my response to hong kong

from seoul, i flew to hong kong.
i've always wanted to see this place and, it was good, but my impressions caught me off guard.

remember that everything i was seeing was through the lens of my year of influence from korea, my sadness of leaving korea and my anxiety of going to back to america and moving on in general.

i arrived to downtown hong kong by mid afternoon and took a taxi to my hotel. er, "guest house". i was staying in a place named "the wonderful inn". i stupidly forgot to capture this "wonderful" place on film. it wasn't awful, it was just tiny, which i had been warned about. but yeah, we're talking a room the size of a Honda Civic small. it fit my needs, a bed a mini-bathroom, a mini tv. i had chosen this place based on some good reviews, but it was certainly not a room i will miss.

now, onto Hong Kong as a whole:

not surprisingly, the mix of china and britain in this place makes for an adventurous experience. i found myself drawn to the "british" influences places more, considering my infatuation with English.

i didn't expect to be so violently yanked out of asia mode. hong kong is obviously still asia but, there were as many english and indian and global tourists as there were chinese here. and so, i was abruptly taken out my my "blond is special" experience that i had in korea. and, i'm not sure that i was ready for that.

maybe the problem is that a 3 flight was not enough to prepare for leaving korea but, it just seemed too fast, too sudden, too harsh to find myself gone from korea.

it's just, compared to seoul, hong kong is tiny. the subway system is too easy, there's no challenge in it, no element of surprise. the way i learn a city is by getting myself safely lost and then, getting myself out of it. somehow i find that entertaining. i certainly didn't see the whole city in my 3 days but, it just seemed so small to me, so easy. strange, considering it's got something like 6 million people living there.

my first evening in hong kong, i stayed relatively close to my hotel, and tried to wrap my mind around the city. i went to a restaurant that seemed populated by lots of chinese (meaning it must not be bad if the locals are eating here) and ordered a noodle soup that looked good in the photo. i love chinese food but, maybe it was the restaurant, maybe it was the culture shock, maybe it was just me, but it tasted like nothing. compared to a year of kimchi and red hot pepper spice dancing on my every mouth full, this dish tasted like nothing. it was tragic.

oh well.

i wandered around that evening through extravagant hotel lobbies (an area in which hong kong knows how to impress), saw some streets markets and took in as much as i could. then i went to bed at something noble like 9pm.

and, on a awkward side note, i kept seeing the people who had been on my flight a few hours prior that evening. that's how small this city seemed to me.

day 2 i ended up wandering around the "soho" area, saw that eternally long outdoor escalator that stretches up a gradual hill for several blocks. i've always thought that the purpose of escalators is to save climbing up so many stairs. this escalator (and others that i saw in this city too) was only for decending. there was no escalator to go up. fascinating.

that night i caved in and saw "dark night" which was delightfully ironic since part of the movie was filmed in hong kong, showing scenes that i had literally just walked past. including, ironically, the long escalator i just mentioned.

the next day (my final day) i woke to the pleasant surprise of a typhoon. actually, it was a bit exciting and, would have been fun since it didn't really seem all that bad, just a little windy. unfortunately, everything was closed. even the stores underground in the subway stations. strangely, the only businesses open were McDonald's and Starbucks. perhaps american businesses are not afraid of unamerican storms.
i wandered around the city filled with displaced tourists wandering aimlessly and then i went to the airport prematurely because there was nothing else to do.

would i go back to hong kong? sure. did i like it as much as seoul? no.