Nothing Wins the Justice

So, I purchased a blessing today. Found a fine Chinese temple with incense and the works not a block from my crappy apartment. I was anointed with the sacred oils, handed a blessing card with golden lettering, and the priest invoked the scriptures to empower my Earthly form. Cost me a dollar.

To be more precise, it cost me a Hong Kong dollar. The Aussie dollar would stretch to seven blessings at least. But then, who really needs to be that blessed? I didn't want to go overboard, but I figured one would be a good investment, just in case some Innsmouth shit goes down. Besides, I just love the fact that you actually get handed a card to signify that you are blessed. It appeals to the gamer in me.

Admittedly, the chance of paranormal attack was pretty low today (it's on the news, right after fire danger), but at 14 cents per blessing, can you really afford not to be covered?

As the above example illustrates, you can buy just about anything in Hong Kong. Typically, you don't even have to walk very far to do it. Moreover, since the average store is the size of a thimble, you can usually find everything you need clustered within a small area. Add to that the Seven-Elevens on every street corner (often two to a corner), and that's a lot of convenience.

I had considered Japan to be densely packed with goodies, but it's got nothing on Hong Kong. Indeed, next to the stores you get over here ("space is at a premium", a local told me), Japan's narrow tunnels of wall-to-wall products are downright spacious.

One thing I miss about Japan, however, is that cute, useless crap was sold just about everywhere there. That and comics. You couldn't walk ten paces without seeing a giant plushie, a transforming robot or a girl with big, watery eyes. It represented a priority for frivolity that I was totally down with. The rest of the store might sell leeks and suppositories, but - see? - they know how to have fun as well. To me, all the anime bullshit sorta represents that.

In Hong Kong, you can don't have to go far to get an outboard motor or some bootleg CDs, but I still hadn't seen hide nor hair of any girls with cat-ears or french-maids (though there were plenty of such outfits on sale, mind), and given how very familiar everything else felt minus that exception, it was leading to some serious withdrawal.

As such, I decided that today, I would find the Hong Kong Japanimation scene. And so I did!

Ashnil, of course, was dead-set against leaving work before 10 pm to go off on one of my loosely-planned adventures. Indeed, he seems to be dead-set against anything I suggest by default. As expected, however, his unyielding resolve lasted about as long as it took me to tell him what I planned to do. Japanimation is an incredibly wide genre, and we all get different things out of it... but Ashnil, well, he knows what he likes. We all know what he likes. And there is plenty of merchandise. At this point, therefore, his baser nature took over, and he immediately dropped everything he was working on. We left then and there (knocking off a whole three hours early, at 7 pm)!

As it turned out, Hong Kong's love of Japan is actually quite pronounced. Unlike many mainland Chinese, the people here have nothing much against their weird eastern cousins, and eagerly lap up the Japanese goods, resulting in a thriving scene for manga and anime related products which may well be the second-largest in the world, behind Japan itself. Once we knew where to look, we were able to find racks upon racks of artbooks, DVDs, magazines, figurines and bizarre random paraphenalia without a great deal of effort.

Oddly enough, though, the whole 'scene' was somewhat unsatisfying. Despite the fact that you could get your hands on just about anything out here, and some of it was even in English (what with Hong Kong ostensibly speaking English and all), it wasn't really quite as much fun to go through as I had expected.

In Japan, the hobby is mainstream to an incalculable extent. People love this crazy crap, and it shows. Figurine stores are almost museums, carefully lit cases displaying the storekeepers' favourites, as well as new releases, in an artful way. In the case of some figurines, this kind of arrangement actually appears bafflingly high-class, given that some of the most popular figurines are far from tasteful themselves. Stuff was categorised, too, and sorted carefully into categories by people who had made this hobby their life.

By contrast, Hong Kong's anime stores are (like a lot of their stores) a winding catacomb of ugly cramped spaces. Here, carelessly mashed-together cartoon goods are doled out piecemeal (since only two people fit in the store at a time) by grim shopkeepers who look like Triad thugs. This wasn't quite the vibrant community I remembered. If these people felt any particular excitement about the latest Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer figurine or whatever, they hid it well.

I don't know how anyone's meant to find anything here that they're interested in, save by serendipity. If by some miracle you were to come across something you wanted in the two-to-five minutes before the crowd-peristalsis pushes you out of the store, though, it almost feels like a waste to buy it here. The atmosphere is murder for the passions that inspire you to buy this stuff in the first place (unless the passion of your choice is lust for plastic tits, which are abundant). If I were to purchase anything here, it would only be because it's markedly cheaper... and actually, most things weren't.

I usually buy and/or watch anime stuff to motivate and inspire myself. Whatever else it may be (and 'stupid' often tops the list), this stuff is always fresh and unexpected. More importantly, there is genuine passion involved in its creation, and it filters through to every part of the hobby. Be it an animated epic about becoming the greatest baker or bartender in the world, or just a filthy ream of horse-porn, making an animated series isn't easy. To produce something people will enjoy, you have to be passionate about it, and - perhaps because those big watery eyes encourage empathy - that passion tends to rub off on the viewers.

To me, the best shows will showcase some situation, profession or facet of life you might never have thought about or considered interesting before, and do their utmost to ignite your passion and interest, and teach you a thing or two along the way. Even if you're already passionate about something, it's a great way to recapture your enthusiasm or explore new perspectives. The show can make you think, or just inflame your own ardor. If you're a classical pianist who doesn't really know how to appreciate classical pieces, you could do worse than to watch Nodame Cantabile, and I've never seen anything resonate so strongly with someone as Battle Programmer Shirase did with Ash.

From my perspective, it is these feelings that imbue the merchandising with any value at all. After all, without the associations as a part of the show, what good is something like a plastic figure? Our English teachers in high-school weren't kidding when they said that characters in fiction represent parts of ourselves. If I buy a character's merchandise, it is because the feelings, virtues or strengths I associate with that character are something I want to encourage in myself, and be reminded of daily by possession of this item.

This may explain why, despite the fact that Hong Kong's market for this stuff is at least as big as Japan's, I didn't really feel like buying anything.

I know it's a stupid attitude to have, considering, but I felt somewhat offended by the whole toy-store mentality. In Liviu's ideal world, you don't just cram the shelves with all the colorful crap you can import and expect people to cheerfully buy it while they're crammed against 5 other people and barely able to figure out what they're looking at. I'm not saying that the literary and artistic qualities of a work should determine where and how you shop for its merchandise, but surely if you expect people to attach sufficient semantic meaning to these bits and pieces to actually feel good about buying them, you should at least treat your own wares with a bit of respect?

If Japan's world of anime is truly the mecca of cheerful weirdness you might expect from immersing yourself in the culture, then Hong Kong's is the one that your parents imagine, where every element exists solely to waste your time and destroy your good Christian values. I tend to play up the twisted angle of it all, sometimes (and who wouldn't?), but I'll be damned if that's not exactly how it is out here. Even so, despite my disillusionment, there were a couple of things I would certainly have liked to buy: things I saw back in Japan, but which weren't available back then (this, for instance).

However many stores I walked into, however, I couldn't for the life of me find any of the things I was after. Presumably, the figure above was wearing altogether too much clothing, since the only versions of that character I saw had next to nothing on, and didn't look happy about it. Other girls looked markedly more cheerful, and wore even less. Some of the stuff I saw on offer would've triggered police-raids back in Australia. It was like I'd been searching online for a copy of Fantasia, only to get rickrolled onto Mickey Mouse porn. Except worse, since continuing to search online would eventually get you what you wanted, and all I found here was more crap.

Since the stuff I enjoy most, and actually want merchandise of, often tends to be non-mainstream and non-pornographic, I seemed to be bang outta luck as regards actually finding anything I want. This is difficult for me to understand, since obviously the world revolves around me, and any right-thinking person who actually took the time to read/play through Narcissu would either want to own a piece of merchandise or HAVE NO HEART AT ALL... but that kind of shopping was clearly better left to a better-organised place, and there was certainly plenty of stuff to enjoy even here.

For one thing, they don't just sell anime stuff here. It gets lumped in with just about every genre of random comic stuff you can think of, and while this makes anything you might be interested in even harder to find, it also means they have a lot of great stuff in here to look at, such as larger-than-life-size replicas of R2D2 and C3PO. If you're some kind of a maniac, and can figure out a way to get it out of the sub-basement or down from the 13th floor (there are no elevators), you can even purchase one, for about the price of a year's groceries!

