Manic Monday

I’m not going to mention the robot clone today, except to say I think I’m gonna call him George Cloney.

Man down

Just me and Tom (and Java) today, since it’s Monday and so Simon had to work. Got up and had my standard issue breakfast of Coke Zero and a banana. The weather was sunny and, as usual, the Hong Kong Observatory had issued some terrifying weather warnings.

There seemed to be no risk of fire. Hong Kong’s geography is such that there probably is some terrible weather or risk somewhere in the country at any time, but there are hundreds of highly localised microclimates and so these national level warnings are kinda meaningless.

Certainly outside no-one was taking urgent risk within the hour. We took Java for a walk down to the nearest shoreline and back, and the views were bloody great.

There was a stiff fresh breeze as we walked next to the building site that’s had no accidents, and has a formula to figure out their frequency which involves some seemingly arbitrary multiplication by 100,000.

Tom asked if I wanted to get any (more) breakfast and I wasn’t that bothered, but he was likely to pick up a coffee and a pastry somewhere. I asked what Hong Kong’s savoury pastry story is, since some countries just don’t seem to have them. He had a think, and couldn’t recall seeing any, like, sausage rolls or pork pies or quiches or what have you around. So maybe it’s just not a thing.

Anyway, stopped at his local coffee place and got a couple of sausage rolls.

Views unsurprisingly spectacular. The lounge bit itself is cool too. It looks like this is a manned bar but it’s actually not, and apparently hardly anyone actually uses this space at all. I reckon if I lived here I’d be up there all the time!

Back down to the flat and we chill for a while. We finish Romeo Must Die off, and I go get my passport and man bag and all the bureaucracy starts. We’re off to China this afternoon.

The 14 minute high speed train ride to Shenzhen

Shenzhen is a big megacity nearby on mainland China. I’ve been to Hong Kong, and Macao, and Taiwan, but never mainland China and so there’s a big gap on my personal map of the world that I’ve visited. Time to fill that in with the quick hop across. It’s just a 14 minute ride on the high speed railway from West Kowloon. Sure, we had to get to West Kowloon first but then just quarter of an hour to go visit this amazing sounding crazy tech hub? Totally one of the things I want to do while here.

So simple to get the train too. First, I registered for visa-free entry to China online, uploading a scan of my passport to a Chinese govt website. Tom bought us “train tickets” online through trip.com, which also involves giving them our passport details. Then we got a cab to West Kowloon station, an hour and a half before departure, which is a bit late because they actually recommend getting there 2hrs in advance. For a train. Why would we need to be so early?

West Kowloon station is a cavernous, kinda impressive building and we headed to the departure hall.

And here’s why you need to turn up so early. First up: passport scan at a machine, which proves we’ve got train tickets because of the link at purchase time. Then, I think, security. Like airport style security, everything out of your pockets and bags through a scanner. Then Hong Kong outbound immigration and the twilight zone between countries with, if i remember rightly, another security check? Followed by China inbound immigration. According to all the signage about how to fill out the visa-free entry thing, we’d done it partially wrong back at the flat. Oh well, let’s see what happens at the desk.

Well, eventually, Tom gets through with just a pic and four fingers while I have the pic and all fingers and thumbs, both hands treatment. The impressively grumpy guy at the desk barely pushed my passport back beyond the perspex. He doesn’t smile or say anything, he just leaves it there so I have to learn forward to pick it up, while he flicks his hand in a kind of “now fuck off” way, looking away in disgust. Welcome to China, I guess.

First thing past immigration is a load of wanted posters on the wall.

Round the corner and we’re in the departure hall. It’s fucking vast and there is NOTHING to do. Honestly. There are lots of seats but probably not enough. There are some police around, including one guy at a sad looking temporary desk looking morose. There are toilets and drinking water fountains and a lounge we don’t have access to, and there’s a poster for a really fancy train ride.

But that’s it. There’s no vending machines, no shops. Just this huge mostly empty space.

It’s over an hour until our train. I walk around trying to find anything interesting at all. Like, I dunno, the departure boards.

There’s a lot of stuff you’re not allowed to take with you. Glad I left my spear gun back at the flat.

It’s a really terribly boring wait. We might have been able to change our tickets to get an earlier one via the “flexi-trip” machines, except there was no option to do so as someone on a foreign passport with visa free entry.

The announcements are in Cantonese, Mandarin and English and the two Chinese versions are ear-splittingly loud. Boarding starts strictly at 15 minutes before departure and closes with 5 minutes to go.

Our train’s only going one stop, to Futian in Shenzhen. In only 14 minutes! Once we eventually get going, about 2 hours since we left the flat. Onboard it’s crowded and uncomfortable and Tom’s seat won’t stop reclining. The bloke next to us has rammed his suitcase in the overhead storage, and when the attendant comes along to ask him to move it because it’s too big, he just outright refuses for a bit. Eventually he’s convinced to put it on the floor by his feet.

