July, 2010 Walking through Sai Wan (西環) on a Sunday, to see a Chinese man practicing bagpipes – playing Amazing Grace and in full kilt, no less – in the garage of a kindergarten.
August, 2010 Getting shaved ice at 12.15am from the local desert shop... eating it on a step nearby...
getting in the car to drive to the only frozen coke vending machine in HK.
We followed the instructions, taking a quaff before closing the bottle and tipping it upside down to watch the ice form... it worked pretty well, but I've heard it's hit and miss. Best of all, imagine all the extra chemicals we must be consuming in this latest artificial offering!
One year, for my birthday, I was given three Marmite cook books. The same cook book. My brother asked me if I thought I might be a little one-dimensional.
The affair My love affair with Marmite began at a young age. I had a tendency to climb the kitchen furniture, which one day lead me to a large jar of Marmite. Aged something like 18 months (ask mother for confirmation) I ate the entire thing, with my hands. My mother was convinced I'd be really ill, and despite being a nurse, whipped me off to the local doctor. Happily, he told her that I'd just be really thirsty for a while and might have some nappy rash. My liver and kidneys both fared well, and a passion was born.
Marmite throughout my ages When I was five, I was given my own pet Guinea Pig. He was brown, so given that his predecessors were called Toast and Marmalade, I felt that Marmite was a great name for him. At a similar age, I was given a Marmite plaque, depicting a traditional Marmite jar, which never got screwed onto my wooden bedroom door, because sometimes these things just never get down. I once tried to get a supermarket to give me their giant glass Marmite jar, which was used to serve up single portion packets in the supermarket café. I collected tokens to buy some Marmite socks – one saying Love, the other Hate stitched onto the bottom. I then collected tokens to get the Marmite fridge magnets, each with a different provocative word, that were used to make rude poetry in my student house. Now days, I have a neat collection of special edition Marmite jars... just not the one with the real silver lid (available in the UK).
Diversity Despite the love/hate argument, Marmite is actually pretty diverse (and, if you whip it, it turns a paler colour and tastes sweeter). In my family, we eat it melted onto butter and rice, with a fried egg on top. This beats the traditional See Yow Fan (豉油飯) any day of the week; it's my cure-all for homesickness, heart-break, flu, rain, hangovers, and generally moochiness. But Marmite also tastes good with banana, it's great with healthy-style peanut butter and lettuce on granary bread... Or eat it with cheddar cheese and raw onion. Spread it on toast and put the toast back under the grill, you'll have a giant Twiglet in your hand! Put it in a white sauce, or your morning porridge or congee (白粥)... No egg is complete without it, especially a boiled or poached egg... Marmite just makes breakfast! In fact, add it to almost anything you cook including Chow Mein (炒面) because it's always worth it. These days I don't have to eat an entire jar in one sitting to get my fill... Marmite is available in so many forms, every time I go to the UK my eyes pop out of my head! These cashew nuts are so insanely amazing... I couldn't wait to photograph the pack before chomping down... But there's also Marmite flavour rice cakes, Marmite Cheddar, Marmite Stilton, Marmite Fudges crackers, Marmite bread sticks, Marmite Walker's Crisps, Marmite Rolls (a vegetarian Sausage roll made with rice, available only in Walkley Bakery, Sheffield)...
Then there's the special edition flavours, like Guinness, Champagne, XO (crafted by master brewers). None of this is available in Hong Kong, where we have Marmite with jar labels that include the Chinese phonetic translation (媽密). In Hong Kong, a 250g jar of Marmite usually costs about (HKD)$55 which is about £4.45. In the UK, that jar costs me only £1.99 (and lasts about six weeks).
Don't compare it! Marmite is nothing like Vegemite and people that compare them should have their taste buds checked. A comparison like this can lead to hours of debate and even taste testing, in extreme cases. The two products have entirely different textures, flavours and ingredients. Never buy a supermarket generic brand, it's just not the same! And no, it's not like Bovril – Marmite is 100% vegetarian/vegan and a high source of protein; Bovril is made from meat.
Political implications During the last UK general election, the BNP used Marmite during a party political broadcast, apparently in relation to the love/hate marketing angle. The use was not requested or approved by Unilever (who produce Marmite) and as a result, Unilever moved to take action against the BNP. No comment.
For the love of Marmite, I wrote this piece, because one day I was telling my friend how great Marmite is and she stopped me and said "you realise you've talked about Marmite for a full ten minutes?" Easily done.
NOTE: This is an ongoing post and will be updated from time-to-time.
07-Mar-2010, #6 I recently read a letter from a reader — probably in HK Mag — in which the reader complained about the general attitude received when trying to access either empty seats or seats occupied by luggage next to the window on public buses. Having taken a group of blind people on an outing, he complained that he had to loudly request that passengers on the bus make room for the blind rather than shift a few degrees to one angle, forcing the seatless passenger to squeeze past to access the window seat (which, being blind, would not be so easy). I immediately sympathised with this issue but also knew that I was sometimes guilty of it myself.
