TANKS Travel Tales - a travelogue.......

Next trip.......  I had just returned from a short weekend getaway to Hong Kong, my second trip to the city this year. While there will likely to be at least a couple more trips to Hong Kong again this year, I am thinking of what other cities I can and should visit next. Because these will mainly be short 4-5 days getaways including over the weekends, there can be no faraway destinations relative to my home city, Singapore. This effectively rules out any sojourns to Europe or North America. Candidates for such short getaway trips thus include only regional destinations such as Bali, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei and Shenzhen, all of which I had previously visited multiple times over the years. Manila, which I have never before visited, is a prime consideration. But any visit to Manila will have to be towards the end of the year because the paranoid traveller in me want to avoid the typhoon season that usually occurs in the middle of the year and we are currently in the middle ...

Singapore , where I was born and grew up in and still live in, has always been compared to Hong Kong . While both cities have their similarities, they also have their unique differences which defined each city it each own right. I was first "introduced" to Hong Kong as a kid when I watched Hong Kong-produced TV dramas with my family. Then, I started listening to Canto-pop, basically pop songs by Hong Kong artistes. While I was not conversant in the Cantonese dialect then, I did slowly picked up the language due to constant exposure. Today, I still do not consider myself conversant in Cantonese. But I can at least understand the dialect when someone speaks to me in it. I will try my best to reply in Cantonese, peppered with Mandarin of course. For the record, I am an ethnic Chinese with Hokkien ancestry . However, I have no known living relatives in China or the province of Fujian , just to digress a bit from the focus of this blog post. Back to why I love Hong Kong and fin...