hong kong honky-tonk

Before we came to Hong Kong, I was kind of like, "Hong Kong, cool, okay, meh." About an hour after we arrived I was completely smitten. There is so much love for this city!

Enter the Pacific Ocean/South China Sea. Rising up from its waters are over two hundred lush green mounds of all sizes. Then, appearing out of the fog, obscenely tall skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper. There are SO MANY. All of the buildings there are literally dozens of stories high. And Hong Kong city. Maybe if NYC and ghetto Chinatown had some crazy baby, and that baby was put in a blender, and populated by seven million well-dressed Cantonese.

I love it. We wandered the streets in a daze. I looked and looked and looked and looked some more, mouth agape. Fantastic.

What I do not love is Cantonese. It bewilders me. It is like bizarro hick Mandarin. I once heard it described as sounding like the speaker was falling off a cliff. I would absolutely agree with this description, if the speaker was falling off a cliff while in the throes of a heated argument. The pinyin drives me to distraction--I can't make head nor tail of it. And all of the characters are traditional. But I still filled my eyes with signs searching for words I know, puzzling over familiar symbols.

We visited the temple, which in real life is this taupe color, but it still catches the light and has this clean radiance about it. It's neat.

Like so. Hong Kong is/was President and Marjorie Hinckley's favorite city in the world, by the way. Our first night there, we subwayed to the Avenue of the Stars on the pier. (Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Chow Yun-fat, etc. all have handprints there. Except for Chow Yun-fat. He apparently has no hands. I was rather disappointed by this fact.) We went there to supposedly see the nightly light show, which I think is secretly an excuse to play cheesy music while everyone mills about the pier gawking at the scenery, which is SPECTACULAR. Pictures cannot and will not do it justice.

This brilliant towering colorful skyline above the dark water... so cool. One thing I learned in Hong Kong is that pictures quite often fail to do things justice. Such is the case here and also at Victoria's Peak. You know when you see pictures of places with enormous mountains, and they kind of loom up beautifully and thrill you a little bit in the photo, but then you actually go there and are blown away by their in-person awesomeness? That's Hong Kong.

The next day, after "sweat buns" at Jimmy Cake Shop, Matthew and the tour bus wound us up to Victoria's Peak. Let me just re-emphasize the skyline fabulousity. You stand up on this pavilion jutting out of an extraordinarily green mountain looking out onto Hong Kong at scads of jaw-droppingly tall buildings. The mountains, the sky, the bay...

Picture fail, but maybe you get the idea. We also drove past Jackie Chan's driveway (99 Repulse Bay), studied up on the Opium Wars, had some old ladies teach us taijiquan, and took a nighttime ferry jaunt. Excellent all.

In Aberdeen we paid $8 US to ride around the bay in a sampan, a wooden tire-clad junket decked out in paper lanterns. Our driver was a loud little Cantonese old lady who let us wear traditional basket hats as we roared around being tourists.

Jetlag face strikes again.

Yep. And if I still haven't sold you on Hong Kong, this most surely will: We were driving to Stanley Bay when we spotted a giant square hole built into a gleaming massive skyscraper. We said, "Matthew (our tour guide), what is up with that hole?" and he gave us a little feng shui lesson. When that building was being built, a feng shui master recommended the hole, not for aesthetic pleasure or balance or anything but so DRAGONS COULD FLY THROUGH IT.

So much love,

The Traveling Kate

Oh! I almost forgot. We saw "The Batman Building." Recognize it from The Dark Knight? Eighty-eight stories of awesome.