skkatter’s Hong Kong clubbing action

Photos here

Part One: some bars around Causeway Bay and Wan Chai

Right, first off, Hong Kong is an amazing city with a hundred thousand different things to see, do and eat however a proper guide book would be the best thing to read in order to find out about all that kind of stuff. My essay here is just going to describe the pubs and clubs that I went to.

On our first day there after we’d eaten some food we went off in search of a decent pub. My group and I were staying at the Cosmo Hotel which was pretty near the Causeway Bay area of Hong Long Island (Hong Kong Island is one part of the general area collectively called “Hong Kong”, here’s a map). My guide book suggested a pub called “Brecht’s” which I chose because it was pretty near to us (123 Leighton Road) so we all trooped off there for our first real drink. The place was pretty small but “funky looking” and had these huge cartoon picture/sculptures of Hitler and Mao in them. I think it was trying to market itself as a German bar but I’m sure that the cartoon Hitler picture with swastikas for eyes (hey, isn’t that a Primal Scream song?) would offend most Germans that turned up. (check my photos section to see a picture of it). Anyway at Brecht’s is where we first discovered the unfortunate truth about drinking alcohol in Hong Kong. It’s expensive. More expensive that Dublin, probably more expensive than London too. Your average 330ml bottle of beer (they’re nuts for San Miguel lager over there, they think they invented it or something, all their cans of it have “Our better, our city” written on it) cost about 55 Hong Kong dollars which is about 6 Euro. So 6 Euro for a bottle of beer, pints were probably a bit more expensive (6.50 Euro ish in places) and spirits and shots and cocktails were none to cheap either.

But hey, it’s a holiday, so I quit my complaining and did some drinking. After spending a while there some members of my group wanted to watch “the football” (screw the football!) so we left and found another place called In Side Out (10 Hysan Ave) which was packed because everybody was watching Liverpool lose against some other team. (I hate football) All the locals seem to be really into their football over in HK and were cheering and ooohing just as loud as the Liverpool supporter in my group. (I hate football) This place had lots of really nice beer such as Duvel, which we bought a lot of. They also brought you over big baskets of peanuts and everybody would shell their peanuts, eat them and throw the shells onto the ground where the staff would happily sweep them up. Of course we all ended up throwing the shells at each other obviously. Stupid drunken Irish!

After the match, or after we got bored, I forget which one, we set off in search of a nightclub. The first one we tried that my guidebook recommended (Club Ing, haha, see what they did there with the name?) was hidden in the lobby of a hotel (like a lot of things in Hong Kong) but was also closed. I asked the guys at the hotel where all the hot club action was and they directed me to the nearby area of Wan Chai (specifically a road called Lockhart Road) and he circled an area on my map and said “You go there!” so we did.

As soon as we got to (or near) Lockhart Road I saw a nightclub that was recommended by my guidebook called Neptune II. My guide book said “Neptune II is a fun club with a crowd made up of mostly Filipinos and a rockin’ covers band”. I’m going to recommend to them that they change this line slightly to read “Neptune II is a fun club with a crowd made up of mostly Filipino prostitutes and a terrible covers band”. I was in the door five seconds and a bunch of girls came up to us and started trying to chat us up. Obviously with my boyish good looks and sharp dress sense I’m well used to this, but these were obviously working girls so we waved them away (well I did anyway, I can’t speak for everybody else that was with me though) and got some seats.

Clubs in Hong Kong sometimes charge you something like a tenner in, but you get a free drink included in the price (and drink practically costs a tenner anyway, so it’s like free in!). Despite the numerous working girls in the place there were also a bunch of non-working girls and people just out for a dance to the terrible covers band (Blue - “All Rise” was the funniest thing they did). Anyway it was only later that I realised that this part of Wan Chai used to be the red light district way back in the 60s but has since transformed into “a less seedy but still kind of seedy in a way” area in since a lot of expensive high rise hotels were built around the place. The place closed at 6am and we went to some other less seedy club afterwards called Bridge which was down the road. That was free in and I don’t actually remember anything else about it, nice decor……uh…….rest is a blur.

Part Two: Lan Kwai Fong and drinking out on the street

All this expensive beer was annoying me slightly so as soon as I discovered that it wasn’t illegal to drink out on the street (curse you Dublin County Council by-laws!) that’s exactly what I did. Hong Kong has a lot of 7-Eleven shops which despite the name are open twenty four hours a day. Also, they have this really nifty feature: For use of the public transport in Hong Kong a lot of people buy an “octopus card” which is a card you use to swipe your way into the subway stations and you can add credit to it etc. *But* if you’re in 7-Eleven you can also use this card to buy stuff, just buy what you want and instead of handing over the cash just swipe the octopus card on their machine! This for me represented the future of knacker drinking where I’d add 20 Euro to my octopus card and then spend the night popping into every 7-Eleven we passed and buying a small can of San Miguel (50 cent in our money), and drinking it until we came to our destination or another 7-Eleven.