Further, the mixing pot that is the Hong Kong shopping scene gives the whole crowd a bit of a more integrated feel. That is, in Japan most people of all ages seem to love their local exports, so it's hardly an issue, but in Australia you could be forgiven for the impression that anime stuff only appeals to sweaty male nerds with social disorders. Despite the often-quite-specifically-targeted nature of the merch down here in Hong Kong, there is so much cross-pollination between stores that they are turned from a dreary suburban porn-ring into a viable place to socialise. The baffling choice of combining nerdy fetish material, ladies' fashion, cute bullshit to put in your hair, huge-ass models of the Starship Enterprise, cosmetics, life-size R2D2's and floral arrangements in the one cramped multilevel mall ensure that Chinese nerds and attractive young ladies are regularly thrust together. Given the numerous cafés just outside, and the fact that the girls are hence developing an interest in nerdy pastimes whereas the nerds have been learning about skincare products and deodorant, this combination just makes sense.

Believe it or not, the people I saw browsing the aisles (some of them prominently featuring disturbing figurines of naked little girls) were some of the most attractive, well-dressed nerds (and young ladies!) I've ever seen in a place like this. Whatever crazy Marxist came up with this ploy for social integration deserves all kinds of praise, because this baffling idea is solid gold.

To round off my report of this day, and display that the breadth of Japanese otaku culture is definitely all scattered throughout Hong Kong somewhere, even if it is the Chinese interpretation, Ash and I decided to end our day with a trip to "Maid Date", Hong Kong's first maid café.

Aimed at the many unfortunate fellows who work 12-hour days and would appreciate a bit of pampering from a pretty young French-maid at the end of the day, Maid Date was a replica of the many such establishments in Japan, and seemed a perfect place to relax and eat an overpriced slice of pie after work.

Maid Date, however, proved hard to get to. That is, it wasn't hard to find. Not at all: it took barely a few minutes to hop on a train, get out at the right station, and spot the wiking store-sign saying "Open". What was difficult was the actual 'getting inside' part. See, aside from the obvious storefront, there was no actual indication of where the place was. Beneath, a hundred little stores plied their business, but there were no stairs or entrances to be found on any side of the building. Indeed, with the exception of some horrible little alleys leading to locked and barred doors that looked unpleasant, there really was no clear way to get into the building at all. You could walk through some of the stores, but they had no upper level. Enjoying a "Maid Date" would seemto've required you to fly.

I considered asking a local, but no-one around here seemed to speak English at all, and the one local I did consider trying to ask anyways turned out to be standing under another of those red-light-district lights I always mistake for traditional lanterns. As Ash tried to usher me away, I briefly considered trying out my limited skills at Chinese after all, to say something like jei guo, ka-shi hei-ryn hen yao yi ge bou gui nu-hai-zi qing ni. This is probably the most complicated sentence I can string together with the words I know (and I can't quite work out how to write the sounds in English, since I only know them phonetically), so I kinda wanted to try it out, particularly since Ash would think I'm asking how to get upstairs.

However, since it translates to something like "Excuse me, but the black man would very much like a cheap young boy, please.", and the dude I was asking didn't seem like he would have much of a sense of humour about his profession, I decided to just wander off into the only stairwell I had seen, instead.

Now, this looked like a private apartment sort of stairwell, but sure enough there appeared to be a resident-button labelled "Maid Date". Unfortunately, pressing this had no effect, and there was a heavy metal grate separating us from our evening of maidly delights. Not to be deterred, I tailgated a family, snuck inside, and prepared to go to work on exploring this dingy little apartment complex.

Unfortunately, I had failed to follow proper ninja procedure in checking all the dark corners (with throwing knives), and as such missed the furious old Chinese man who was apparently watching the bottom-floor stairwells intently from his alcove, despite not appearing to work here. He began a torrent of incomprehensible Cantonese gibbering, waving his arms and shouting loudly, chasing me outside, much to Ashnil's amusement. I think Ashnil would prefer it if this happened every time I entered a building, the bastard, and admittedly it often does when I'm exploring places with him; but then, it's their own fault for always labelling picturesque parts of their temples and such with signs that say 'no admittance'.

Anyway, I decided I would wait the old guy out, and hung around outside pressing the "Maid Date" button. Nobody answered. The old guy sat there like a gargoyle, his beady eyes visible in the darkness. Watching me closely.

A few more circles walked around the building later, I decided that this was probably just God telling me that my Maid Dates aren't likely to go any better than my regular dates. After one last check, revealing that the beady-eyed old guy was still there and no less furious-looking, we gave up on that part of the entertainment, and headed on home.

Hong-Kong-ites have a curious relationship with the sea. On the one hand, they will cook and eat just about anything that moves down there, however disgusting or endangered. On the other hand, they're perfectly happy to turn sea creatures into big fluffy mascots or star performers and make giant piles of glinting money from charging us tourists to see them.

I've always found it a bit weird how the dual-nature of Hong Kong's money works.

Back in the slums where we live, and even at the uni, one would be outraged to spend more than seven Aussie dollars on a full meal. Indeed, one can comfortably eat multiple courses for five bucks. I once got three courses for $3.50. Certainly, you wouldn't spend more than five to ten Australian on a pair of pants or a shirt. If you were desperate, you might go as high as fifteen.

In the center of Hong Kong, though, you can forget about that kind of pricing. It's like a whole new currency has taken over. The currency of brand-names! I had never considered that there might be such a thing as brand-name food, and was startled to find that a crappy muffin with a chic French bakery brand-name on the wrapping set me back more than the price of a restaurant meal. It didn't much bother me at the time, since it was still half the price I might've paid for a stale bread roll supposedly subsidised by our University Union back in Sydney, but I would've imagined a true Hong Kong resident would be more outraged than slightly bemused.

Not so! In Hong Kong, brand names are a source of social status, resulting in the strange effect of the rich and poor living pretty much the same way, save that the rich spend far more money on exactly the same things. Fashion, in this case, is the great equaliser.

Seeing as how no-one thinks to question the status quo, I feel a sort of moral obligation to get worked up about it all on their behalf... even if it's probably hypocritical of me to do that, since I've been buying brand-name camera equipment just about exclusively ("you paying more for the NAAAME", shrieked the storekeep, waving about a Fisher Price looking Chinese replica he assured me would do the job at half the price). Besides, in a place where anything you want is easily and cheaply at your fingertips, what else are you supposed to spend your money on? Getting slightly nicer stuff is as good an idea as any. However rich you are, I don't think you can afford a larger apartment.

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So, where I'm going with this rant is that the entry fee for Ocean Park (and for Disneyland, though we haven't been there yet) is - in terms of what else that money would buy you - downright unbelievable. For the same price I could probably pay for food and transport for a week, buy two suits of clothes, a chicken, a two-hour massage session and a colour TV, and still have the change to get some Pocky and/or drinkable water.

Upon seeing the entry fee, therefore, I was seized by a sudden impulse to throw up my hands in disgust and leave - except that I then realised this was still pretty cheap for a theme park, by the reckoning of Australian Liviu anyway. Nevertheless, I can see why the Chinese might pick up a reputation for being cheap if they had to contend with this kind of currency double-standard every day. It's enough to drive a man squinty!

After contending with the gigantic queue (or 'scrum', rather) and the admission price, I amazed Ash with my miracle of turning bottled water into wine (well, Berocca), and we set off to explore the fun-park for ourselves. The first ride we tried was some kind of subaquatic 'multisensory experience' which was basically a dimly lit tram car that shakes around a bit when the lights flash. This was pretty disappointing until we realised that it doubled as an actual tram, and had delivered us all of the way up a mountain.

At the top of the mountain, we got to explore the real business of Ocean Park: carnival games, rollercoasters, animal shows and exhibits. Within a short walk of each other, a variety of attractions allowed you the opportunity to meet your undersea friends as cheerful mascots, learn all about them from educational museum rooms, ride their corresponding roller-coasters, see them do a show, watch them in their natural habitat, and then get them served up on a bed of rice with a slice of lemon.

Watching the seals and the dolphins was good fun, and they had an enjoyable little side-show wherein you got to see dolphins save a drowning guy and a seal give him mouth-to-mouth. There was much jumping and splashing and asian dudes wearing skin-tight suits. Overall, there was plenty for everyone to enjoy, and I can only recommend it.

I even learned a thing or two from this business, such as the fact that seals apparently enjoy swimming upside-down and frustrating attempts at photography. Also, it would seem that certain jellyfish just don't show up on film at all, like vampires.

Speaking of ghastly pale bloodsuckers, Ashnil lost a few degrees of coloration today - and for good reason. Afflicted with some reasonably nasty vertigo (as you may know), Ashnil was downright thrilled to find out that the most exciting parts of the park were its surprisingly large number of really tall tower-rides (some of which sent you plummeting back to earth), a roller-coaster overlooking a sheer drop down the side of a cliff, a cable-car that sways dangerously as it shows off the local scenery from dizzyingly high up, a simulated hot-air-balloon ride and a series of other fine ways to fall to your grisly death on the stones below.

