obvious downsides to our lifestyles but at least for a larger number of us the everyday elements of it are slightly more tolerable.
Just imagine the conversation you could have with one of the crewmembers of one of those expeditions about your dismay at the shocking discomfort you have to go through, at your righteous indignation at having to go through the absolute unmitigated Hell of sitting in a smallish chair and eating low-quality food for ten hours to get to Hong Kong. You might think it would be awkward when he responded but don't worry, by the time you'd finished talking about how much you hate air-line food he'd probably be dead from malnutrition anyway.
So anyways, in the majority of ways and for a fair number of people life is good. I love technology and boo-ya sucks to you if you don't realise the miracle of modern living.
Ps. I do realise this only applies to the people who have the technology, I doubt you'd have to invent a time machine to produce a person who would be shocked by the convenience of your lifestyle.

Squashed Expectations.

Today, yesterday and the day before I played squash, I now love squash, for me squash is the new black.
I, like so many others, have never really been a sporty kind of person. Because this statement is so often said it's easy to miss its full implications so I'll say it again, I have never really been a sporty kind of person. Whatever you want to say, I wasn't cool, I didn't do weights,I'm not buff, I'm physically inferior, whatever. I just didn't have the attitude for it.
This of course is a nice way of saying that while I wasn't last picked for teams in school, I certainly wasn't a "go-to guy" when it came to competitive sports. I have always put this down to two things, a lack of the peer pressure of having loads of other kids around where I lived as a kid and the fact that I'm usually pretty comfortable doing anything I'm not comfortable with. Now I don't mean that I was an unphysical kid, I spent ninety-percent of my days exploring the forests near my house in the wilds of Wicklow, building forts, hunting my brother, getting hunted by my brother, having my brother, cath, gut and clean me and mount my head on his bedroom wall, I was seriously down with that sort of thing.
I just didn't so much get the whole rugby, football, tennis conspiracy that private school habitually tried to lay on you. Inwardly, I always thought that rugby was for morons, tennis was for girlyboys and football was for egomaniacs, I just couldn't appreciate their conception of finesse so instead I watched Star Trek and read books and I stand by my decision.
So playing and genuinely enjoying sqaush is a pretty big thing for me, it could theoretically be the difference between a thriving vigorous sixty-year old Rudhraigh and a thrashing, cardiac-arresting forty-seven year old Rudhraigh. It really is fun, and I don't often say that about anything that requires you wear funny shorts or keep score, other than the hooker-sex of course.
Now I have been playing in a place up the road that Emma's family are members of called the Hong Kong Cricket Club. It's a high-class mish-mash of old ex-pats and young go-getters. It's yet another holdover from the old colonial days, back when every member was A) White B) British By God! and C) White.
Now of course even though there are many Chinese members today it's still quite odd, like an old pub that's had smoking banned but you can still detect the odour an colour of nicotine in every square foot of every room. There are old pictures on it's tastefully decorated walls with pictures of strapping Englishmen in white conquerer helmets straddling Hong Kong like they were claiming Prima Nocte.
Recently, it's had the inevitable PC making makeover so you're no longer around to call the Chinese staff "coolies" or beat them for some entertainment. No, It's important to know that today if you're going to beat one of the Chinese servents you have to have a real and valid reason or else the other members will stand there in the background while you wash the blood off your shoes and their pick the teeth from your squash racket and give you cold and dirty looks over their Pimms and lemonade and mutter to each other about your "Ill-Breeding and typical Irish mania".
Anyway, in truth the place is great (It has a bowling alley, a swimming pool, three great restaurants, two bars, four tennis courts, four squash courts, a golf simulator, a cricket pitch and a video shop that you can take 5 DVDS at a time for a week, all included in the membership fees) and there are at least as many Chinese members as gwai-lo's, but I'm learning that that's pretty typical of Hong Kong. There's not nearly as much segregation as you'd expect, at least not within the rich. Here money buys you everything and everything has a price, and averyone smiles when a friend buys something new. My price might be swanky squash facilites and traditionally elitist drinks, I haven't decided yet.

Seven Times a Lady.

