Hong Kong, my reintroduction to Asia

Five months ago, when I first set foot in Europe, I wished I had a friend with me around every corner to share every new thing I saw. I’ve pretty much gotten over that now; every new thing I see, I see alone. Everything takes on a romantic haze, like I’m wandering alone in the wild, in a “Crouching Tiger”-like jianghu world.

But when I landed in Hong Kong three days ago, I wished again I had someone with me to witness the jarring discontinuity that Hong Kong represented against five months in Europe. How medieval and Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings hundreds of years old were replaced by towering skyscrapers, how languages that were impenetrable to me were replaced by another language similarly impenetrable but at the same time familiar and reassuring. Then also how there was a surreal, comforting continuity from London to Hong Kong in the place names — Salisbury, Victoria, Edinburgh — and in the zebra crossings, and in the electric plugs that I didn’t have to change. Sometimes, talking to fellow travelers from Canada and England, I forgot, as I often did in Europe, where I was and that I am in fact an entire continent away now.

The first night here, off to meet my Cousin Lindy, I hopped a ferry across the harbor and it was Venice all over again — water all around, the hum of the ferry, and across, the seduction of lights. Only this time, instead of Giudecca, it was Kowloon, and instead of the warm glow of the Santa Maria church dome, it was an undulating rectangular mass of blinking skyscrapers. I was entranced all the same.

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It’s the city of the future. You walk around without ever touching the ground, footbridge to lobby to footbridge, escalator to escalator, walkway to walkway, in a sort of air-conditioned shopper’s paradise. It’s like Hong Kongers are a futuristic metropolitan race of people, elevated permanently above the normal plane of existence, beeping from one place to another with their Octopus cards.

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And yet there are places like Chungking Mansions, a chaotic hulk of a building where African and South Asian entrepreneurs congregate, and also, incidentally, where some of the cheapest accommodation is in the city. It’s got a certain notoriety among Hong Kongers who see it as a shady market of drug dealing and who knows what else. This makes it all the more exciting.

My hostel is run by Taiwanese expats. The bed is too short, so my feet dangle over the edge while I sleep. It’s also abnormally narrow; I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in the last three days partly, I think, because of a constant fear that I might roll over the edge in middle of the night. Attached to the room, quite unexpectedly, is a tiny, unused kitchen. It doesn’t belong there. Or maybe the room doesn’t belong next to the kitchen. There isn’t so much a shower in this place as there is a shower nozzle attached unthinkingly above a toilet, in a bathroom that looks like it’s not meant to house anything other than a toilet. Living in this place is an exercise in patience and flexibility, but it’s also, as my guidebook calls it, one of the most “atmospheric” places I’ve ever lived in.

But let me just add this by way of afterthought: as fun as Hong Kong has been, I’m off now to Shanghai, for what might be an even better time.

Tomorrow: China

When you first arrive in a new place, you may have some preconceived notions about it. Paris is the most romantic city in the world, or Tokyo is brimming with bowing businessmen. Or you might not know a thing about it. In both cases, the truth is really closer to the latter; the city, for all your ideas about it, or lack thereof, is an unknown quantity.

You don’t know how or how long it takes to get from Gare du Nord to Port de la Chapelle. You don’t know how much help you’ll get from kind strangers (it turns out, usually, a lot). You don’t know what it smells like on the street or just how that belfry in the market square looks when the sun rises behind it at 8 in the morning.

All these things you begin to know the second you step off the train or leave the airport. All these things, the contours of a city, are part of the landscape of your memories by the time you board the train or plane to leave.

The surprising part of it, considering your sheer ignorance of the place days or weeks before, is how loathe you are sometimes to leave. Even when you’re eager to move on, even when you’re homesick. It’s like leaving a new friend, or a new home.

