What a difference a day makes.

After a 14 hour connecting flight through Beijing, my first move as a savvy backpacker is to totter up to the transit information booth, cut in front of another group of travelers, and exclaim “How much is the bus to Hong Kong?,” as if Hong Kong is the size of Victoria and could only possibly have one point of entry.

Shift ahead to lunch the next day, as a I snake my way through the bowels of the nameless dim sum restaurant’s kitchen to the bathroom, where a confused local gives me a friendly pat on the back and bellows “How did you find this place? It is very local…”

 

Healthily in the swing of things, Maya and I have unwrapped Hong Kong piece by piece, often standing in disbelief at the package beneath the surface: the endless and unique skyscrapers built into the mountains, with countless more going up supported by layers of bamboo scaffolding, the large avenues, tiny sidestreets, and hundreds of flights of stairs – an overflow of concrete that spirals upward, downward, sideways – everywhere – until you happen upon a soccer field in the sky, or a perfectly manicured English garden, or a mezzanined zoo where flamingos, ducks, primates and, yes, rats, call home. The streets, packed at all hours of the day with locals that brandish the Samsung Galaxy Note tablet as the trendy phone of choice, with their mixture of 7 elevens, coffin manufacturers, food vendors, upscale clothing boutiqueries, watch stores, fake watch stores, and night market stalls all jockeying for your attention. The maitre d, wearing white billy boots, dancing Gangham Style at the table next to us inside a packed eatery that looks like an abandonned mall as we down our upteenth beer out of tiny bowls while the lazy susan serves up sweet and sour pork, black noodles with seafood and oysters with chilis and ginger (was it ginger?), followed by a jetfueled taxi over to Lan Quai Fong, a thrall of expats jammed onto the sidewalk outside clubs – a scene that resembles Ios in the Greek isles…