January 24, 2006

At Hong Kong Airport

I just watched a Hong Kong drama serial. In this episode, a lawyer (a character in the story) said that it was an offence in HK to utter vulgarities in a public place; and the more public and international a place was, the more serious the offence.

This brought me back to last December. We were waiting in a holding area in Hong Kong International Airport waiting for a Jetstar flight back to Singapore. A group of male airport employees were not far away near the wall talking among themselves. Suddenly one of them uttered quite loudly a four-word Cantonese phrase ‘dew ……’ It means screw your mother. Later we heard another 4-word phrase also starting with ‘dew’. I did not know what it meant. Neither did my friend who is a Cantonese.

I don’t know if these words are vulgar under HK laws but certainly this incident didn’t give a good image of HK.


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