On Dec. 28 of last year, in that hollow space between Christmas and New Year, Eric (of Anticompass, see right), said it best when he wrote about moving on:

… And so I continued on my way with creaking legs and an aching heart. It seems that everywhere I go I meet so many wonderful people, and each place I stay for a few days, I could stay all my life. The hardest part of traveling isn’t the riding nor the uncertainty of where I shall sleep or what I shall eat. It is the certainty that leaving will break my heart and will be an abandonment of home.

Pull this thread and just walk away

Back in London for a week, staying with my friends here. We were meant to watch this new movie “Jumper” the other night. You know, this one:

A genetic abnormality allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Paladins’ who have sworn to kill them.

But here, “jumper” means what “sweater” means in the United States. So if you want to destroy my sweater …

Do your country proud
One of the first things my friend Devon did when she got home last night was ask if I wanted to be on TV today. I would be one of a few Americans on a panel talking about the U.S. presidential election.

I did a little soul searching and then agreed to make a fool of myself on European cable TV. The next morning I got out of bed and rushed over to the studio, where I met the four other people — they were all more than well-informed. They were students of the London School of Economics and a couple were even campaigning for Barack Obama, if not Hillary Clinton.

Basically, in comparison, I sounded a little silly. To keep my nervousness in check, I pretended we were just making a Wayne’s World sort of video podcast with all our African friends phoning in to debate the virtues of Barack versus Hillary.

I hear I will get a DVD of the event, though I doubt I will ever subject myself to the watching of it.

Last day on the continent

In a few hours, I’ll be leaving continental Europe. After months of moving from place to place, always on the next train to the next city, the next hostel, the next place with the new language and the different food, I can barely believe it. I’m in denial, I think. I can’t believe it’s actually over.

Well, sort of anyway. I’m spending a few more days in London and then flying to China.

I spent my last night here at a hostel in Lisbon that was probably as different from any hostel I’ve stayed at as it could be. It’s probably the second smallest hostel I’ve ever stayed at, which lent it a perfect sort of intimate atmosphere. At dinner (the place has an in-house chef), about a dozen of us, half travelers half Portuguese, sat around the table talking about our homes, cultures, about Lisbon and Portugal. It was the perfect place, and the perfect way to end Europe.

And now I’m in Seville

I feel like I’ve been missing in action from my blog for a while, even though it’s only been a little over a week since Cinque Terre.

Maybe because that was two countries (or four cities) ago, and I haven’t written about any of those places. It wasn’t uneventful though:

Avignon was small and kind of charming; I braved some local version of the Santa Ana winds in the early morning to catch my train to Barcelona, which is, incidentally, an awesome city. In Madrid I spent one night in a hostel, and then resigned myself — due to being blindsided by weekend travelers — to staying two nights in an expensive hotel.

There I took my first bath in adult memory and watched Sylvester Stallone and Daniel Dae Kim dubbed in Spanish in their respective movies. I also watched Sky News report breathlessly around the clock on beached ferries in England.

A couple days ago I met a Kiwi on the train who had lost €100 in a shell game on the streets of Barcelona. To compensate, he was sleeping on overnight trains rather than finding beds in hostels. To him destinations were not so much end goals as an incidental byproduct of having slept on a moving train through the night.

Five days — five beds I should say — before I fly back to London, I kind of feel the same way. As if I’m really only interested in each new place (and there are two more) in so far as they offer me another bed, another night, to cross off my countdown to London.

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I reached Seville in the early afternoon and had a stroll about. The one place I wanted to visit, the Giralda, was closed. Nearby, the trees in the Alcazar garden were swollen with oranges. Some had splattered onto the ground. I was amazed no one was picking them to eat. I saw an intact one on the ground and considered picking it up for the sake of vitamin C, but orange has never really been my fruit, let alone road orange.

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It’s late afternoon and I’m lying on my hostel bed staring upward, listening to the birds chirping outside and eating those long rolls of bread with chocolate bits in them — you know the kind. The French girl who is reading next to me is stealing glances at me, I can tell. Maybe I’m retardedly enjoying my bread too much. I’m almost done with Europe. Seville is so quiet. Life is good.