For Chinese New Year, Alice found a nice door for everyone. These photos were taken in a temple at Stanley. The two deities were the Door Gods...the military and the civil door gods. The one with a paler complexion is the civil door god (presumably because he is studying indoor)! The darker complexion one is the military door god (tanned from the outdoor activities)!
Chinese people like to put up images of door gods (must be in pair) to guard the home against evil spirits and bad luck. The gods' faces should thus face outward, and they must never be put back-to-back.
There are so many different portrayals of the door gods. They could be holding different weapons or wearing different armours. But the intention of putting up the door gods is the same: protection.
Now, this house is protected! May the new Year of Ox bring you good fortune and health. Kung Hey Fat Choy!
Alice found another door to luxurious enjoyment...this one is actually a small dim sum restaurant, Colorful Dragon Restaurant, in Shek Kip Mei. The restaurant is located in an older part of the town, surrounded by public housing estates. The entrance to the place is still maintained in the 1970s style: gold-colored columns, the name of the restaurant in big Chinese character and the coin-operated mechanical rides! Alice hasn't seen any of these mechanical rides for ages! Just when Alice thought this is just another regular neighborhood dim sum restaurant, she spotted the poster.
The poster:
Colorful Dragon Night Club
Great music and fancy dancing at Colorful Dragon
Tea Dance: $68 Night Dance: $108
The neighborhood dim sum restaurant will be your neighborhood night club from afternoon onwards! Tea Dance, once a dirty word for something else, has made a strong comeback in Hong Kong in recent years. Now, it is not the men who go to these tea dance venues in various neighborhoods, but the housewives. The mamas put on their fancy dresses and dance with their friends. It is all about having a girls' night out!
Though the poster doesn't say when Tea Dance will start, Alice saw the waiters clearing out the regular dining tables for the dance at about 2pm. One night, Alice will call up all of her friends to enjoy a night out of dancing!
There are quite a lot of old buildings in Hong Kong. Many of them are located in older districts like Sham Shui Po.
In these buildings, lifts are usually not available. This set of stairs is an interesting contrast to Alice's earlier picture of stairs to nowhere. The staircase is extremely dark and smelly. The question, then, is...does this set of stairs leading to somewhere?
Alice can imagine all kinds of monsters lurking around the corners, the truth is, it just leads to someone's home. Ordinary homes in the older part of Hong Kong.
The stairs seem to be a forgotten part of the city, the building is too old to be considered for redevelopment. The area is forgotten on the economic map.
Technically these are not really gates, but they do look great in the sunset. The lines worked quite well with the fisheye lens.
Alice has been experimenting with her FishEye2. This was taken outside the Hong Kong Art Museum in Tsim Sha Tsui. Surprisingly, the place is really lively during weekends. Not that people are actually going into the museum, they are going to the harbour front square to enjoy a bit of fresh air. Passing through this long corridor with the partitions (are they partitions?) was the only way getting to the square.
Alice found another funny door. This one leads to a herbal shop. Strangely, it is sort of 'attached' to a school building (the yellow brick building). The door is at the back. It must be a very tiny shop.
According to the writing on the wall, you can buy herbs for all kind of pains: lower back pain, sharp bone (?), shoulder pain and just pain. There is no call for medication or needle. Just put the herbal pad on!
Unfortunately, it never opens! Maybe the herbal pad seller is already so rich for his miracle invention that he doesn't need to work anymore!
This is one of the strangest staircases Alice has ever seen. It is next to a highway intersection in Shek Kip Mei. You can walk up the steps from either side and then there seems to be another short set of stairs leading upward. After about 10 steps, you will run into a concrete wall! There is no sign of any door. There is no sign of a passage leading anywhere. What's the point of the steps then?
There are a lot of rumors about funny empty and pointless steps in Hong Kong, especially in the rural areas. If you see a set of steps that don't really lead to anywhere, don't go that direction. Some steps were laid down by villagers to confuse the restless lost souls. If you walk on the steps, you may become one as well!
Alice strolled around the Flower Market today, the stroll in itself is already a very pleasant experience. She didn't expect that there is actually a door to luxurious enjoyment! At the start of the Flower Market, there is one old building with three hourly hotels. On one advertisement board, it said, 'Hotel facilities/luxurious enjoyment/hourly/over night/reasonable price'.
The building itself is interesting. If one looks carefully, there is still one of those really old-style lift where one has to open a door and push an iron grille. The building materials at the entrance also suggested that this could be a building built in the early 1950s.
What kinds of 'luxurious enjoyment' can one find in a 1950s building?
Alice has been writing something about her Shanghainese in the last week or so, and she rediscovered this photo from her trip to Shanghai two Christmases ago.
The Paramount was once the most luxurious dance hall in Shanghai, in the heydays of jazz from the late 1930s to mid-1950s. Jimmy King (Jing Huaizu), the first Chinese jazz band leader, also played there.
The Paramount is located in 218 Yuyuan Lu, Jing'an, Shanghai. There is no missing of the massive building. Andrew Field, a historian, made a short film about the building, the place and the time. It is a spectacular art deco building, and it was also among the first buildings in China to be fully air-conditioned in the late 1930s. It is not even possible to imagine the wealth and extravengance in those days: the fancy cars, the men in cigars, the beauties and the music. It was the place to be at that time!
