Chungking Mansions

You might not know it if you never left Central, but Hong Kong actually has some buildings that house neither luxury goods stores nor giant investment banks!  Chungking Mansions is one of the most famous of such buildings, and although you won't see many suits walking through the door, you can get one made there! Very good price for you! You want copy watch? Copy bag? Rolex? Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada?

Built as luxury residential apartments in the early 1960s, Chungking Mansions is now a giant shithole of epic proportions.  However, it has excellent Indian food, which pretty much makes up for it.

Comprised of 5 blocks of 17 stories each, the internetz say that 4,000 people live there and that 10,000 more people enter on a daily basis.  I believe that, because at least 100 people follow you around asking you which Indian/Pakistani/Nepalese restaurant you're looking for, approximately 100 more want you to stay at their guest house, and following those guys are all of the people selling suits, cell phones, copy bags, copy watches, foreign currency, pirated copies of Windows and pirated DVDs (Bollywood flicks are particularly prevalent). And that adds up to a few thousand people at least, right?  There are also a number of other food stores and other shops catering to practically every nationality (well, mostly India, Pakistan and a number of African countries - don't think I wouldn't be all over Chungking Mansions like a cheap CKM-made suit if they opened a taco stand or purveyor of authentic corn tortillas up in that piece).

One of the least awesome things about Chungking Mansions is that the elevators are pretend. Well, at least I think they are, because we waited for one for 15 minutes and even though the numbers on the display kept changing, the purported elevator never arrived at the ground floor.  I'm told that the place is no longer teeming with Triad gangsters or rats, however I don't care about that because I am way more scared of cockroaches than Triad gangsters or rats and I would bet one trillion pounds of sketchy South Asian hash (also available at Chungking Mansions!) that the place is crawling with them.  Thankfully, all I saw in the stairwell was the world's most dangerous-looking wiring and a weird assortment of discarded furniture. No cockroaches.  

Chungking Mansions is also allegedly home to a number of "secret restaurants", however I don't have time for such B.S. so I haven't been to any of them. Thanks to Erica for taking me on my first trip here. In November, 2010. But that's why this is blog catch-up week!