Today, the weather was beautiful, the sun was casually sidling down and gently insinuating itself with the city. It was like being seduced by some sort of natural force, like aquicesence was inevitable and that any attempt on my part to try to do anything other than give in was pointless. As such, the daytime of my day was focused around a visit to the Hong Kong Botanical gardens. It's mostly a repository for plant-life having a billion differnt types of tree, fern, moss and grass. It's full of kids, tourists and of course the animals. It's kinda like a semi-zoo whcih is kinda worse than a real zoo because it doesn't have the funding. It has the low-budget highlights of the natural world. Flamingos and other random birds fill the aviary, sloths and terrapins and lemurs litter the other parts of this diet-zoo. For the most part it's just sad, then you see the orangutan's then it becomes genuinely upsetting.
I think one of the great betrayals of chlidhood other than Santa Claus's non-existence and the expectation of work is zoos. When you're a kid you're completely oblivious to the reality of the suffering of these prisoners of evolution. When you're a kid you think that these animals love being enclosed, because you love looking at them, that's kid-logic.
Now today, as an adult, I can pretty much stomach any of these things without getting upset, but for some reason, seeing orangutan's in a cage upsets me. They look so empty, like the unexplained confinement has sucked the life out of them. They look like prisoners without hope, ignorant captives of ignorance.
But on the upside they gave me a splendid idea for a book.
Later, when I was far away from the pseudo-zoo and back in the human equivelent I went out with Emma and my friend Lauren. Lauren works for the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's resident Irish Times. She seems to know everyone. We went out for drinks and such because this weekend is Hong Kong Rugby Sevens weekend. I'm still not totally sure what the specifics of Rugby Sevens are, I assume it's seven players playing rugby and such but I also assume it has to be slightly more complicated than that, but to be honest that's as far as I will go in the interest stakes.
Anyway, the upshot is that we went out for a drink on Rugby Sevens weekend, it was somewhat like reaching for a glass of water and unwittingly picking up a glass of bleach. Think of the worst, most tacky, most randomly chaotic, drunken, pissed, vomit covered, vomit coloured evening you have ever seen then think of what it would be like if it was arranged in a foreign country by the Chinese. Think of sports and how serious certain people take them (this may in fact be yourself, if so then you know exactly what I'm talking about}. Now think of all this, a convention for people who love all these things, shouting, getting drunk, nationalism and more shouting. Think of the women who are attracted to the men that are like this, except realise that in the HK Rubgy Sevens they're all about forty years old and trully, finally, minging. And desperate. Think about the fact that every hooker, every scabies-ridden, pox-filled-clabtastic AIDS ho looks forward to doing a roaring trade for the three days of the Sevens. It's like Hooker Christmas. The place is infested with the most hardcore bunch of absolutely fucked Rugby fans I have ever conceived of. If the prospect of vomiting on another man's piss while he's getting a blowjob from a Thai Girl with a ciggarette in the side of her mouth appeals to you, then come to the Sevens! It's full of every stereotype you ever thought ot raging against.
Of course, I watched the Ireland-Wales Match with five hundred other people at one in the morning, four hundred and ninety-nine of which were absolutely wasted. I shouted, I regaled, I bellowed but nothing could help Ireland, especially because inwardly I wasn't really fussed. It's not that I wouldn't love Ireland to win, it's just that I kinda want Wales to win too, the Welsh are just adorable! With their unfeasible accents and their inabillity to discern between their sister and their girlfriends they're just darling!
Anyway, I saw us lose then we left.
On our return to the center of town Lauren and her friend Holly both drunkenly gave the taxi-driver a real colonial stylee what-for for trying to rip us off. I couldn't tell if he was really doing so or if they were just practicing the ancient European tradition of hassling people who don't speak the same langauge as us but all the same the journey was remarkably silent after he threatened to kick us out of the cab at the side of the road.
It's important that you realise that by this stage I was pretty drunk, Lauren was also drunk, Holly was drunk, Emma was drunk, Lachlan (Emma's brother) was drunk, the rugby fans were certainly very fucking drunk, I suspect that even the taxi-driver was drunk. It was like going to the World Relapse Convention for Alchoholics Anonomous.
All in all I enjoyed myself, I think that tonight was like going swimming in the sea as a child, starting to struggle and drown, then finding your resolve, pulling yourself up and out and emerging from the water as a man with a raging hangover and the realisation that in fact the sea was not water but beer,.
I feel it was fairly successful..
Oo Eee.

I Ain't Got no Time For Yo' Jibba Jabba!

