Hong Kong

The day started out nicely with an early rise but I totally underestimated the time it takes to get to the airport. First I was running late because I had forgotten something in my room, so I was thinking that if I want to check in relaxed I should hurry a little. So I ran through my neighborhood, through MRT stations until I reached the main station where I was faced with the first obstacle: finding the bus stop. After 15 minutes of unsuccessful search I asked a middle-aged lady who was so nice to walk me all the way to the station (a 10 minute run in the sun). I got on the bus only to find out that it would take an hour to the airport. If true I was definitely going to miss my flight, so I was asking a young woman in front of me if I could use her phone to online check-in, which I could but for which the time frame had already passed. Then she told me one of the wisest of all Chinese sayings: “What happens will happen and what won’t happen won’t happen, so don’t worry about it”. I tried my best, so why worry now?

Eventually I made the flight and was not even the last passenger to board. Despite all this I arrived in Hong Kong late, spent hours at the border and at the luggage conveyor belt and as a result missed Tilmann who had been waiting for me all the time. Since I couldn’t find him I tried to call him and ended up using somebody else’s phone (the third person that day who saved my buttocks) and reached him. It turned out that I was too late for the boat party, which he had organized for us that night. So I would meet him afterwards.

After I missed Tilmann and the party I was supposed to go to, I went straight to Kowloon where I had a hostel booked. As it is usually the case with the cheapest of all hostels this one is in a quite exciting neighborhood with lots and lots of Indians who try to sell me watches, cell phones, food and hostel rooms, which I always kindly decline.

Hong Kong hit me like a train! Next to Hong Kong Taipei feels like a village, even though population-wise they are not so different. Hong Kong boasts with endless opportunities to consume any imaginable product in an endless variety. It makes you feel tiny with its tall skyscrapers. It is filled with huge amounts of luxury cars and with people who have every imaginable skin color, eye shape, and face topography. One of the first things I noticed was that whenever I wanted to cross a street there were apparently no cars until I figured out that I had been looking into the wrong direction. Hong Kong drives on the left and that almost killed me. Well – so far Hong Kong is definitely a place that makes an immediate impression (input overload) on you like only few places in the world.

Hong Kong Island’s skyline:

The Hong Kong Museum of Art

The ICC, Hong Kong’s tallest building.

Luckily I was upgraded from an eight-people dorm to a four-people dorm, which is as big as you’d imagine a single. My ‘I-am-so-lucky high’ ended abruptly when I was confronted with the brutal reality of food prices in Hong Kong (or just my neighborhood). Coming from a country where my average meal cost only 2 Euros, Hong Kong’s average 7 Euros came as a shock. Eventually I found a place that served curry for 5 euros but judging so far, it will be hard to live in Hong Kong on the cheap. This is after all the place where the world’s most billionaires live.

Hong Kong’s skyline at night (duh!)

We met right before midnight and along came Kai from UCM and a drunk Austrian guy whose name I forgot. For the rest of the night we wandered around SoHo (South of Hollywood), drinking good Japanese cocktails and whiskey, and essentially just watching people and places. Tilmann summed up one truth about Hong Kong: ‘This city is built on money’, meaning the insane amount of fancy cars, the exorbitant entry fees to clubs, people who wear classical suits and dresses that seem to have an ‘expensive’ tag jumping into your eyes. Because SoHo is hilly it is almost entirely reachable by open-air escalators (so businesspeople don’t get sweaty). I was torn between being impressed and disgusted at the splurge. It may be nice to see this fantastic lightshow but is this really necessary? I have a hard time switching of my conscious and just enjoying the theater. If you are environmentally conscious, socially conscious, gender conscious, health conscious, then you will have a hard time ignoring Hong Kong’s stance towards these concerns because it is amazingly good at ignoring all of them. Enough ambiguity: since I shouldn’t be here in the first place if I was really going to criticize these things, I will enjoy everything as good as my conscience lets me.

More skyscrapers:

Tilmann and I on the ferry.

The following day I went around the neighborhood looking desperately for something to eat for breakfast, which is more difficult than one might imagine. I ended up at McDonald’s. Later, Tilmann and I met a group of CUHK students with whom we went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The Art on display was mainly 17^th century drawings, which were drawings of surrealist landscape based on the artist’s memory. When we were done Tilmann and I would go to Hong Kong Central and head up to the peak, one of Hong Kong’s places with the best view over the city. To go up we took the cable car, which rises almost vertically. We enjoyed the scenery for a long while, then we walked downhill towards SoHo where we enjoyed a cocktail before we headed home. That night my legs started to hurt because the way down was extremely steep.

On the peak.

The next day, I visited Tilmann at his campus for breakfast. CUHK is built on a hill and compared with the rest of the city it is basically a rural campus (not really but as I said – compared with the rest of the city). The surrounding hills are lush and the campus trails provides for a good hike. We didn’t stay for long, heading towards Pat Sin Leng, a nature park, where we figured out a supreme hike with good views over the islands. And it sure was a beauty. We were so full of energy that we did the hike up to the peak in record time (a New Zealand pilot died of dehydration last year). The park was designed just with the right degree of interference with nature so that it was neither a paved road nor was it impenetrable jungle. In the end we were rewarded with a million-dollar view over several bays at the most gorgeous weather. Sweet!

Lotus on the CUHK campus.

The hike at Pat Sin Leng.

Verrrrry steep.

Yes that’s a butterfly on Tilmann’s foot!

That’s where we were!

We got lost on the way down but arrived, still way ahead of the trail schedule in the valley and hitched a ride back into town where we had dinner. It’s been a long time that I have had a day this exhausting and this rewarding at the same time. We went back to Tilmann’s place and watched ‘Waltz with Bashir’, one of my favorites. In a slightly depressed mood we wished each other farewell, a quick reunion and parted.

The next day began too early, at 5:30, only 4 hours after I fell asleep. When I arrived at the airport, though, I was so early that I was offered a seat on an earlier flight. So I arrived in Taipei an 45 minutes early and dragged myself, half-dead, back to the dorm. One thing really annoys me, which is that my left foot is swollen since the big hike and according to the symptoms I have an infected tendon and should get treatment asap. I will in due time, promised. But now I just have to get my well-deserved sleep!