With heightened awareness in the following few days, I boarded a busy #6 one Sunday evening. Finding very few seats free, I headed to one of the '2 facing forward, 2 facing backward' sections on the lower deck because it had two free seats. Of course, both passengers had left placed their bags on the seats next to them and I foolishly presumed that one of them would move their luggage, given how full the bus was, and it would not be considered an outrageous request.
As the bus pulled off I stood and waited as the two aforementioned passengers had a staring competition of "whoever looks away first must move their luggage so this annoying person can sit here". I asked once and again, "please could you move your bags so I can sit down?" Not to mention that I was carrying luggage of my own, this was going on far too long and neither had moved an inch! Finally, feeling fed up and somewhat inspired by the letter in the paper, I reached forward as if to move some of the bags, making it clear I was not interested in this game and had indeed paid as much as they had for my seat on the bus. I was pretty sure that their luggage didn't have it's own Octopus card in order to pay for a seat!
Finally, action! The moment I came close to touching one of the passenger's possessions, she lurched forward to grab it away from me, stood up, tutted loudly while looking wildly around the bus for witnesses to my insane behaviour. I couldn't be bothered to talk Chinese to her, but stated "I paid for my seat too, I doubt that your bags did." And as she grabbed her things so she could move far, far away from me — presumably because I am obviously crazy and/or dangerous — she gave me a firm slap on the head.
For more information on Chinese people who love to fight, visit the entry that tries to capture all that anger on tape.
05-Nov-2008, #973 There's this stench on the bus. I've smelled it before and I know it comes from this really overweight guy, because when he shuffles past to get off the bus it wafts by me and doesn't go, it doesn't go for ages so I have to breath into my cardigan. Women around me root through their bags for Tempo hankies to breath into. It smells like rotting flesh, and I can't get away from it.
Today, when he gets off the bus I am sitting in a seat near the door. I look over and realise... it is rotting flesh. He shuffles because his foot is injured, not because he is so overweight, and there is a hospital bandage around his foot but I can see skin and puss through it.
I feel sick. But what can you do?
21-Oct-2008, #970x I am on the bus and this Chinese guy just pulled out a bag with like 10 of those yummy siropenwaffle things... from Amsterdam, that me and Liz love to eat, that me and Gair munched on during our last sojourn there. There's caramel syrup oozing out of them. They look so good.
Those things are so hard to find here, and I really want to ask for one but a Chinese person would only find that rude, and more importantly, unhygienic (a westerner would think I was a scabby chav).
It just crossed my mind that I could try to make some, but ironically, I think some things are meant to be mass-produced.
17-Oct-2008, #970 There's a woman sitting opposite me with a bag depicting a family of birds. It says 'Nestle Nutrition' on it. It makes me laugh because... none of the Nestle foods are that nutritious, and they certainly did a bad job at promoting nutrition when they gave all that milk powder to starving mothers to give to their starving babies in Africa.
I took a photo of it with my rubbish camera-phone, while pretending to text.
11-Oct-08, #5B Man shouting on bus. MAN SHOUTING ON BUS!
This never happens, especially not in HK. I am on the bus and a man gets on, starts shouting, goes upstairs and continues to shout for about ten minutes.
People in HK don't know what to do about things like this. You could take your clothes off on the MTR and no-one would say anything. They would just look past you as if you weren't there.
People from upstairs start piling down, because they don't want to listen to the man shouting anymore. Meanwhile, the driver says and does nothing. In the UK, the bus driver would stop the bus, go upstairs and tell the man to leave. He would threaten to call the police. He would be a grumpy hardass.
I'm on the phone to my friend Katie in the US and she can hear the cacophony. She thinks it's hilarious that she can hear this man shouting all the way from Hong Kong.
After the famous Bus Uncle incident, people just don't want to deal with things like this.
It's come to my attention in the last year or so that there's a number of "angry Chinese people videos" out there on the Internet. I've titled this "Chinese people love to fight" which I think is a fair title. Living somewhere like Hong Kong you realise that there's a very odd kind of dichotomy — or should I say schizophrenia? — among locals here.
On the one hand, you could get on a bus naked and no-one would know what to do. They would most likely sit politely, not saying anything or even looking. On the other hand, often at the most surprising of times, uncouth screaming, shouting, hitting — yes, hitting — occurs. Even I was recently hit on the head by a woman on the bus who refused to move her bags so that I could sit down! After waiting for over a minute for her to finish her staring match with the woman opposite, also using a spare seat for her tired shopping bags, I went to move them for her in order to speed up the process of me sitting down. After a loud tut, she looked at me like I was crazy and hit me on the head before storming off (so I ended up with two seats).
Anyway, enough preamble, enjoy the following, international displays of fighting!
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