Hong Kong - A Retrospective (Way Too Many Days Late)

For some reason, it was difficult to locate a computer lounge in one of the world's most technologically advanced cities. I attribute this to a) everyone has laptops and hangs out in hot spots instead of lounges, or b) i still haven't figured out the hand signal for "where can i find a computer?" (the phantom typing motion usually gets me pointed to a creepy massage parlor). Right now we're in Beijing after a 3-day trek from Hong Kong to Macau to Bangkok to Taipei to Seoul to Beijing (all in the interest of saving about $150 instead of flying direct), and the past few days have been a true test of our mettle, most of our time spent in the airport drinking overpriced Ovaltine and playing card games for the "Dorimon Cup," (the rights to a plastic Dorimion doll that came free with our purchase of $1 or more at 7-11). We finally made it to the Red Lantern Inn, a ridiculously cool guest house which we'll address in a bit, but for now...Hong Kong.

Our TurboJet ferry, truly deserving of the "Turbo" moniker, shot us across the water from Macau to Asia's king of cities for a late-Saturday arrival, where we were prompty ripped off for the 114th time by a taxi driver (one more and we qualify for a free six-inch sub). Wary of the notorious high costs of living in Hong Kong, we entered the lobby of the famed backpacker destination Chungking Mansions, to which we instantly handed the "Most Deceiving Name" award (narrowly edging out the nametag affixed to the enormous ladyboy in the Bangkok airport that read "Anna.")


To understand the enigma that is Chungking Mansions, imagine an 18-story haunted house, where instead of ghosts and witches there are drunks and Faux-lex salesmen, and instead of cockroaches there are...bigger cockroaches. To its credit, the place scored off the charts on the "character" scale, with a veritable Indian food/bootleg DVD paradise on the first floor, and each stairway landing boasted its own unique 1-inch flood which provided endless fodder for the "guess that fluid" game.

Soon after arriving, we teamed up with a Swedish dude named Tony and cased the building for a vacant room. 17 floors of slammed doors later we were back in the lobby trying to figure out who's iPod would fetch the most money toward a room at the Holiday Inn next door, when a random dude tapped Tony on the shoulder.

Random Dude: Excuse me, are you Swedish?
Tony: Yea...
RD: [In Swedish, translated later by Tony] Listen, my partner and I are here for the Electronics Expo and we weren't happy with our room, so we just took a room at the Ramada. If you and your friends follow us up to the 8th floor, you can have our room for the night, free of charge.

Two seconds later, we were in the elevator, and while Don and Tony celebrated our lucky break, I eyed up the friendly Swedes and tried to decide which of the inevitable endings to this story I'd prefer. I settled on, "We get ripped off and end up overpaying for a room that was never really paid for," over "There is no 8th floor, it's a medeival torture chamber," or "We somehow get roped into becoming drug mules and spend the rest of our lives walking the insanity circle from Midnight Express."

But miraculously, the scam never came, and we parlayed our good fortune into a right before the end of Happy Hour arrival at a local pub where we loaded up on beer, darts and late night kebabs from a dude named Ebeneezer.

The next day brought us to the super duper major part of the city, Hong Kong Island (we were staying in Kowloon, which is only moderately duper), with no plan other than we heard there was some mountain we were supposed to climb by sundown. It turns out, the entire island is built on the face of a mountain and the streets are filled with sky-climbing escalators, the first set of which threw us into a Sunday afternoon "Carnaval!" on Hong Kong's Bourbon Street, Lan Kwai Fong.

After a disappointing show by a "face changer" and a few scoops of ice cream, we avoided temptation and stayed on course, eventually beginning our ascent up The Peak, a towering mountain overlooking the city. We sweated our way up the hour-long climb to the top while 75-year old men ran past us, and reached the top just in time for the city's nightly light show, where the entire city skyline becomes a multi-colored strobe light for about 20 minutes. And though we spent most of the 20 minutes asking "is it starting yet?" (we would later find out the view is way, way better from across the island), we had conquered the Mountain In The City and retired to the mansion for champagne, caviar and asbestos inhalation.

The next evening we scrounged up some half-decent shirts and dined with a friend of a friend in Hong Kong's top restaurant, Felix, where the Maitre'D scoffed at our unhidable beards and sneakers and we gawked at the world-famous view from the bathroom urinals, which sit against a glass window atop one of the city's highest buildings. And after a hard-fought battle filled with guilt trips and tempter tantrums, Don finally convinced me to accompany him to Disneyland, where we were visciously harassed by the dude in the Dale costume who insisted through mascot sign language that "Amy" in the Happy Birthday sign was actually Don, and that the two of us were lovers.

On our way to the airport, we hit up the world's largest casino (The Macau Venetian) so Don could inexplicably hit trip-4's in SicBo for the 2nd time in a week, and headed for Beijing, the final stop in our most excellent adventure. The Grand Finale begins...