Stan and I spent one weekend in Hong Kong mid-trip. I planned this into the trip carefully because I truly love this place. Always so much going on 24 hours a day. Anyhow, Saturday evening we were in the Wan Chai district, hanging out at an expat bar called the Queen Victoria Pub. Like most bars in HK, the wall which separates the bar from the sidewalk opens up when the weather is suitable, as it was this particular evening, so the crowd had spilled out onto the sidewalk. Here, I ran into someone I know, Owen – the New Yorker I met on my last trip who lives in HK, has a factory on Guangdong which makes picture frames for Wal-Mart, and is always entertaining – loud, cocky, funny – typical New Yorker!
Stan and I were out on the sidewalk having some beer and pitching HK$5 coins against the wall with Owen and a few others (Stan was a natural and won some money, I was not so good) and the conversation turned to what a cool place Hong Kong is – and how you find people from everywhere living here and food from everywhere to boot. At one point, Stan told Owen that since leaving Minneapolis, he had been craving Bratwurst and asked if he knew if you could get a proper one here. Owen thought a moment and said “Hold on a minute, let me go find you a German” – Owen disappeared into the bar and came back 5-minutes later. “I found one! He’ll be right out. You’ll live this guy – a real Nazi” Owen is a funny guy.
Sure enough soon out came Paul; about 55, tall, bearing a strong resemblance to Fred Gwynn and speaking with a heavy German accent. “So I hear you are looking for zee best Bratvurst in zees place. Vell, zee Sviss Chalet eez verrry good, but zee abzolute best eez at zee King Ludvig…” and he went on to tell us all about the restaurant, King Ludwig himself, and on, and on, and on. We stood on the sidewalk with Paul for nearly half an hour in between coin tosses.
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| Pitching coins in Wan Chai |
Besides Paul, we also met an older Irishman, Paddy Finn, who kept going on about how he doesn’t worry about the Chinese “They want the same fookin’ tings we want”, he kept saying over and over between pints. He was doing the Irish proud! I also chatted with a South African and an Aussie, and a few others, but this is typical of Hong Kong. It may be the most international city there is, more so than New York I think. I was in an Irish pub another day chatting with a woman from Hunan, drinking an English cider served by a woman from Nepal and nothing about this was unusual, it was just Hong Kong. I think if you took a census you would find the whole of the UN represented here.
...and if you ever need a German, someone will go find you one!
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