This made Ashnil very edgy for a lot of the duration of our stay at the top of the mountain, and practically the whole cable-car ride back down. It also didn't help that, thanks to the locals' love of Halloween, some kind soul had thoughtfully peppered the area underneath the various high-up attractions with partially decayed remains and shattered skeletons.

Unsurprisingly, Ash was pretty keen to check out some of the more indoors-oriented activities, and there were also a good set of those to choose from. Now, there were certainly some highlights here and there that rate a mention, such as the "Sea Jelly Spectacular!" and a fine little terrarium where you could watch real Pandas eat real bamboo real slowly... but these were not really as exciting as advertised.

The "Spectacular", in particular, may well have been a mistranslation (and, admittedly, I too struggle to think of a word which means "slimy-ass jellyfish bobbing in glass jars set to trance music"). The Panda exhibit was as large as advertised, but there was only one panda in there, and he was studiously ignoring his audience to attend to the Bear Necessities, which for him (if I recall correctly) means eating bamboo pretty much continuously from dawn 'til dusk.

Like every attraction in the park, these funneled the viewer into a corresponding gift shop, where we could stand around and wonder why anyone would buy a big ol' plastic Sea Jelly...

The real attraction here, however, was one particular building, which went down several levels, and featured the biggest darn indoor fish-viewing pool I have ever seen. This simulated coral-reef basically drills down in a spiral-shape, providing visitors the ability to view the busy undersea scene within from a variety of viewpoints both above and below the water. As you got lower, new layers of the ecosystem were uncovered, with different fish making their homes in different parts of the pool while the larger fish and manta rays and things zipped about all above them.

I don't know how they introduced such a vast amount of fish into the one massive tank without resulting in a feeding frenzy. Indeed, a number of very large sharks were swimming about all over the place, not to mention enough stingrays to take down a platoon of Australians. Although we wisely kept our distance, I never saw any fish make a hostile action towards another fish. They all just lived down there together, ignoring their usual antagonism in the wild, floating in their own cramped-yet-comfortable Fish Hong Kong.

Watching these fish do their thing was quite fascinating, and probably the most interesting part of Ocean Park. Besides the giant tank, there were also numerous smaller tanks featuring other species such as seahorses and clownfish, and all in all there was a great deal to see in this building.

Even here there was queuing out the wazoo, however. One expects to queue up for things at theme parks, but here in Ocean Park (perhaps surprisingly, given the price-tag) there is such a profusion of attendees that even though they manage the crowds with an amazing level of effectiveness, and roller coasters and the like run two at a time (!), they still can't get through all the people very quickly at all. Everything had wait-times associated, from the cablecar to the least popular ride, even down to peering into a small fishtank on the wall, getting a bite to eat or looking at the Panda you've already queued up to see.

It was fortunate, therefore, that Ash and I are reasonably patient folks (with iPods), because just about everything required at least a quarter-hour of wait time, often going up to 30 or 40 minutes. Overall, given the amount of standing around we had to do, they couldn't have released the iPhone version of Team17's Worms at a better time.

Beyond the fishy attractions, Ashnil and I basically spent our time queuing up to try every roller-coaster at least once, since apparently Ash's vertigo doesn't stretch to being turned upside-down over a cliffside or dumped down a waterfall riding a log boat (oddly enough). These were the perfect way to round out the Ocean Park experience, because we got to tuck a few more death-defying 'coaster-rides under our belt (for our international collection), and get good and wet (which, at Ocean Park, seems like a must, really).

Moreover, the Raging Rapids ride was not so much notable for drenching us all over with water, but for also doing the same to every single young lady who rode it. Since light-coloured T-Shirts are popular in the Hong Kong heat, and not everyone chooses to wear a bra underneath, this added all kinds of extra appeal to the ride.

Given my powerful zoom lens, I was tempted to share this part of the experience on NWTJ also, but this is just the kind of thing Ashnil needs to finally get me thrown into a Chinese prison, so I decided that your numerous Internet-high-fives would have to take second seat to self-preservation.

Once we had sampled every rollercoaster, hung around the Raging Rapids exit for a while, eaten some more overpriced carnival food, and discovered an oddly out-of-place garden of flamingoes, Ash and I decided we were done with Ocean Park, and went on our merry way back home, enjoying another fine non-over-priced meal as we returned to Hung Hom (and appreciating it even more than usual).

We may return another day for the Ocean Park 'halloween content' which happens at night - but I don't really expect to, so don't count on it.

So, today I accidentally swallowed a mouthful of the local water. In horror, I tried to make myself cough it back up, but it was too late. As such, I decided that it was time to go purify my soul, just in case.

Now, although most of the actual people I have met here are actually Christians, I figured that the appropriate local religion was Buddhism. My choice was aided in no small part by the fact that the prime purification locations of each faith were either the small, not-as-impressive-as-the-guides-make-it-sound Christian chapel in the city center, or an honest-to-goodness Buddhist temple complex right beside the second-biggest Buddha statue in the world.

Obviously, Buddha won by default.

As such, Ashnil and I spent today trekking high up into the mountains in search of bigass statues, vegetarian food and spiritual enlightenment.

As has become pretty much standard practice, we started our journey by standing in an incredibly long queue. Enlightening as this attraction is, it obviously attracts a vast number of visitors from both here and abroad, to the extent that they have had to build an extremely large and complicated cable-car station at the bottom capable of handling over an hour's worth of enlightenment seekers standing in a long, winding line and slowly shuffling forward.

Everything here in Hong Kong is full of people, and difficult to visit without exhibiting some serious patience, but in this case it seemed to make sense. After all, no one comes unto the Buddha but by letting go of Earthly impatience, right? To truly experience the Buddha, one should no longer desire to see it.

This wasn't a problem, since the "45 minutes from here" sign which we got to after some 30 minutes of waiting certainly discouraged any and all desire to see the Buddha to slowly disappear, and when that didn't make me turn back the fact that there was a second queue to actually go up once you'd gotten your tickets from the first queue almost did. It's fair to say that I had worked up an almost Buddha-like indifference to the Buddha by the time I got onto the cable-car. This saved me some money, because when they offered me a trade-up to a ticket which would also include some animated 'monkey theatre' and a short cartoon about Buddha's life, I told them where to stick it.

What we did decide to spring for, however, was the "Crystal Cabin": a cable-car system that was so amazing, so wildly innovative, that you could actually see through the floor which was TRANSPARENT. Whoa.

As it turned out this was incredibly pointless, since all that passed directly underneath you was water and treetops (and the glass was tinted blue for some reason), but it did set us in good stead as regards standing in line, because those foolish enough to pay extra for a crappy glass floor (and I just about had to, since it is my solemn mission to jostle the cabin and make Ashnil wet himself) didn't have to stand in the queue for quite as long.

After a lengthy and picturesque cable-car trip (which passed over a fascinating group of chinese fishermen, among other things, whom we were able to watch as they caught fish by the traditional method), we made our way to the top, from where the Big Buddha could be seen. The cable-car dropped us off in what was essentially the Buddha Gift Shoppe, leaving a large variety of restaurants and tourist stores between ourselves and the Buddha, so as to properly attract our tourist dollar.

As has become the traditional thing for us to do when starting anew in a brand new locale full of stuff to see, Ashnil and I immediately went in to one of the local restaurants and proceeded to stuff our faces. Enlightenment (and vegetarianism) forgotten, we picked out a downright unholy amount of meat (every major animal-group was represented!) and settled down to devour the lot.

I can't say that this was terribly pious of us, but the best part about Buddhists is that they're not terribly judgemental about this sort of thing. In fact, they're not even terribly sure whether they're allowed to eat meat themselves. The Buddha wasn't all that clear about it all, so most Buddhists just end up eating anything that's sufficiently delicious, tending to prefer vegetarian food when possible. That is, they're basically on the Ethistan diet.

Luckily, I myself was not, and I gotta tell you: it may very well be possible to overdose on meat, even for me. Particularly since Ashnil has a stomach the size of a dime, I ended up feasting so richly on pork, beef and duck that for a while I considered just curling up under a Bo tree in perfect contentment myself, and waiting to attain the Buddha state.

Eventually, though, I decided that - having come all this way - I should at least go see the giant Buddha.

Sporting some wicked cornrows and ears the size of a man, the mighty Buddha overlooked a valley full of natural beauty, his serenity marred only by a profusion of Indian tourists who insisted on shouting at each other at the top of their lungs from every direction (perhaps because they, alone out of everybody, couldn't read the "keep silent" signs).

Surrounded by statues of lesser exemplars of perfection (bodhisattvas, folks who remained mortal despite qualifying for Nirvana), the Buddha sat atop a massive monument, crowning one of the highest hills in the region. The view from up there was an amazing one, including all manner of other statues, inscribed gates, plazas, temples and wide open areas for prayer, as well as a wealth of natural beauty in the form of forests, mountains, crumbling weathered stones, meadows and waterfalls. Save for the cable-car linking the area to Hong Kong proper, this place existed outside of the influence of modern life, set apart as a spiritual (and touristic) haven for the appreciation of the richness of Buddhist life.

