Tourist in Hong Kong, part 2: the market, the skyline, and the night was ours.

As per usual, traffic was reduced to a matter of centimeters (ha, metric system), but eventually, the ride down from Victoria Peak, its life of conspicuous consumption to the max (because all of Hong Kong suffers from conspicuous consumption), and the views from the peak went into the horizon. Way up there. We then transferred from the middle part of Hong Kong island to the southernmost point on the South China Sea. Destination: Stanley Market.

Driving in, we immediately saw a change, noted from the architecture. Gone were the glass-plated marvels only meant to impress the financial analyst and architect alike. Growing in the distance: soft pinks, lime greens, pastels, set against the calm tide, with good stretches of sand...

Wait. The beach?

We were being taken to a resort town. Stanley is basically a resort town.

But instead, we were lucky to find that the colored high rises and such were actually very functional, government-built apartments, and this was actually a great place to reside for foreigners living for extended periods of time. Because, unlike other locales in Hong Kong, people leave at night time. No tourism exists after dark, and the season is usually pretty shallow when it's not swimming season. It wasn't swimming season. Only beach going. In the water? Forbidden. I never took the chance to ask Kevin why. He was too busy doing his standup routine or something by this point. Jolly ol' guy.

Finally, we arrived.

 What a marvelous place it was, initially. It, for all of those intangible reasons, screamed "vacation". But we knew that wasn't the purpose. Lurking within lay one of the best haggling destinations in East Asia. Had to be worth a shot.

 For whatever reason, I never associated Hong Kong with hills like these. Yes, it's a tropical island of sorts... But the thought of elevation seemed like a secondary, even tertiary afterthought. Thus, the horizon still always gets to me. Even in somewhere unremarkable. Though maybe the delicate balance between mature forest and residential apartments hits the spot. It's not gaudy. It's not neon. It's highly impressive. It's beautiful and ordinary. Beautiful in that it gets to be ordinary. Ordinary is nice sometimes.

We eventually crossed into a more tourist-friendly locations with a promenade, some chain shops, and a lot of cafe-esque restaurants. No, this isn't Florida. I promise.

 Mainlanders are just as bad of tourists as we were, so it wasn't a total whitefest this whole time.

 Nothing significant here, but this guy was just paddling along on his plank, literally rowing himself in and around the other buoys because he could. Just asking for a photo opp, dude.

And passing that even further, we arrived at the market itself. Boy, did it meet its expectations. It was chaos. Makeshift chaos. There wasn't a ceiling per se... But the overhanging tarps from the entirety of the shops pushing against each other while other tourists fought back in the other direction amongst shopkeepers yelling at you in Cantonese to look at their prices and pickpocketers lurked and you feel like you can't breathe so you try to say everything you possibly can in one breath as if it were the last one you ever took (just like this sentence). Hong Kong, in general, is not a place for the claustrophobic, but this place, in all of its hobnob sanctimony, really allowed that to shine. You pushed someone else to move everywhere, only because every square inch of the little floorspace was taken up by another person.

Unfortunately for me, upped regulations on bootlegged gear by the Hong Kong government and the addition of a lot of touristy fare (read: pleather purses and crappy t-shirts) made this a mostly worthless trip. I came home with just one trinket, and the owner wouldn't even let any of us barter store-wide. As we waited for our good, he shook his head no at everyone else. For what it was worth, he was offering the lowest price in the pedestrian mall.

But that's what Mong Kok is for. It's the newer, more crazy market. Maybe I'll snag a bootleg DVD or two, there. As if the Internet didn't already hold an infinite supply. It's about the fun of the game, and honestly, the owners at Stanley Market forgot how to play. Maybe another time in another place.

So we moved on to the final guided location: Tsim Sha Tsui, which famously houses the Hong Kong equivalent of the walk of fame, here dubbed "the Avenue of Stars". I tend to like this name better. A lot of Asian stars have their stars/handprints here, including none other than Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. Not only is it not in a trashy, enclosed part of Hollywood amidst shopping disasters and hecklers, the Avenue is actually a promenade of sorts along the entire Harbor, and is a prime viewing spot for any kind of picturesque looks across the bay at the simply awe-inspiring skyline.

I know I saw (and had a hard time giving perspective to) the skyline and its beauty (the peak of human creation, I'd even say) from however many feet above sea level, marveling at humankind as if I were distant and far from that kind of existence. But here, on the avenue at night, the exact opposite occurred to me. The height jutted from the Earth, gargantuan, unmoving. Lights in the distance weren't merely indicators of life, but indicators of life really lived. Technology was our weapon, and we were using it well. The average human may be 5'10", but we sure had a jealousy issue to make up for that. Society really showed. This was not our coup de grace of architecture, but our never-ending battle with the sky.

