A foodie's tour.

This past weekend was dedicated to one thing and one thing only: finding weird things to eat, and then eating them.

Oh yes, pictures are included.

I tend to think that you can get a lot out of a culture by looking into the qualities of their food. People tend to put a lot of soul in their food, and hence, have qualities that mirror the people, or at least what they aspire to be. Also relates strongly to the available ingredients, and thus, what kinds of flavors they have to work with, showing the cyclical nature of culture on the landscape and landscape on the culture. Food from the southwest? Fiery, powerful, not afraid to make you cry. Food from San Fransisco? A bit quirky, no real established rules, definitely fun. New York? Eh. That's a tough one.

And you can't really apply this to the uppity food and the chain restaurants. What do the regulars eat? What flavors will the majority of the population identify with?

I tried this with Hong Kong this weekend.

Keep in mind the things I've already tried up to this point: jellyfish tentacles, octopus, assorted sea critters, fish eyes, chicken butt, seaweed, and a lot of tofu-like things. Definitely getting a palette for this whether I like it or not.

First, the street food, especially the desserts and the street vendor fare.

On Saturday, we headed out to Mong Kok for some random sightseeing/people watching/shopping and whatnot. The region will get its own post soon. But here, here is where you can find where most of the Hong Kong population, brand conscious, but not necessarily able to afford the high end stuff on Causeway Bay or by Tsim Sha Tsui, shop. Literally, an entire block-long street, both sides, are dedicated to selling sneakers. Nike, Adidas, whatever. All kinds are sold. Each possibly illegal. But who cares.

The point is, with such a large gathering of people here, food vendors must also make stops, as well as small, somewhat affordable restaurants. First, a stand.

... including these indescribable dumplings of... something. So naturally, not knowing what it was, we ordered them, and commenced to put both of the whatever sauces were sitting grubbily next to the stand.

Amazing. There was definitely pork in them (not a hard bet to make, considering most places that sell pork at this income level will actually butcher entire pigs in the alley next to their restaurant before cooking.

Hey, it's fresh, okay.

There were probably some mushrooms in it, maybe, as well. I don't really know. But the sauces, one vaguely resembling a soy sauce or a fish sauce, and the other a pepper sauce of some kind, really drove the dish to perfection. At about $1.25 in US dollars, it was a great snack.

On to dinner, which was a restaurant located off of some alley. A local pointed us there (Ainhi, from Penn State, can speak Cantonese, so we get pointers where possible). This place specialized in a special kind of dish where they take a meat and some veggies, put it in a clay or ceramic pot with rice, and steam the bajeezus out of it with open flames. In doing so, the meat cooks, the veggies steam, and the rice cooks (and burns at the edges of the pot), giving everything a bit of a smoky flavor. Unfortunately, it was called a "hotpot", meaning that the translation was a bit off. Oh well. Pictures.

I ordered one with preserved duck (again, never had it) and Chinese greens. Which they were.

Because everyone here is so curious, we all take bites of each others' food, just to give things a shot. I had a piece of all of these. From left to right: sausage, eel, and spare rib rice hotpots.

And the eel! It was so interesting. The meat was very mild, and quickly seized up any soy sauce you put on it, but when you took a bit, it was a curious experience, because it wouldn't chew... There was a bone in the way. Apparently, eels have bones.

Shut up, science majors.

My duck was outstanding as well. Also chopped with the bone in, I could pick around and get some really choice bites of amazing flavor. It was crispy at parts, with great meat inside, still tender. Very salty compared to the other dishes, and the soy sauce exacerbated that fact. Loved every bite I could muster, until only the matted remains of rice burnt to the pot were intact.

And that was essentially that day. Another small remark: a famous vending dessert here is actually the crepe, both with savory and sweet fillings. Being the American I am, I gorged myself with a sweet offering.

For the record, it included the following: banana, whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, cheesecake, and chocolate sauce. How amazing. Gave me some stomach pains later, but totally worth it at the time.
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Next day. Sunday. Sunday was a special day. Today would be the day I lose my Michelin Star virginity. What this means is that I was going to get dim sum, a special Hong Kong brunch, at an internationally acclaimed restaurant, meriting it a heralded Michelin star rating. The best of the best of the best can only get one. We're talking upper ninety-ninth percentile of all restaurants on Earth.