In actual fact, this may not even be the second-largest Buddha in the world, since apparently Ashnil was wrong about that part (or perhaps trying to throw me off the scent of his countrymen), but I really couldn't see the point of building a Buddha bigger than this one, and was suitably inspired by having seen this one, to the point where I probably wouldn't be that impressed by one that's slightly bigger. The important part, after all, was the temple complex surrounding it, and the isolation and natural beauty of this area coupled with the carvings, iconography and agressive untethered livestock essentially equalled a rich, concentrated experience of monastic and cultural interest that I can't see another temple easily replicating - however large their Buddha.

At first, I must admit that I found the whole thing a little samey. After the giant Buddha, the actual temple complex and such was pretty much exactly the same as every one of the many such temples we had seen back in Japan (well, I say 'we', but after we got separated at the Buddha, Ashnil apparently couldn't find his way through the trees to the temple proper, and thus missed out on that part of the experience).

As my parents can attest, I need a fair bit of variety for any kind of sightseeing to hold my interest, and the fact that this complex looked to me exactly like the one in the center of Tokyo (Meiji Shrine, to be precise) made me yawn and roll my eyes. Where were the unique Chinese touches? One might point to the Chinese characters everywhere in place of the Japanese - but actually, the Buddhist language is not really Chinese nor Japanese, and neither languege is lettered within. What *is* written there is much the same in both countries: in each case, comprehensible only to the monks themselves, and all somewhat obtuse to the lay people. So, yes, with only slight variations, the architecture and decor of temples here and in Japan seemed much the same.

Having expected that all Chinese monks would be ass-kicking Kung Fu types who force every tourist that passes to kick them repeatedly in the balls, and laugh at their puny efforts, I was somewhat disappointed. The butt-kicking here was limited to the ceremonial, and there was not much to be seen on a regular weekend. Sure, I suppose Chinese Buddhists couldn't all be quite as awesome as the Shaolin (nor even the Jews, whose mysterious martial skills are well known), but they could at least have let me boot them in the nuts a few times just to keep up appearances. No fair.

According to the various helpful English plaques, however, this similarity amongst Buddhists is actually one of the most positive traits of their faith. Unlike a lot of the 38,000 or so sects of Christianity, Buddhist denominations (of which there are up to about a thousand, but only really 8 or so main ones) pretty much all get along well and labour to a common purpose, treating all other Buddhists with a deep respect and never once coming to blows over doctrine. Much as I might've enjoyed a bit more variety in their temple's offerings, or maybe just a few roundhouse kicks, I couldn't argue with those statistics. Besides, all religions being equal, when he faces the afterlife the average Buddhist would seem to have at least a 38-times higher chance of being right about everything, provided his overall faith turns out to be the correct one.

If they've never had to fight one another, though, why are these monks so very good at kicking ass?

It only took a bit of careful exploring and the ignoring of a few "no admittance" signs to get a bit deeper into the unique aspects of this particular complex, however.

In particular, this place was big. Very big. Big enough to despair at Ashnil's eyesight if he didn't notice it. Whereas I have seen monasteries that claimed to be self-sustaining before, this is the only place I really would've believed it. The monks tended a vast stretch of grounds consisting of temples, statuary, conference centers, mess halls, accomodation, craftshops, greenhouses and gardens as far as the eye could see. Behind various conveniently unlocked gates, I found rows upon rows of beautiful bonsai trees, huge stretches of potted fruit trees, unfinished carvings, noticeboards bearing newspaper clippings in Chinese and English about various issues of import to the physical and spiritual wellbeing of people in and around China and Hong Kong, and a great deal more.

All about, the temples and bells and gardens and things were a great deal more colourful than I remembered from Japan: not on the outside, but most definitely on the inside. Whereas the exteriors were frightfully generic (though, of course, still very dignified and finely crafted), the interiors were always painted in strong colours, and decorated with a patchwork of symbols, images and emblems so dense they would've made Robert Langdon lay down and weep for joy.

It was this side of the temples I was interested in, and I skulked about for a long time, in both private and public areas, inwardly pretending that I had arrived at this temple as an acolyte, for my induction in the Sutras and the Way of the Open Palm. It was good fun trying to figure out the purpose of the various halls, items, bells, plants, tools and other paraphenalia, and by the time I squeezed down a passage between two buildings to avoid a wayward monk and found myself back at the exit, I had invented quite a rich personal history for the place, almost all of which was undoubtedly bullshit.

The shops and tours and whatnot in the adjoining tourist section around the cable-car stop were also most intriguing, particularly the more expensive stores which showcased the monks' most beautiful and expensive creations.

My favourite stores amongst these sold exquisitely carved statuary made of various semiprecious materials such as marble and Jade and so forth, and it was amazing the way the creators had worked the natural shape, texture and coloration-changes of their materials into harmonious scenes from the Buddhist scriptures which used these traits to excellent effect. There were also shops displaying other intriguing curios such as a downright unnecessarily varied and vivid collection of designer chopsticks, amongst other little finds such as little scrolls bearing calligraphied sutra.

In fact, there was so much to see, and so little time in which to see it (since the queue for the cable-car back was also at least an hour long, and the last car went out at 6 pm), that the least interesting thing to do in the area was to enter the Tourist Trap Theatre and enjoy a pointless animated film about monkeys. By the time I lined up for the return trip in the cable-car, I was quite footsore, and very glad I hadn't opted for the 'trade-up' which meant also getting the movie tickets.

The cable-car trip back was just as picturesque as the arrival-trip, save that this time the encroaching sunset painted the area in vivid colours, temporarily making the outside of the temples, and the surrounding countryside, match the rich colouration of the temple interiors. Although the cable-car windows were annoyingly reflective, and actively fought my attempts to take good pictures (oh, for a polarising filter!), the above may give you some idea of how the sunset lighting set off the most attractive shapes and colours of the natural environment.

We had gotten used to the hustle and bustle of downtown Hong Kong, and had few chances to get any real distance away from the skyscrapers that dominate the skyline. As such, it was a fabulous experience to also see the other side of this region: the natural and spiritual side; and to have the tallest building around as far as the eye could see be a gigantic, finely crafted Buddha, his serene countenance a warm, radiant bronze against the rich greens and browns of the forest and the ethereal blue, pink and gold of the sky.

Back in my series on Japan, I talked about the uncanny assemblages of breakdancing youths that one finds in most of Japan's hipper destinations - and, apparently, just wherever flat spaces are to be found. These gyrating lads and ladies really brought a nighttime stroll to life, and I was pleasantly surprised today to find Hong Kong is not without them. True, Hong Kong's version may be the downmarket alternative, but that only makes it all more accessible to a funky, yet rhythmically challenged dude like myself.

I made this discovery this evening around nightfall, that being when Ashnil and I get off work. I had just demonstrated my lack of physical co-ordination by walking into a door (bathroom and exit doors which would just push open in Australia here have doorknobs you must turn, as I have been painfully reminded numerous times), and we were about to head down to get a bite of dinner (so cheap!) when we heard some particularly loud music and/or shouting from a little down-campus. Eager to see who could get away with causing such a disturbance in the centre of our peaceful university, we wandered over to take a look - and, lo and behold, here was a motley crew of Cantonese dancer types. They were pretty excited, but not quite Japan-style breakdance material as you can see below. That said, it did look like something even I could do, and they did seem to be enjoying themselves...

After each bit of dancing, an excitable dude with a microphone would shout something in Greek (at least, it was all Greek to me), and then everyone would cheer, and more dancing would happen. Noticing me standing there wondering what he might be on about, a few of their number took it upon themselves to educate me in the ways of Cantonese dance. Now, they did tell me their names, but unfortunately this rarely does me much good in this country. Sure, some dude might earnestly tell you his name is Fhggfwy, but is that going to help you pronounce it? No, it’s not. As such, in order to remain an equal-opportunity offender, I typically just give everyone a weird nickname (even the ones with ‘English names’), and leave it at that. As such, let’s just say that it was Cute Glasses Girl who approached me first, and offered to translate what was going on, closely followed by Nurse Guy, a cheerful chubby sort who immediately insisted that I join their group and try to learn the dance.

What the hey, why not? I thought. It was that or head back to my closet and power down for the night. Ash seemed to be getting a little eager to leave what with people LOOKING at him with their EYES (those terrible squinty EYES), but I nevertheless accepted their challenge, and joined them in learning to dance some Asian Disco. Cheers went up as I stepped into the group (the kind of reception some of you folks in Australia could stand to replicate from time to time), and immediately some of the dancers from before began to teach us the moves.

