At the airport there is someone holding up a sign with my name on it. He takes my luggage and leads me to a big black car. I sit in the back on the way to the hotel. We pass through the gates and after security inspection I am inside a large marble lobby. Someone is playing the piano in the distance. It is cool and comfortable and spotlessly clean.

 

I check in and make my way to my room, kick off my shoes and lie down on the bed to watch an uninteresting business channel on television. In the evening I get back in the big black car and I am delivered to another carefully guarded and beautifully maintained hotel, to a dinner in an excellent Italian restaurant.

 

The next day I go from one meeting room to another in a series of glass-office towers. And by the end of the day I am back at the airport and on the evening flight back home. Throughout the trip, I spend most of my time sitting in the back of the car. The traffic is terrible here and between each hour-long meeting there is at least another hour of staring out the car window.

What I see are rows and rows of tattered stores, crumbling buildings, and a sea of ageing motor cycles and cars. And people everywhere. Groups of men standing around smoking, young women laughing, and children chasing each other along the sidewalks. Going past the window of my car is an endless display of daily life.

Nothing looks clean or organised to anything like the standard of the hotels and office buildings I am visiting. There are piles of garbage against the walls of the dilapidated buildings and when I can look through the doorway of a store or a bar I see dark, dusty rooms or glaring fluorescent lights.

If we stop for long enough, a small child or woman holding a baby will come and knock on the window of the car begging for change or selling plastic toys. I am practised at not making eye contact lest I attract a whole gang of beggars. If they are too persistent the driver will shoo them away while I sit in the back feeling guilty.

At each destination I walk into well-designed meeting rooms with speaker phones, flat-screen televisions and friendly waiters serving horrible coffee. I talk with groups of men in nice suits about economic growth and inflation and sovereign bond spreads. We exchange business cards and they ask me when I arrived and how the weather is in Hong Kong. We shake hands and say that we look forward to speaking soon and then I go back to the car for another hour to watch the folks go by whose lives actually depend on this economy.

I wonder what would happen if I were to get out of the car and go and introduce myself. "Hi, I'm Alan Alanson. I'm trying to arrange a zero-coupon sovereign bond issue by your government. We're hoping to issue US$800 million in the first tranche. Are you OK with that?"

Best case they might offer me a cigarette. Worst case I'd probably be kidnapped.

No one would think to ask me what the purpose of the fund-raising is, what the government is planning to do with the money or whether there are cheaper funding sources available. When the most expensive thing you own is a mobile phone, I doubt you are much interested in public-sector financing.

I'd like to think that the fiscal stability of the government is of interest to the people I see out the window. But the truth is that I have no clue what they are interested in. I'm doing my thing and they're doing theirs.

Even if I did actually get out of the car one day, I doubt that I would really be able to appreciate what it's like to be on the street. Sure, I could sit on a stool and eat some noodles or I could order a beer and say cheers to someone who doesn't speak English.

I suppose I could even walk down the street and try to join in a game of football or something.

But I'll never know what life on the other side of the glass is really like. I can help their government raise money, or privatise businesses or even develop new industries. But I'll never really understand the people that live here. Because I can always get back in the car.