Take a walk: Hong Kong videos attract followers by celebrating joys of strolling through city nooks
- ‘When in doubt, take a walk’ YouTube videos, posted without narration or dialogue, presents city as ‘a moving museum’ to be enjoyed on foot
- Followers of a related Facebook paged share strolling routes, photos, memories
The video opens with a wide shot of a truck moving across a flyover squashed between a red block of flats and an old industrial building.
The frame widens to show the buzzing street life of an old district in Hong Kong, with restaurants offering congee and noodles, and tiny fruit stalls.
Then Sampson Wong Yu-hin appears, walking into the Yau Ma Tei Car Park Building, a Kowloon landmark due to make way for a highway. He strolls inside and navigates through the building floor by floor, going past tight parking spaces and along dark, narrow corridors.
There are no words spoken in the six minute, 47 second video on YouTube. There is not much action either, just the scenes of one man walking, walking and walking.
The YouTube channel, “When in doubt, take a walk”, which promotes the pleasure of walking in the community, is started by Wong, and Eric Tsang Tsz-yeung, both of them artists and lecturers at Chinese University.
“The city is itself a moving museum that requires you to walk in it and observe,” Wong said.
