The Ubiquitous Peak

This holiday I've been going through the tourist brochure doing all the things I haven't had the time for because of the work, the family and the commute. If I'd known what to notice, I could have gotten an idea about the flavour of Hong Kong from the first when I picked up the tourist brochure in the airport. It's thin enough to fit in a purse or breast pocket. It's full of succinct descriptions. And it includes detailed instructions on how to get there at the end of each paragraph complete with what exit to take out of the MTR. So I've been dutifully following instructions and checking off each attraction.
Here is my required picture from The Peak at night. There's the white "bearclaw" of the IFC that is the terminus for my ferry commute. There's the incredibly red Panasonic sign that makes the harbor glow. There's the "lightning" building which is the new Bank of China building. Somewhere in the foreground is the apartment in which I'd spent an hour of my vacation, tutoring to pay for a loft bed.
The Peak is in a nutshell what I understand Hong Kong to be. It's historic - the tram's been running since 1888. It's full of high end shopping - you are funneled out of the tram into a five story shopping mall. It's kitschy - there's a Ripley's Believe It or Not and a Madame Tussaud's wax museum with local celebrities like Jackie Chan. It's bright and electric - there's a multi-coloured light display on the ceiling of the Peak Tower. There is free fun - a big EA electronic game centre for the kids. It's sporty - lots of nature walks going off in all directions. And it's crowded.

Treacle

In Turkey I made gingerbread cookies and molasses chews with pekmez. I could buy pekmez, a black sugary syrup, made from grapes, dates or mulberries. Mulberry pekmez I found to work best for cookies, though date pekmez was the thickest. We also used pekmez mixed with tahini for a couple of the years when we couldn't get decent peanut butter and hadn't brought any in. Tahini cookies became one of our Christmas cookies, too. They're not so pretty, but they are delicious. Roll the balls in sesame seeds before they're pressed with a fork like peanut butter cookies.

But pekmez is too thin to use without any modifications to the recipes and I was looking forward to finding the HK equivalen. Now that it's Christmas time, I have been able to buy everything I'm used to: Libby pumpkin in the can with the recipe on the side, Carnation evaporated milk in the size can that goes with the pumpkin, fresh Oceanspray cranberries, Pepperidge Farms stuffing mix, Swansons chicken broth and a 12 pound frozen Butterball turkey. It's not exactly the frontier. If I were British, I could get prepared mince, the mince pies already made or all the nuts and dried fruits for the pudding. But for some reason, there was no molasses.

The kids and I went to a store called Gateway that's in the basement in a local part of town on the recommendation of a guy who knows. It's there, he said, that you can get all kinds of N. American products. It was a wonderland full of products straight from Costco - in Costco sizes! We reveled in the beauty of huge jars of spaghetti sauce, quadruple packs of beef jerky, enormous boxes of cereal, gallon jugs of cranberry juice, kilo packs of coffee, bags of craisins and raisins that were bigger than my purse. We bought Kirkland pecans, cranberry juice, dried apricots (a concession to homesickness for Turkey) and chocolate chips.

But delightfully enough, there was no molasses and I was obliged to go looking for treacle. There's nothing quite so Dickensonian. Here is a picture of the can of treacle I bought. I found it in a fancy supermarket that sometimes sells fresh oysters on ice flown in from Brittany. This beautiful can was only about $2 US, though and so beautiful. It is thick, slow, sweet, black and altogether treacly! That word is so Alice in Wonderland!

If you look closely at the can, you can see in the logo the quote, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." That is a biblical reference from the Samson story - as in Samson and Delilah. Here's the story: When Samson went down to take a wife, he killed a lion with his bare hands. A few days later, on his way home, he saw that bees had made a hive in the carcass. Samson ate some of the honey and took some to his parents, but he didn't tell them where it came from. When he went down to marry his wife he posed the riddle to the the guests. Out of the eater, something to eat, out of the strong came forth sweetness. If by the end of the feast, the brides guests couldn't guess the riddle, they would have to give linen robes to Samson's guests. For days, they couldn't figure it out until they told the bride to find out. She cried for three days that Samson didn't love her because he wouldn't tell her the answer. He said he hadn't even told his parents, but finally he did tell her. She told her people and Samson had to pay out the linen. But that made him mad, so he went to another village, killed 30 of the men there and took those linen robes to pay off his debt. Then he went home and his wife was given to one of the men who attended him at the wedding. Hmmm, treacle.

