« The road comes to an end | Main | Ogle.com »
May 19, 2002
Breaking New Habits
It's been just over two months since I came back from Hong Kong and I've only now kicked the habit of wanting to feed my Metrocard through the exit turnstiles. It's interesting, really, how I can spend three weeks in HK and get so accustomed to the way their subway system works, that I would have trouble with my own.
In Hong Kong, you swipe your card (branded an "Octopus" card for reasons that I didn't find out) both when you enter and when you exit. The fare you pay depends on the distance between your stops. In New York, you swipe you Metrocard once when you enter and it's a flat fare systemwide. On average, the HK ride was cheaper than a NY ride and the stations and trains were significantly more pleasant. I'll bitch about the NY subway system some other time, like when it's 100 F outside and 110 F inside with 110% humidity.
I rode the subway so much in HK that the process burned itself in my mind and every time I left a subway station in NY when I got back, I would reach for my pocket for my card and be forced to check myself. The fact that I probably rode the subway more in three weeks in HK than the previous six months in NY probably accounted for much of it.
Along the same vein of reverse culture shock, I had an odd little time of getting used to TV ads when I got back, as well.
There is a decidedly different style to ads in HK, brought about by a more European structure to broadcasting and the differences in language. Pretty much every night we were there the TV was on. There are very few stations -- four, compared to the seventy or so that I get with cable -- and a very limited pool of commercials, which means we saw the same ones over and over again.
I can still hear the odd mix of Cantonese and English in the Orange advert for some cellular promo. I keep expecting to hear the kids talking about what a box could be in the Discovery Bay (a new real estate development) could be.
Posted by KinCross at May 19, 2002 06:11 PM