This restaurant was special, though. The Tim Ho Wan restaurant (Google it to get more accolades), known for its waits as much as its fare, is known as the cheapest restaurant to ever receive a Michelin Star. Considering that the top of the top in American cuisine all vie to get one with the most upscale, expensive gastro-hybrids of fancy and experimental cuisine, for a little shop in nowhere, Hong Kong (Mong Kok East, to be exact) is saying a LOT.

But it meant that we would have to wait. So we went there for 11:30. Big mistake. Line already could have gone down a block and a half if the nearby stores hadn't already threatened to call the cops for blocking business. But we got our number: 69.

They just called 24. The place had been open for two hours now.

This could be a problem.

The irritable hostess told us in fragmented English to go shopping or something, so long as we weren't there. So we did.

To cure my breakfast hunger, with realization that we wouldn't be seated for a while, I invested in my new all-time favorite dessert: dan tat. I found my new dessert obsession: it's can "dan tat". Roughly, it's an egg cream tart... But it is so sweet, so delicate, so flaky like a biscuit at the crust, so perfectly sweet but not too sweet... That I've had too many since coming here. The egg is there, but doesn't taste like it, and the center is like a custard, almost. And served warm from the local bakers... the center just melts in your mouth, and you get to do the happy dance. Simply outstanding. Might be my new favorite dessert ever. Recipes already stored.

For snacks and treats on the go, the place to go in Hong Kong is a bakery or cake shop, where desserts are always ready, or perhaps a savory roll with a filling like preserved pork and vegetables or cheese and hot dog... But also, these tasty little treats everywhere. Bakeries are ubiquitous... I like that idea. So we headed back.

59. For another hour, we waited. In fact, we were almost forgotten because so many parties of 2 had already passed us. It reached into the 80s for parties of 2. Our party of 5 had to suffer the consequences.

And finally, the magic number was called. Which meant that they took our order and we waited for the next group to pay their bill and leave. This place seated maybe 40. Maybe.

Then, 3 hours after putting our number in, we were pushed from the rowdy crowds, all grappling to their numbers like lottery tickets, to be swept into the aromas pulsating with every sweep of the door opening. It was a veritable oasis. 

We crammed into a tiny booth for 4 in America. There's been worse. 

And then nearly immediately, we were given tea and then a surge of waiters began to hand us baskets of food. Oh, literally, by the way.

First these shrimp dumplings. Then spring rolls, pork something, barbecued pork buns (THE BEST IN THE WORLD, seen in my hand in the picture), steamed vegetable dumplings, meat balls, chicken's feet, other buns, sponge cake (to die for), shrimp and pork dumplings, rice-dumpling with pork and vegetables... Everything.

Literally was full then.

Oh wait. We ordered two sets. 

So then wave two began. All of the same stuff, served steaming hot, in small recepticles, 3 at a time. We fought the wave, consuming it as if we hadn't eaten in weeks. And eventually, the waves subsided. Less and less waiters. 

We apparently ordered enough for 8 or 9 people here. Whoops.

We sat there, basking in the eternal happiness of food coma, all of a sudden realizing that the 3 hour wait was so worth it. I even had chicken feet. Cooked so that the small amount of meat literally fell off of the bone when you grabbed it with your chopsticks, in the most perfectly balanced glaze of a sweet sauce ever. It was perfect.

And we hadn't even had dessert yet. In fact, we still had a serving of sticky fried rice (again, amazing... Chinese food is forever soiled because of this) to go. We consumed it slowly. It was all we could do.

About to wave the white flag, dessert was brought. Two dishes. One was a pumpkin and cinnamon soup. Best bite of food I had, by far. Not too sweet, not too heavy... I could eat it forever. I don't even like pumpkin. It was that good. And then the other one was like a gelatin... But within it, there were lotus flowers, and some berry I had never heard of. I was about to eat a flower for dessert. Cautious? As always, I tried it. The taste reminded me of a spring morning. Minus the hay fever. But still. I had never imagined that a flower taste would be appealing. But I was wrong.

We sat there, dazed. We just ate two or three meals' worth in 45 minutes. We had won. It was all worth it.

