Culture of Hong Kong - Leisure

Leisure

See also: Leisure and Cultural Services Department

When not at work, Hongkongers devote much time to leisure. Mahjong is a popular social activity, and family and friends may play for hours at festivals and on public holidays in homes and mahjong parlours. The image of elderly men playing Chinese chess in public parks, surrounded by watching crowds, is common. Other board games such as Chinese checkers are also enjoyed by people of all ages. Among teenagers, shopping, eating out, karaoke and video games are common, with Japan being a major source of digital entertainmment for cultural and proximity reasons; there are also popular local inventions such as Little Fighter Online.

In the past, Hong Kong had some of the most up-to-date arcades games available outside of Japan. Negative associations were drawn between triads and video game arcades. Nowadays, soaring popularity of home video game consoles have somewhat diminished arcade culture.

Outdoor activities such as hiking, barbecues and watersports are also popular due to the local geography.

Chess is run by the Hong Kong Chess Federation.

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Famous quotes containing the word leisure:

    “Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption ... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
    —Guy Debord (b. 1931)

    “The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
    —Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)

    “The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)