Traveller’s Tales

baggage reclaim
By Our man in business class
August 24 2005

Last week it was Madrid, where the heat ricocheted off the walls and the pavement and smacked me in the face, and I found myself dodging from one piece of shade to another, as though I was being stalked by a man with a gun.

This week it is Hong Kong in typhoon season. The humidity wraps its arms around me in a fat, wet cloud.

 

Madrid needs rain. From the plane, the country is the colour of a manila envelope. No significant rainfall has been recorded for three months and my advice to you is to get in some stocks of Olive Oil before the price goes through the roof.

 

The airport taxi driver is disappointed to discover that I speak some Spanish and I seem to know where my hotel is located. This means he can’t turn off the freeway and drive me around the outskirts of Madrid for fifteen minutes.

 

We head straight to the hotel, where the taxi meter shows eleven euros and he turns to me and mutters “Twenty five euros, señor”. “Why so much?” I ask.

“It’s the airport supplement, señor”. “But the supplement is just over four euros!” He stares at me and stammers “I think I have made a mistake”.

“I think so, too” I reply. “Give me a receipt for sixteen euros and write your number on the paper.”

 

I think he is going to cry. “Please don’t report me, señor. I just made a little mistake.” I feel terrible. I am making a big issue out of nine euros. In a flash of remorse, I give him two euros as a tip. As he drives away, I check the number written on the receipt. He has written the registration number of the car parked in front of us.

 

I am hungry, and Spain is no place to be hungry at 6.00 pm. Most restaurants don’t get busy until around 10.30. As I walk past the hotel restaurant, American tourists are beginning to assemble for dinner, checking the menu, peering through the glass door, stomachs growling, blissfully unaware that those doors will not open until 9.00.

 

My business meeting is with one of Real Madrid’s largest sponsors, and in his office, everywhere I look I see him in a photograph, here shaking hands with Luis Figo, there with his arm around Raul, on the desk grinning with Zinedine Zidane, on the sideboard embracing David Beckham.

 

“No pictures with Michael Owen?” I ask. “Aaah, Michael Oven” he mutters, stressing the V sound as though the little fellow was a kitchen appliance. “Michael Oven, he’s a great artist of the football. I like him very much more than Ronaldo. Ronaldo, he just wants to be, as you English say, a hanger of the goal. He don’t want to work like Michael Oven. He just want to score a goal and be in the newspaper and get the pretty girls.” “So why is Michael Owen not required?” I ask. “Because he don’t sell no shirts. This is not football, this is merchandising!”

 

To Hong Kong, via Amsterdam. I first came to this demented city in the early eighties, when the airport was in the heart of the city. The runway stretched out into the sea, which meant there were only two ways to land the plane – coming in or coming out.

 

Route One had the pilot pointing his plane at a target painted on the side of the hill as he came in, rocking and reeling while the typhoon winds broadsided him. Route Two had the plane wafting in through a maze of tower apartments, so close that terrified passengers could see the residents’ televisions flickering in their living rooms.

 

Nowhere on earth approaches the population densities of parts of this city. Living space is at an absolute premium. Back in the eighties, from my swanky hotel room, I could see into one of the notorious dormitory hotels where each room was filled with bunks from floor to ceiling, with a dozen men crammed into this claustrophobic, foetid living space, sweating and snoring and smoking.

 

My contact then, a sophisticated, well-travelled, managing director of an import/export business, had never in her whole life eaten a meal in her own home. A kitchen and dining room was too great a luxury to afford. Every meal was taken in a restaurant.

 

Hong Kong has changed. Now there is a swanky new airport on Lantau Island, Hong Kong Disneyland is ready to open, and day by day new buildings rise into the sky on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Not the least impressive is the Bank of China Tower.

 

The original Bank of China is a colonial-style granite building, with Chinese lucky lions guarding it’s entrance. It was completed in 1950, and was deliberately built a few metres higher than the then HSBC building, now destroyed. When HSBC built their Norman Foster-designed alien spacecraft in 1987, the Bank of China realised that to complete architecturally, it needed a unique monument of it’s own. It commissioned a prodigal son, I.M. Pei, a master of geometric architecture who had escaped the 1949 Communist Revolution by studying in America.

 

Pei’s mandate was straightforward; to create an imposing building to symbolise China’s increasing influence in the city. He certainly achieved this and only spent US$300 million, less than half the cost of the HSBC tower and a third more floor space.

 

Completed in 1989, the tower was the tallest in Asia. Its criss-cross steel beams slice through a mirrored façade that reduces progressively by one quarter right up to the antennae on the 70^th floor, a design inspired by a bamboo grove.

 

But Pei’s connection to the Bank of China runs deeper; his father was once one of its senior managers, so before commissioning Pei, executives flew to New York to secure his father’s blessings. The message to Hong Kong was clear; bourgeois origins are irrelevant in modern China.

 

As apparently was feng-shui. To many Hong-Kongers, the building has the worst feng-shui in town. According to Chinese geomancy, sharp edges are to be avoided, as are parallel poles that suspicious minds consider look similar to funeral incense sticks. It is suggested that the bad feng-shui is directed at the buildings facing the Bank of China’s sharpest corners.

 

In such a dynamic environment, change is inevitable, but I cannot help a feeling of regret. When I first came to this city, it was another world. Of course, the bustling streets of the industrial centres are still the same. The grubby streets heaving with busy, noisy humanity, the air-conditioning units dripping onto your head as you pass beneath, the pharmacies selling heaven-knows-what organs removed from exotic animals to cure your aches and pains.

