Expat Corner:
It's not easy to find places - even quite large places - in Hong Kong. A lot of offices and services are buried deep inside tower blocks and plazas.

Recently I tried to go to Garden Road post office in Central to set up a PO Box account.
My taxi driver looked as bemused as if I'd asked him to drive me to Beijing.

He appeared not to be aware of the existence of such a place, and cheerfully attempted to drop me off outside the US consulate.

I stayed resolutely in my seat. I have had extensive experience over the years of being dumped in wrong locations in sweltering tropical or sub-tropical heat by practitioners of his noble profession.

I showed him a street directory of Hong Kong, indicating where I thought the post office might be. This he found a most mysterious document, even though it was written in Cantonese as well as English. I began to think that he had spent even less time in Hong Kong than I had.

Perhaps he was - heaven forbid - a "mainlander". Mainlanders, or what the rest of China would simply call Chinese people, tend to get laughed at and blamed for everything that goes awry in HK, from overcrowding on buses to pickpocketing in Kowloon. They can often be spotted by their crappy shoes, fake fake tee-shirts with meaningless English words or phrases on them (a language known by expats here as "Chinglish") and a complete inability to wait patiently or queue for anything. (Three of them literally climbed over me as I bent down to get my passport from my bag while waiting to go through immigration at the airport.)

Anyway, back to Garden Road post office. It's as discreetly advertised as a Soho private drinking club (that's Soho in London, not the fakes in New York and HK) and about as friendly.

In the UK, certain buildings are always in certain places. Post offices are always in the centre of town and usually well signposted. Pensioners, motorists and legal secretaries depend on this as a fact of life.

Crowding and breakneck development means that in HK this doesn't apply. There IS a huge general post office in Central (built by yes, you've guessed it, the British) but it charges twice as much for a PO Box at its prestigious address. Meanness and bloody-mindedness drove me on to Garden Road.

To be continued...