a welcome break

after spending almost four consecutive weeks without having a real conversation in english with another person or being able to successfully order and consume food, the expiration of my chinese visa was the most welcome pain in the neck i could have come up with. this meant that i had to leave the country for a period of time to have the visa renewed and now here i sit in a swanky hotel in hong kong enjoying my break from the monotony of shunde. monotony is an understatement of the highest degree.

hong kong is what you would get if you put new york and london in a blender and then poured out the mix onto a series of islands in asia. it is a truly wonderful city, architecturally reminiscent of vancouver. i guess i should now reword that thought and say that vancouver is architecturally reminiscent of hong kong. the throngs of people are everywhere, in crosswalks, on the mtr, in restaurants, and for the first time in my experiences in big cities, i truly enjoyed it. there is something very different about this city that is quite difficult to verbalize. whatever that x-factor is, it certainly is a great one.

i made my way around the city today to the best of my abilities. traveling via mtr to all of the must see markets and massive edifices, photographic opportunities were ample and duly observed. regretfully my lack of unadulterated internet access prevents me from putting them online at present. the street in which nothing is sold except live fish is quite the treat, especially when the people kill, scale and clean the fish on the spot before they are wrapped and dispensed to the patrons. the first few instances of this aren't exactly pleasant, but once the initial issues with fish that are still moving while they are being cleaned are overcome, the workmanship with which the fish peddlers operate is quite impressive. omnipresent on this street were the feral cats for obvious reasons.

also made it through a massive outdoor market of any sort of "engrish" t-shirt you could find. things with slogans such as "death is egzalent" abound and it seems that those who purchase the shirts either don't know what they say or are trying to make some attempt at irony, as almost everyone in hong kong speaks english fairly well. it was quite interesting for me to observe all of these traditional markets stuck in between the alleys of one of the major financial centers in the world. in the shadow of the aig, bank of america and hsbc buildings, you can get a fish scaled and gutted for 35 hong kong dollars.

i think i could live here for some time.