Hong Kong: A postscript!

Our special presentation tonight on Straight from the Sky is a talk about a Drug Rehabilitation facility called “We Do Recover”, run by Center Director Mr. Tico Aldanese. It is a privately-run facility that aims to rehabilitate drug and alcohol addiction, one of the toughest jobs on the planet! I’m sure we have heard all sorts of stories about the effects of drug addiction including alcohol and how extremely difficult it is to rid oneself of this problem. Thanks be to God we have such a center here.

Tonight, aside from Mr. Aldanese, we also have Medical Director Dr. William Minoza and Mr. Emmanuel Hernani who will help us understand the various steps in getting their residents back into the main stream of society. If you know anyone who needs their help, before you send them to this facility, I suggest that you take time to watch this show on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00pm tonight.

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It’s back home after nearly a week in Hong Kong literally manning the fort (the booth) for Cebu so that we can be up front in the I.T. Industry that we’ve been so blessed to have here in Cebu. We have met so many people who joined the Expo who’ve heard about Cebu, but never came to visit, many of them come from Hong Kong. Their idea of Cebu is that, it is a tourism destination-cum-paradise, but they never realized that we have become an important player in the I.T. Industry. So let’s hope they join our C.E.B.U. ICT 2009 International Conference and Exhibit this June.

We only had Friday to tour and shop and since we stayed in a hotel in Causeway Bay, it was an opportunity for us to commute like what most of the people in Hong Kong do when they go to work, use the MTR subway. The MTR is undoubtedly one of the best, if not the best mass transit system in the world because of its ease of use. For first time users, there is a teller who can get you a ticket or give you instructions on how to use those fully automated ticket machines.

In the ticket machine, you can use paper money or coins. All you need to do is push a button on your destination and the screen will show how much you need to pay. You then slip in your paper money or drop the coins and you’re off to your destination. However, you have to be careful where your train is headed; otherwise you might end up going to the opposite direction of where you want to go. It is important to read maps, instructions and all sorts of warning signs and platforms. When you get used to it, it becomes second nature and part of your daily life.

Cebu is still very far from getting a mass transit system like the MTR in Hong Kong, but if we do get that Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) that’s good enough. The mass transportation system in Hong Kong isn’t just rail-based, they also have surface buses and taxis. Flag down for a taxicab is HK$18.00, that’s nearly P130 bucks! If you use the taxi’s trunk for your bags, you have to pay a dollar for each bag. This is something we can give to our taxi drivers, but I wonder why they don’t implement this?

Shopping in Hong Kong hasn’t changed much (which is why I prefer to shop in Bangkok). Unless you have a “suki” you’d end up haggling to the point of fighting the salesman and increasing your high-blood pressure! Don’t forget, the Hong Kong salesman does this for a living, making a sale where he can make money and if he cannot convince you, he becomes insulting and arrogant and downright “bastos”!

A never-heard of Hong Kong columnist may have called Filipinos “a nation of servants”, well, this columnist says that Hong Kong salesmen are the most arrogant I have ever met. I knew this nine years ago when I last visited this former Crown Colony. A lot of things have changed in Hong Kong since my grandfather, Don Jose Avila, studied in St. Joseph’s College there. But the Cantonese haven’t changed much; one salesman even admitted to us what sorts of tricks or methods they use in order to entice a would-be buyer to look into their store, only to be disappointed.

I got back Friday evening and it was raining hard. I always end my travels with the same message, that the reason why I really hate to travel abroad is that I have to return home. There’s no place like home, but arriving in Cebu and being greeted by our darkened streets was like a cultural shock coming from a week in Hong Kong where almost every single street corner was very well-lighted. But then, the problems of the Filipino people is that we never get to solve our problems, hence we end up doing the same wrong things over and over. This is why we have stagnated!