SHAM SHUI PO

Today is my last day in Hong Kong. I just left the graduation ceremony, there is a dance party for the students in an hour, and I will leave from there to catch a bus to the Airport and head to Tokyo. I want to get one more blog post up at the airport so I can dump some of these pictures to the cloud. There are definitely some stories that need to be told.

In this post, I will chronicle my rather turbulent experience with electronics in Hong Kong.

I came to Hong Kong with the intention of buying a laptop, hoping I’d get it for cheaper here than in the states. was wrong; I’ll get better warranty coverage and default software in the states. In Mong Kok I did some price checking at a store called Broadway, which is basically the Hong Kong answer to Best Buy and is literally on every other street corner in Mong Kok. The prices were comparable to anything you could get online in the states, though I saw a lot of KIRFy tablets and MIDs and other fancy video devices that will never be available in the US. But if you want a serious computer market in Hong Kong that isn’t just a chain outlet, and it is clear that there is only one place to go: the Golden Computer Arcade in Sham Shui Po.

Sham Shui Po has several blocks of open air markets down roads that are mostly closed to traffic, and is generally far less crowded than other places in Hong Kong. It is also far less commercial; although it is easy to find a KFC or a McDonalds, most of the restaurants are tiny local places, and this is pretty far north in Kowloon away from the more touristy places on the island.
Many of the buildings in this area were built in the 30s and 40s, and were old and busted up and crowded. You can tell that people still lived in them, though, because nearly every window had clothes drying on lines outside. Given the >90% humidity most days, I can’t imagine this is a very efficient way of drying clothes, and I am sure they don’t smell very good when they are done.
In the center of Sham Shui Po is the Golden Computer Arcade, which is a two story indoor market that takes up an entire city block.

The upper floor of the building was devoted to games, consoles, peripherals, and other gamer ware. The bottom floor was packed with people and tiny electronic shops spilling out into the walk ways with cords, fans, and just about every computer part you could imagine. I didn’t get any good pictures of the really tightly packed shops, but this gives you some idea of how it looked. Imagine this, wall to wall filling an entire city block.

My first trip into Sham Shui Po was out of a desperate need to buy a laptop cable, since I burnt out the other one (which was already a replacement) when I plugged it into a Hong Kong outlet. Fortunately my hotel room had a laptop to use. Unfortunately, that laptop was in Chinese and ran IE7, and it made it more or less impossible to do any real work apart from simple data processing.
I bought a universal adapter, which I took home to be confronted by the horrible limitations on the word ‘universal’ (h/t B. Goodney). Of the eight adapters in the package, none fit my laptop.
As an aside, I soon thereafter posted the adapter to Craigslist Hong Kong, which is surprisingly active (especially the personals, which had its share of prostitution and angry Johns calling out the CL prostitutes. Scorned lovers are an international phenomenon, to be sure.) I got a response about a week later.
The responder claimed to want to send the adapter to his daughter studying in Africa. I checked around online, and indeed the Hong Kong outlets (which are identical to British outlets) also serve large parts of south east Asia, the Middle East, and large areas of Eastern and Central Africa. So I agreed to sell it for about half of what I paid (around HK$250, or around 35 bucks [note that universal adapters at Best Buy cost upwards of $80]) and waited for him to send me his address.
I got a response only a few days ago, along with a fake Paypal email claiming a deposit of US$190 into my account. It was obviously bogus, and I knew better than to click on any links, but surprisingly the guy got onto gChat with me and tried to convince me to give him bank account numbers. He listed his address as Nigeria. So I had a good 20 minute talk with a real, live, honest to goodness Nigerian scammer. Pretty awesome, given that I was protecting myself pretty well and suffered no negative consequences.
The adapter I bought is now a gift to the cleaning ladies at the hotel.
I went back again with the old adapter I had in hand, and found someone to sell me the right part for HK$180 (a little over 20 bucks). I also went around price shopping on microSD cards for my phone, and realized that this is exactly the kind of part that is worth buying in HK. I scored a name brand 16GB class 4 card for around $35. They go from online outlets for nearly $70 + shipping. I should have bought two.
I didn’t buy it until my second trip to SSP, though, because I wanted to do price comparisons online and my phone didn’t have data so I couldn’t do any of the fancy scanning stuff with my superphone. When I got back from SSP, somehow my phone’s SD card became corrupted, but I knew what I needed to buy and I had all my data backed up.
I’m blaming the card’s failure on the humidity, which is terrible and constant. Maybe not just the humidity, but also the constant temperature changes. Hong Kong is so hot and miserable all the time, so all the buildings and cards blast freezing cold air, so you are constantly faced with 20 degree changes in temperature. Leaving my hotel in the morning would cause my glasses and my camera to fog up like a steam room, and I can’t imagine that was good for my technological bubble.
My last trip to the computer arcade ended with some interesting activity in the markets.

Just as I was leaving the markets, a van pulled up and a dozen cops jumped out. They stood around for about 10 minutes, laughing and looking around and adjusting their belts, and you saw the markets in every direction jump up and start moving quickly to clear the aisles and remove stuff hanging out in the walk ways. I stood back and bought a belt for $5 and kept my camera out to see if anything would happen worth blogging. I was hoping to see some harassment, or some bribery, or something else juicy. I was trying to not be too obvious with my pictures and was able to snap a couple of good shots.
But instead of drama, the cops just strolled leisurely along, looking at the wares and enjoying the power of making people jump to demonstrate compliance with the law. They would point out things that were out of place or not up to regulation, but they weren’t causing much trouble. I watched pretty clearly after the cops left and the markets unfolded back out into the streets like it was before.
I bought a coke from a machine and left.