Hong Kong 2004 Archives

In about ten days time, I'll be leaving New York for three months in Asia. My new employers have kindly consented to me taking the time off, so with the ink still wet on my job contract (we have slow-drying ink around here), I'm getting ready to abandon web services and Windows for wats and water buffaloes.

4 pictures

• 1
• 2
• 3

The first time I came to Hong Kong, I had a window seat. As the plane made its final approach, I saw tropical green islands in a sea that changed from shining silver to pale emerald to sand-yellow. Between the islands, fishing boats with nets slung out on booms amidships looked like water insects.

4 pictures

• 1
• 2
• 3

Outside on the street, a large dot-matrix ticker display showed the number of street prostitutes that the local police had arrested in the past year: more than 2700.

3 pictures

• 1
• 2

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a three-thousand word entry.

3 pictures

• 1
• 2

Some more photographs from Hong Kong.

3 pictures

• 1
• 2

Some pictures taken on a walk through the Central and Wan Chai districts on Hong Kong Island.

3 pictures

• 1
• 2

Some photographs from Hong Kong.

We arrived back in New York in the aftermath of a torrential rainstorm that had backed up traffic on the runways at JFK. We sat for about an hour in a double queue of aircraft, all slowly inching their way towards their respective gates. It took almost another hour to get from the airport to the Howard Beach subway. In the darkness, the rows of lightless cars in the long-stay car parks looked like lines of mussels clinging to a wet black rock.

Seen through the dazed mental state that comes from a twenty-hour flight and a twelve-hour time difference (plus a light fever due to some minor infection or other), Manhattan appears even more inexplicable than usual. The New Yorkers appear almost freakish in their variety. My feelings towards the city are more ambivalent than ever, and it seems almost more alien to me than Bangkok or Hong Kong. I feel like a refugee.