It used to be that it was only on Friday that a large portion of China (population more than you can count to in your lifetime) descended on Hong Kong (the small dot at the bottom of China, population 7 million) to buy up all the mobile phones and baby milk they can carry, push up hotel prices and generally get up the noses of the locals. But now it seems to be any day of the week, and why aren’t their children in school? Or is this an educational trip?

They can be easily spotted by the way they walk so slowly, spread out across the full width of any walk way they are on, are always pushing suitcases, and as I said, have lots of kids with them.

This has meant that hotels at the weekends are full and more are being built to lodge them. If you have relations coming to Hong Kong for a family event, the cost of accommodation will make you wince. It also has the effect of making other visitors trade up. Some of the mainlanders go into the bottom run of places to stay, displacing the visitors who would have stayed there upward to the next tier up of hotels. That results in overseas visitors get bumped upwards, and making their visit more expensive, discouraging tourist from stopping over on their way from Europe to Australia.

There have been other consequences of this mainland invasion is that property prices are rising. But then Hong Kong people have done the same, with weekend apartments in southern Guangdong province, just across the border. But in Hong Kong the cost of housing was already high, and land is limited.

So there is the age old problem of the prosperity from the RMB the mainland people spend here, versus the inflation they are causing. Their rudeness against the jobs they create managing the queues outside Gucci & LV.

There is also the continuing question of where do they get the money from? A job that in Hong Kong would pay $8,000 or $9,000HKD, in China would only rate 1,000RMB ($1,200HKD), so how can they afford all the mobile phones and the handbags?

Not yet in our LISTEN page is a new test stream

48K AAC+ Stereo

http://174.37.194.139:8188/listen.pls

Please give it a try.

We would welcome your comments on the quality.

Don’t forget you can also keep up to date with Apple-FM via our twitter feed @applefm or our facebook page at facebook.com/applefm.net

We have been working on the Apple-FM distribution servers, the way you hear us. Ever since we started Apple-FM, we have rented servers from other people, but now we have enough listening to run our own servers.

So from now we will be our own masters, and dealing with the data centre directly.

So, hopefully without you noticing, all the settings that send you to a stream have been changed and if you listen to us now you will get the new machines.

However this may take 24 hours or more to get to all corners of the world as local DNS servers update. PCCW here in Hong Kong is all ready connecting to the right machines.

The old servers will work for a few days, until we are sure the world has caught up.