Hong Kong Half Year

All photos included are my own.

When I moved from the US to Europe, I fully expected my parochial tiny American chauvinist brain to be blown to bits with the realization that america doesn’t really matter that much in the grand scheme of the world.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Europeans watch american shows, listen to american music, use american products, and love to talk about american politics. When the opportunity for an exchange semester came round, I tried to get as far away as possible. A place where they don’t play Taylor Swift in the grocery store and all that. I chose the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Hong Kong is probably top three places in the world. It’s a megacity crossed with a jungle crossed with mountains crossed with a tropical archipelago. It’s like a video game biome.

The university was a little bit out-of-ways of the city proper, and to travel to and fro we had to take a minibus. Green ones had a fixed itinerary, while red ones were renegades playing by their own rules.

The university itself was a cross between a tropical resort and a Greco-Roman temple complex.

A beach was fifteen minutes away. Locals were too busy studying to enjoy it, so it was a good place to sit alone and read for a few hours.

Sometimes the fog rolled in and gave everything this ominous cast.

My own dormitory was at the bottom near the sea, some fifteen-minute walk away from lecture halls.

As an exchange student I didn’t really care about classes, and I kept very odd hours.

I enjoyed wandering the campus when nobody was awake and finding strange places.

One thing I was very happy about was the opportunities for hiking. Charleston and Amsterdam are great but sadly very flat.

mountainous terrain + subtropical rainforest means a lot of cool waterfalls and rivers

And of course some spectacular views

Plus monkeys

They have a lot of these signs around but as far as I could tell nobody takes them seriously?

Back to the city, something I noticed is that they don’t make any attempt to hide the scale. In big US cities like Vegas they use certain architectural techniques like joining four windows at the corners to make it seem like one window from far away, which makes a lot of the megabuildings look “friendlier.” Hong Kong just doesn’t care.

I also liked how … not seedy, exactly, but aesthetically worn a lot of the city was.

This hike was to a place called “suicide cliff.” When we heard the name we were like “that sounds baller we have to go.”

It got super foggy and we were sort of winging it a lot of the way.

Took a wrong turn and found this old radio station?

But the view at the end was definitely worth losing the trail multiple times.

Every time someone has a Hong Kong flag they’re required to have a slightly bigger Chinese flag right next to it.

On dates and holidays (even those specific to Hong Kong) they stage grand celebrations of greater Chinese culture.

The drone shows are neat though.

The city has obviously declined under Chinese rule in many ways. It’s maybe half as cool as it was. But it was so cool to begin with that it’s still one of the coolest places on Earth.

Tune in for part 2, where I plan to talk about asian student culture, miscellaneous city excursions, and the great and benevolent mister wong…