Danco Waffles has been warning the kids of Shenzhen about the dangers of LSD by plastering this picture of its horrific effects everywhere around the city.

People are funny when it comes to seeking medical treatment abroad. Foreigners in Hong Kong often pay substantially more for insurance to cover treatment in expensive private hospitals that are designed to make you feel like you are visiting a swanky spa. I was just discharged from one of those hospitals. I spent the whole time there feeling uneasy.

Two days ago I ran across my living room – barefooted – to answer a knock at my front door. My small toe connected with a coffee table, snapped outwards and back in again, resulting in a dislocation, fracture and torn ligament (and a good five minutes of very loud profanities). I ended up getting a minor operation in one of Hong Kong’s more upmarket private hospitals, the cost of which is mostly not covered by my insurance (more profanities). The alternative was to hobble around while waiting to get a slot in a public hospital.

This was my first time to go 5-star with healthcare. The hospital I ended up at is popular with expats. Why? Well, from discussions on online forums the chief reasons tend to have nothing to do with medical treatment. They prefer the better service and easier communication at 'westernised' hospitals. One expat woman complained that she was freaked out in the public hospitals because, although they spoke English to her, the staff spoke Cantonese when communicating with each other and she had no idea what they were saying. She must have presumed they were discussing their plans to nick one of her kidneys and flog it online.

I have never been to a public hospital in Hong Kong because, thankfully, I never had a problem serious enough for a hospital visit since I came here. From what I hear, the doctors are well trained and know their stuff. (Sometimes when a patient in a private hospital develops serious complications, he’s rushed to a public one where there is more expertise). But, being the public sector, service is often delivered with a snarl or is just non-existent in the first place. And the junior staff can’t communicate well in English.

So service is what foreigners are paying all the extra readies for.  I could go without it to be honest.  I have no complaints with the fine work the surgeon and her team did guiding a wire into the bone of my toe today, but for an operation that took 30 minutes, there was almost three hours of preparation and another two hours before I could leave. During this time, I was weighed and measured and sent  for a shower; I had my blood pressure and temperature checked about 10 times, signed about four forms promising not to get too litigious if they screwed up, and listened as the procedure was explained to me in minute detail, twice. The whole time I was tended to by a team of nurses and orderlies who always introduced themselves when first speaking to me, addressed me as Mr Lynes, and made sure to confirm that I had no food or drug allergies every two to three minutes. I don’t think there were any other patients in the entire hospital.

If that was a rural clinic in China, the whole thing would have been a 15-minute job, involving two doctors, a nurse, a cigarette or two and about a dozen hard-faced onlookers who smelled of vegetables and sweat. Nobody would ask if you feel comfortable or give any warning before they stuck a needle into you. I know because I have been to clinics in rural China. The floors are littered with bloody swabs. Crowds of patients gather around the doctors and have their problems heard one by one and by everyone else. The doctors smoke and mutter and never offer explanations to anything they are not directly asked about. Random people come and go in and out of different rooms. Nobody tells you where to go or what to do and the filthy toilets stink the whole building to hell. The city clinics are different of course.  They are much bigger.

I’d need to be seriously off my face on anaesthetics before choosing the Mainland experience over what I received today. There are a lot of things I love about China, but the third-world brutality, corruption and squalor of its healthcare system is not one of them. The fussiness of the luxury hospital treatment doesn’t work for me either though. Hospitals, no matter how clean and well run, are miserable places. Even if you are in for a minor problem, seeing masked faces and ceilings roll by from the perspective of a moving gurney is a depressing reminder of your fragility and mortality. People face their worst fears in this building. They say their last goodbyes to their loved ones here. For someone, this gurney ride was the final journey.  Attempting to distract from the seriousness of a hospital with “hi my name is Mandy and I’ll be your nurse” creates an incongruity that just intensifies the gloom for me.  

Those Europeans and Americans who presume they will be safer receiving medical treatment in their own countries are comforted by the blending of hospitality and healthcare you find in hospitals that have the word ‘international’ in their names. Relax! If  a hospital models its admission process on that of a top-end hotel check-in, it must be more professional in a medical sense. Similarly, an orthopaedic surgeon is defintely going to be more competent at treating a shoulder injury  if he can speak fluent English. Surgical talent usually goes hand in hand with a flair for foreign languages.

