Trading Mobile Phones in the Streets. Hong Kong


Some streets in Hong Kong are full of people offering to buy from you second hand mobile phones or many other kind of electronics. They are buyers, not sellers. 

 A particular street in Causeway Bay is full of them, but you can see them in other streets as well.

They look kind of funny, always calculating and chatting and ready to pay cash to the approaching customer. 


Where do the acquired phones end up ? Almost all the stuff that these people buy is recycled and sold to Africa through a cavernous shopping mall in Kowloon, Chungking Mansions.
Please see my collection of videos on my YouTube channel: 
http://www.youtube.com/user/settime2588/videos


 

The arcade at street level of Chung King mansions is not really a shopping mall, but more a business and wholesale centre recycling second hands goods from the market of the Indian Subcontinent and Africa.

Chinese University of Hong Kong anthropologist Prof. Gordon Mathews estimated in 2007 that up to 20 percent of the mobile phones recently in use in sub-Saharan Africa had passed through Chungking Mansions at some point.











Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milano Malpensa Airport. Designed by Ettore Sottsass. MXP

Image
This airport is always crowded, noisy and dirty. The floors and ceilings seem to be made up of materials from the 1950s’ even though the Terminal 1 started operations in the 1990s’. Food served in the restaurant is terrible, of very expensive, or both. This is the only airport I have heard of where from time to time expensive items disappear from the checked bags of arriving passengers. On the positive side its architecture is a masterp iece of the “Postmodern” period. Its main designer was Ettore Sottsass. If you get out of the crowd, rest your eyes, and look at the lines of the building you smile at their beauty. Notice the two different rhythms of the columns on the upper and lower floors in the photo here.   Please see my collection of videos on my YouTube channel:  http://www.youtube.com/user/settime2588/videos This photograph was taken from a plane window and it is on the air side of terminal 1. The design is typical of the “Memphis Group”  producti
Read more

Cooking The Khachapuri from Georgia. Tried it in Warsaw

Image
 The Khachapuri from Georgia. Tried it in Warsaw Video on the channel:  https://youtu.be/j_MhOuUDsL4 Khachapuri is a traditional Georgian dish of cheese-filled bread. The bread is leavened and allowed to rise, molded into various shapes, and then filled in the center with a mixture of cheese (fresh or aged, most commonly, specialized Khachapuri cheese), eggs, and other ingredients. The bread crust is traditionally torn off and dipped into the cheese. It is very popular in Georgia, both in restaurants and as street food. As a Georgian staple food, the price of making khachapuri is used as a measure of inflation in different Georgian cities by the "khachapuri index," developed by the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University. It is Georgia's national dish, inscribed on the list of the intangible cultural heritage of Georgia. On the behalf and initiative of the Gastronomic Association of Georgia, the 27th of February was announced as National Khachapuri D
Read more