With this technique perfected we all headed down to an area of Hong Kong called Lan Kawi Fong (it’s near the Central MTR station, the MTR is the name of their subway system) to check it out. A lot of people had told us to come here, unfortunately it turned out to be the Temple Bar of Hong Long. Lots of drunken tourists (a lot of Chinese-Americans seem to like the place) and lots of tacky bars and nightclubs. It also reminded me of Newcastle a bit, and also of that road in San Antonio where they try to tempt you into each club with offers of free drinks etc. (they didn’t have those people trying to get you into clubs here, but they did try to get you into their restaurants). Lots of the pubs were playing your typical Copper Face Jack’s soundtrack of the Abba, Grease soundtrack megamixes, Shania Tawin etc. All the nightclubs seemed to be pretty I dunno, “posh” (like I imagine that D2 club would be, I’ve never been inside it) and they all played the identical MTV Bass commercial hip-hop, rnb, reggaeton soundtrack. All of them. The exact same music. I must have heard that “I Ain’t No Holler Back Girl” track 50 brazilian times, not to mention that Kelis/Michael Jackson “Milkshake” bootleg. Add in your 50 Cent, The Game, Snoop Dogg and that pretty much sums up each and every nightclub in Lan Kwai Fong. I went to about four of them searching for some decent music, but found none (some were free in however). A place called California (”I Ain’t No Holler Back Girl!”), C Club (”I Ain’t No Holler Back Girl!”), Haven (”I Ain’t No Holler Back Girl!”) and Sugar (”I Ain’t No”, ah I’m tired of doing that). They were all technically “nice” places, clean and upmarket surrounding and great sound systems (what a waste), but all really expensive to buy booze in, all playing terrible music and also most of them had a lot of tourists in them. They had a lot of locals too who seemed to be big into the hip-hop thing and were all dressed up like 50 Cent. I believe the correct descriptive term is “Chiggers”. Still, we had a lot of fun there, the local Chinese girls seem to love the gwai low (ghost man, what the Chinese call us white people) and everybody’s really friendly. A lot of times instead of buying a drink at the bar I’d go outside and nip down to the 7-Eleven there and have a can outside. I met a bunch of Germans doing the exact same thing as me and got to talking to them, they didn’t find any decent clubs either. Oh well!

Part Three: Kimberly St, Kowloon and the Cyber Club

After a couple of visits to the residents bar in our hotel (which was brand new and unbelievably swanky, I’m surprised they let us in) we got friendly with the two bar staff there, Lima (a guy) and Joey (a girl). So friendly in fact that once night they let me mix my own Long Island Ice Tea behind the bar after I kept insisting they were doing it wrong (”where’s the flipping triple sec gone!?”) Joey, on her day off, kindly offered to bring us out drinking so after a stop off at a weird “cook it yourself via throwing meat into a pot of boiling water in the middle of the table” restaurant) we headed to Kowloon which is the part of Hong Kong that’s connected to mainland China.

The name Kowloon means nine dragons, cool huh? That’s a much better name than Fairview (which means “nice view”). Kowloon is generally more packed and less full of tourists and poorer than Hong Kong Island so the restaurant we went to there turned out to be ridiculously cheap. Afterwards we went to a bar on Kimberly St. which is a street full of bars that all seemed a bit like Dakota or Spy on St. Anne Street in Dublin. It was mostly locals though and we could drinking outside at their tables. It wasn’t amazingly special, but apparently the Hong Kong kids like pubs that they think are “western pubs” and Joey thought we’d like it. After a few drinks there (where Joey thought us this cool game called Twenties which involves predicting how many hands you and your opponent will leave open at any one time, it’s hard to explain, ask me to teach it to you when you see me, it’s great fun when you’re drunk) Joey told us we were going to this nightclub called Cyber.

This “Cyber” club deserves a whole new paragraph, it’s *that* mental. Actually, now that I think back, it wasn’t really too mental, (The most mental club experience I’ve had was in the Moog Club in Barcelona in 2003, but that’s a different story) but it was fairly mental. First off, the place is on Nathan Road in Kowloon (in case you want to go there). I ended up going there three times during my two weeks in Hong Kong, partially because some people in my group were under 21 and had difficulty getting into other clubs (Cyber seemed to be 21s too but if you were white they let you in if you were over 18) and also because it was the most fun club we found. When we went there they’d ask us at the door how many there was and then they’d book a table for us inside the club where we could sit. This seemed like a bit of a silly idea because the table was at the back of the main dance room place thing, and most of the time we’d be up dancing or at the bar and not sitting at our tables, but hey, it’s their club. Around the main room (which was a bit bigger than the main room in the TBMC) was a corridor that circled it and off this corridor were a number of VIP rooms that you could also book for karaoke and stuff, I’m sure the music from the main DJ could be piped in there too. One of the nights we went there was also a side room opened up to play “hip hop” (the same MTV bass stuff that was so popular there).

