This is me having breakfast at a Hong Kong McDonald’s, where in addition to the stuff you would get in England (minus the bacon rolls) the breakfast menu also includes the fillet’o fish and macaroni in a broth. I am sitting in the ‘McCafe’ section, where it’s supposed to be more quiet, if not for the small child smashing a sound emitting toy with the persistence only a small child would know. Patience is being tried, but I’m cool. It’s not the Chinese way to allow your child to be a nuisance I thought, but its guardian currently is its maid, who probably couldn’t care less.
The morning news on the television is a testament of the rampant capitalist and isolationist attitude of this city, where they spend 10 minutes droning out stock values and currency exchange rates, where there are two items of international news tops, where almost every instance of traffic accident makes the news. I am aware that this is probably the same for many other cities, like anywhere in America, but coming from a very international city where stock market statistics (what’s the journalistic value in that? They’re just reading out strings of numbers..) seldom find their way onto the main news, to me there is still a certain degree of culture shock.
