Jetlag, things to do in Hong Kong and local cinema

I’ve found starting musings quite hard.

This semester I’ve done a lot less than I did last time around. Purely, because jet lag has been an issue this term when it wasn’t last term and the solution to it was doing a hard reset which helped a little bit (ie. staying awake for 32 hours and then having a nice eight-hour rest)

Waking up at lunchtime for a week was a bit weird, as I found myself just looking at the clock for a few minutes hoping it would somehow change, do you have any solutions to help with that that would help in future?

Indeed, I’m also a lot more bored this semester. I’ve been looking up things to do in Hong Kong and found I’ve already done a lot of the suggestions.

One of the few suggestions left on the list was a trip to the Film Archive, which I went to on Friday, the exhibition room was a bit threadbare being limited to just one room and the screenings tend to clash with lectures, giving my experience, I would recommend only going if you intend to visit a screening, with the exhibition room, showing bits of the archive collection being a good accompaniment to what seems like a very interesting collection of screenings.

I have seen a lot of Hong Kong films in my time here, making use of Netflix whenever I’ve had a couple of hours to kill and the films have been quite enjoyable.

In particular, the collection of Jackie Chan films is top notch.

Wheels on Meals is a very enjoyable one starring Chan alongside Yuen Biao as two Chinese street food vendors in Barcelona, with Yeun’s character David delivering food on a skateboard, the film revolves around the two characters encountering a pickpocket who poses as a prostitute Sylvia (Lola Forner) whilst visiting the David’s father who is interned in the same mental institution as Slyvia’s mother.

The main plot involves rescuing Sylvia from a criminal gang who kidnap her to take a large inheritance after David and Thomas (Chan) are informed of the situation by Moby (Sammo Huang). It is a good film full of good action and humour.

I mention it due to the fact that everyone speaks Cantonese in the film. It makes sense for David and Thomas to do so and most of the audience would be Cantonese speakers, but bizarrely, the local Catalan characters have their lines dubbed into Cantonese too, even when talking to each other. Naturally, films involve suspension of disbelief but the occasional Spanish words such as hola and gracias are thrown in the film making this a bit surreal.

I can see surreal dubbing in OCTB, a series focusing on a Hong Kong police department focusing on organised crimes and the Triads set in the last years of Hong Kong as a British colony.

As a result, there are a handful of British characters, whose dialogue in Cantonese with local characters is dubbed, but the dubbed voiced appear to be retained when these characters speak in English, resulting in the surreal situation of these characters speaking English in thick Hong Kong accents.

The series, whilst occasionally a bit melodramatic is a good one, with good plotlines focusing on working in the high octane environment of the Hong Kong police whilst juggling personal lives, so I would recommend it for anyone who likes a bit of crime drama, but the dubbing did make me chuckle.

The film archive was nearby the museum of coastal defence, the only government museum I was yet to attempt to visit (the art museum being closed for renovations), only when I got there it transpired, it was closed until 2020.

But I need to find some more fun-filled activities to do that don’t involve me getting lost (google maps for Hong Kong is not very accurate, I was told this during induction, but I didn’t expect to be this bad) as this would also help me get the most of the remaining two and a half months in Hong Kong and give me more to muse about.

I’m likely to spend Monday checking out the shops in PMQ on Gough Street, as that’s pretty much the only thing left in the list, that isn’t a sporting occasion with a specific date apart from a ferry to Lai Chi Woo, which I can only do on Sundays.

Anyone have any recommendations of things I can check out in HK?