It's funny, I'm not a very articulate person, I usually put this down to a belief that I never learned to stay silent when I had nothing to say. At times {in fact most of the time} I'll walk away from a conversation inwardly berating myself for not giving a decent representation of myself to the person or persons involved, I feel grateful for their tolerence of my inarticulate nature. I spend a lot of my time deperately trying to justify myself to the people I know. If there's one thing I've realised in my life it's that people dislike casual desperation in a close aquaintance, but they hate close deperation in a casual aquaintance. I've always been somewhat of a sensate, convinced that my life should be as interesting as humanly possible so it's hard to stomach it when it's actually me that's the uninteresting party, it means that there is never any party, just a bunch of people standing around trying to silence the common awkwardness by talking loudly. Believe me, I'm very aware that it's annoying to have to deal with a casually known person who can't contain their inner deperation, or at least make it casually interesting. As such I've always felt that to an extent I'm inhibited by the people I know, that my behaviour around the people I know is part of the main reason that I feel slightly estranged from my life. As such my move to HK is a lot more than a move to a foreign country, it's an opportunity to redefine myself, to finally give myself a chance to say what I meant to say.
Actually, you know what? That's not funny at all!!
Calvin & Hobbes are funny. And anything that Mr-T says.
That man is a laugh riot.

Bus-Love.

When I first considered coming here I must say one of the most intimidating factors of the whole "Living in Hong Kong" concept was how the non-European persons who resided here (I.E. The Chinese) would regard yet another foreign devil coming over and taking one of their rightful jobs merely because I could speak English and was white. I was worried that I would walk into a job that by rights some more able Chinese guy should be filling purely because of an unjust system of racial opppression and fiscal harassment. I was worried that the Chinese people of Hong Kong would hate me, spitting rancid saliva on my food, evil looks at my face and the demand for justified karmic retribution into the infinite arena of Nirvanic Circularity. I was worried that I was walking into a situation where the avarage Chinese mother would see me in the street, stop their small and beautiful child and point at me with a wary finger as I passed them by, desperately trying to ignore the newly learned hatred in the child's eyes. I was worried that I would find myself ignoring the fact that my new friends were racist, sexist bigots who saw the Chinese people as resources and were quite able see themselves as righteous consumers of a historically endowed vice. I was worried that I would do well here, that I would prosper, but that all the time I would have a sickening desperation permeating my whole being, knowing that I was prospering through the degredation and mass-abuse of the many by a priveleged few. I was worried that I would have to lie to my family and friends about my life here, mask vital truths that were completely definitive of my situation because my acceptance of them was so shamefully morally reprehensible that no person with even a modicum of self-respect could know they existed yet go on without without denying them completely. I was worried that Hong Kong would make me a hypocrite because it was based on a system of hypocrisy that had been going for hundreds of years. I was worried that I might end up a miserable, fat, bald forty-five year old advertising executive with a totally consuming cocaine addiction, four technically legitimate children that saw me as nothing more than a mine for money and a tribe of illegitimate sprogs who legtimately saw me as an analogy for the rape of their country.
But today, as I ran for the departing bus to go to Central and pick up a suit I was having repaired, the bus stopped because it saw me running. Never, in all my time in Dublin, actually nowhere in anywhere in Ireland did a departing busdriver stop the bus because he saw me running for it. Never.
Hong Kong loves me.
And I love it.
Oh Yeah!

Fake Country..

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Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

