Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 22:55:58 -0800 (PST) From: colin roaldSubject: end of the road
So, in three hours or so I head for the airport for an overnight flight back to San Francisco, where I have a few days before continuing onward to Halifax for Christmas. (Side note: Halifax time is exactly 12 hours offset from Hong Kong. I'm not going to know if I'm coming or going.)
It's been a great trip, but I'm worn out -- it gets harder and harder to actually pay attention to all the stimulation China throws at me. I need home for a rest. Or another week on a beach somewhere would do in a pinch, but I think I'd rather see Anna for a few days and have Christmas in Nova Scotia.
Hong Kong is a madhouse. Crowded, dense with skyscrapers, and lit by more neon than I think I've ever seen in one place, New York included. For one thing, HK doesn't seem to have any rules about how far over the street signs are allowed to project, so frequently they are guyed out over the street so far as to meet in the middle, and they float three and four stories above the ground. The entire sides of skyscrapers are also lighted -- two of the taller buildings in Hong Kong have permanent animated displays on their sides, and another dozen have got elaborate Christmas lightshows. The view of the harbourfront from Kowloon is stunning.
There are no bicycles to speak of in Hong Kong, and no motorbikes either, but infrastructure for pedestrians is extensive -- you can walk for all the way across Central without leaving the elevated walkways, and you can get halfway up Victoria Peak by escalator! I've never seen anything like the Mid-Levels Escalator. It's 800 metres (or half a mile) long, gains something like 500 feet vertical, runs from 6 am to midnight, and is entirely free. I've ridden it a couple of times just for the view; it also happens to run through one of the better nightlife districts.
(Incidentally, in China, even in Hong Kong, the late-night drinking-and-dancing kind of nightlife is driven almost entirely by Westerners, business travellers and expats. The Chinese like going to loud, brightly-lit restaurants, but "late" means 9 pm or so.)
Hong Kong has a reputation as a great food city, but if there really is good food here you must have to pay through the nose for it; I personally ate much better in Singapore and Bangkok. There is surprisingly little street food here, and what there is doesn't appeal to me at all. Cantonese cooking has a fancy reputation, but at street level it's bland and salty and much too likely to include unidentifiable crunchy or gristly bits. More than once I have been served chunks of chicken that had just been hacked up with a cleaver with the bones still in them, so not only did you have to try to eat around bits that were too small to hold, but the ends were sharp and splintery. No, I'm not impressed with Cantonese cooking at all.
This is, however, a shopping paradise. Clothes are cheap, movies are cheaper (especially Hong Kong-produced ones), and there are endless streets of shops, everything from booths set up in alleys to cooler-than-thou boutiques with names like Shiny Beetle or Hair Potato. I've spent a lot of time browsing the video stores -- there's good stuff in the bargain bins.
And now I'm away....
c. -- colin | opportunity calls from a payphone, bruno. you never roald | get a chance to call it back. (christopher baldwin)