Feel Good Lost: Hong Kong Pt. 2

When I arrived in Hong Kong, Alfred, my old classmate, and his pal Cherry were there to meet me. Having someone wait for you at the airport is always a great feeling, even if you already feel comfortable in the place where you are to land. Thanks for picking me up guys!

I like airports, the Hong Kong airport is especially advanced. Rated number one in the world for service a few years running now. As the Beijing airport before it, spick and span.

This is what the subway looks like when people are going to work, they stand in silence.

I don't really know what to say about Hong Kong, it is a very overwhelming place. It is warm and cut-throat and ice cold all at the same time. The people walk fast, you are shoed out of restaurants so that new guests can be ushered in, and the gap between the rich and the not rich is enough to make you question where in history the fair-line was done away with. Hong Kongnese are expert wasters of resources, energy, money, and almost anything but time. Of all the places I have been, this one gets ranked by itself in hyper-cosmopolitia.

That being said, Alfred was a wonderful host for the first night. His house, which is not as big as the living room of the Mansion, sells for almost one third of a million Canadian dollars, just to give you an idea of the HK lifestyle.

Land is beyond precious in Hong Kong, things are built up not out.

This is what I saw when I was showering, looking out the bathroom window. Alfred lives on the 34th floor, and from it you can look down on the closest thing to real science fiction.

In my last post, I made a list of things that I wanted to accomplish. The second day, Alfred and I went directly to the Chinese embassy so that I could get my visa taken care of. Not only could I not get it the same day (which meant spending at least one more day in HK on a tight schedule), but I waited in line for an hour only to have the lady working the service desk tell me that my passport was 'damaged'. She was cold, ice cold actually, not glancing at my passport for longer than it took me to take out the rest of my documents. She did not give it a second thought, I pleaded with her unsuccessfully. Her suggestion to apply for a new one would surely eat up two or three days of the four I had remaining, never mind needing my passport to apply for the Taiwan visa later on that afternoon, my primary goal.
Not going to China was something that I could accept, it was merely a bonus in my HK plan, but now I had to worry about: A) what if the Taiwanese embassy rejects my passport as well? And why shouldn't they, certainly there is some sort of standard everyone adheres to, one on the basis of which I had just been denied entry into China. B) I am going to have to spend five days in HK, making my goal of spending less than $200.00 CAD utterly impossible.

It turns out the Taiwanese embassy folks are a lot more relaxed, and I was able to pick up my passport with it's shiny new Taiwanese visa inside it the next day. I immediately went back to the airport (which I am now more than familiar with) to see if I could change my flights to an earlier date. I could, free of charge too! This is a shot from the airport.

From the airport I went back to the city, and wandered around. Alfred had already left at this point, I was without a phone or computer or anything really, so I just checked stuff out. I made friends with the buses and the subway and the roads.