Muted response in Hong Kong for royal wedding
It has been 14 years since Britain handed Hong Kong back to China but some people on the street are still royalists at heart. “I’ve been following them for quite a while, it’s quite an exciting thing, after all these years,” said a member of the public. A quick check at a travel agency shows there are still plenty of flights to London in time for the special day. Mary Ngai, Assistant General Manager of Goldjoy Travel, said: “I think that most of the clients enquire about London, fly to London because of the Easter holidays rather than the Royal Wedding. There isn’t much particular interest because of the Royal Wedding.”
For those who do want to get into the thick of the wedding festivities but can’t go to London, the British Chamber of Commerce and the Royal Geographical Society are jointly hosting an evening get-together, complete with bag-pipes and a live broadcast of the wedding.
Christopher Hammerback, Executive Director at the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, said: “It’s a sell-out, I’ve had a number of people asking if you’ve got any tickets, spare seats but we can only take 300 so it’ll be fun. “There’ll be bunting, I would’ve, its not appropriate, (but) had it been possible, I would have liked to run some sort of street party because that’s what people in England do on these occasions…I’m so old I can remember the Coronation and I was in Germany at the time with my parents, we had street parties there.”