Yesterday I crossed the border into the PRC and went into Shenzen.
Talking to Christopher (Emma's Dad) he says that Shenzen has probably changed rather a lot in the last few years, but that he really wouldn't know because he's only been there once.
He first came here in the seventies. Back then he was a British police officer one of the many colonial Gweilo's keeping the peace. This was obviously back when the British still owned this town, so I believe him when he tells me that things have since changed. The only time he has ever in Shenzen was when it was still just a conglomorate of tiny little villages that was only remarkable because it bordered Hong Kong.
He was chasing a criminal throught the streets who thought that he could get away if he ran over the border bridge and escape into China. When Christopher ran over the border line in his HKPD uniform he says that suddenly roughly a hundred Chinese soldiers pulled out their rifles and ran towarsds him screaming at him in rapid Mandarin that they would fill his Gweilo ass with Chinese metal if he didn't get back into Hong Kong pronto.
Potential internationial incidents aside the thing about this is that in this repect very little has actually changed, the Chinese are still threatening to fill our Gweilo asses with metal it's just that today this is a different kind of metal, not so much bullets, kind of more digital cameras.
Shenzen is a shopping mecca. You can get absolutely anything and everything you could ever want in Shenzen. While it used to be a few tiny little villages it's now one ridiculously labyrinthine sprall of a mall. It was the largest shopping related building I have ever thought of. I'm not joking when I say that you can get absolutely lost in there, I know this because I did, several times. Believe me when I say that at the top there are two floors the size of about four football pitches full of tailors and cloth sellers where you can get absolutely any clothes you can conceive of made up. Three equivelent floors where you can buy electronic goods and watches where a "Lolex" will set you back about $2.50.There are literallyt thousands of Chinese trying to persuade you to buy weirdly incongruous goods. Every once in a while a crowd of these hawking Chinese passes you by and you see that they're crowding around another Gweilo (European) and the Chinese that are simultaneously crowding around you go after this alternate Gweilo because you're ignoring them and the Chinese that are following them come after you because they have met similar disinterest. It's like you swap subordinates.
There are also about nine floors of identical boxy seventies shops selling fake everything for nothing. Fake this and fake that. Genuine Chinese fakes. Strangely enough, all the clothes I was wearing when I arrived were probably made in China, it was like they were coming home.
The really funny thing is that it's actually illegal to sell fakes in China so what you end up doing is sidling up to a likely looking ten-year old Chinese kid and muttering "Prada, Prada, Prada" He then takes you through the incomprehensible maze of shops full of millions of harrasing and haranguing peopel to the back of one particular shop where he pulls at a wall of packages of nappies. The wall opens and you walk into a tiny room filled with every kind of Prada shoe you could possibly find, for about a hundredth of the price. The location of the Prada room changes every day so that the authorities can conintue to turn a blind eye because this mall is so insanely huge that they can happily claim it's an impossible task and keep on taking their bribes.
Ironically, many of these fakes are apparently made by the same people who make the real deal. This makes sense because it's cheaper than having to bother finding someone new and going through the hassle of teaching them how to make it when you can get the only people in the world who knows what to do from experience and pay them roughly a dollar a day to do it for you.
Apparently the workers make more money from the fakes than the genuine articles, once they're trained to make a particular kind of shoe/shirt/wallet etc. they can then go work for the fake makers, the lucky bastards..
Anyway I bought Armani shirts, Levi jeans, Ralph Lauren socks. I'm having a suit made, A full length Cashmere jacket. I have now got fifteen different kinds of everything and I spent roughly.....two hundred quid.
My tailor, John, the nicest guy ever, works from 7 in the morning till 11 at night, if he's lucky. On a fairly regular basis he might not sleep at all.
But it's okay because I returned from shopping with more bags than I could carry, a manicure (my first ever) and a real repect for the fact that the Chinese people really know what work really is, mostly because they're really working themselves to death for us.
So now, for a laugh, why don't you check and see how many articles of the clothing you're presently wearing comes from China, when I did it I got 4!!

Work Schmirk.

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Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

This is but the tiniest part of my view from my bedroom window at 6:30 in the morning. The jet-lag still has me waking up at odd times so I have a lot of time to think and take pretty yet random photos like this one.
As it is there are a few things I need to get done in order to legitimise my stay here somwhat. The requirements are:
1] Get a job
2] Get an apartment
3] Get a work visa
Now 2 and 3 totally rely on 1.
If I aint got no job I can't get an apartment and they only give you a work visa if you have a job. So, in order to rectify this I narrowed my career choices down to two main areas: Journalism and Advertising.
On the Journalism front:
Possibility 1] I had sorted out an internship with a magazine called BC magazine before I arrived. It's supposed to be a fairly irreverent piece of anti-establishment crap, exacrtly the sort of thing I would be interested in wasting my time at. The fucker was that it's unpaid, so if I were going to take it I would have to have some sort of paying gig at the same time. Luckily I undertook a TEFL course before I arrived and just have to finish one or two parts of it. Apparently SARS scared all the Enlgish teachers away so there's a real shortage of Europeans with TEFL courses around, I could make great money teaching Hong Kongites how to appreciate the Simpsons while at the same time doing the internship.
Possibility 2] It looks like a good chance that I could end up writing for one of the local English papers [of which there are a few] I know a couple of people who work here as well as Christopher [Emma's dad] knowing just about everyone there is.
In Advertising:
Possibility 1] I could just go and apply for an internshiop in one of the 4a companies here and hope for the best. They take in a huge amount of copy monkeys and spit them out as seasoned ad-men. I'm not sure I'd enjoy it though, it seems pretty regimented..
Possibility 2] I had a meeting today with a fantastic lady who owns a small hotbox of an agency. Basically she employs a small team of people with a total emphasis on creativity and quality of work. They have some great clients and they all seem like really cool people. I'd have to be flexible and able, but at the same time she's flexible and able so the work environment would be great. They're crying out for capable designers here, there';s a real shortage and I think she was hoping I had some sort of ability in that department but actually I think she was impressed by my ability to express myself. She set me some research, intorduced me to a friend who was the head of Reuter's Hong Kong division and told me to get back to her. I really want this job.
So all in all it's working out fine. I have options that feel right and I'm generally pretty happy about the whole thing. Now if only I could get some fucking sleep.