The Helpers Celebrate Christmas

Every Sunday on the above ground walkways (in Canada they call them plus 15's) helpers gather. These are the women from the Philippines, Indonesia and Nepal who work as domestics in everyone's houses. I am one of the few people I know who doesn't employ a helper. On another post I'll explain how much easier my life would be if I did, but that's much too bitter a post for Christmas.
Almost all of the helpers have Sunday off, so they gather to sit together for the day. This pictures is of early in the morning when the first ones arrive and stake out their area with flattened cardboard and picnic boxes. They bring cards to play, music to listen to and of course, cell phones. I've seen people trading manicures, women practicing dance routines, others selling plastic crafts. Walkways all over Central are full from early to late on Sundays. On the way home from shopping this Sunday I saw that under the HSBC building was packed with people. I'm going to go back and check that out another time because it looked almost big enough to be a church service.
Sunday is the days you can see how many helpers are in the city. There are church services in parks; the $10 stores are packed with shoppers; the buses back from Stanley and Repulse Bay are packed with women speaking Tagalog. But it is the walkway picnickers who intrigue me the most. This last week it was almost cool, too cool for me to want to sit on concrete all day. I remembered long days of sitting around Eugene, Oregon waiting away the day, chilly and without the money to choose to hang in a coffee shop. That was the season that lunch cost me $1.10 every day. It was fifty cents for a bun at the sandwich shop and sixty cents for a half-pint of milk. I was making about $650 a month at the office, plus money from being an artist model and from selling quilts at Saturday market. Not a lot to support two people.
The minimum wage for a full-time life-in helper now is $3783 HK. Divide that by 7.8 to get the equivalent in US dollars. There was an article in the paper last week explaining how the loss of the US dollar buying power has made it so the helpers can send much less home each month. The HK dollar is pegged to the US dollar, so their pay is worth a lot less against any of the relevant currencies. The women who were interviewed said that the change in conversion rates made it so they were sending home a lot less money. The families depend on this money, so the woman said that she doesn't eat lunch on her days off and waits to get back to her employers house to get supper.
But this Sunday, you couldn't see the falling dollar anywhere. There were boxes and boxes of foods and around the corners of every territory, piles of Christmas presents waiting to be exchanged. Merry Christmas, helpers. Happy New Year!

Because the format changed and I can't write Html

All of you who look at this blog from time to time (aren't I feeling optimistic,) will notice that I lost my big picture in the header. I am bereft and may have to spend the holidays learning to write Html. It's not one of the happier prospects on my horizon. I want to write about orchids, the city's night time breath, how Venus doesn't have a magnetic field, the prettiest mall Christmas tree and how one night last week "The Raven" in its entirety came back to my memory. And here I am fighting with formats.

The Diner

Adventuring out on Saturday to Kowloon, we went to the Night Market for the first time. It was a delight! I bought jade, pearls, antiques, knock-off watches, t-shirts, chopsticks, change purses, rocks, toys and lighter fluid. It was enough to make anyone hungry. One of the best things about that market is the whole sections of street that become restaurant as the evening deepens. We saw people eating piles and piles of clams, mussels and crabs, but I was hungry well before they had set up. So we went into a diner advertising Coke and Black and White evaporated milk. We had roast pork over rice, roast duck over rice, and roast duck and chicken over rice. But Kestrel tried the peanut and papaya soup. I stuck with Tsingtsao beer. The old ladies at the booth behind shoveled the rice from their bowls into their mouths with a rhythm of ages past. Next time I'll order the steamed fish that they did. It was the best corner restaurant I've found in Hong Kong. The owner and waitresses were nice. They all but pinched Kestrel's cheek since she ate the soup. It was as satisfying as wandering for hours in Ulus and having nice pide at the end. And actually it was not much more expensive: dinner for four came to $13 US.