Wandering Aidan Miniseries, Episode 2

Welcome to the Wandering Aidan Miniseries, where every post means one less inadequate description of Hong Kong from me! Today's topic is "Shopping and Currency".

First up: shopping. Luckily, we have a few shops in our peaceful apartment complex, but sometimes we need to fight through the dangerously busy city in order to find what we need. Unfortunately, there are a few things make shopping quite difficult here.

1. The city isn't laid out in a complicated way, but it has no landmarks. No matter where we go, it's just more of the same buildings, making it necessary to inspect every street name closely and map out a route beforehand.

2. Very few of the stores are familiar, so we have to put in more effort that usual to find out what shop we should go to. The effect gets worse in shopping malls- the shops are spread out across several floors, so we often only have names to go by, as we can't see the storefront until we're right next to it. We often end up wandering the halls until we see something that looks useful.

3. Finally, Hong Kong uses a different currency that we do, named Hong Kong Dollars. Because of this, we need to calculate the price of an item before we can determine how expensive it is.

Most of our shopping gets done fairly easily and quickly downstairs, but every once in a while, we come across something that is oddly hard to obtain. You'd be surprised at the seemingly common items that we have to grapple with the city to acquire. Take graph paper, for example. None of the shops downstairs sold it, so it took a whole trek through the city- and quite a long one at that, with many failures- to finally get our hands on a few simple sheets.


Speaking of Hong Kong currency:

An assortment of Hong Kong money, confusing me. From traveling the world, we've learned that America is just about the only place where every bill is the same shape and color. It turns out that the color system makes it easier to identify bills from one quick glance.

We've found that country-hopping sometimes results in a few left-over coins. This is our collection (every row is sorted by value, going up from left to right). Note that the sizes of Hong Kong, Singaporean, South African, Czech, and Euro coins all correspond with their value, the only exception being the Euro penny, which is still obviously of a lower value because of its color. This is another area in which U.S. money is lacking, and the fact that the numbers are frequently unmarked- for instance, nowhere on a dime does it say "ten cents"- compounds the problem. By contrast, Hong Kong coins are easy to get used to because they say, in huge numbers: TWENTY CENTS!!! or whatever value the coin is worth. Singaporean coins are equally friendly, with the added benefit of being unreasonably shiny. Seriously, it seems like Singaporeans polish their coins. Anyway, back to American currency. Interestingly, we seem to be the only country that has nicknames for coins. British coins, for example, are just called 2-pence coins, 5-pence coins, 50-pence coins, and so on. We never realized all these difficulties with American money until we got examples from other countries.

                                     

Thanks for reading!