Hong Kong: Green Lasers and Rice Noodles

Hong Kong is a very busy city - exciting, but a bit overwhelming. I am staying in Mong Kok, which according to Guiness Book of World Records, has the highest population density in the world, at 130,000 people per square kilometer.

Over the past few days, I've been walking all over the place. On my first night here, I went exploring with Willa - we took the metro down to the Temple Street Market, then walked back to Mong Kok from there, stopping for dumplings and coconut juice on the way. On Wednesday I did more exploring - after a delicious breakfast of rice noodles, I headed into Hong Kong Island proper, where I rode the tram, then met up with Keith.

Keith and I had lunch, then took the escalators up to the hills and then walked around the botanical gardens and the zoo before heading back down through another street market.

I took the ferry to Hong Kong Island and back - it's quite cheap and takes about 5 minutes, and the view of the harbor and the skyline on Hong Kong is pretty amazing. I'm glad the guidebooks recommended that I take the ferry, since I might have otherwise taken the metro.

It was dusk by the time I crossed back to Kowloon on the ferry, and from the waterfront walkway in Tsim Sha Tsui, I watched as the lights of the skyscrapers came on, and the sky grew darker.

At 8 PM, the nightly light show started - music blared out from speakers all across the waterfront, and about 20 different skyscrapers on the other side of the harbor participated in the big event - choreographed lights and lasers shooting up to the sky. I guess it was pretty cool to see, but it's also kind of crazy that this show happens every night. Overall though, I think the general skyline is impressive on its own.

After this, I headed to a wonton place I had read about on chowhound. I posted a picture of this in my last post too. The wontons were really good, and I had another kind of dumpling there as well, which had shrimp and some other vegetables in it too.

Being here is funny - it actually doesn't feel that foreign to me. I have found myself sitting by myself in restaurants here, surrounded by Cantonese with no English spoken...but it's also the kind of experience I seek out all the time in the US. In San Francisco, Boston and New York I've put myself in similar situations, so the sounds and tastes here - as well as the lack of English - is actually quite familiar. Markets on the streets are similar to what I've seen in South America, India and even the US, and the busy streets are reminiscent of Times Square in New York - except here the busy streets continue on for blocks and blocks.

The food here has been good so far, and there's a lot of it - but I don't get the sense that it's as much of a food city as Kuala Lumpur, or from what I hear, Singapore. It will be interesting to see how food here compares to Macau and Guangzhou, where there will be some big similarities but some differences as well I think.

That's enough for this post...I will now try to upload some pictures if I can navigate the Chinese on the computer.