Little Manila and pastries

I had read that the area of Statue Square, where I started my walking tour a couple of days ago, turns into Little Manila on Sunday afternoons between 12 and 6. So I thought I would go and have a look. And yes, it does. Every available space there was was just full of Filipinos, mainly ladies. The road around the square, because it's the central financial district, is empty on Sundays. There are no buses running. So the Filipino community had occupied the whole area. Apparently, it happens every Sunday because that's the only day these ladies get off work, and I guess it's just to be out in the open air. They were in big groups. They were all adults. I'm assuming that these ladies come to earn money in Hong Kong and leave their families behind in the Philippines. They were sharing food. There were lots of elaborate picnics. They were choreographing dance routines on the street. A lot of them were singing karaoke. Most were just sitting around on the pavements, on the square, on the road. There was definitely a party atmosphere in the square. There were police there, but they were very low-key. They were just monitoring the situation, but there was no trouble at all. It was unusual, to say the least.

And then it got even stranger. As I left the square, all I could hear was the sound of packing tape - that sound you get when you pull packing tape off the roll and use it to seal a box. The next few streets were rammed full of people packing boxes. There were piles of collapsed empty cardboard boxes that already had a roll of packing tape attached to them. And then people put their contents into the box and sealed it with the tape. There were other doing the paperwork. There were hundreds, if not thousands of Filipinos doing this.

I got talking to two ladies who explained to me that because it's nearly Christmas, they're sending all this stuff home to the Philippines. They said that stuff is cheaper for them in Hong Kong, which I find hard to believe because I think everything's expensive here. But anyway, there must be a benefit to them to doing it. One of the ladies did say that a lot of what they send is second-hand. This, activity went on for street after street. I've never seen anything like it in my life before. It was over the whole area.

I crossed a multi-lane road over a footbridge. There were people packing boxes before I went up the steps onto the bridge, and then on the bridge, there were lots of ladies in temporary shelters made from cardboard boxes having their picnics and socialising. They'd left all their shoes outside the cardboard 'house'. It was just very, very odd to see it. It's their only day off in the week and that's how they spend it, because it's just a question of being out in the open air, even though they're sitting above a very busy road.

There's a lot of pollution. I can feel it in my throat now. It's very sore. I think it's a combination of the fierce air con every time you go in a building and the pollution every time you come out.

It was eye-opening, very strange to see, to be perfectly honest. And the weirdest thing? All of this is happening in a very expensive part of Hong Kong. I mean, Hong Kong is expensive anyway, but it was literally on the corner of the five-star Mandarin Hotel. There were also a lot of ladies in the street outside Van Cleef & Arpels and Tiffany's, two of the most expensive jewellers in the world. The contrast was really incredible.

And then the next thing I saw was a whole row of Chinese bakeries with huge selections of sweet and savoury pastries, which I find hard to resist. So I did go in and buy a few, including some for the ladies that I had been talking to. I bought a chicken pie and a cheese pie for me to have for my lunch instead of going to a restaurant today.Read more