Avoid dirty locals: stay at a Langham Hotel
At the risk of repeating ourselves: yes, the Dark Side can be a spooky place. Local habits, food and hygiene remind us why we like to hide among our peers on the island and go grocery shopping at GREAT. Langham Hotels agrees wholeheartedly, but decided to take that notion one step further in their latest promo vid. It shows a distressed white woman, wandering around anxiously in Kowloon in search of food. Having finally found a location to eat, she orders chicken with rice, only to discover (EEK!) that a chicken foot in congee is served. She rushes back to the Eaton Hotel, a true oasis because that’s where she can have some proper chow (a spring roll.. Woot). The message?
‘Langham Hotels: where white people go to pretend they’re not surrounded by filthy Chinese’ (courtesy of Miss O’Kistic, found on our Twitter page).
The genius behind these ‘Big Deal’ videos appears to be Douglas White, a social media douche ‘leader’ who finds it incredibly important to show us what he looks like (slight smirk on his slightly faded Twitter page background, full body shot here). However, the true star of Episode II is none other than couch surfing hippie Kay Ross: marketing consultant, editor, copywriter, connector, comedian, actor, singer and why not, healer. Thanks Kay. You have indeed healed all non-HK based viewers from thinking that this is a cosmopolitan city. The Hong Kong Tourism Board salutes you.
Update: Bingo! Both Douglas and Kay are fans of The Dark Side now.
Update II: Episode III is online! Douglas, you have truly outdone yourself this time.
Update III: A pretty “Big Deal” indeed, Langham removed all videos. Fortunately we were able to retrieve the first two episodes here.
Update IV: Today (16-6-2009) we received an email from Youtube saying they deleted the Youtube vids due to a copyright infringement claim by Langham Hotels. You wonder what took ‘m so long, considering the shitload of bad publicity. Luckily we found the 2nd episode on Dailymotion, click here for more.
















