OGGI HO FATTO

it's hard to capture all the residential buildings in photos. there are so many of them. very very close to eachother. apparently they are government-issued housing, originally for the Chinese refugees who came to HK during the last century. they are rented or bought from the local government by working families.. .they all have basically the same architecture. very simple and practical. and some are scarily thin.

one of the most amazing things i've seen here. when a building needs to be built here in HK.. it is surrounded not by steel scaffolding but BAMBOO SCAFFOLDING! made by hand, poles tied together with string, and men climbing up and down.. it is scary and beautiful at the same time. all buildings use this system, even giant skyscrapers. I only have photos of this one but even the fancy hotel-residential complexes on the port were being built like this. it really shows how HK is a mix of very old and very new. nobody in the western world would trust bamboo scaffolding but here there a million skyscrapers that probably have been built very very fast with this method. the inhabitants of HK strike me as very, very hardworking.

During our second-day tour of Hong Kong, we got taken to Wong Tai Sin temple. this is a very strange place. it was built in the late 19th century but looks ancient-chinese style, explosively decorated, every surface covered in gold, red, green, blue yellow ornaments, dragons, ribbons, anything you could imagine, surrounded an impossibly quaint little zen-like garden with twisting paths, fountain, islands, koi lake etc.. in the middle of giant, grey, scarily high residential skyscrapers.

So you don't know what to look at when you're there.. at the skyscrapers, which are fascinating even if they're ugly, or the "fake" temple? maybe it only seems fake to me because i'm used to the European concept of places-of-worship, where ancient = precious. here it seems they have no use for ancient things. many people were worshipping and praying in this Taoist temple, lighting bunches of incense sticks from holy fires, shaking cans with fortune-telling sticks in them, getting their fortunes told.. i didn't really understand how their worship worked but i tried to stay out of their way. there were more people taking photos than people praying. it seems that taking photographs of anything and everything is a very common habit.