Michelin star quality? Yes. Michelin star bill for about 20something dishes? Not at all.

For the equivalent of about US$10 each, we had the dim sum of our lives. It was so worth the wait. So worth the company.

On the way back, we looked around at the Tai Po Market, which was a poorer suburban (ha, yeah right) district, close to University Station. There, I had more dan tat, but also bought grapes from one of the fruit markets. Open air, sampling as you please, maybe a bargain or two, but definitely delicious food. The entire experience in that town was, in a word, authentic. No glitz, no billboards... Just real people trying to really get by and sell goods to their neighbors. We helped, as always.

And our trip ended there. The foodie's weekend had passed. I still have one more adventure about visiting a Buddhist temple with some surprise guests, but needless to say, my stomach got a lot of characteristics... Based on the food characteristic measurement, the Hong Kong people are efficient (even the pork livers were served in the Michelin restaurant - not my favorite thing in the world), fresh, diverse in the tastes that they like, yet centric to the family, as every dish is meant to be shared, helped through by chopsticks.

A meal can always say plenty.

And the city burst into symphony.

I'll actually blog about this day when I have time. But for the moment, I'll leave you with a video. It's crummy quality, but should be recognizable enough. Per the Guinness Book of World Records, it is the largest laser light show in the world by any city, and involves a colossal number of buildings in a light show, orchestrated to some pretty bland music. If you get the gist after a few minutes, that's probably fine - it's a long video. Still, it was a cool scene, and the link can hopefully give just a glimpse of the spectacle. Thus, I present the Symphony of Lights:

Don't you wish I had a better camera?

A weak week recap, picture edition.

Classes have sprung up, and thus, I don't have a million things to talk about anymore. However, with my trusty phone and its decent camera, I've hopefully expunged a few snippets of this past week that I can share. With or without meaning ascribed... They're distinctly Hong Kong. Captions and words to follow. Maybe. They're mostly self-explanatory.

To summarize what you're about to see: what a mall looks like. Or rather. Four malls. All connected together. And perpetually getting lost. Four seven story malls. Why? How? I don't have the answers. Maybe somebody does.

 Random view from one mall to the other. The catwalks between them are particularly gorgeous, and often covered with a billboard anyway. A few floors are underground as well. Or at least under this roadway.

 Ah. Ubiquity in the form of a cartoon dog.

 Breathtaking. I'm already on the fifth floor, mind you.

 THESE STAIRS GLOW AND CHANGE COLOR.

 Funny story about this store... More later.

 Crepe. Get ready for this. Banana, whipped cream, cheesecake, vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce. Hey guys, I found heaven.

Yes Kobe. You sure did.

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.

Tourist in Hong Kong, part 1: The drive, the nostalgia, and the peak.

This yarn depicts the first part of my day of tourism in Hong Kong. Stay tuned for the rest when I have more free time. Namely, when classes don't murder me. There's plenty of pictures to share.
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So, for all of these days talking about integrating myself into a new culture can take a backseat for a moment. Yesterday, I got to play the Hong Kong tourist game. On slate for the trip were 3 of the stops that Hong Kong is known for internationally: Victoria Peak, Stanley Market, and the Avenue of Stars in Tsim Sha Tsui.

And part of this, since I still felt like a tourist or some kid at a boarding school finally let out, was refreshing. Appropriate, even. I didn't know the sights. I didn't know Hong Kong for what everyone else knew it for... So now, for those who had visited, I had the chance to relate, albeit superficially, because I still really didn't notice anything substantial about these places. Amidst the company I made, the memories tethered to these experiences had a lot more to do with the "who"s and "how"s of the journey than the "where" itself.

It began like all other tours do: on a bus. With my newfound friends, I was able to marvel at the city from the lens of the bus' slightly shaded windows, overlooking the compact cars and massive traffic jams. After all, with 7 million people crammed into the land size of 423 square miles... Which really is too large of an estimate, with plenty of islands in the New Territories to the north still being mostly uninhabited.