Okay so the music in the main room was …—===***TERRIBLE***===—… A mixture of Cantonese happy hardcore, Scooter and whatever other happy hardcore people there are, and happy hardcore versions of “We Will Rock You”, “I Will Survive”, “I Turn To You” (You know, that Mel C song) and so forth. My god, it was so bad. They’d also do a 30 minute “hip hop” section every so often (yep you guessed it “I Ain’t No Holler Back Girl”!) However, it was just so bad that it was actually fun. The place was jammed and hopping full of hot Chinese guys and girls. We were practically the only tourists in there and all the locals seemed to want say hi to us or give us the peace sign. Some people took photos of me when I did some robot dancing. They had an excellent sound system and light system (with lasers and everything!), oh yeah the beer was too expensive as usual but the second time I went I smuggled in a load of cans and drank them instead (I know, I’ve got a problem).

The second time I was in Cyber a rather strange thing happened. It was about 4am in the morning and everybody was ‘avin’ it large as per usual when all of a sudden the crowd all backed away from the stage and a big circle of empty space formed on the dancefloor. Straight away I said “alright, a dance off!” and I was considering walking into the middle and doing some robot moves. Next thing the music goes off and I said “alright, time for the dance off music!” hoping it would be some Mantronix or Man Parrish or some other man related electro tune.

Next thing the lights all come on and I say “okay…….maybe they need it to be bright for the dance off?” but suddenly a suited employee of the club (the manager) came up to us and in a rather agitated voice asked us to follow him to the “VIP room”. We just sat there and said “what the hell are you on about duder?” and he said “Please please, quickly come with me to the VIP room!”. I thought we were being thrown out or something and there were security guys behind him so we followed him out of the main dancefloor to one of the side rooms. Inside he asked said “Please sit down and keep calm and quiet and I will explain.” He then told us that the Hong Kong police were doing a “routine raid” of the club (which I found out later they do at lease once a week at this place) and it was normal procedure for them to gather all the non Hong Kong nationals and put them in the VIP room for “their convenience”. He told us that when they came into this room they would ask to see our ID and that we should be quiet and just show them the ID, or tell them it’s at the hotel if we don’t have it. “Fair enough” we all said, and he also had some staff member bring us in some water. He explained that the Hong Kong police would be in the club for about 30 minutes “checking people’s IDs”. After a few minutes we were joined by two American guys (”What up Ireland? So you guys like to get drunk huh?” Assholes!), a few Thai people (they kept quiet), and three of the hottest girls ever in the world who turned out to be from South Korea (or “Korea” as they called it). We were kept in the VIP room (which had a toilet, luckily enough) for over half an hour. During that time this Chinese guy who was monged off his tits on pills was also thrown into our room, he lay on the couch and had a bit of a twitch for himself. Every so often us Irish lads would start getting a bit loud and rowdy (laughing and whatever, mostly at the Americans attempt at chatting up the Koreans, they shouted “What up Korea!?” from the other side of the room, smooth!) and the manager (who kept watch over us all the time) would get a bit worried and ask us to keep it down. Eventually the HK police popped their heads into the room but didn’t bother asking anybody for ID and then left pretty soon afterwards.

After they left the music started up and everything in the club was back to normal (where normal is over a thousand Chinese kids going mental to happy hardcore Euro trance whatever it was rubbish). I still don’t know exactly why we were moved out of the main room but I’ve a few theories:

a) The local Hong Kong people know better than to mouth off in front of the HK police whereas we’d probably say something and cop a beating

b) The HK police were doing stuff that they didn’t want non-nationals to be witness to. According to a few people I met they make everybody lineup and check people for drugs, check IDs (not just for age but also for people trying to sneak into Hong Kong from mainland China), check for known triad members and what have you.

Either way it was an interesting thing to be a (semi) witness to. The manager told me that the police raid the place at least once a week, so if you’re ever in that club prepare for a raiding!

Conclusion

So overall I found the music to be terrible wherever I went, but I still had a lot of fun in most of the pubs and clubs I went to mostly because of the hot friendly foreigners but also because I was in another country and it was all a bit of a novelty. One thing I failed to mention above is that taxis in Hong Kong are really cheap. All the ones we got ended up just costing 3 Euro to get all the way from Kowloon back to our hotel on Hong Kong Island. Any money you save on taxis will be spent on the expensive alcohol though. Clothes and electronic gear is all pretty cheap too, worth having a good shop for yourself. I’d a brilliant time in Hong Kong and definitely like to go back and see some of the stuff I missed (and try to find some better music, maybe bring some records over next time!).

PS, see you all at Dexter in Electric City this Thursday in Traffic!