We were attempting infinity. It's a futile battle, but the results aren't half bad.

 Life's just a show sometimes. The epitome: there.

 God is truly spectacular. What's sight without the ability to see the reflections on the water, the chatter of a foreign language, the smells of... well, dead fish at times. But regardless. Hong Kong is a sensual treat.

 I'm only sharing a small portion of these. What can you do but stare? I did a lot of staring this day.

 We walked down the promenade a bit, once we unglued our eyes, and saw really a nice cross section of people: despite the fact that touristy elements ran rampant, there were plenty of simple Hong Kong families walking down the area. It was gorgeous... why not share it with everyone? And at a point, there was a temporary stage set up for some performances. The songs were all in Cantonese, but modern. Apparently, they were karaoke equivalents to past radio hits, and I found them surprisingly smooth. Good for them.

Finally, with the walk sufficiently exhausted, and the tour over with no accommodations back home, we made way out for dinner... Somewhere. Despite the fact that a few (including me) were beyond exhausted from trekking everywhere, the walk over was really quite interesting. In fact, it might have been the highlight for me. The spectacle still hadn't worn off. I had been dashed from the cornfields and thrown into the urban wilderness. But it was a comforting cage, if a cage at all. After all, I had a camera.

 The motion, the cogs of the city appear. You can't see this from the skyline. In fact, if you looked at the skyline still, you'd be very dead. Again, life is happening. And it moves with the ferocity of a freight train.

 No, I don't have any idea how ferocious a freight train is.

 But if I could anthropomorphize one and chat with it, I'm sure it would be pretty proud of its specs.

 The night here, it's surreal. Just because the offices aren't working doesn't mean they can't function. Take this building. The lights on it flicker and swivel through shades of blue. Unbeknownst to the few remaining workers within, this one building offered me a perfect microcosm from the bounds of endless entertainment.

We finally decided to take the train over to Causeway Bay, which is also home to Times Square, a massive luxury shopping district, juxtaposed nicely with hideaway restaurants, open air markets in the middle of the streets, and a prime case study to Hong Kong by night.

 Once we got to an underground tunnel to catch the MTR, a moving sidewalk aided our journey. Being as exhausted as I was from this day, and the unfathomable, 6 year old delight I get in these things always, it was the perfect temporary remedy to my fatigue.

We got there, and wow. People. Pedestrians. Movement. Everything was happening. From simple people watching, maybe the quickest glance of someone's face, and you could instantly perceive a life story. There was an elderly man shopping for his wife. There was a new couple on a date. There was a woman, goading her small child into a nearby mall with a fast track to the MTR so sleep could come soon. I could almost hear the stories pouring out of the world around me.

 But, from a marketing perspective, look at this. Saturated to the fullest extent. To catch the eyes of a Hong Konger, having billboards is a given, not a way to stand out. If  you don't have public space in this series of a few blocks, you're nothing to these brand-conscious people. I grabbed every snapshot I could, where the ideal worlds slated on the promotions pointed to answers for the stories everyone was revealing.

 Every night looked like a group hustling for a Mardi Gras parade. Every night is like this.

And at some indistinct point in the future (time got away from me by this point), we tucked into a little restaurant, hoping for some kind of sustenance. Burger King was everything I both wanted and needed at that point earlier, but nutrition might have been at a minimum. We ordered three dishes for sharing: a bok choy dish in some outstanding sauce, an eggplant dish that could have resembled beef, and the weirdest kumquat-orange beef, thinly sliced and cooked in a way so that the beef curled up and had the consistency closest to bacon... Crisp and thin. But terribly spicy. The meal and the company topped off a night marked only through one word: unforgettable.

The train ride home only brought one quirky picture: that of a vending machine for any amount of colored arrays of umbrellas. Hong Kong, folks.

And even with the lights of the skyline still burning through my eyelids, I never slept so well... That night gave me the rhythm that I currently have for sleeping. It was all I could ask for.

The flurry. I don't think I can ever forget the flurry. It was too organized and too successful to be chaos, because all of the pieces worked together reminiscent of a Hong Kong Mercedes not having a single scratch on the crowded highway. But with each of however millions of pieces moving towards their personal goal, the joint goal of collective happiness, it's no strange thought that, with one look into the skyline, any height is attainable.