I was feeling a little bit better, but still not in that great, but I was up to doing some shopping. I mostly did some window shopping, but it was still fun.
Had the same breakfast buffet, then headed out to look around the Tsim Sha Tsui area near the hotel. As I was looking around, a man approached me and asked if I would help proofread his English and give him some help. We went into a nearby McDonalds and I looked over his papers. His name was Peter and he was training to be a social worker. The government and the agencies they work with still do their paperwork in English, and so part of his training is to become more proficient in English. He was pretty good, but he had trouble with mixing up tenses.
He asked a little about what I was going to do and I mentioned that I was going to look at Golden Shopping Centre at software and VCDs. He mentioned that there were some piracy crackdowns lately, so it was difficult to find any "copy CDs" anymore.
After this I went into HMV to look at music and video stuff. They had a good selection of all sorts of music and videos both domestic and import, and prices were ok. They had quite a few legal VCDs for around US$10-15, but mostly older stuff, like a year or so old.
Then I started walking up Nathan Road for a while and looking at various stores. Most of the places in Tsim Sha Tsui are clothing places and tailors. buy a suit.
Around in Yau Ma Tei I was getting hungry so I stopped in a small restaurant and managed to order some noodles and milk tea.
Then I kept walking up to Mong Kok where I visited the street market called "Ladie's Market" where they have a bunch of tourist t-shirts, clothing, etc. Last time I was here, they had lots of copy shirts with sports, Hard Rock Cafe, anime, movie logos, etc. for about HK$15-20 (US$2-3) each. This time there were many fewer, and the prices were HK$35-70 (US$5-10) each, and there was a lot less variety. The Hard Rock and sports shirts were still around, and Planet Hollywood has been added, but there was very little in the way of anime and movie stuff. The quality was much better though.
There were also a few CD and VCD shops. As mentioned earlier, copy VCDs were non-existant here. Everything I saw was apparently legit stuff, much of it marked "For Sale in Hong Kong and Macau Only". (Macau is the adjacent Portugese territory which goes back to China at the end of 1999.) The VCDs here were a good bit cheaper than HMV, with well known titles going for US$7-11. They also had a lot of bargain VCDs that went for 3 for
Around the corner I went into a mall called Sino Centre on Nathan Road which had a lot of anime stuff last time I was here five years ago. They still had quite a lot of stuff, but they were short on new stuff. In fact, they still had a lot of the same things as five years ago such as Video Girl Ai, Kimagure Orange Road, etc. About the only new stuff was some Evangelion and
It was here that I first saw what appears to be the last remnants of the pirate VCD industry. There were several shops selling adult VCDs without a jewel box for about US$5 each alone or US$3 each when buying 5. They mostly appeared to be copies of Japanese adult videos. There were several shops of this nature in this mall alone.
After this I hopped on the MRT up to Sham Shui Po to visit the Golden Shopping Centre. This is the infamous video game and computer shopping area in Hong Kong that used to do a booming business in copied software, and cheap hardware to defeat various copy protection schemes. When I was here five years ago the hot items were floppy disk copy systems for the Super Nintendo system. PC programs were widely available for little more than the cost of the floppy disks. More recently this was the origin of the chip which disables copy and country code restrictions on the Playstation, and where popular software packages were packaged by the dozens on cheap CD-ROMs.
This time however, the pirated software was very scarce, both for computers and video games. Again, the adult VCDs were widely and cheaply available, but that was a far as the piracy for what was on display. There were a few clever devices available such as a Sony Playstation add-on to play VCDs.
I walked around here quite a bit looking at all the items, then walked around outside where there was another street market. This one was less touristy and that sort of thing.
As it got dark I hopped on the MRT back to the hotel. I had to get up a bit early to get to the airport and still had a bit of a cold so I decided to get to bed early. I finished up the fruit basket as dinner.
is the Subway system for Hong Kong, and is comprised of several lines which depending on how far you want to go. You can also buy special cards that offer a discount and debit your account as you use them. You can get to most places in the city by taking the MRT and then just walking at most a