Adventure in Mongkok!

You don’t actually need to travel to have an adventure. Most of the time, you just have to be curious and possess the spirit of discovery. Some expats jokingly call Kowloon ‘the darkside’ and I think that’s ridiculous. I LOVE Kowloon in all it’s jumbled mess and chaotic glory. I find area around Mongkok, Sham Shui Po and Yau Ma Tei particularly interesting. There are so many cool things to see, buy and photograph there.

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A few days ago, a fellow photographer asked me if I wanted to troll the photography supply shops in Mongkok. I’m always looking for an excuse to go to Mongkok, so it was perfect. We MTR-ed it out there and as soon as we got out of the subway, we found a restaurant which had a massive black snake slithering in a glass box. I don’t know if it was a restaurant serving snake, but we didn’t stop to have lunch in any case.

We found all kinds of great treasures for photography- dimmer switches, neon lights in every color of the rainbow, tripods, reflectors etc.. and it was all much cheaper than any other photography supply shop elsewhere in the world. Afterwards, we walked through the market and found an endless treasure trove of fascinating junk. There were all these things I wanted- a snakeskin banjo, a tacky 70’s gold watch, a rotary dial telephone, nerd-chic granny glasses, vintage film cameras and this cute gold mouse made with beads.

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The afternoon sun cast long shadows onto the streets and people’s stray hairs were highlighted by golden light. We turned the corner and there was an old man wearing dozens of rings on his fingers. He was examining a ring that someone had just brought him through a magnifying loop. Around another corner, there was a throng of old men squatting on the floor studying the horseracing pages of the newspaper. Yet another corner brought us to this decrepit tenement building with an interesting balcony. We decided we wanted to see what was up there so we found the staircase to go in. It was  treacherously steep concrete staircase and the place was so dark and run down I got frightened halfway up and decided not to proceed.

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We got hungry and needed some caffeine after seeing all the sights, so we headed over to Yau Ma Tei where my friend knew of a cool café in some random building. I have no idea how he found that cafe as a typical gweilo would have never stumbled upon this place.

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Anyway, I promised to keep the location secret so I won’t post it here, but the café was so neat! You do not get places like this in Central. The place had a soul, a personality. It looked like someone’s colorful artistic living room. It was full of books, knick knacks and vintage Euro chairs. It was on the 4 th floor of this skinny building. In fact the whole building was full of bars and coffeehouses but this place was particularly special because there was an outdoor terrace. We sat on the terrace talking over beer and dumplings until day turned to night and the moon came out over the towering buildings.

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All the people at the café seemed to be artists and trendsetters. The owner had long hair and amazingly original sleeve tattoos. This Eurasian hippie guy came in with a groovy hat and goatee. He also had these strange leaf-like tattoos on his neck. We got to talk to them later on and found out that Leon (the hippie guy) is from France and traveling around the world doing tattoos. He’s actually working in a studio in Tsim sha Tsui at the moment. Brillant stuff.

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When we got out of the lift, there was a mass of trendy locals going up to various establishments inside the building. My friend ran into a buddy of his that he knows from riding scooters. The guy’s Vespa was parked just outside and man was it cooool! You can’t really see the color here but it’s kind of a dark green and the seats are white.