Hong Kong: Everything’s Relative!

We arrived this afternoon in Hong Kong, and already we can feel the grime and wear of the road falling off of us, shedding the traveling armor that has built up for the past month or so. It might have been the pleasant person checking us in at the YMCA Salisbury Hotel, or the cab that had seats clean enough to lick (or at least sit on without grimacing), or the way cars actually stop for red lights, or the abundance of restaurants offering every worldly cuisine, or the bookstore that stocked more English language books than we’ve seen since leaving Portland, or the cool, kitschy light show that we can see from our bedroom window which overlooks the harbor onto Central District, but we feel like we’ve come home, never mind that we’ve never visited before.

Of course the first-time visitor to China whose first stop is Hong Kong would be amazed by the crowds, the dirt, the decrepit buildings, and the traffic, but we wisely nod our heads and know that it’s all relative.

We plan to stay here a week, maybe more, until we can rearrange our tickets. We are staying with the original course, to go to Thailand after Hong Kong. Mostly because we have already paid for tickets to take us that far, and because almost everyone we’ve talked to has given us hope, telling us we’d love Thailand. If we still want to go to an English-speaking country, it looks like it would be far more pleasant to visit Australia and New Zealand for their summer than Great Britain and Ireland for their winter. Who knows. We can’t even drive from Oregon to Montana without changing our route, so there’s no telling where we will be after this.

Oh, exciting news, for the first time in a month we can access Blogspot so we can check out our blog and finally post our Tibet adventures.