And as funny as the driving style is  here (British, for one; compact, for two; amazingly skilled, for three), the cars, going at whatever pace their drivers' hearts desire, don't seem to have the slightest dink on them. Which tends to look extremely impressive, given that no model seems to predate the year 2000. Many of the businessmen drive Mercedes and Beemers... though Toyota, Volvo, Volkwagon and Honda are the predominant brands overall, I'd estimate.

As we drove through town, the ability of the buildings near the financial district in Kowloon to eclipse my view left me astonished. It was outstanding, and the architecture here was something I've never experienced. Truly, it showed the bounds and capabilities of human achievement in the field. The height, the shape, the aesthetics, the way it met the sky at some inane height, it all swiped my breath from me, no matter if corporate office or residential apartment (people LIVE at those heights).

I wouldn't want my hung towels to fall from the roof here. This building was dwarfed by those in the skyline, too. This is considered a building in the outskirts of the hub. THIS is second class architecture.

The reason I had time for this link of ridiculous thoughts? Well, the unremitting lines of cars gave ample time for this introspection.

Notice the gloss of these buildings. The building fading into the background... It's pink! Pink windows all the way up. Only here.

THERE IS A HOLE IN THIS BUILDING. And it's supposed to be there. The only thing there? An elevator shaft. I don't even understand the science behind it. Seems like a dangerous move in Jenga, too.

(1) Again, the modular shape is outstanding, and kudos to the developers here for stressing, or perhaps even demanding, sound, cutting edge (literally) buildings. (2) Remember the eclipse thing? This is post-eclipse. I perceived the sun moving toward, behind, and emerge from the other side of this building, all in one-yard movements.

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Oh, and speaking of measurements: our adorable tour guide, Kevin Chan (not related to Jackie, he stressed. But still looking for his millions in the lottery.), gave us some interesting, slightly arbitrary rules for measurements here, much to the chagrin of the Europeans in the back of the bus. Though speeds are in kilometers per hour, liquids in liters and mL, and distances measured in kilometers, houses are measured in square feet. This points to the layered and complex history of Hong Kong being distinctly Chinese in culture, yet owned by the British fully until the mid-'90s and idolizing of American culture. The British measurements of feet for house measurements were retained somewhat arbitrarily, but the other traits mirrored the standard European measurements, which is typical of the rest of Asia. I still haven't quite gotten the conversions perfectly, but for the first time, I have to take all of those conversion factors from high school seriously to talk to others here. They don't have any idea what a gallon of gas means. And I'm just fine with that, considering current prices.
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We finally edged our way back to consistent movement toward Victoria Peak, aided mostly by an underground tunnel... Rather, an underwater tunnel. This tunnel, built in the 1940s somehow, allows for the cars to drive under the harbor. Very impressive, and crucial to the city's growth and expansion into Kowloon form the old Hong Kong island.

Kevin assured us that some of the cracks in the walls were typical, and that "the construction company in China assured us we had another 50 years before replacement." ... How do you replace an underwater tunnel? It seemed like an off-kilter quip to a seemingly integral part of the city's commerce for the full-fledged belly laughs he engaged in. Either way, he loved his job. Good for him.

We briefly fled through the financial district some. Lines of these buildings engulfed us. We were in the middle of the beast.

And, as captivated as we were by the prospect of being surrounded by de facto walls on either side, it allowed us, for once, to stop looking up and look down at the life occurring here. Because, well, life occurred here more than simply up. The density of life really allowed us to look in any direction and see something interesting. Street markets here and there looked to attract away from the gleaming billboards of distinguished shops, the clutter and panging of everyday life in full throttle as we took our day off from this life.

Eventually, we made our way out and up to Victoria Peak, which is the US equivalent to Beverly Hills on the way up. A few of us marveled at the cars here: to be frank, those who drove Porsches around were the everymen. I counted a few Ferraris, many Maseratis, a Lamborghini, and even a coveted Aston Martin. No Rolls, but hey, there's a limit there. One in a million gets that distinct pleasure in a lifetime.

After all, being "one in a million" here means that you have 6 doppelgangers.

How scary is that.

The climb up brought us eventually to a parking garage for buses, and we were told to follow Kevin to the best viewing spots to see the skyline from a mile above sea level or so.

We walked in, took an elevator, and somehow landed in a mall.

A mall. At the top of a mountain. Where trees outnumbered people in every other location in its expanses.

