I know that all expat blogs in Hong Kong seem to take great pleasure in panning the HK government in all its forms, and some also love to have a go at asian service, but I would like to take time to praise both. I needed to get my HK visa transferred to my nice shiny new passport which i coillected yesterday from the British Consulate. I called personnel (or H.R. as we are now supposed to call them). Thanks to the type of management logic you could only get in an american bank they are located in another building approximately 15 mins away by foot. They asked me to leave the old and new passport at our reception here this morning. It was collected at 11 am, and now i have just had a call asking me to go back to reception to pick up my passport, complete with it's new visa.

Someone from our personnel had come all the way down, picked it up, gone to the immigration office, got the visa transferred and brought it back. If you tried to get anyone in England to do that they would look at you like you were mad, and the chances of getting any government institution in the UK to turn something round in a matter of hours is absolutely zero. I think Asian service is superb, and the HK government has many faults, but not as many as most other governments. There is no such thing as perfect government, but HK doesn't do badly, especially seeing as there is no political history here and most "politicians" are really ex-civil servants or bankers / lawyers / similar with no political experience or "savvy".

And now here