Stereotypically Sarcastic.

So tired.
I spent the day following my family (who are over for a couple of days) walk around the streets, buying this, haggling that, buy, sell, buy.
So tired.
The jetlag is making me feel ill, my body keeps wanting to pack it in and go home where inactivity rules. It also makes you sensitive to the oddest things.
When I arrived here I quickly remarked (internally of course) that this country seemed to vaguely smell of something I didn't expect because it seemed to be so obvious, I thought it smelled like a Chinese takeaway. The scent of Kia Ora flavoured chicken dishes seemed to be everywhere, wafting around the oddest places. It's not exactly what you'd think, I suppose you'd hope that the Chinese takeaways you patronise at home are at best a pale imitation of the real thing, that when you visit the reality it shocks you with the zest of its Oriental mystery, the timbre of its nasal ablutions. So I had to ask myself, what did this piece of shocking stereotype come true bode for the rest of my experience here? Was I to look to the stereotypes we all love and endorse with our ignorance to inform me of what to expect? Could I look forward to many great nights talking about "Flied Lice" and watching people in pointy bamboo hats walk around calling me "A Wowee-san" (or is that Japanese?)
Not really, I think it was just a phase. The scent improved as I moved around.
As I walked around the streets I was assailed on all sides by an all-out olfactory war of people and cars and smog and dead chickens and ginger and dogs and people and dirt and clean and disinfectant and maybe still a little the faintest little ghost of Kia Ora chicken. Frankly any attempt to reconcile the stereotypes you expect and the reality that confronts you is as pointless as a bowl of strawberry jelly.
The streets here are wide and slightly dirty, yet the shops are small and totally clean. At the moment the weather is extremely pleasant but it bodes of the coming months of living in a wet spirit-sapping inferno. Apparently Hong Kong is a hot moist bag of muck in the Summer months and I can certainly see how that might happen. It becomes an indoor world, powered by air conditioning. You're trapped in a place of constant sore throats brought on by over-dry air and SARS and Avian Bird Flu paranoia. If these killer diseases have the same symptoms as a cold, when you get your Summer cold, how do you know you're not dying? That's what I want to know. I think I might buy myself one of those surgical face masks that people wear to protect themselves from germs. Even now you still see a couple of them floating about, like some guy was halfway through surgery and stepped outside for a fag. At first I just thought that there were an awful lot of Michael Jackson fans who just couldn't let go, then I remembered about the whole epidemic thing.
My mum bought me a very pleasant phone that I much appreciate because it makes me feel like if the worst comes to the worst I can always indulge in some hot sexx chat, something that was advertised almost everywhere I went today.
In other news I'm trying to decide what I'm going to do about work, I have to get a concrete job sorted out as soon as I can simply because you require a work visa if you stay in Hong Kong for longer than three months. As I might want to stay for a great deal longer than that, a job becomes a neccesary part of the equation. I've given myself three months to decide if I want to stay here for a while, you can guess for yourself which I'll do as my mind vascillates between the different possibilities. Perhaps we can make a game of it?

MECHA-RUDHRAIGH!!!!! Taller than the tallest building, more powerful than all of the armies of man!!