The dance itself was essentially a cross between the Haruhi dance and the Macarena, with a little bit of World of Warcraft thrown in. Tooth Fairy and Whiskers tried to explain to me the meaning behind the song we were dancing to. Despite their efforts, however, about all that came across was "so there’s a big hero, right, he saves this area... and then, well, *waggle eyebrows suggestively*, a girl, right, there’s a girl... um, so, yeah... "). Presumably he and the girl did many sweet things with one another, and hence I was expected to make a lot of heart-shapes with my hands, in-between overly-fast goose-stepping and amateur contortionism. I was sorta getting the hang of things by the end of it, but there was a lot to remember, and it didn’t help that only a few of the ‘instructors’ actually knew how to do it properly, with others - such as Whiskers - trying their level best to ape along, much as I did.

If any of you would like to learn the Asian Macarena for yourselves, then you can totally pick it up from me with I get back, because as you can see in the following montage, I am totally rad. Unfortunately, Ashnil got sick of standing around on the sidelines holding up my camera long before I got any better at this dance, so you’ll just have to imagine how much awesomer I got at doing this by the end (hint: not much). Anyway, rather than finally join in once he no longer had the "I’m filming" excuse, Ash went off home to his own closet. This was just as well, of course: without Ash’s massive sex appeal to confuse and bewilder them (I wonder if he’s collected his harem of cohabitants yet, as anime tradition demands?), the girls all immediately turned to me like iron filings to a magnet. It was Liviu’s time to shine!

The dancing went on for some time, and ended in a big ol’ dance-off, where groups were shunted into the centre one by one, and forced to recall the whole darn sequence of dance-moves all at once, very quickly, for the audience’s amusement.

After the dance-off had officially concluded, Cute Glasses Girl, Hanger-On, Fingers and Nurse Guy invited me to join them for dinner. Now, of course, I had already had dinner that night, but as always, this only served to put me more in the mood for dinner #2, so off we went. As it happened, the entire group regularly ate together in one big block, so this equated to joining the whole lot of ‘em for dinner, since everybody was pretty much heading to the same place.

In so doing, a strange ritual eventuated, whereby just about everyone (or representatives from each group, at least) would come to speak to me in turn. Not, that is, walking in a group and chatting with me, but rather forming a sort of queue, with one or two people chatting with me at a time before moving on, at which point another one or two would detach from the main group and come chat. In this way, I was quickly introduced to way more people than I could conveniently come up with awful nicknames for, and began to feel quite the socialite. Not everyone in Hong Kong speaks English - a fact they conveniently omit from all the ‘English is our second language!’ brochures - but most of ‘em gave it a damn good try, and I was flattered to be subject of so many painstakingly-formed well-wishes. Who knew a bit of extremely sloppy Macarena work could make you so many friends so fast? I’m going to have to do this more often.

They took me to a food court very near the university, which was apparently a hip student hangout. Ashnil and I had skirted it previously, but been redirected elsewhere by a large number of delicious and incredibly cheap dumplings, which we had then spent the rest of the evening shovelling into our mouths. Now, though, I finally went up that one last staircase, and found a world of cunningly-labelled Chinese cuisine at my beck and call (cunning, that is, because I still couldn’t read it). With the exception of a Japanese store, just about every store on this level sold food from one or other part of China - and you don’t truly realise how big a place that is until you see it all lined up for you in a culinary masterpiece of food sorting, serving and displaying. I could essentially travel the country and eat of their greatest hits (so long as, admittedly, I didn’t mind the cheap and greasy version thereof), thus deepening my spiritual kinship with this vast eastern land, as well as saving money with my new Uni Staff card. Truly, it was the perfect unity of the secular and the divine, in my mouth.

As soon as I had ordered my delectable melt-in-the-mouth Shanghai pork, however, the difficulty presented itself of where to eat it. See, I had been getting to know people in rapid-fire mode since leaving the uni, and I felt like a speed-dater trying to choose the girl he liked best. This was an even more apt comparison in my mind, since in the only speed-dating event I have ever attended, gross mismanagement on the part of the organisers resulted in my ‘dating’ a whole lot of greasy Asian guys as well as the girls. In a further (although not technically ironic) coincidence, tonight ended exactly the same way: with me suddenly having a lot more guy friends, and only getting two phone numbers, neither of them from girls I’m likely to call.

As I was saying, I had to decide where to eat it, because several groups of folks by now had staked their claim on me, and were calling for me to join them. In the end, although Whiskers batted her eyelashes most fetchingly, I decided to join Cute Glasses Girl and Nurse Guy’s group, since they had been the ones to invite me. I needn’t have worried about alienating my new friends, however, as I was about to get significantly more popular. My first jump in popularity came when I displayed some of my incredibly poor knowledge of Mandarin, and everyone around me immediately resolved to teach me some Cantonese. Eventually, after a great many shouted instructions, I was able to form a sentence asking the waitress for a drink. Buoyed up by the crowd’s support, I proceeded to get up with a flourish, clear my throat, walk over to the counter, and begin to speak the first syllable, at which point the waitress gave me a flat look and immediately handed me the drink I was about to ask for.

Sheepishly I sat down, and ended up talking to Fingers for a while before the subject of my camera was broached. Needless to say, since I had been carrying a camera the size of my head for some time, people were eager to see some of my photographs. There were some oohs and aahs as I described where I had been in the last few days, and showed them some of the nicer pictures I had taken. By this stage, a bit of a was starting to gather (some perhaps wondering how they might best pilfer some of the millions of Hong Kong dollars of equipment I had just pulled casually out of my backpack...), and it wasn’t long before Tooth Fairy showed up to say hi, and to ask if I had any photos of Australia to show them.

Put on the spot, I replied that I might have some of Sydney and surrounds, but wasn’t really in the habit of taking a lot of photos of places I went all the time. Gamely, I searched through my iPhoto library, and finally realised that I actually DID have a great many photographs of the inner city, rather good ones too, which we had taken back when my grandmother had come to visit Australia a couple of years ago. This lead to a rather unique bit of showmanship, with me surrounded by a growing number of Asian university students, and pointing out the choice bits of Australian geography and geology in increasingly laboured terms: "this is Grandma standing in front of the Sydney Opera House", "and here, you can see Grandma is lying in the grass of the Royal Botanical Gardens...", "my university is just about a kilometer from where my grandmother is standing now", "as you can see here behind my Grandma, the Australian coastline is made of dramatic structures of weathered sandstone...", "if you look just at the edge of the image, there’s a reflection of Grandma in what is actually the window of the Queen Victoria Building, a landmark which you can almost see here on Grandma’s left in the picture where she...".

Against the odds, people kept piling in, eventually resulting in my hearing some broken English a ways behind me to the effect of "What happening?", a few quick exchanges in Cantonese, "Guy is showing pictures of his Grandmother... I think."

"... what?"

Needless to say, it was at this point that I realised how unusual a scene this had become, and decided that it was time to stop with the show and tell, and maybe capitalise on my popularity by getting to know a few more of the young ladies in the room. Unfortunately, as soon as my grandmother was out of the picture, a lot of the interest ran out. Apparently, when it came to holding the interest of a crowd, I had a lot left to learn from my dear ol’ Gran, so there was little for it but to start once again from scratch. Unfortunately, I never much got that chance, as it was just then that the lights dimmed, the shops shut their doors, and we were all ushered out into the hallways. Here, since they were mostly heading back to "The Hall" (a different accommodation to mine), there was a hurried conversation regarding whether I could find my way back. I assured these caring souls that there was no way a great Australian explorer like myself could ever get lost on the way back home, and took my leave of them, orienting myself at the exit door and dramatically walking face-first into it.

Feeling slightly sheepish, I fumbled for the doorknob, opened it up as they looked on bemusedly, and strode confidently out into the gloom, and then around the corner.

For a little while, I just stood there, looking at the lights of the city, the cars going by, the many layers of upper-and-lower roads and crossings that made up this multi-layered city, wondering where on God’s green Earth I was. I then tried to work out how this door - which should have brought me homeward - had suddenly taken me here. Eventually, I realised that all of the exits at the bottom of the last staircase I had passed had been identical, and I’d simply walked in the wrong direction. Further, I realised that the correct way to walk had in fact been the same way all the others had gone, and that there was no other way. As such, of course, roughly two to three minutes after my dramatic exit, I shuffled downstairs and hurried past a group of chatting students. With the same bemused expression, a few of them noticed me, and watched me go... but no-one said a word.

I got home a little after 1 am, and promptly collapsed into bed as I am known to do at home, before remembering that my bed here is an unyielding block of wood and quickly resolving never, ever to do that again. As it turned out, ironically since I was the one who had gone out with a large number of girls whereas he had headed home, Ashnil had had a little adventure of his own that night, and it had involved a good deal more sauciness and a whole lot less elderly relatives than had mine.

