Not so bonkers in Honkers

I'm in Hong Kong. I honestly can't tell you how I've spent the last week or so. It's been brilliant. Very little site seeing. Walk up the hill to the reservoir with Mike, met up with Kat and Craig for dinner at Oohlaa in Soho - mojitos a-plenty. Dinner and dancing last Saturday night with Mike and Phyllis's friends. True Blood. Coffee. Ferries. Doctors. Fucking opthalmologists who won't remove fucking cysts. Trying to avoid the shops. Cooking pasta or Vietnamese salmon. A holiday from a holiday. A blur of conversations about What it All Means punctuated by Steve Jobs's death. Wifi. Tours. Emails and Skype. Missing people. Talking to Pfizer folks. Wishing I felt more grateful and less sad and scared. Two little girls with one pair of skates in the plaza laughing and showing off for their parents. I have two skates but only one of me.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Above is my only diary entry for Honkers, and as you can see it was very low-key. My uncle Mike is an air traffic controller in Hong Kong and it was great to see him and his wife Phyllis. I stayed at their place in Discovery Bay, an expat oasis on Lantau Island.

I'd been to HK twice before and both times I shopped until I dropped (it's almost possible to walk around the entirety of the city without ever leaving the air-conditioned comfort of a shopping centre). This time I felt as though I was living a completely different life, knowing full well that I would have to carry anything I bought. How things had changed!

It was funny to come to a more westernised part of Asia after travelling through other parts of the South East. I took this first photo which is almost the complete opposite of one I had taken a couple of weeks before in Vietnam (below).

There's a little something in that for all of us, don't you think??

In any case, the most important development was that I got my Chinese visa with little difficulty courtesy of an agent that Mike and Phyllis put me on to in town. Booked a tour with Gap Adventures, and soon, I was on my way to Beijing. Stay tuned :)

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