Let’s talk about Hong Kong.
My second stay in Hong Kong was a little different from my last one. My feet hurt much, much more, I spent more time in Kowloon than Hong Kong Island, and I was on average a lot drunker. Instead of staying in a hotel, I stayed in a family friend’s apartment up on Victoria Peak - that’s where the above photo was taken from - and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to spend those couple days. Hong Kong summers are no fun and it was consistently cooler up on the Peak, thank God for that.
A couple days after we arrived, Wolfy and I met up with our friends Tim and Welfred. We were pretty tired after spending our days wandering through Kowloon and our nights partying in Lan Kwai Fong, so it was nice having someone else lead us around for a change. Tim and Welfred were supposedly Hong Kong locals, but I found it hard to believe since they got lost so often. They looked the part though - tall and skinny, stylish backpacks, cool hair. Welfred and Tim both talked a lot about a “challenge”, but they were coy about it until we actually sat down and it was too late to back out.
The “challenge” was the first time I spent money to eat something I didn’t want to. We were all sat down in an all-you-can-eat-sushi-buffet, facing a long, crowded table that brought sushi to and from you on a conveyor-belt-type thing when I found out what the “challenge” was. They explained that they came to this sushi place pretty often, and once in a while, if they felt bold, they would order a dish of red bean sushi and see who could eat the most before quitting.
Now, I like red bean - usually it’s sweetened, ground into a paste, and used as a filling for cake or pastries, but there’s also red bean ice cream, red bean shakes, and they all taste damn good to me. This time, it wasn’t so good. Whole red beans without any sugar were dumped on top of vinegar-smelling sushi rice and nori, the black seawood used to wrap sushi. I have to admit I was the last to eat mine, but I didn’t really want to after seeing Tim take about half a minute to finish his one piece (from a combination of the taste and laughing too hard). When I finally did eat it, I had to chew and swallow as fast as I could. It tasted fucking terrible. But there’s something funny about four guys trying their best not to gag from eating something so foul and nasty and nausea-inducing, and besides, it made the rest of the meal taste so much better.
After that, it was Victoria Peak, click, flash, some photos, and then back to the apartment. Tim and Welfred made great tour guides - they showed us more than a few interesting places, places we would’ve needed weeks to find, and they were pretty fucking funny too. I’ll be seeing them again next time I’m in Hong Kong.
We just had dinner at the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant, Hong Kong’s Tim Ho Wan. It was some of the best dim sum I’ve ever had, and we ended up ordering six more BBQ pork buns (baked, not steamed, with a crispy sugar glaze on the outside) to take home. No, that’s not my photo above, but can you blame me for eating and not picturing?
On a Saturday night, two drinks in at a Shinjuku izakaya, I decided Tokyo was alright after all. And really, Japan is too.
I had thought being in Japan would be stressful and aggravating at times. People said, “Japanese culture is homogeneous and the people xenophobic.” But whether or not that’s true, I didn’t feel completely like the outsider I imagined I would. People smiled and bowed, you did the same back, and all was well. The past few days in Southern China have made me realize I’m not as emotionally invulnerable as I’d like to think, that bustling, breakneck-paced cities can wear me down, and that I much prefer polite, amiable “facades” over pushy, swindling “honesty”.
I’ll be back in Japan in the future, maybe as soon as next year. There’s still so much of Tokyo to explore, and I’d like to go up north too. How does Hokkaido sound?
Yoyogi Park, one of my favorite parts of Tokyo. It bewilders the mind that some place so serene and quiet can exist in the center of a city so active and agitated. Perhaps one of the few instances I can recall where I didn’t regret waking up before 9.
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Hi, my name's Kuang.
I just recently graduated high school, and I'll be writing about my travels through China this summer.
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