Hello from HongKong!

I've been here for three days, and I'm just about to head out again...the only thing keeping me from being sad is how much I'm looking forward to Shanghai, and the fact that I'll be back here in a week and a half! This city is amazing. It is friendly and crowded and BIG and shiny with great food. I seem to have a knack for ordering the wrong thing (too many different words for shrimp, all of which equal a very ill me) but even then, it's incredibly tasty.

The city itself is split up into two areas, Kowloon (where I'm sleeping in a shoebox with no windows....but the security is great and the price is right! Plus, some fantastic Indian food downstairs) and Hong Kong island. There are a couple of others too (lamma and lantras) but the city itself is concentrated in those two areas. 6 million people in an area I can walk through in about a half hour. Yeah...it's wild. It's tall. The skyline from Kowloon is simple incredible, I just don't have words for how it feels to be completely surrounded by buildings this big all of the time. This puts pretty much every other major american city to shame in terms of sheer concentrated enormity. And then you decide to go up to Victoria peak, and lo and behold there is dirt again, and trees and nature. It's just...wow.

You can find anything and everything here. The world's longest escalator? Check. It just keeps going somewhere upward of four city blocks...I actually lost count, and it extends halfway up a mountain. Tucked underneath there are shops and restaurants and bars of all kinds... Authentic russian offering free vodka to anyone who shows up and orders something between 8 and 10, next door Lebanese with some seriously tasty hookah and the owner who hangs out at the bar and chats with his customers. I had a moment of inner hilarity when he asked me what color the stripes on his shirt were, amusingly close to the color of the Rainbow building in taipei on monday nights...fuchsia? Red? It's a question for the ages. (I told him Fuchsia :P)


Anyways, my internet time is about to run out, so I will run along. Think of me packed into a four person train carriage tomorrow, reading 100 years of solitude in a teeny upper bunk,. I'm actually looking forwards to lazing about after all of this walking up and down the steps of SoHo!