Hong Kong: Thoughts

1. HK is shopping. Everywhere you look there's a shopping mall. There are shopping malls at the bottom of office buildings. There's shopping in Metro stations. There are little shops in every street. There's a huge shopping mall at Victoria Peak. You could easily spend days shopping in Hong Kong at grimy little stores to high end designer shops like Louis Vuitton and Coach. The consumerism got to me quite early. Having already shopped myself out in Guangzhou, I found it difficult to reconcile wanting to see Hong Kong with the fact that sightseeing entailed seeing a lot of malls.

2. No more squat toilets. Save for one, at the vegetarian restaurant at the Big Buddha.

3. Hong Kong feels a lot like the UK, which is not a surprise, considering its colonial history. The streets have names like Edinburgh Place and Coombe Street, people drive on the left side of the road, a friendly woman's voice in the Metro reminds you to "mind the gap", and the Metro has an Octopus card, which works the same as London's Oyster card.

4. In Guangzhou, I found that many people still spoke to me in Mandarin even though Guangzhou is the largest city in Guangdong (formerly Canton) province, where Cantonese is dominant. Chalk it up to Mandarin being the state-sanctioned national language. In Hong Kong, however, everyone speaks Cantonese, and I find that I can get by much better. I usually speak a mixture of English and Cantonese to my sister and cousins, and most people assume that we're from Malaysia or Singapore because of that mix.

5. Crossing the border from China to Hong Kong entails more bureaucracy than I assumed it would. We had to fill out health report forms, submit our China exit cards, and fill out Hong Kong immigration cards. It really was like entering another country, even though the handover was over 10 years ago. One country, my ass.

6. I've been wanting to go to Hong Kong for a long time, but lately I've been wanting to see it specifically because of the movie Chungking Express, which I consider in a new light now that I've been to Hong Kong. The escalators, the rampant consumerism (of products and food), and the camera's point of view of the city—all these things as they are represented in the movie are very Hong Kong. It's difficult to get a full geographic view of the city, as it's spread out across several (?) islands and is very hilly. Even the view from Victoria's Peak was incomplete.

7. Starbucks is expensive in China and HK, but the quality control is excellent and I don't know what I would have done without it, especially in HK where we decided to forgo paying for the breakfast buffet in the hotel and forage for ourselves instead.

7a. I had just ordered a coffee at a Starbucks in the Central Metro Station in HK. The white man after me asked, with a heavy German accent, for beer. He ended up buying a bottle of water instead.