December 5th, 2010
It started with the new white curtains my girlfriend and I bought for our bedroom in Hong Kong. They’re opaque enough to block any potential embarrassment but shear enough to let light through, because there’s nothing I hate more than waking up in a dark room. After we installed them, they had an unintended effect. Sitting in the living room in the afternoon, my eye would wander to the bedroom, where for a second the slightly transparent curtains would trick me into thinking the window was iced over.
Later, lying in bed one sleepless night, I heard the sound of a shovel being scraped across pavement. My mind drifted to snowy nights in Montreal, when neighbours would get a head start on the falling snow by clearing their steps and front walks before going to bed. It created a peculiar chorus to the muffled hymn of car tires and footsteps trudging through the snow.
Recently, I’ve come to appreciate the seasonality of Canadian weather, which I took for granted until I moved to Hong Kong two and a half years ago. Hong Kong does have distinct seasons — I never realized 12 degrees could feel so cold until I experienced my first winter monsoon, when a chilly, dry wind blows from the north — but the differences between them are subtle. Only a small proportion of trees here lose their leaves in the winter; the best way to tell what season it is is by which tree flowers are blooming.
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December 2nd, 2010
Castle Peak Road, Yuen Long, Hong Kong
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December 1st, 2010
For years, the seven beaches along Hong Kong’s Rambler Channel presented swimmers with a conundrum: awesome views, filthy water. Pollution at the beaches was so bad in the 1990s that the government withdrew lifeguards and put up banners warning people not to enter the water.
Now, more than a decade after the beaches were closed, new sewerage and water treatment facilities have improved the water quality to such an extent that the government has deemed it clean enough for swimming. Lifeguards will return to four of the beaches next summer and the rest will be re-opened by 2013, when new changing rooms and other facilities are built.
The water quality at Anglers’, Approach, Casam, Gemini, Hoi Mei Wan, Lido and Ting Kau beaches has improved by 70 percent since 2005, according to figures released earlier this month by the government.
That improvement comes thanks to a new water treatment plant in Sham Tseng and the opening last year of a new sewerage system in the villages along Castle Peak Road, which had previously relied on leaky septic tanks. So far, 210 of the area’s 400 village houses have been connected.
“These seven beaches have been subjected to different sources of pollution from every direction since the 1990s,” said Elvis Au Wai-kwong, the Environmental Protection Department’s assistant director of water policy. Raw sewage flowed directly into the sea from restaurants and houses, a problem that intensified as the population near the beaches increased from 26,000 in 1996 to 37,000 today.
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