SV1
Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

So yeah, two days ago I moved to "Hong Kong" I did this for various reasons but mostly I just did it. As you may or may not know (but of course if you don't know then you're a moron) Hong Kong is one of the most famous and most wealthy cities in the world and is situated on the Eastern coast of China. It's the world's eight biggest economy, and that's compared on a national level. Hong Kong as a city makes more money than most of the world's countries do and that includes my lovely Ireland. This is one one of those statistics that probably suprises you, like finding out that Finland tops the world in competitive market forces or that in many places the avarage American probably can't spell competitive without spelling it with a 'z'
Anyway, Hong Kong is populated by around 6.8 million people, 95% of which are of Chinese ethnicity. For a person who is only really used to the Chinese in the traditional Irish manner, as being some kind of guiltless tribe of newly freed and industrious triers who are continually, facelessly, working away in the capitalist paradise of McDonalds, it's new to see them actually living normally in a place that they call home and in jobs that you actually want to do yourself. The idea that a Chinese person can move to Hong Kong and be able to be free to work, live and play as they want makes this place seem like a haven and everyone knows it. There's a weird feeling here, looking down out of the the absolutely fly-ass pad I'm presently staying in makes it seems like there's money and opportunity stuffed into every crevice. The thing is, it's not like London where it seems like economics exists because London does, here you know that Hong Kong exists purely because of the economics. In this way it feels like freedom, the freedom of the Chinese people. It's that same freedom that makes America seem so attractive Now some of you might be thinking "Hey, wait a minute, I've heard about Hong Kong, it may seem Chinese but it's really ruled by the Europeans and Americans there and since McGrath's a European he's only really competing with other Europeans, a quick handshake in the right place and a nod to the right person and he'll be fine"
To you I say this, do you think Rocky Balboa won because he was Italian? No! He won because he had heart! Do you think he won because he knew people? No! He won because he wanted it! He won because He had an edge formed by his experiences on the streets and he had no-where to go but up and nothing to lose! The Chinese people are the modern Rocky Balboa! There's a pool of ability that we all talk about back home in our kind of casually knowing way "Oh yeah, look at China! Look at China! Look at the Chinese! Look at their work ethic! They're definitely on the up and up!" Well then, tell me something, if you all really believed that, why the hell aren't you learning Mandarin? Why the hell are you still anywhere other than in China learning to be Chinese? Because I can tell you, even after only two days, it is so obvious that these able-bodied hungry-ass Chinese people we've been talking about, they're not some sort of vague conceptual issue that might have an affect on the global society one day, they exist! They're real! They're here! It's as simple as this, they are hungry and we are fat and when it comes right down to it that means that they have the better ability to take what we all want.
So now that I've left my home and moved into all of this you'd think I'd be pretty intimidated. After all there are 6.8 million Hong Kongites here in this city and I don't really know any of them. For the most part they speak a language I don't understand, come from a culture I have no real conception of, have customs I'm unaware of and they were here first. Even discounting their numerical advantage, in a one on one fair fight the avarage Hong Kong resident could probably kick several entirely different varieties of shit out of me and then make me eat it at their leisure, and this includes the many little old ladies they seem to have hanging around the gaff.
So, in order to prevent this happening, I have decided to make sure a fair fight never occurs.
In the late great spirit of European colonialism and the traditional spirit of white oppressors everywhere I intend to lie, cheat, steal and destroy my way to the top, because believe me even after only two days here I know that Hong Kong is a city of extremely able people in transit, some are on their way up and some are on their way down and I have decided that up has a better sound to it. I have decided that I would like to live in a place so fly that it never touches the ground. I want a car so fast that by the time you realise I'm coming, I'm gone. I want to have a job so poweful that I can change the word for "Power" to the word "Rudhraigh"
You may be thinking, "Jesus, it only took Rudhraigh two days to completely sell out and go rampantly insane, it's like he's some kind of ravingly capitalistic monster with no moral standard and a desire to drink human blood? What's that about?"
If you are thinking that, don't worry, you won't be for long, only until I have you executed for daring to impinge upon my imperialistic goals. I will straddle this city, tearing down the concrete edifices and the fantastic buildings and throwing them into my hungering gullet. I will use my flaming breath and lazer vision to melt their puny defences as they hurl them in tiny desperation against my magnificent form. Prepare for a new era world! The era of Mecha-Rudhraigh! King of the Universe!

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