Hong Kong's Lunar New Year Fair

Hong Kong's Lunar New Year Fair is an eagerly-awaited seasonal tradition that runs for several days up to New Years Day, which is on 28th January this year. The main Fair is held in Victoria Park, an oasis of green in the midst of high rise buildings, in Causeway Bay, one of the main shopping areas on the main island. This year there were almost 500 stalls.

When I first visited Hong Kong about 30 years ago the stalls mainly sold flowers and some traditional foods and delicacies. Now, many political interest groups and charities, schools and associations all take stalls to promote their interests and there are some fast-food stalls as well.

Today, the Fair was crowded with - it seemed - most of Hong Kong's population of seven million, all desperate to get a bargain, to buy an essential prop for the New Year, or just to rubber-neck.

The politicians were there, making speeches, collecting donations, selling books, t-shirts and souvenirs or just 'pressing the flesh.'

I don't know if they are a political party as such, but there was a protest group there collecting funds for the 'June 4 Museum,' a museum to be dedicated to the suppression of democracy efforts in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on June 4th 1989.

Inside the small cramped 'museum' tent were a few photographs (in negative form) of the ill-fated attempt to introduce democracy to modern China...alas, as they were in negative form, so you had to invert colours on smartphones to capture them in the original colours - but they still reproduce as shown below...

Apparently, the reason for this process was to make people re-create the event by re-developing the truth of the event like developing a photograph, the idea being that the mainland authorities want to maintain a distorted negative version. A little confusing? Anyway, the usual t-shirts etc were on display and sale.

Probably two thirds of the almost 500 stalls were taken up with things other than the traditional flowers, and there was plenty of shouting from eager sellers - and some general silliness with lots and lots of soft animals.

And, yes, there were flowers, lots of them. But first, remember the mandarin oranges so popular at CNY time? Well, there were hundreds of them...

Remember the odd-shaped gold coloured fruit that we saw before on CNY Countdown Number 1 of 16th January, 10 days ago.  Well, one seller that we talked to did not know the name of it -'its the New Year fruit.' The seller we talked to today was more helpful, apparently it's called the 'gold fruit.' Now we know! There were plenty of them at the Fair, check out the photos below...

 And, in a rare discovery for this mythical fruit - we even found some on the vine!

If we were worried that the regular flowers might be a disappointment after the excitement of the gold fruit, we needn't have worried, they were impressive enough in their own right.

In a corner of this vast park there is a statue of Queen Victoria, a hangover from colonial days. I wonder what the old girl thought of the Lunar New Year Fair?

We are MOST AMUSED, WELL DONE!