The display at the end of the carriage tells us our speed, topping out at about 194km/h I think. It said the temperature in Shenzhen was 33ºc. The screens hanging from the ceiling showed a video of the train company’s corporate song.

There are no views because the entire stretch of train ride is in a tunnel. As “wow, I got a bullet train in China” experiences go it is hilariously underwhelming. I loved it.

When in Shenzhen, then

Emerging at Futian railway station, it’s a bit like West Kowloon in that it’s cavernous and sparse. My passport isn’t accepted by the gates to leave the arrivals area and I have go be seen by a person, while Tom sails straight through.

I haven’t signed up for AliPay or WeChat and have to rely entirely on Tom to do basically everything while we’re here, and I’m a bit parched so I ask him to get me some water from a vending machine.

This proves impossible for some reason. So instead we get something from that most Chinese of institutions, Starbucks. Then we go looking for the cab he’s booked us, and that takes us about 10 minutes because we can’t find where the ride sharing pick up is.

After much frustration on Tom’s part, some comms from the driver and assistance from a policeman we discover that the ride sharing pick up is where the arrows on the floor that say “ride sharing pick up” are pointing, which is upstairs.

The driver mercifully seems to find this hilarious, as he does my attempt at saying hello in Chinese. I am also finding basically everything hilarious at this point.

Huaqiangbei

The cab is a luxury cab, by accident, and it’s (hopefully) taking us to Huaqiangbei. To quote Wikipedia:

Huaqiangbei is a subdistrict of Futian, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. It is one of Shenzhen’s notable retail areas, having one of the largest electronics markets in the world

And it’s that electronics market I wanted to visit. It seriously does not disappoint. It’s incredible. There are 9 floors of all the electronics and components you could ever hope to see. Stall after stall of nuts and bolts and cables and labels and hubs and switches and fans and AI glasses and motherboards and keyboards and EVERYTHING. ALL THE TECHNOLOGY. ALL OF IT.

I’m giggling with joy at this point, but also kinda lost for words so here’s a load of pictures without words for a bit.

NINE FLOORS of it, and the only shop that isn’t a technology shop is this little convenience store counter.

On, I think, the 6th floor, we were greeted upon our arrival at the top of the escalator by 6 or so loud women shouting hellos and trying to sell us AI translation gadgets. This whole floor was full of translation gadgets - headphones, speakers, handheld tablet-y things, glasses, etc. But there wasn’t really any theme to the floors, I suppose the lower ones felt a bit more component-y and the upper ones were a bit more complete but you could get almost anything on any floor.

Robot dogs. Laptops with 4 screens. VR or MR or XR glasses. Every kind of cable or plug or storage or card or case or backpack or rideable suitcase or drone or camera or just anything and everything. Absolutely fucking remarkable. Loved it.

Tom had no idea people could be “into keyboards”. The keyboards were great. He called me a keyboard wanker.

On our way back down through the 6th floor, Tom actually bought something - some AI powered live translation glasses. Little speakers in the handles. Pairs with an app. He asked to try them on and then said “how can I test these, where can I find someone who speaks a language other than English?”. This attempt at humour did not land at all, which only made it funnier (for me). But as it goes the woman who served him spoke great English and really tried to drop in some idioms she’d clearly picked up from TV or something. “Wow, that app downloaded in the blink of an eye!”

What an absolutely phenomenal place. I could so serious wallet damage there, probably a very good job I had literally no way of paying for anything (except getting Tom to do it for me). Mind you, I say serious damage, I’ve no idea how much anything cost except that these translation glasses were only £28(!)

Beer o’clock

Lots of boxes already ticked to far today. Next on the list, kinda predictably, was to have a beer in China. Tom ordered us a cab which picked up almost immediately. We had to step through the flow of moped riders to reach the car.

Eventually we find Taps, and Tom orders a beer. The wrong beer, it turns out, but thankfully it was lovely anyway.

Then we have the correct beer, which was also pretty good. Two riot police walk past outside, one carrying a baton and shield and the other one of those big “keep back” sticks. Is there a small riot somewhere nearby?

We’re the only customers until a Chinese bloke comes in and the server pours a noticeably fuller glass for them than for us. Hmm. Anyway, Taps is alright but not the most exciting place. Tom has been to another place before called Craft Head, so we get another cab there and it’s absolutely brilliant.

It’s upstairs and we sit outside and watch the traffic. I get this time lapse video of the junction and am super impressed by the cab driver who’s just stopped right there and is giving zero fucks about moving.

The beer is better than at Taps, the location better, it’s just a great bar. Not even the button popping off my shorts can spoil my mood. Once we got past the crazy time-wasting and bureaucracy of actually getting on that 14 minute train, Shenzhen has been bloody great.

Cab back to the station and there’s much less faff here because all the faff is in Hong Kong. It’s confusing though. The convenience stores only sell food that I don’t want to eat, but they do sell beer. With old school ring pulls.