Hong Kong, as I know it.
Thought today was going to be a boring day, as I drank my mug of black coffee in the morning. Little did I know I would see the the best side of Hong Kong once more today, the people and the vibe. The destination of this afternoon was to Sham Shui Po, Kowloon to take my written driving test at the transport department. The person next to me decided to leave her mobile phone on while doing her test and let’s say “unintentionally” wrote answers on her palm as well. Despite all the planning, she got towed out of the room by examiners….pity. The amazing thing was the written test is very easy to pass in Hong Kong, and only has 20 questions. Even an IQ of 100 will get 50% of questions right just by guessing. Logic behind her cheating preparations, which would have taken the same amount of time reading the book provided by the transport department on the test subject is perhaps related to oestrogen in the body, apologies to the extreme feminists. Affected by her quarrel with the examiner(s), my test took slightly longer, totaling 10 minutes in duration.
After that, taking my certificate for passing the test, I left the building to be blasted by a bunch of middle aged women handing out leaflets of driving schools. Amidst the chaos of leaflets being shoved into my hands, despite both of my hands were occupied, of which the middle aged women would have realized if they looked at my hands rather than trying to get me to look into their eyes for a decent conversation, I managed to run free of their trap. Mind you, I am perhaps a few feet taller than them and bending my neck down would have strained my cervical spine and paraspinal muscles just to give them my ocular attention. Off the point of sarcasm, I am again reminded of Hong Kong’s role as a South East Asian financial center. These middle aged women’s aggressive marketing technique perhaps shows our business prowess, if not the least, our marketing skills. Impressed.
So I walked to the driving school I have signed up for, to show them my certificate and to organise my driving lessons. Upon walking in, there was one receptionist sorting out a customer who had probably just enlisted to driving lessons. The problem presented itself when they tried to slide the customer’s credit card over the credit deduction machines, the ones with numbers on so you can enter you PIN if you’re using a debit card. The machine was not working, so the 50, or maybe 60 year old receptionist decided to slide the card on all his machines. To no avail, he called his colleague for help. The other colleague of around the same age decided to ignore his wide-eyed colleague’s comments and did the same thing all over again, getting equally wide eyed and astonished at the engineering difficulty. There I waited just for a driving instructor’s phone number for 10 minutes, while watching this happen was quite an amusement. I got served eventually, as the dilemma resolved itself when the receptionists decided to slide it slowly and less violently over the the reader slot.
Thought I would have had seen enough for one day, I was proven wrong once again while sitting on a mini bus just before arriving at home. A middle aged women was telling her daughter 16 years of age minimum that you have to call out your stop just before you get to it, so the driver knows where to stop. This is done en route normally for those of you who do not know. From this you can tell her daughter was not use to sitting this local mode of transportation, perhaps she’s lived in a foreign country all her life. Before her mom, I presume, could finish her sentence, she yelled out at the top of her lungs as if her life was endangered, “STOPP PLEEAASEE” in perfect Cantonese, alarming both passengers and driver alike. The driver immediately stopped the bus, to that her mother had to apologise and inform us that the stop is 40m ahead. FML moment perhaps for the mom.