But that, of course, is a story for him to tell. So maybe, if you’re good, he’ll do a guest post!

Today, as attested by my dwindling bank balance, was the first exposure I had to the shopping scene of Hong Kong.

I don't mean the 'retail' shopping scene, having already encountered every variety of overpriced fashion. I mean the *real* reason you go shopping in Hong Kong: computer parts and bootleg software!

This morning, we jumped in a taxi to the Golden Cyber City, a massive underground complex dealing in every form of electronic mayhem imaginable. Here, in the artificial chill lay technological chaos, a universe of tiny, gadget-studded stores hawking everything from the cheapest computer crap imaginable to some amazing (and unfortunately rather expensive) top-of-the-line gear. Newly released computer games could be had at $5 a pop (with labels and DVDs printed to almost a professional standard…), and everything was negotiable!

It quickly became clear that a lot of very good equipment could be bought here very cheaply, and would even be assembled, etc., on the spot by the helpful service folk (who even go pick up the necessary parts from the surrounding stores for you, if you ask them to). What was also clear was that the better quality a product was, the less the price-difference would be between the Hong Kong price and what you would get in Australia (not counting negotiation, of course). As such, the kinds of things I would normally buy weren't really all that discounted - with the notable exception of a few things, such as graphics cards. There was, however, a much wider spectrum of dodginess than you would ever otherwise see: every brand-name product had a cheap Chinese knock-off, and every cheap Chinese knock-off had a few of its own carbon-copy clones. If I had wanted to stray from my usual policy of buying top-quality gear, and been willing to puzzle my way through a couple of shifty driver installs ("Windows cannot verify the authenticity of driver '?????????gs550?? ?? ????'. Installation is not recommended. Would you like to install anyway?"), I could've probably kitted out a fine new machine… but that wasn't really what I was interested in.

What interested me was the vast, neatly sorted collection of awesome optical equipment, particularly the high-end Nikkor lenses. As a result of this dizzying level of choice, I have expanded my lens collection significantly, which is allowing me to take some much more interesting shots (such as the 'Happy Ash' you saw in yesterday's post). In so doing, even considering discounts, I have spent at least sixteen thousand dollars… which may be the most I've ever spent on any kind of trip, albeit in the much less weighty Hong Kong dollars.

After splurging rather an extreme amount of cash on lenses, I had to distract myself to keep from ordering more. Luckily, for me, this may very well be the best place to lose track of reality for a while, ever imagined. Practically every surface is covered with one kind or another of TV, and I have always been partial to the way they put together bands in Asian countries. Whereas MTV and other such purveyors of depravity have somehow garnered the impression that what the public wants to see in music videos is gang warfare, abstract pattern bullshit and chicks with nose-rings breaking shit, the Chinese and other Asian countries still remember that all that is truly necessary for a great music clip is that it include hot girls in nice outfits. Rather than freaky it up with the fashionable bullshit of the week, they take the altogether sensible step of taking what works, and multiplying it. As such, there's nary a music clip in sight here that doesn't feature at least twenty girls, all of them hot, wearing all kinds of nice colour co-ordinated outfits that maintain a comfortable ratio on the skimpiness-to-frills spectrum. The sight of that many hot girls shakin' their bon-bons in unison, coupled with the fact that every surface is beaming out a different such clip, and the TVs are arrayed at odd angles and in all shapes and sizes, up and down the interior walls makes for an effect that is downright hypnotic.

I'm not sure quite how long I stood there watching, but I was pretty hungry by the end of it, so I shrugged out of my daze and wandered off to get some food. Well, actually, I wandered right into a section that looked like the exit I had come from, but which turned out to be a clandestine pornography store (I guess they know their audience). As it happens, the bright lights and shifting landmarks of the underground cyber city made it quite a pain to navigate. Eventually, though, I managed to find my way back to the exit I had come from, to go check out the food stores of the regular-type city above.

It was then that I saw my first truly Chinese restaurant: heralded only by a massive snakeskin bandolier, this small, dingy little shop-front reminiscent of a fish-and-chip store departed slightly from this image by the fact that its walls were lined with the pickled carcasses of reptiles of all shapes and sizes. Each of these displayed prominently what it would cost you to get the jar unsealed, and the hapless creature within turned into fritters.

Adamant as I have been throughout that I simply have to try some dog over here, my list of culinary desires didn't stretch quite as far as the mashed-up shells of baby tortoises, nor even the abjectly horrifying bloated eyes of some kind of shrivelled wormy alligator thing. I'd like to try something exciting over here, but there is certainly a limit even to my adventurous impulses, and it was staring eerily back at me from inside a hundred tiny jars.

I did, however, fully appreciate the smooth business model of attracting people to look inside with live snakes on display, cooking those snakes to serve to your guests once they're in there, and then finally trying to sell them accessories such as belts and purses made from their dinner's untreated hide. (Man, those belts looked ratty!)

I wasn't quite impressed enough with the store to want to hang around much longer, though, since the flayed white bodies of googly-eyed snakes are kinda creepy. As such, I decided to get out while the getting was good. It wasn't much longer until we got the call from the worker drones we had enlisted to do the real work of purchasing computer parts and building the machines for us (I love this country's convenience!), and suddenly we had fully set-up, specced-out computers all ready to go. That meant it was time to head back to the uni and get to setting up our fantastic multimedia lab!

We dumped the computers in the lab in the early afternoon, and realised right off that we would need a few more components in order to be using these computers as much more than ashtrays. After a brief inquiry, we were told that there was a network administrator called Ryan whom we would have to contact if we wanted certain cables and network hardware. His name was Ryan, and he would become the cause of a great deal of friction between Ashnil and myself.

When initially we were instructed to call Ryan, I asked Ashnil to do it, only to be steadfastly resisted, and told to damn well call the guy myself. Fair enough, I went and called Ryan, but he wasn't at his desk. As such, I headed back to my desk and asked Ash to call again in a few minutes. Here's where the trouble started. Ash said no, and this time I decided that it would be shameful for the guy who was supposed to be in charge of this debacle to once again back down and go call Ryan personally. I mean, how am I supposed to manage an employee when I can't even get him to call some asshole down in tech support, a task which would take maybe a minute?

I told him to get his ass over to the phone. Ashnil refused. It was clear that this was no mere phone-call to him, no small one-minute task. This was tantamount to speaking with a waitress. It just wasn't DONE.

And so, the game was afoot. Ashnil delay-tacticed. I pulled rank. Ashnil tried flattery. I tried threats. We alternated cajoling, arguing, blustering, handwaving, all punctuated by a common thread of "Call Ryan; CALL RYAN; YOU FUCKING CALL RYAN!"

Needless to say, we were deadlocked. Even though it was a trivial task, neither of us even considered calling Ryan. We each set to other tasks and rushed around between rooms, each occasionally shouting at the other to CALL RYAN. Both frustrated with the other's stubborn refusal to even entertain the idea, we ended up locked in this stalemate for hours, thousands of dollars of computer equipment lying forgotten and unopened on the laboratory floor.

That night, the Professor showed up from out of nowhere, expecting the lab to be finished, the equipment all set up. Grinning, he asked me to take him on 'the tour'. I paled considerably. "Uh, you see… mumble mumble… technical support… mumble… Ryan…"

"You say, Ryan not supporting our students? I make a phone call, hold on," he said, reaching for his magic phone of problem-solving.

"No! Nonono, I'm sure… I'm sure he was just really busy…" I lied, sweating. "We've, um, been calling him all da-"

Waving me off, the Professor held the phone to his frowning face. "I call him now, just wait."

"I, no, Sir, I - we, um, we've had a lot to do anyway, and there's not much time left in the day. Why don't we, um, wait until tomorrow? We'll, uh, call him again, ourselves."

I was rather tempted at that point to roll over on Ash and point out my lengthy chat logs of "CALL RYAN, YOU BASTARD", but I figured that isn't what friends do (even if they are ostensibly in charge ). Luckily, the Professor dropped the matter at this point. Not that that was the end of it: I went over to scowl at Ash a whole lot and tell him what a mess we were in because he hadn't frikkin' CALLED RYAN. Blandly, he looked up from his work and suggested that in that case, I better go do it myself. Ungrateful bastard!

Needless to say, this started the back-and-forth all over again, flooding the airwaves with CALL RYAN until well into the night, at which point both of us went home, plugged into the internet there, and proceeded to spam each other about bloody well calling Ryan yet again. This was followed by another phase of scheming how we might avoid calling Ryan for long enough that the other one would be forced to do so first. Our last messages to one another were, of course, CALL RYAN.

The next day, we found out Ryan had gone on long-service leave a month ago.

There was no Ryan.

