Shop till (His Tears) Drop

(One of the huge, more explicit kind of outdoor ads in Causeway Bay. The first sight of it reminded me of not an appetite of shopping but-- I beg your pardon -- just some fishy, stinky odour. The tram just whooshed by just in time to made this a beautiful scene too enticing for me not to click on the GX200 shutter. Talking about trams, I should tell some interesting facts about them after I've got good photos of this century-old public transport)

Yesterday, I wrote about the flea markets of my choice in Hong Kong. An Aussie friend of mine, after her fifth visit to Hong Kong, has so far spent in my estimation a grand total of 18 full hours of amassing her plunders in Stanley Market. That coould be a record of a single shopper for Stanley Market.

Luckily, she was crazy about shopping in the flea market only. If it were other upmarket shopping districts, her husband would have gone broke.

(One of the ostentatious signs showing expensive brandnames along the Canton Road)

Local shopping meccas well-stocked with famed brandnames' items are the Canton Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, the IFC Mall in Central and the Times Square in Wanchai/ Causeway Bay. Canton Road has actually be occupied by the I-have-the-money-to-burn sort of Chinese Mainlanders, who are perpetually lining up outside the grandeur shops for over-priced, machine-made items. But Canton Road leads up to the always festival Tsim Sha Tsui harbour front. So there is still a special quality to Canton Road which entices people to burn money there.

(Ordinany passers-by are humbled by the godly brandname and the skinny models. And what on earth does a lady buy such a gigantic bag for? Oh, plenty of money for curing shoulder pain too?)

For the IFC Mall, it lacks the open-air sort of carefree feelings. Everything (and everybody?) feels even more pretentious there for that reason maybe. It is not like in Canton Road where the affluent and influential Mainlanders festooned with shopping bags just flaunt their wealth around with loud talks. Alas, there are still polite and more educated Mainlanders, to add a footnote.

Causeway Bay is okay. It is a crowed version though. What's special about it is the mixture of old and new in the district. Take for example, the modern Times Square sits just next to an old outdoor wet market. Oh, in Causeway Bay, there are many things to see and buy other than man's briefs. Just in case you wonder.