Okay, I've fallen MASSIVELY behind in my blogging, so I'm going to skip over about a million things and write what ever comes to mind.
So about a week after I arrived, I got my first visitor: my oldest friend, David deKoos, here in Hong Kong on business. I waited for him in the lobby of his lavish, company-paid hotel, and sure enough, after a short wait, there he was. It was so weird – so normal – to see Dave just show up like that. As if we were meeting to go see a movie in downtown Montreal. Except we were meeting on the other side of the planet. We met up and he took me to a little restaurant he'd gone to on his last visit: a little Italian place in one of the very touristy areas where I hadn't yet been (I tend to avoid the tourist traps – but I'll admit after a solid week of Chinese food, pasta DID sound like a brilliant idea). We chatted and had a good time, got hopelessly lost in the streets of Kowloon, shot pool and drank a few beers. It was marvelously mundane! Normal! After a week of getting to know Hong Kong the hard way (and I was, at this point, getting settled – I knew my way around pretty well already), it was really nice to just chill with a good friend. Dave didn't last too long into the evening, as he was tired out from traveling, so we parted ways relatively early and planned a meeting for the next day. The next day it was my turn to pick the venue, so I brought Dave to an outdoor hot-pot restaurant in the New Territories. This was no tourist trap – it was as local as they come. We had to jump out the way as waiters wheeled giant tables through the crowds of people clustered around their hot-pots (Chinese fondue pots), playing cards, drinking beer, laughing raucously. It was thoroughly Chinese, and we were probably the only foreigners in the place. The waiter didn't speak a word of English and had to enlist a young boy from another table as an ad-hoc translator, but it wasn't much of a problem as it was mostly a serve yourself kind of place. And so we threw all sorts of random and unrecognizable foodstuffs into the pot and had a great meal (as I was choosing from the buffet tables, I tried not to look too hard at the things that were actively squirming, for fear of losing my appetite); we ate heartily and drank local beer, made bad jokes about courting the bird-flu, and felt, unlike the day before, like we were really in another country. With a smile, Dave said to me, “You're a local already”.
So about a week after I arrived, I got my first visitor: my oldest friend, David deKoos, here in Hong Kong on business. I waited for him in the lobby of his lavish, company-paid hotel, and sure enough, after a short wait, there he was. It was so weird – so normal – to see Dave just show up like that. As if we were meeting to go see a movie in downtown Montreal. Except we were meeting on the other side of the planet. We met up and he took me to a little restaurant he'd gone to on his last visit: a little Italian place in one of the very touristy areas where I hadn't yet been (I tend to avoid the tourist traps – but I'll admit after a solid week of Chinese food, pasta DID sound like a brilliant idea). We chatted and had a good time, got hopelessly lost in the streets of Kowloon, shot pool and drank a few beers. It was marvelously mundane! Normal! After a week of getting to know Hong Kong the hard way (and I was, at this point, getting settled – I knew my way around pretty well already), it was really nice to just chill with a good friend. Dave didn't last too long into the evening, as he was tired out from traveling, so we parted ways relatively early and planned a meeting for the next day. The next day it was my turn to pick the venue, so I brought Dave to an outdoor hot-pot restaurant in the New Territories. This was no tourist trap – it was as local as they come. We had to jump out the way as waiters wheeled giant tables through the crowds of people clustered around their hot-pots (Chinese fondue pots), playing cards, drinking beer, laughing raucously. It was thoroughly Chinese, and we were probably the only foreigners in the place. The waiter didn't speak a word of English and had to enlist a young boy from another table as an ad-hoc translator, but it wasn't much of a problem as it was mostly a serve yourself kind of place. And so we threw all sorts of random and unrecognizable foodstuffs into the pot and had a great meal (as I was choosing from the buffet tables, I tried not to look too hard at the things that were actively squirming, for fear of losing my appetite); we ate heartily and drank local beer, made bad jokes about courting the bird-flu, and felt, unlike the day before, like we were really in another country. With a smile, Dave said to me, “You're a local already”.
