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[subwoofer]

Sai Kung is quite a distance out in the sticks, Luddy, so it's got to be cheaper than Lan Kwai Fung.

I'd love to know where you eat there so cheap though.

Breakfast (of champions?) for $10? Where?

A fair while back I went to a pub in S.K. with some mates and we had a pretty standard steak kind-of-thing for which we paid quite handsomely.


Spill the beans, man! Where do you eat?





Not a lot to do out there after 9.30 is there?

[Ludwig]

I am actually a short ride from the fringes of SK, halfway up a hill, in a small Chinese 'family village'. I speak Chuchou (潮州) � the language of the village - fairly well and so eat at the small local restaurant. I am known as the mad Western Chuchou-speaking bee-keeping university English and linguistics teacher that likes to smoke on his roof at night.

Not much to do after 9.30? That is exactly why I took the place thank you very much!

[subwoofer]

Smoking what, may I ask?
Maybe that's why you come across as some kind of Dickensian character.



Nice spot, though, Luds. Pretty close to Big Wave Bay which is not too bad.

Being in a Chinese village I guess you eat the local food then. No wonder it's so cheap.

[subwoofer]

What? That 'beep' in my last post was the last name of the guy who wrote 'Oliver Twist' and whose first name was Charles and it gets censored??

Ok.....

[tparker]

Reading through this thread, it appears as if everyone is comparing different things and therefore drawing different conclusions in the 'which is cheaper' department. I personally think Mainland China is cheaper, in terms of raw figures anyway, but perhaps not in terms of purchasing power.

Yes, Pizza Hut in Hong Kong is similarly priced to the mainland, as is McDonalds, KFC, or even Fairwood. The same can be said for Giordano, Baleno, U2, or the several other H.K. clothing chains which have now made it onto the mainland too. Of course in Hong Kong this food/clothing would be considered quite average - whereas in China for many, these would be a treat. But let us not forget that there is a large middle class emerging in China, and there are now more and more 'well off' people roaming the streets. If you compare Hong Kong to China based on this category of outlets (TGI Fridays included), of course nothing will be cheaper. That said, not everyone in the mainland shops at Walmart...

For "everyone else", you can get bowls of noodles at the roadside for less than 10 RMB easily, congee for a similar amount, and you can of course buy cheap clothing too - if you are not concerned about branding. CD's are cheap (real looking ones from legitimate looking shops - they may not be, but who cares?), as are DVD's and pretty much anything that can be produced domestically. It would be silly to compare the price of a Mercedes Benz or even standard electronic or computer equipment from the likes of Sony - these are imported goods and China taxes heavily for most imported items. But let's face it - how often does one buy a hi-fi? If you need something like that, bring it with you, or nip down to Hong Kong.

People tend to say that quality in Hong Kong is better than China - I would have to disagree somewhat. Hong Kongers are (on the whole) sophisticated enough to at least have minimum hygiene/quality standards which surpass that of their mainland counterparts. I would agree with that. But that doesn't mean there aren't dodgy places in Hong Kong, and providing you know where to go on the mainland you can easily have a high quality meal for less than the equivalent high quality meal in Hong Kong. Particularly with the dishes that require skill - in Hong Kong they tend to be sloppy or mass produced unless you go somewhere nice (read: expensive), in China even the cheapest of chefs have fairly good handiwork. Case in point: many Chinese noodle shops would make their own noodles ; in Hong Kong most buy pre-made noodles. Those Shanghaiese dumplings (Xiao LongBao) are another example - most in China would do them better than the average outfits in Hong Kong.

Sure, we have read about noodles being bleached to make them look whiter; factory-wrapped dumplings containing rotting meat; people being killed by poisoned pork fat; even (most recently) matresses discovered to be filled with rubbish (and I mean rotting stinky rubbish). But hey, China is a big place, and the media wouldn't ever report "Nothing happened today in China, nobody got cheated"... it's just not interesting, and all we ever hear about is bad things to get us all paranoid. There's also over a billion people in China - the amount that die from bleached noodles is very small in comparison... if the problem were really that big, there would be nobody left.

I'm by no means a fussy eater - I eat anything, and as far as i'm concerned, if it doesn't kill me then I don't care. I live in Hong Kong fairly near the Chinese border - ShenZhen for me is just a short hop across, and heck, i'm still alive! I think the fact that so many Hong Kongers to this date still flock to ShenZhen to shop speaks for itself - nowhere in Hong Kong can you get curtains made to order, or a CheongSam, cheaper than on the mainland. Of course, mainlanders are also flocking to Hong Kong for shopping - that speaks for itself too... they come to buy jewellery, electronics, and branded products.

To settle the argument of where is cheaper I think one has to first ask what it is they intend to do/buy. I can't speak for anyone else, but I certainly don't buy gold nuggets or hi-fi's every day - so to me it's not important how much those items cost. Were it more convenient to eat out and buy my groceries in China on a regular basis, I would definitely be making a saving over doing the same in Hong Kong.

[mandu]

look at it this way

if your on holiday in china or in hongkong then things are cheap

but if your earning the HK$ or rmb and living here then things are expencive

[tparker]

- I would put it this way.

Rent aside, even if you are earnign your money in Hong Kong then things are cheap - you just need to know where to go.

Transport is cheap in Hong Kong, and you can easily eat cheaply. Just don't go out for steak every night nor the oyster bars, and you'll be fine.

As for rent - unfortunately property prices in HK are still high compared to a worldwide average, but they have dropped somewhat since the '97 days (although are gradually rising again) and you can still find cheap digs if you look and pick carefully.

Perhaps London isn't a good comparison since it's ridiculously expensive - but if I WERE to compare the two, i'd pick Hong Kong any day.

- Terence