It’s that time again to look back at an assortment of shots I’ve grabbed throughout my daily life in Hong Kong over the past few months. Being the world’s most vertical city, its sheer density lends itself to an almost endless supply of places to discover where often the most mundane of circumstances lead to the most memorable sights.
I’ve been increasingly using Path recently to document my daily life in Hong Kong. It’s an amazingly well designed app that lets you share stuff with your closest friends (private Facebook if you will). Similar to Instagram, you can apply filters to photos with some nice results. Instead of these photos being lost in the stream forever I thought I’d start sharing some of them here in a new series I’m calling “Hong Kong Path”.
After leaving Shenzhen at the end of 2010 I began 2011 in a state of limbo, living somewhere between temporary accommodation in London and Hong Kong airport, while I was working on a fairly dull project. After an unexpected turn of events (getting a new job) I ended up doing something completely different and far more exciting.
As anyone who’s read his biography will know, Steve Jobs was not particularly pleasant to the people around him (to put it lightly). Like it or not this seems to often be the case with people who end up in positions of power, but whatever his personality, his impact on the world was undoubtably immense.
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…
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.
I don’t generally give much credence to management or lifestyle books which propone to provide the secrets to success; we are all defined by unique sets of circumstances and experiences which ultimately propels us down one avenue or another. What works for you is unlikely to work for me and visa versa – we are individuals, not robots.
A few weeks ago before my life turned überbusy I visited the tiny island of Peng Chau (坪洲) located off the north-eastern coast of Lantau Island in Hong Kong for a bit of R&R. Around 6,300 people live on the island which, only being around 1 km², can easily be explored in a couple of hours.
If you were asked to move house twice and start a new job during the course of one month you’d probably think it was a madness, but that’s exactly what I’ve done over what was among the four busiest weeks of my life. Now that it’s almost over I can begin to settle down and reflect on a fairly busy beginning to 2011.
Away from the glitz of Hong Kong’s many skyscrapers the city is much like any other with a mix of people from all walks of life. Having been segregated from mainland China for much of the last century it’s developed it own unique culture and ways of dealing with the inherent lack of space.