But with health tourism on the rise, old people from affluent countries will seek medical care in cheaper, sunnier places and won’t worry about incompetence or kidney harvesting as long as the doctor speaks with a near-perfect American accent and there are lovely floral arrangements in the foyer. And hospitals will remind their nurses to smile and make eye contact at all times. With aging populations and cheap travel, the hotel-style hospital has a promising future.

If I had to design a hotel-style hospital, I would staff it with the Russian hotel workers I met in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. They would ask each question only once, ensure everything you need is available with minimal discussion and would not do something as silly as tell you their names. Why would they do that when they are wearing name tags and it has been noted that you can read? Mostly they would just leave you alone until you ask a question, which they would answer before politely withdrawing. More important, they would also insist on having cool job titles like 'ad –MEEN–is-trait –oar'.

In the meantime, if you are travelling to Hong Kong take note that public hospitals here offer foreigners affordable rates. If you are in hurry, need to have your pillow fluffed or are so paranoid you have to understand everything the hospital staff say to each other, make sure your insurance covers private. And watch out for coffee tables.

Today I caught my first glimpse of the Kingkey 100, Shenzhen's new super skyscraper. I haven't been down that part of town in months (though I should have noticed it when crossing Shenzhen Bay Bridge).

This is a 440m skyscraper with 100 floors -- taller than ifc2 but still under the height of the ICC in Hong Kong. It is the tallest building in Shenzhen ( the previous title-holder is the one next to it with the two spires). Floors 75-98 will be occupied by a six-star St Regis hotel. It opens on Nov 1, which is my birthday.

Coincidence? Maybe. But now I know where to eat that day.

Hong Kong is one of the world’s most spectacular rat races. It starts a few months after you are born, when your parents begin prepping you for preschool interviews. It ends with a retirement spent hanging out in McDonalds because that’s the only place you can sit for a few hours without being constantly harassed into making another purchase. After that it’s a temporary grave, unless you can fork out for a permanent one, and your family will make sure you’re afterlife is kitted out with all the possessions you worked yourself to death for by burning paper miniatures of everything from furniture to cars and electronics.

In between is life in the modern city, which entails a grudging obedience to rules, systems and etiquette. Personal victories are won by shaving seconds off daily routines. You can hit the close button on the lift before you press your floor button. Have your exact change ready before you reach the top of the check-out queue. Know exactly which subway door to be at so you can make the lift before everyone else. Anybody who delays in any way in these efforts and thereby slows someone else down by a millisecond is treated to tuts and sideways glares.

One Asian expat told me he thinks Hong Kongers are always in a rush because they fear thinking. “Look at the restaurants,” he said. “The waiters are on your case for your order the second you sit down. They won’t let you think. Everyone rushes because if they slow down they will have time to think and that will lead to questions.”

He attributes the same fear of reflection to the fast walking. My dentist asked me about this a few weeks ago, but at first I thought she said “work fast”. She certainly does. She sees patients from 9am to 8pm, six days a week and with only a one-hour break each day. I believe she and her nurse studied dentistry at the same place that Formula One crews train for pit stops. As I write this though, I have a pain in one of the teeth she filled. Like a lot of things that are done quickly, it will probably need to be redone.

Anyway, she didn’t say “work”, she said “walk”, and no I could not say that I thought Hong Kongers walk quickly. I have heard some visitors remark on the fast pace of a Hong Kong amble but my opinion is the opposite. I find myself slowed down and hemmed in by dawdlers on Hong Kong’s footpaths every day. And I’m not alone. A British friend who has lived here for about the same length of time has only one complaint about Hong Kong: people walk slowly and tend to weave. I also find the latter infuriating – a whole footpath blocked by one zigzagging crawler.

The strange thing is when I’m in Shenzhen – for a few days every week – I never get annoyed by slow walkers on the street, laggards at the check-out, or complex bill paying at the ATM. Are Shenzheners walking and doing things more quickly than Hong Kongers? Hardly.

The only conclusion I can come to is that time itself is different in Hong Kong. The city warps time. It’s not that Hong Kongers walk slowly. It’s just that when I cross the border my sense of time goes on an amphetamine binge, my patience vanishes and I start walking very fast.

I wasn’t always a resident here. I used to be a regular visitor. The problem is I can’t remember what I thought of Hong Kong walkers when I was a tourist. I remember enjoying the fast pace of the city because I was on the traveller’s slow pace. It’s pleasant when you have nothing to do in a strange and hectic city; when your internal clock is set at a slower tick than the time of the environment around you. You can linger over your coffee while the world rushes to work. Even traffic jams are interesting when you are a tourist. But then you get a job and chores and routines and your internal clock catches up.

