First Impressions

I'm writing this post from a sunny spot on my platform bed in my tiny apartment in the Jordan neighborhood of Kowloon, Hong Kong. Tom is here with me watching the Yankees play the White Sox on TV :-). After ~3.5 days in HK, our internal clocks are slowly starting to adjust (HK is 12 hours ahead of NY time, or, as Tom says, Maine time) but we still get up pretty early and have trouble staying up past 9 pm.

If I had to describe our arrival in HK with one word, that would be "welcoming." Everything is welcoming -- the public transportation is incredibly efficient and user friendly, people are helpful, the apartment did not lose my reservation...! After an uneventful 15+ hour flight, we got to the HK airport on time, our bags showed up on the luggage carousel immediately, we had no problems with customs or immigration, and the Airport Express train brought us within blocks of our apartment. We dropped off our bags and rinsed our faces, then headed to the nearby Temple Street night market to check out the stalls and get some food.

The Temple Street night market is a popular tourist destination, and has all sorts of cheap goods for sale from ~7 pm to midnight every night. While we were mostly on a search for food, I will definitely check out some of the t-shirt and jewelry options there...and practice my bargaining skills. We decided to eat at an open-air seafood/noodle place -- Tom had oysters in a ginger and green onion sauce and I had noodles and pork. We each got a healthy-sized bottle of Tsingtsao (sp?) beer as well, and thoroughly enjoyed our meal under the breeze created by a dozen well-placed fans.

We woke up the next day and headed up to Kowloon Tong to take care of Tom's school registration, as his classes start a week earlier than mine. The City University of Hong Kong is a pretty, leafy, modern campus in a nice suburb, and Tom got all of his logistics taken care of relatively easily. The school is connected to an extremely nice mall, with an indoor ice skating rink and lots of ritzy stores. Getting up there on the metro takes ~25 minutes door-to-door, which was a nice change from my hourlong commute in Washington (I think my commute will end up being even shorter, as my school is a little closer).

After the trip to KT, we accidentally took a 7-hour nap from 4 pm until 11 pm -- the 12-hour time change really is tough to get used to! After the nap, a couple of hours of reading were followed by a brief night's sleep and we woke up on Saturday determined to resume normal hours.

Our day began with a walk down Nathan Road (a commercial thoroughfare that runs next to Kowloon Park, and is lined with gorgeous old banyan trees along certain blocks) down to the waterfront promenade where we looked across the bay (ocean?) to HK Island proper. Unfortunately, the smog from the mainland was readily visible as well, but the view was still gorgeous -- huge skyscrapers backed by pretty mountains. We stopped by the Star Ferry terminal, which, until the metro was built in 1980, was the only way that commuters could get from Kowloon (the northern part of HK Special Administrative Region, which is connected to the mainland) and HK Island. A night tour of the harbor by ferry is towards the top of my to-do list! Finally, we picked up a late lunch at "Tim Kee's French Sandwichs" in one of the more derelict parts of the city -- a trip off the beaten path which was totally worth it.

A tropical thunderstorm kept us indoors in the afternoon, but today is another sunny day and we plan on more adventures. Delicious buns from a nearby bakery will fuel our morning!

Packing

In the past month I've finished editing an article for the law review, wrapped up my clerkship at the Federal Reserve, thrown two 30th birthday parties for my one and only, gotten engaged to that same one and only, moved out of Jenny and Eric's spare bedroom in Washington, D.C. and unloaded all of my things into my parents' upstate New York attic for the umpteenth time of my life, and negotiated the terms of a Hong Kong apartment with a gentleman named Pinky Lung.

Said apartment is only 450 square feet (and in HK, they trickily count one's share of common spaces such as the elevator as part of the square footage), so packing should theoretically be easy: bring as little as possible. But 5 months in Asia consisting of both school and traveling necessitates a wider range of things than one would think. My goal is to throw it all together tomorrow morning, to give me all of Tuesday for a last-minute trip to CVS (to stock up on hair gel and migraine medicine) and Border's (to try and find a Cantonese phrasebook). Tom and I rendezvous at his uncle's house in Boston on Tuesday evening, and take the shuttle flight out of Logan on Wednesday morning to JFK. From there, it's a bit more than 15 hours directly to HKG. Hopefully the positive reviews I've read about Cathay are true!

I will try and use this blog as a bit of a journal -- and a nice, optional (for my readers) way to provide updates :-).