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- Bank of China
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- city coy pond
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- Upturned boats, lonely beach
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- pagoda in the rocks
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- treeheart
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- metropolis plasma cannon moveable fortress bank
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- Eye of the Squid is dead when its alive and alive when its dead
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- The Grand Lisboa Casino = By far the uggliest building I’ve ever seen
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- HK by night
When I think back on Hong Kong, I think about the human body and how I can’t wrap my head around how it works. Foot traffic scrambles (albeit with great focus and control) through tight corridors, over densely-crowded, multi-level pedestrian walkways that crisscross over streets and along buildings, through hotel lobbies and hallways, banks, insurance offices, with all the purpose and organization in the world. A complex vascular system, men and women in businessware hasten through this network blindly, hardly looking ahead, absorbed in phone calls or papers. In no place I’ve seen can you truly and accurately analogize the people as the lifeblood of the city like you can in Hong Kong. Everywhere else, the blood is too thin.
At the same time though, you really only need to walk 20 minutes or so and all of a sudden the city recedes. The car horns, the shuffle of leather soles and heels on pavement, the calls of shop owners, all gone within a matter of minutes. Hopping on a ferry to it didn’t matter which island, I found that HK has done an amazing job cultivating the various spheres of urban life. Although there’s little room for parks in the city proper, they have turned the majority of the islands into parks, wildlife preserves and nature research centers. For a resident a day in a quiet islands park is only 15 or 20 minutes away. I manage to find myself completely alone on a certain beach. Myself and cargo ships on the horizon. Giant outcropping boulders colored orange towered over the water. A little shrine to some warrior god stood at the far end of the beach. Washed up on the beach was a plethora of recently historicized artifacts, cultural detritus: light bulbs, dolls heads, Minnie mouse, a squid that looked like it must have died in the fight of its life, the image of a model, a cognac bottle…
By nightfall I had gotten a little lost. The bamboo creaked in the wind like old bones creak. It was that most confusing and otherworldly moment of dusk where you feel the world has gone just a little out of focus, like opening your eyes for the first time one morning before it’s really light outside. I saw red Chinese characters scrawled across the wall of an abandoned stone house, seemingly too small to fit any average sized person. It looked liked it had aged in a museum, with ghostly energy and weathered, but somehow pristine. A few steps beyond, tombs rose out of the ground like giant stone drums, each with a picture that was too faded to make out. All quite surreal really. And to think that one of the busiest commercial centers in the world was only a few miles away.
Macau was a mess. I lost, I think, 80 bucks playing blackjack in the biggest casino in Asia. I can say I did it now and move on. Also it’s a good thing I drank before hand because they don’t seem to serve alcohol in most of those casinos. You’d think they’d learn from Las Vegas and understand how much more money they could take from people if they just gave them a few drinks now and again. Their loss.
I finally ran into my uncle, after several misses and he and his family fed me one of the best meals I’ve had since leaving the states, with a few things you absolutely can’t get anywhere outside of the states (or outside of our extended family for that matter). Jambalaya, homemade bread (man did I ever take bread for granted… never again), milk that tastes like milk, and huckleberry freakin’ pie. It was good to be around family as far from home as I was, even if only for a few hours. Thanks again to Cory, who as busy as he was, let me stay in his place for four nights without ever having met me before. A real standup guy.
My time there was rushed to say the least. And as packed together and concentrated the city engineers of Hong Kong have made it (hats off), I could’ve spent more time exploring. But the prices were a bit forbidding and I had plans to move on already.
Highlights:
Climbing above the city
Medium-rare, 2 half-pound patties, jalapenos and cheese
Huckleberry pie
Walking away from the Grand Lisboa with most of my dignity intact
Sorry for the absurdly long hiatus. I have things to write about again.