Today started the way a lot of my days here in China have started: poisoned by the local foodstuffs. Don't get me wrong, the food is marvellous (and did I mention cheap?!), but it certainly is a heavy-hitter when it comes to the ol' immune system. Some people's bodies just aren't optimised to filter microscopic fungus out of rancid dog meat passed off as Moo Shoo pork, and I guess mine is of that number. As such, I wandered in a little pale in the face today, and certainly later than usual.

Given my desire to avoid inflaming my body's humors further, I decided to steer well clear of the usual greasy fare in favour of a healthy alternative. This is surprisingly difficult to do in this country: presumably, if it hasn't been run through a few deep friers, food isn't fit to eat. Luckily for me, the eating at this university is a great deal more varied than at Sydney - and as a staff member I have access to the exclusive Staff Canteen, which is essentially a restaurant whose menu changes regularly based on the time of day. At breakfast today, therefore, I did happen to spot something on the menu that looked reasonably healthy: namely soup.

Ahh, excellent. What could be better than a nice hot soup to soothe away my ills? I ordered that.

"Will that be Western or Chinese soup?" the serving lady asked, in significantly worse English than that.

"Well, we're in China after all. Let's make it a Chinese soup, thank you."

Meal tickets were scribbled, a harsh shriek of syllables was directed at the kitchen, and I was shortly sitting down next to Ash. He tucked into a hearty breakfast, as I lifted the ceramic lid on my small pot of Chinese soup to reveal a featureless brown muck. Looking over with interest, sniffing slightly, and then wrinkling his nose, Ashnil went back to chowing down eagerly as I experimentally tested the waters with my spoon. The lukewarm brown paste bubbled up some soft gray lumps of something hairy. It reminded me of the eyeball soup from Indiana Jones.

Cringing slightly, I scooped one slowly out and took a bite. The texture was that of old newspaper, the flavour was what I imagine Mr. Miyagi's beard might've tasted like if you shaved it off, boiled it, and rolled it in oatmeal. The soggy, hairy mess, once swallowed, did not rest easily in my already-queasy stomach, and the wash of tepid brown sludge that followed did little to keep it down. For one of the few times in my life, I pushed away my meal almost untouched, got up, and went back to order another. Russian-style beef in onion sauce might've been a bit rich for my condition, but I'd be damned if that meant I was going to eat watered-down, mashed-up cigarette-butts instead.

As it turned out, I felt better almost immediately after wolfing down that fine, beefy breakfast. Perhaps, as with liquor, it is the hair of the dog that bit you which sorts you out in the end. So long as it's not in your soup, at least. To-date, my plan of solving stomach upsets with more eating is working out fabulously well, with the only caveat being that it probably only serves to perpetuate the cycle. I suppose I could starve myself for a bit, just to let it all out of my system, but with the general air quality around here I have my doubts as to whether I will be able to get Hong Kong completely out of my system until at least a few months after I leave.

With regard to starving, however, I was surprised to find that it is a popular hobby among the female half of society, here. To someone like me, who eats two dinners and usually two lunches, this is pretty shocking - although, admittedly, it should come as no particular surprise. It just seemed to me, I suppose, that the girls here were somehow more sensible - or at least so serious about their work that they had no time for such frivolities as anorexia. I had noticed that a lot of them are exceedingly small and thin, of course, but then I'm generally told God makes 'em small in this part of the world, and it has nothing much to do with shoddy eating habits.

In actual fact, however, that is not the whole story. I know this because every time I offer a young lady one of my snacks (everything is individually wrapped around here, so it seems tailor-made for sharing), she will typically demur by saying that she's keeping fit. Usually I would take this to mean she probably just doesn't want any Lindt (so cheap here!), but it's a fact that no-one in their right mind refuses Lindt, and it struck me as odd that they all tend to answer in about the same words. In the Hong Kong English parlance, 'fit' appears to be the opposite of 'fat', and since there aren't really many gyms about (that I could see), this is achieved by refusing to eat anything at all between certain scientifically-determined hours.

This, of course, leaves a great many very cheap sweets for the rest of us. The store pictured above actually sells all of its sweets by weight: it's all quality stuff, and (if I remember correctly) you can ladle as much of it out as you want, from almost anywhere in the store, and pay only $88 Hong Kong Dollars per pound. That's a lotta chocolates!

At any rate, today was a day spent largely on our work, so I won't bore you with the details. Rather, I would like to mention the remarkable transformation in our research group's illustrious leader. See, within the scope of our duties here in Hong Kong, we are actually able to quite regularly engage in a bit of téte-a-téte with the bigwigs. Moreover, these get-togethers are no longer dreaded grillings in their office, scheduled late at night, occurring once every few months. Rather, we are invited into pleasant little antechambers with sofas and cups and Oolong tea, and a friendly atmosphere of camaraderie and shared experiences ensues. On the other hand, this is also the first time our Professor has talked to us in his full capacity as a paragon of learning, rather than as a kooky old guy who loves talking about China and throws pizza parties. Finding out at this late stage how frightfully competent he really is - even if we have known it all along, at least on a theoretical level - is quite a thing.

See, when I was first imagining what doing a PhD would be like, I imagined getting up early, wandering down to the library, sitting down in an old british-style sofa with a stack of books and making a whole lot of notes, while maybe discussing Socrates or Artificial Intelligence with my fellow boffins, perhaps smoking the odd pipe of tobacco-free, imitation pipe-weed in-between cups of tea. I imagined research trips to far-flung locations, and days spent powering on for some worthwhile purpose, not even noticing when the sun has gone down because you're too busy unravelling the mysteries of life. Then, of course, I experienced the reality of PhD candidacy, which essentially revolved around the same day of boring office-work repeated ad nauseum, downloading boring-ass math papers and coding 'til your eyes fall out, if you even have the time in-between the constant report-writing, presentations and working on the higher-ups' projects.

Now, long after I had given up on my imagined scenario, I have suddenly been thrust into the middle of almost exactly that environment. Everyone here is incredibly passionate about their work, the supervisor-student relationship is a close, nurturing one, people share their knowledge in comfortable studies over cups of tea, and I am treated like a valuable, free-thinking agent. I suddenly have my own responsibilities and the ability to manage my own time and activities. Further, I get to actually be social with the person who's been in charge of my studies from far, far away all this time.

The Professor is rather pleasant to spend time with, in this context, even if he does tend to make me feel rather ignorant. He even took the time to give us a tour of the place, and has often stopped for long chats throughout the day. Accustomed to maybe getting a few minutes of his super-valuable time, late at night, if we're lucky, we felt at first a little like we were sitting in a cab with the meter running. It wasn't until he began to tell us about rooftop gardening, and give us the theory of window-allocation in the building that we realised that he really, truly was just being social.

At least until we learned his true agenda, for everything he says has a purpose, and the shocking truth about the windows was about to be revealed...

If you read a lot of Dan Brown, you know that many of the buildings whose shapes we take for granted were actually laid out very precisely along numerological lines. Hidden meanings in the number and shape of various accoutrements can lead to all kinds of realisations in these stories. Typically, these will send Robert Langdon on some intercontinental wild-goose chase. In our case, they allowed our Professor to communicate a powerful message. Just by being here, by being included in the close counsels of the people we'd just met, we had risen steeply in the academic hierarchy. Become the doers of great things. The hands and feet of the great and powerful.

Some time ago, when the University was first laid out, he told us, special care had been taken to ensure that in this building, every postdoctoral fellow (the dudes with the fancy doctor-hats, the people who have been our bosses for our entire academic career) would receive his own window. The window was a status symbol, carefully measured and withheld from all but the worthy. As such, of course, it was a rare and special individual for whom the building architects had made the special allocation of a double-window. Two windows. These people were the movers and shakers, directing the movements of their lower cohorts, the sort of people with which lowly students like ourselves should count ourselves lucky to be associated. To have two windows was to move in the circles of power.

With a more reverent tone, he went on to mention that some few offices, those specially placed at junctions, on the lines of power, might have three windows. Three windows. If your title didn't say "Professor" somewhere in it, you could just forget about three windows. It was the elite who had three windows. The Rainmakers. The leaders of men. We might speak to them, and they to us, but they operated on another level. The blessing of their time was as a gift, not lightly given. He mentioned how we had already spoken closely, on a personal level, with the kind of men who could control the very apex of our future. Build us up or snuff us out, with but a wave of their Godly hand. It was our peril, and our opportunity. We were on a level, now, with greatness.

Here, he stopped, moving seamlessly from this building's architecture into a discussion of Hong Kong's fantastic skyline, rooftop gardens, and the beauteous man-made surrounds. There was some chatter, friendly banter, the opening up and bonding we had never really done before. We smiled, we chatted, and at a well-timed portion of the speech, he mentioned the excellent view of rooftop gardens and the like outside his office. With one hand, he slowly levered up the venetians, stilling our chatter. He remarked only on the fabulous view, but then he didn't have to say out loud what all of us could plainly see.