Corporatism could be frowned upon here, and I could go into a fuming rant about the incorrigible draining of culture to standardized McCulture, but rather, I faced a new conclusion: the malls, these floors of floors of boutiques, clothes, food, whatever... It's just as much a promulgation of Hong Kongian culture as any street vendor. Because let's face it, if one lives in Hong Kong, they'll buy fish at the local open air market sometimes, but they'll also supplement their wardrobe within the schizoid confines of these escalators. As artificial and stuffy as it may seem to have my panorama of the Hong Kong skyline tolled by any number of tea chain stores or a wax  museum (yes, a wax museum), it reflects what the people here do. They all live in any number of indistinguishable boxes with the same indistinguishable windows in the massive indistinguishable complexes with the same cookie cutter pools at the bottom, but waking up every day to that life probably implies a tolerance to standardization... of life. Every 7-Eleven here will let you grab the same lunch, and every mall will electronically transfer you up and down floors. It's not sad; it's life. It's expected. The benefits of standardization just seem to resound more with these people: there's ample comfort, there's plenty of safety and little real crime, and there's no housing shortage, for sure. Homeless people are trace to none. It's a tradeoff with variety, economics would dictate. Monopolization of culture? Perhaps to an extent. But it's a voluntary one.

Either way, the mall had its little perks here and there. One of these being the availability of American food. Marking our entry into this region just a week ago, some of us longed for familiarity. Anything. And we found it.

Burger King.

And as I mentioned earlier, there was something about these familiar logos, brands. Even though we were far away from any culture we had previously experienced, without shelter from the anything-but-embracing hand of urban Asian life, sitting there, in near silence for a moment as we sat in what could have been any Burger King at any of its locales - though this one haphazardly located at the top of a mountain in Hong Kong - and felt... comfort. There was comfort in familiar flavors. This Burger King meal would undoubtedly meet our expectations. Considering my expectations have been lashing around wildly without footing for the past week, it allowed me to calm some. Offer a comparison point, even. We sat there, all taking in the same collections of thoughts. This was a world where Burger King could represent home... Even if home meant trans fats, barbecue sauce, and ketchup-glazed pickles being tossed to the side of the tray. The illusion of the brand let us be regular American kids in regular Anytown, USA.

For just a moment, we could be content with the familiar.

And after what really was a feast, we rode the escalators, winding up in right-angled rounds to the observation deck. And with the blip of the Octopus card, we were at the summit. The view... I could hear gasps. Like desertmen stumbling into an oasis, we drank in the sight.

The magnificent heights, the harbor, the haze of mid-day... It was a portrait of humanity.

 And it went higher, too.

 Another view. The air lighter, and colder, it all seemed like a mirage. But we were there. Under those stories upon stories of metal and plaster, people inhabited the ground. Somewhere. But dang, it was hard to remember that. As if all life froze.

 Foliage on the mountain? Beyond dense. Multi-layered. Roads winded underneath, occasionally.

 Notice the shadow of the peak creeping to the city. As if the dozens of stories of buildings didn't already shade everything.

Suspended, we were, from the rest of humanity. From this vantage point, all you wanted to do was look. Not look, though. Gawk. Rub the eyes a little to remind oneself that this wasn't a dream, maybe. It all seemed surreal. In the war of attrition between the mountain and the people, the mountain was winning. But man, the people were sure getting closer.

I wish I had a picture from 1990 or something to showcase this.

But this wasn't the end of the awe-inspiring dance through town. To come, there will be a look into the tourist underbelly that is Stanley Market, where no ceiling existed, but also existed, and Hong Kong's skyline by night. Oh yeah, it was a feast.

To be honest, I'm running low on extended metaphors, so this seems like a good ending point for the moment.

And the flowery language aside, I'm amazed by this city. Every piece, and the intricacies of activity that composes its populace, blow me away. The buildings are a reflection of the people: they're brilliant, in a word.  Simply brilliant. The same minds that concocted these buildings share space with the mall-goers who can buy toy helicopters, share space with the market salesman who make a living by haggling their trade's worth to people they will never see again, and share space with the minds that took Hong Kong from a British afterthought to the crown jewel of capitalism.

Brilliance runs 7 million deep.