Hong Kong

I was in Hong Kong for a week. It’s a mix of old and new, touristy and authentic, cheap and pricey. Real estate must cost through the roof, because the hostels there were the dirtiest I’ve ever seen. Granted, all I’d seen before that were the ones in South Korea and Japan, which are very clean and tidy places. But still: I’m talking about taking a shower while staring at insects crawling on the wall a foot away, about trying to put your pants on without letting the ankle cuffs touch the bathroom floor. That kind of dirty. The weather was a mix of good and bad. My first foray into the city was on a rainy and humid day, the kind where the sweat sticks to your back and face. Other days were quite pleasant. I got around quite easily on the MTR metro, and even rode the tram both ways to see Hong Kong Island. I saw and did lots of stuff:

• Hong Kong Park
• Hong Kong Botanical Garden
• The Peak
• Graham St Market
• Midlevel Escalators
• Temple St Market
• Wong Tai Sin Temple
• Chungking Mansions
• Peninsula Hotel
• Tsim Sha Tsui promenade
• Light show
• Lan Kwai Fong
• Causeway Bay
• Aberdeen Harbor
• Hong Kong Tram
• Star Ferry

I didn’t make it to Lantau Island or Macau. The Vietnam consulate kept my passport for four or five days, so I couldn’t enter Macau. I ran out of steam before I could do Lantau. I met a lot of cool people in the hostels I stayed in. At the second hostel, Tin Tong, I was standing with a group of other guests on the building roof, drinking beers and chatting. I realized at one point that I was the only native English speaker there, and everyone was talking and joking conversationally just fine with each other. I felt extremely privileged to have grown up speaking English, and at the same time very stupid for not knowing another language myself; everyone else seemed to be more accomplished than I linguistically. It was a humbling and wondrous moment. I met this guy around my age named Sergio from Texas in Seoul just before I left for Jeju. He was traveling around the world, and had just come from Egypt. In Kyoto, we saw each other in the lobby and squinted and tried to recall where we’d seen each other. We laughed about it, and got a beer together. I went out for dinner and karaoke shortly later, and I left Kyoto the next morning, so I never got his contact info. Well, guess who I ran into at a hostel in Hong Kong? Sergio! We drank some more beers and exchanged contact info and laughed about it again. Hopefully we’ll run into each other again on the road. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to practice Cantonese more. The people I interacted with we’re mostly cashiers, retailers, and waiters, and most were unfriendly, barely acknowledging that I had said anything at all. When you can’t tell if you’re saying things right, you stop wanting to try. So I did. I had fun learning some Korean and Japanese, at least.