Last month heated words were spoken between two residents of this city just outside my flat. A man was allowing his dog to run up and down the street unleashed. The dog made to fight with a smaller one, which was on a lead and being walked by a woman. She snapped at the man that his dog should be under control. He exploded: “Fuck off! My dog should be on a leash? My dog should be free. Fuck you! I want my dog to be free.” Wisely, the woman kept moving, dragging her pooch behind her.

Despite his histrionic outburst, he had a point. Dogs should be free. But in a densely populated city, it’s just not practical. Nor is it possible for humans to be free in urban environments. Big cities – if they are to work – need to be orderly and efficient, like machines. People, by nature, are not orderly or efficient. Humanity is chaotic.

Maybe this is why I find it easier to become impatient in a city. The more ‘developed’ the city, the more impatient I become. In Hong Kong, I can stand on a footpath and look across a street at a shop that I want to visit. It’s about 15 metres away from me but to get to it I have to walk to the end of my side of the street, enter a shopping mall, take an escalator to an overpass, take a flight of stairs down and walk back along the opposite side of the street to the shop, which by now I have lost interest in.

It’s madness that people are forced to go on these detours so that machines can move more quickly through our living environments. It’s madness that this is regarded as normal in all cities that lay claim to being modern.

Paul Theroux commented darkly about seeing the future in Tokyo on his second Europe to Asia overland journey. You can see it in Hong Kong too. This is the urbanised, over-populated future that lies ahead. As populations grow and societies industrialise, individualism and the human spirit will have to take a back seat to order and efficiency. We will have to keep moving, like the army of office workers that clack clack clack between Central and Hong Kong MTR stations every rush hour. A steady march of drab colours and exhausted faces glued to smartphones and tabs. And just as happens in Hong Kong today, our tired legs will be forced to move by signs saying ‘no sitting’, ‘no loitering’, ‘keep passageway clear’.

If people in Hong Kong walk fast, it’s because their internal clocks are faster. They are set to a future time zone. If you don’t live here, I’d highly recommend visiting just for a glimpse into what lies ahead for the human race. Pick a bar or café with a window seat. But remember, space is limited and expensive. So either drink up and order more, or keep moving!

I’ve heard tell that a Mongolian can ride a horse by the age of 3 and Mexicans can eat raw chili peppers before their second birthdays. I can’t say for sure. But I am certain that all Uzbeks are born with the ability to count a wad of bank notes without any errors and in a matter of seconds. It might be something to do with their history as world trade middlemen on the Silk Road. Or more likely, it has to do with their currency – the som – and the thriving currency black market.

 On the black market, one Yankee dollar will get you 2400 Uzbek som or thereabouts. And the highest denomination in the Uzbek currency is a 1000 som note. So, if you change US$100, you’ll get 240 notes. And nobody changes money in the bank. Not only is the rate crap, but you will age considerably while waiting for the process to end.

 Travelling in Uzbekistan is a totally cash experience. There are no ATMs (I heard rumours of a few existing somewhere in Tashkent but I also heard rumours that they are always empty), credit cards are not widely accepted and getting a credit card cash advance from a bank is worse than being mugged because most muggers have the decency to not add the insult of hours of bureaucracy to the injury of robbery.

 Interestingly, when it comes to money and currency issues, Uzbekistan is one of the most stress-free places in the world to travel. This is because everyone in Uzbekistan is a moneychanger. Guesthouse receptionists, museum staff, train officials, taxi drivers, and waiters – I changed money with people from all walks of life. I have even heard of people changing money with cops, though I didn’t try that. If you are in Uzbekistan, ask anyone to change money with you and without hesitation he or she will state a rate, you haggle a bit; after a quick disappearance your moneychanger will return with a small bag of cash.

 And they can count with the speed and accuracy of any machine.

 I’m not sure what tourists do there in the hot summer months. I needed every one of my jacket  pockets for carrying all that filthy lucre. The photos show what US$50 looks like in som.

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A taxi driver in Ashgabat was playing this catchy tune on his stereo. When I say "taxi driver", I mean  the Central Asian definition of the term i.e. a bloke in a private car who pulled over when I flagged him down and agreed to take me downtown for the price I offered. The tune reminded me of something you'd hear in a Harbin diba circa 2003.