Living in Hong Kong you quickly discover there’s a large divide, both physical and social, between Hong Kong island and the Kowloon peninsula. While the island has all the trappings and excesses of absolute wealth (largely generated by the financial sector) the story is often very different in much of Kowloon.
While Beijing may be famous for its traditional Hutong (胡同) courtyard residences, Shanghai has its own distinct architectural style of residential homes called Shikumen (石库门). During a recent trip to 1933 Shanghai I spied from its roof one of the few remaining Shikumen tenements and decided to take a look around…
It’s been over a month now since my last trip to Korea but I wanted to share a few photos from Busan (부산) which I visited for the second time since the first in 2008. Busan (or Pusan) is the second largest city in South Korea, located on the southeasternmost tip of the Korean peninsula.
The words ‘art deco’, ‘abattoir’, and ‘Shanghai’ are not ones you usually find in the same sentence but on a hot summers morning in China’s second most populous city I found myself in one of the most curious architectural relics you could imagine; a 1930′s former slaughterhouse beautifully crafted from concrete in a style most unbecoming of China’s usual mausoleums to the uncouth.
One of the most enjoyable parts of travelling is experiencing a moment of serendipity, that is to say coming across something unexpected, or in other words a “happy accident”. During my most recent trip to South Korea the weather was pretty miserable but pausing for shelter on a bridge during a hard downpour yielded a particularly memorable scene…
South Korea has long been an interesting place to look at trends in technology and popular culture, such is the effect caused by a population mostly centered around a single city (Seoul) and having rapidly developed over the past 50 years. Every time I visit I’m always on the lookout for what’s trending and below are a few notes I made on my most recent trip:
When film director Mamoru Oshii was looking for a model of the city of the future for his seminal 1995 animated film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (based on the manga by Masamune Shirow), he turned to the cityscape of Hong Kong for his inspiration.
Around the time of the Shanghai World Expo last year the Rhône-Alpes region of France produced a wonderful series of short films about their twin city. I can’t find much background about them but for anyone with an interest in Shanghai they provide a wonderful glimpse into this burgeoning metropolis at the turn of the last decade.
Ankle deep in stagnant water the rancid air magnified the sense of claustrophobia I felt as me and 5 other Indian-Jones wannabes trudged through the 70-year-old tunnels the Japanese Imperial Navy forced locals to dig during WWII (1941-45) on Lamma Island (南丫島) in Hong Kong.
At the end of my visit to Atlanta (USA) I managed to find a couple of spare hours to visit Georgia Aquarium, which happens to be the world’s largest with more than 8.5 million gallons of water housing more than 120,000 animals of 500 different species.