Family Insight Tour

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The next morning Toby and I went to look for discount camera shops.  We found some legit camera shops that were selling Canon EOS 7d bodies (the one that I really wanted) for $1300, which is pretty great considering you could never dream of finding one below $1700 in the US, but it still wasn’t as low as we hoped.  We ended up subwaying to the Mong Kok Lady’s Market, which wasn’t set up yet.  He decided to do some time lapse photography, and I tried some as well.  Mine didn’t come out so hot.  It’s okay.  I didn’t have much time once the market opened at noon to look around, but no one was selling black market electronics like I had hoped anyway.  I got back on the subway and went to the ship.

 

The Family Insight tour was that day from 1pm to 5pm.  I wasn’t sure it’d be great, but Catie was on it and we knew that if it sucked we could just leave at any time and easily find something interesting to do nearby.

 

It turned out to be awesome.  Our tour guide was this adorable 40-year-old woman with an amazing smile who looked like a kitten every time she laughed.  The center we went to was Christian, but not crazy like in America.  We got some hot chocolate when we went in, and sat in a room while a couple people from the center told us what it was all about.  There were only like 15 of us on the tour, and I was the only dude who was a student on the whole trip.

 

The gist of the info was this.  There’s a really bad “doughnut-hole” housing problem in HK.  If you make LESS than $1500US as a couple per month, you qualify for public housing.  It takes a while and it’s rarely very good, but at least it’s your own housing space and it’s guaranteed for you.  If you make MORE than $4000US as a couple per month, you’ll be able to afford your own private housing.  Again, they start out as tiny little things at that point, but you’ll definitely be able to find yourself something.  If you’re anywhere inbetween $1500 and $4000, you’re pretty seriously screwed.  The government does nothing for you – there’s no sliding scale – and until you work your way up to $4000, there’s pretty much no options for you.

So you end up in what’s called a partition house.  One of the presenters actually grew up in one.  It’s a room – maybe 30 feet by 30 feet or so – that has a number of beds and bunks and a single toilet and usually three families in it.  So like fifteen people.  The showers and kitchens are communal and shared by a number of rooms, meaning even more families.  It’s a pretty tough way to live, but that’s seriously all there is for a number of people.

 

There’s also a pretty bad drug problem in HK.  Apparently amphetamines are pretty common, and so are ketamines.  We didn’t really know what that was, so I looked it during the presentation so I could give more detail to the people who had asked.  It’s an opiate, and causes relaxation and hallucinations.  It can also be fatal pretty easily.  Apparently kids do it in class.  A lot of them die.

 

There’s also some weird endemic illness/psychological problem there too.  Kids will go to high school and get made fun of or embarrassed one time, and then come home, shut themselves in their rooms, and refuse to come out until they’ve graduated.  It’s sort of expected, and parents will just help them out, give them assignments and stuff, whatever, but they literally never ever come out until they’re done school.  It’s crazy.  Apparently this happens to old people too.  More old people commit suicide in HK than anywhere else in the world.  They have pretty awful living conditions – they have the same problems as everyone else – and the country is so hustle and bustle that families don’t take care of them anymore.