 

But in the tourist and business centres of Tsim Sha Tsui and Central, Hong Kong is becoming internationalised. The Star Ferry between Kowloon and the Island is still the best bargain on the globe for just under 13p and the Peak Tram offers one of the most breathtaking cityscapes you will ever see (and a waxwork of David Beckham that makes him look slightly more Chinese than Mao Tse-tung). But I miss the junks bobbing in the bay, the fortune-tellers with their little birds that can see into your future, the workmen in their coolie hats. I miss the sheer Chineseness of it.

 

Walking up Nathan Street, I am accosted a number of Indian gentlemen, determined to make me a cheap suit from the World’s Finest Cashmere. Avoiding any eye contact is essential. One fellow falls in step with me, chatting as though we had been the best of pals since our schooldays. “How are you today, my friend?” he enquires solicitously. “I am in a hurry and I don’t need a suit, thank you” I snap back. “I will make you a suit ten times nicer than the one you are wearing” he informs me. This hits a nerve. “Excuse me!” I reply. “This just happens to be an Armani suit!” Without breaking stride, he informs me that within twelve hours I can be the proud owner of the finest Armani suit ever worn. He slips a business card into the top pocket of my jacket and wheels away.

 

Back at my hotel, I glance at the card of my hopeful friend. It reads “Harmony Tailoring”. I had missed the opportunity to own a Giorgio Harmony suit.

 

My first meeting was at the offices of one of the giants of the sporting goods business. We talked about their plans to expand in Soccer, to move into Rugby, to sponsor more golfers, to develop their Motorsport interests. We discussed a marketing budget that might have fed the starving children of several small countries or eradicated a couple of killer diseases. But I hadn’t been invited to lecture them on Ethics and Morality, so we stayed focused on Return on Investment, Low Hanging Fruit, Group Synergies and Cost-Benefit Analyses.

 

Then off into the hinterland of Kwun Tong. My driver dropped me at the front entrance and I picked my way through the loading bay and took the goods lift up to the Fifth Floor. Stepping out of the grimy lift, I am immediately ushered into a palatial office suite and shown into the Boardroom.

 

I sit on one side, my hosts on the other. The game begins. They outnumber me; one goal to them. I am older than them; one goal to me. They are the home team; another goal to them. They are smart casual, I am suited and booted; two goals each. What is more, I am wearing a red tie, the most auspicious colour; that’s a free kick to me on the edge of the penalty box. They offer me coffee, but they have run out of sugar; my free kick sails over their goalie into the back of the net.

 

We go through the Ceremony of the Presentation of the Business Cards. The rules are precise. Start with the most senior of the party. Stand up. Take your card in both hands, ensuring it is the correct way round for the recipient to read. Pass it across to him, with a slight inclination of the head. Not a bow – that is way too Japanese. Now it is his turn. Receive his card in the same way. Take it from him with two hands. Incline the head. Now follow his example. Place the card reverently on the table before you and study it. I repeat, study it. Don’t glance at it as though it was just another little piece of cardboard to be fished out of your pocket before you send the suit to the cleaners. Don’t staple it to a page in your notebook. You must treat it as though it is a valuable artefact handed over to you for safekeeping. Scrutinise it. Thoroughly review every detail in front of you. When you have absorbed all it has to offer, leave it in front of you upon the table. It is then time to repeat the process with the next in rank.

 

Once the meeting is under way, I concentrate on the Big Boss. In the West, no boss likes to be contradicted, but most bosses are prepared to hear a second opinion and even relinquish the floor to another speaker. In Eastern business culture, this is very rare. The Big Boss is always right, even when he is wrong. It reminds me that after the Duke of Wellington had held his first Cabinet Meeting as Prime Minister, he wrote in his diary “Quite extraordinary! I gave them their orders, and they wanted to stay and discuss them!”

 

Over dinner, we make some small talk. Every Chinese businessman likes to discuss world affairs, so our talk ranges across the future for China, outsourcing in India, oil prices, the instability of the US Dollar. Out of the blue, the Big Boss suddenly bowls me a googly that send my stumps flying. “When do you think you will have your next erection?” he asks me. Blimey! That’s floored me, and no mistake. All eyes turn to me, awaiting my reply.

 

What can I say?  That these things sometimes take you by surprise?  If I point out that I am no spring chicken, and that as the years pass, there is a certain slowing down in the trouser department, will he recommend a daily intake of lizard spleens? While I am giving a convincing impression of a cat working up a particularly large fur ball, he saves my blushes with his supplementary question. “Ret me put it this way, do you think Mr Brair is wirring to lesign as Plime Minister, in favour of Mr Gordon Blown?”

 

Chinese food in China is not like Chinese food in Northampton. If you call for a basket of Prawn Crackers, Sweet and Sour Pork Cantonese Style with Egg Fried Rice, a Chinese Toffee Apple and Two Gallons of Stella please, you may be disappointed.

 

The description of dishes tends start off mysteriously and often there is a surprise towards the end. For example, I had Braised Matsutake, Shimeji and Mushrooms with Black Chicken and Sliced Frog. I was pretty comfortable with 80% of that, but the other 20% gave me pause for thought. I soldiered on, but considered that it might be best not to review the menu again for my main course, but simply point at something that looked appetising.

 

Afterwards, I asked one of my hosts to give an English translation of what I had just finished. He consulted his dictionary. “It was Sea Slug” he told me. “Was it good?” Actually, it wasn’t at all bad. But I wish he hadn’t told me. Somehow, I don’t think I am going to be sipping a dry sherry and burrowing under my African Marigolds looking for the ingredients for a Chinese Sunday lunch any time soon.

 

Early next morning, it is time to head home. As the plane wheels over Lantau Island, I catch a glimpse of Hong Kong Disneyland, due to open early in September. How many future tourists will now skip a visit to the Giant Buddha in favour of paying homage to Mickey and his pals?

 

Aah, who cares? I have eleven and a half hours of sucking in pre-breathed air before I get home, ready for the next adventure.