Hot and steamy in Hong Kong

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I am very hot at the moment because the computer of my guest house is sitting atop a clothes dryer in the laundry that has been chugging away then entire time I have been sitting here. Apart from that the whole place is kind of hot. But I love the heat so I think its great!

I got in at 6am and after 50m walk from baggage collection got on the express train in to Kowloon (just north of Hong Kong CBD). It was all a bit easy, there were people to show me how to use the ticket machine, and people to point at the train and tell me that was the train I wanted to get on, and even a free shuttle bus from the station to my guest house.

From what I can tell so far, I have only seen it at a distance, Hong Kong is a beautiful place. It is so organic. There is nothing straight or planned or systematic about it. It just kind of errupts out of the jagged mountains and tropical rainforrest that permeate the horizon.

Kowloon is the equivelant of Southbank in Melbourne: full of expensive hotels and clueless tourists. Everything is tourist orrientented, every shop is a souvenier shop, every second restaurant is anything but chinese. There are McDonalds and Skybucks everywhere.

Beyond the external gloss there are some interesting things. There are delapidated buildings held up by bamboo scaffolding (my guest house is in one of them) entire walls of these buildings are covered with old evaporative cooling systems that drip constantly so that it is always raining in the back streets even when its sunny. The whole place is reasonably clean, probably because its so touristy.

I discovered the Hong Kong Museum of art just down the road from my guest house, and spent most of the afternoon there. Thier exhibition of ancient ornaments was spectacular. The detail on the tiny gold broaches and the patterns on the ceramic plates was so fine that I smacked my head really loudly on the glass case trying to get a closer look.

I have literally spend most of the day walking around the block. Initially i was just trying to orientate myself, which didnt work. All the streets look the same and twist and turn in deceptive ways so losing sight of the guest house each time resulted in at least an hour of block walking. It was frustrating because the same touters would ask me the same things each time I passed them.

I didnt really need to use Cantonese at all today, which is lucky because I dont know any. Everyone seems to speak english here anyway, all the road signs are in English and all the menus for food and everything. I ate some very average pork ball soup for lunch but I have decided to hence forth avoid all ball related foods, they have an unsettling texture. I had some fantastic chicken noodle soup for dinner that was spicy just to the brink of painful, which is how noodle soup should be. And I bought a pound of Lychees for less than $3. In all my random wandering I still havent come across a super market or even a milk bar type thing. I badly wanted a fizzy drink for the 3pm sugar low but the only place I could find that wasnt trying to sell me silk shirts, mobile phones or fake watches was a 7/11.

Tomorrow I am going to catch the ferry across the harbour into Hong Kong CBD, and if the weather clears up, catch the tram up Victoria Peak.

It is looking like uploading the photos to the computer will be an issue. I will look into this. Not that I have an awful lot of interesting photos as yet. When I first got here I just wanted to take a picture of EVERYTHING which I know would be boring because it would be mostly buildings (which fascinate me for some reason) so I refrained. If I get the knack there will be some photos of my two favourite buildings from today (and explanations)

Im starting to feel a little sleep deprived, probably because I am, so Im off to bed.

Chow

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