GX GARNERINGS

(One of the fishball kiosks near Dundas Street, Hong Kong) Roadside fishball kiosks are a unique common sight in Hong Kong and are ubiquitous in the more local neighbourhoods. The must-try food items topping the list are deep-fried or poached octopus tentacles that help build up heart attacks, stinky tofus (but yum in your mouth) that evoke pent-up vomits and deep-fried fishballs with sweet and sour sauce or chili sauce for sure. And believe it or not, these kiosks pay some of the dearest rents in the world for the tiny premises to make lots of money. On the same side of the road where this kiosk is on, there are a whole array of different roadside eateries that sells food ranging from the self-proclaimed Ireland's special snacks to fun stuff like the "relaxing biscuits" which allure unceasing queues of anxious customers all day long. A true food heaven it is!

(Near Ladies' Market, Mongkok, Hong Kong) Passing the narrow space between the sardined crowds and the itinerant showroom (inside a truck), this guy with a gangster kingpin face was squeezing himself through and rushed on in a zigzag way. Welcome to Mongkok (literally, Busy Corner)! Either for a shopping spree in the really cramed flea market, an eating binge at the local roadside Zha-Yu-Dan Dong (deep-fried fishball kiosk), snapping motions in the street like crazy, admiring trendy people or simply loitering without intent, this is the place to be! Feel the heat, the humid and the sweat of someone passing by you. (Other passers-by passing through and wondering what had interested the phohographer so much for so long) Wonder around the streets: literally, Soy Street, Watercress Street, Washing Clothes Street or, well, Getting Rich Quick Street. It is the most mixed, strange and thronged place in Hong Kong that is filled with fun and activities.

People are coming out of Hong Kong's underground railway, known as the M(ass)T(ransit)R(ailway), and going back home. It has stations named after the stopover districts. Coming out of the specific distircts'history, some names are amusing if you read it literally. Take for example, Tsim Sha Tsui (Pointed Sandy Mouth), Yaumatei (Oily Sesame Place), Mongkok (Busy Corner), Shek Kip Mei (Stony Gorge End), Kowloon Tong (Nine Dragons Pool) and Tsing Yi (Green Clothing). The most successful experience the MTR keeps touting to the neighbouring countries, and rightly so, is the electronic instant payment method implemented jointly with all the major public transport. The payment is facilitated by the Octopus Card , which has extended its use to almost every aspect of life from buying newspapers on the street to paying fines in the public libraries. The Octupus Card has morphed into different forms from wrist watches to cellphone lanyard pendants. This may ring a bell to its counterpart...

(Courtesy and copyright of LittleBlackBox.   Taken with GRD II ) This is LittleBlackBox's entry for the Ricoh Forum Photo Contest for September , with a theme on School, Learning and Teaching. I voted for this photo because of its interesting composition that tells of the theme poetically. The left-to-upper-right diagonal shadows are pleasing to the eyes and give the viewers a sense of peace or smoothness as all such diagonal lines will theoratically do so to a photo (since general viewers will view a photo from left to right). Then look at the pensive exression on the face of the little girl, which is saying something to be interpreted differently by the viewers. The silence of the photo is at last broken, or more aptly, compensated by the running kid of whom the action is realised, too, by the shadow. It is clear from the shadows that the kids are carrying school bags. This is a very well done photo, unmistakably the best of all entries in my opinion.

There is a big fruit wholesale market in the neighbourhood, with workers unloading consignments of a motley collection of fruits from around the world throughout the night year round. In the early hours, retailers will flock to the wholesale market to bargain for boxes of fruits to get their roadside kiosks prepared in time for business during the morning rush hours until nearly midnight. I always fancy taking a picture of the piles of boxes dotting the street with the crowded skyline of highrises in the background, just to give an interesting thought to the viewers about how the fruits from the vast fields of different orchards have ended up in the street at a crowded place for the busy communters of whom most have not given them a thought. But, sigh, the streets are far too crowded with the goods and people for a photographer to catch the right angle for any photo. Let's see if I will ever have the good light and the right viewpoint.

An aged woman carrying a child in a traditional baby carrier walked past a makeshift aquarium shop that has been running business in the back alley for a long time. The shop sells species of tiny marine fish and food for them, for example, larvae of Chironomid on the bottom left (yes that paste of unknown substance). The neighbourhood has got its atmosphere from every little bit and piece of such interesting sights that are fast vanishing in this big city. The sense of oldness rightly gives an unique exotic taste to the district. This is really the place I love.

In Hong Kong, there are lots of similar old buildings housing tens of thousands of families. More often than not, these "tenement buildings" as known here by the locals are built around the WWII. They have a history of their own and provided shelters for families running away from the communist conquest of China at first, then those starting to surf the booming economy and now new immigrants from Mainland China. As probably all old buildings of little extra values around the world, these buildings have become cheap places to rent or buy. But their new found potential of being bought out for urban renewal by the government have made them covetable to speculators that have the money to keep these buildings in stock for the government's handsome ransom at the right time. These buildings interest me for their pigeon-hole yet varied looks.