Ash and I looked at each other apprehensively. The Professor cut a dramatic figure in the rosy light. Behind him, silhouetted against the sunset over Hong Kong's rooftop gardens, a dark outline stood out plainly, no longer hidden by the blinds.

Four windows.

It occurs to me that I haven't really showed you guys where I live yet, except through the occasional anecdote. It's about time I remedied that, so here's a bit of a look at my apartment.

What you are looking at here is the common area of the apartment. This is shared space, which may at any point be populated with random people you don't know, who have been given keys to the apartment by he Powers That Be at the University. The uni owns this entire apartment building, and provides us with a wireless router (nobody knows the password to this, so I'm just glad I brought a really long Ethernet cable from home), some ancient cookware, and a colour TV that nobody ever uses. Scattered about the common area are a variety of bags, documents and expired foodstuffs. These, after some discussion with my roommate, I discovered didn't actually belong to anyone who hadn't left long ago, which allowed me the distinct pleasure of cleaning out the last of the junk (shown above), as well as an obscured and horrible can of 'iced tea' which had grown something entirely non-tea-like in the bottom.

Let's take a look at the part of this apartment that is actually mine: Room 1.

My room is, as you know, incredibly tiny. It consists of roughly six square feet of space, wherein I have an old swivel chair, an unstable little desk, a cramped wardrobe with no coathangers and a rock-hard plank to sleep on, covered over with a mysteriously stained ugly bedspread and an even more stained bedsheet with a green-and-brown design depicting what can only be described as 'soiled leaves'.

Despite the air-conditioner, and partly because of it, this room is never quite pleasant to live in. See, it's either incredibly stuffy and hot from the lack of airflow and intolerable Hong Kong heat, or it is unpleasantly cold (there's no actual temperature setting for the air-con), and incredibly noisy (since silent air-conditioning would, of course, be un-heard-of in a bedroom).

The bathroom is also an adventure, with space just as cramped as my bedroom ensuring that there's no way to shower without getting the entire room wet. Add to that the fact that the fan doesn't really work, the 'instant water heater' has two settings: 'off' or 'shoot incredibly hot boiling water at Liv's crotch'. As advertised, it switches between these settings instantly.

Next to the water heater is a small fan which doesn't appear to improve ventilation even a little, generally serving only to make the window-panes rattle and look like they're going to fall off. The mirror in the bathroom appears to have largely rusted away (do mirrors rust? is it only Hong Kong mirrors?), requiring you to duck and lean sideways in order to see yourself in it - making otherwise routine bathroom operations just that much more fun. Finally, there is the toilet, which - as you know by now - has a roughly one-in-three chance per flush of overflowing, spraying water in every direction, and then emptying its cistern all over the bathroom floor.

After getting more of a chance to talk to my roommate, I found out a great deal more about this apartment than just which of the garbage in here is owned by somebody, and which powerpoints were safe to use: I also found out why accomodation here was so cheap.

See, I had spoken with some Hong Kong natives about my accomodation, occasionally mentioning the general level of squalor and suggesting that this might've been why I got the room cheap. Every time I had done that, the natives had refused to be convinced. Hung Hom, they said, was an upmarket district (or, at least, well positioned relative to Hong Kong's center and the university). Even after I mentioned the fun-park toilet and the odd mildewy smell, they seemed surprised I'd gotten it so cheap.

And, well, now I know why:

I had been quite enchanted with the whole scene outside my home for a while. Beautiful floral arrangements were being made daily on just about every street corner (God knows where they keep getting the fresh flowers for it all), stonemasons and artisans were carving lovely plaques with gold-leafed Chinese characters. All around it was a hustle and bustle of handicrafts and activity. As an information worker, a class of person utterly useless to any society below a certain point of development, I very respect the skills of anyone who can create something worthwhile with their hands.

But I never thought to question what it was all for.

Turns out, these big ol' attractive floral arrangements - far from being lovely things to give on Valentine's Day - actually exist entirely for the purpose of being incinerated in a massive bonfire in a funeral ceremony.

The final send-off of the rich and famous would involve a great many of these giant floral arrangements, as well as the artistic displays of Hell money, and other various weirdness. The beautiful chinese pottery they sell around here is in fact a selection of funeral urns to hold the ashes after the whole mess is set alight. The candles and cushions and lovely silk hangings, likewise created to go up in smoke. The lovely plaques with gold-leafed Buddhas on them and whatnot were the grave-markers to install atop the urn.

The Chinese are a superstitious people, and if you are too then the odds just went up in the office-pool. As it turns out, I live in what is essentially Death Alley: a part of town most right-thinking Chinese people avoid out of hand, because living here is the worst of bad juju. Surrounded by the artifice of death, I - who have been cheerfully wandering around taking pictures of it all, and wondering why people occasionally made strange hand gestures or refused to let me photograph them - only paid so little for my squalid apartment not because it is a shithole, but because it is the Hong Kong equivalent of a haunted house full of bloodstains.

And, well, come to think of it there was that strange brown stain on my pillow.

That said, let it not be inferred that Bad Juju will keep any Chinese man or woman from laying out a sumptious meal of fish and crabs. Which is just as well. I'm not so much against living in an accursed district of scary-death-stuff if it also contains a relatively cheap lobster dinner.

And they do serve a damn fine lobster dinner.

Besides, the Bad Juju clearly doesn't work on skinny foreign assholes. Not only have I been receiving an unusual number of compliments lately - from girls, mostly, some of whom think my hair looks 'wonderful', and also (incredibly) from Ash - but just as I was about to head to sleep for the night, a one of the girls I had made friends with recently invited me out on a date!

That's not so bad, now, is it?

That's right. It's Swiss.

Envious?

Well, you should be.

I got this baby for $3.

That's right, campers: this was the day I went for my big trip to the Hong Kong markets, to get my hands on all of the quality Chinese merchandise that makes Hong Kong the world leader in fine touristy bullshit.

The day actually started, however, with something doubly out of character: I went on a date with a friendly Chinese lass, and I did this without carrying along my usual tens of thousands of HK dollars in camera equipment. I felt almost naked without it, a plethora of weird stuff going by unphotographed, but overall I think it was the right idea, even if it does mean no sugar for you guys.

With this occasion, I got to try out yet another new flavour: Guangdong food. The Guangdong province may be (from what I managed to put together) the place responsible for all of those superdelicious Chinese dumplings. As such, their food is a fine mix of yummies sharing some of the characteristics of dumplings. Basically a variety of stuff steamed in a soft, doughy outer shell. All of which, incidentally, will remain VERY HOT on the inside, even when the exterior has cooled... not that I burned my tongue finding this out or nothin'.

The most exotic of these fine Guangdong dishes (which were served in small portions, yum cha style) was something my date could not pronounce the name of to my satisfaction. The harder she tried to render the name in English, the more it sounded like "Rice Dick". It could well be that this was exactly what she meant, since the dish consisted of a plateful of pale white shlongs. These were basically weird, veiny white sausages, bulging at the ends. Sticking these in the dipping sauce (aside from being vaguely sensual) was a tricky experience, since they were extremely slippery and prone to falling apart. They were, however, delicious.

After eating out with my lady friend, I had some time to kill before my planned excursion to the markets, having been offered a bit of a tour thereof by my roommate, who - after witnessing my rapid-fire lifestyle - had wished to prove to me that her own life was not 'dull' (not that I'd said any such thing, of course... although I may have been thinking it).

In the interim, I wanted to go see something for myself. See, we'd been told earlier in the week that one reason we were working such obscenely long hours was because Saturday was no longer considered a work-day, those extra hours having been appended to the regular working days within the week. Ashnil, however, with his insatiable need to kiss just a little more ass than the next guy, had told the Professor that he, for one, would be putting in the hours on Saturday anyway. Because he's just such an incredibly efficient guy.

Leaving aside the fact that incredible efficiency would've meant finishing his work during the week, I simply had to see for myself whether he'd actually do it. The uni being a short walk from where I'd be meeting my roommate, I popped on up to check on Ashnil, and say hi to all the girls (who had a paper deadline, and hence an actual reason to be there).

Incredibly, he really was there. After we'd both put in in a full week's work-hours, plus the extra hours to make up for Saturday, plus about an hour or so extra per day, here he was doing the same thing again. I sorta felt bad for ol' Ashnil when I saw this, remembering a time when I had been like that. After all, when work is the only thing you're good at, and social events are typically awkward or embarassing, it's tempting to get really, really good at work and pretend nothing else exists. Unable to coax him away, I went and got a few tourism tips off the ladies, then left Ash to his devices.

When I met up with my roommate shortly thereafter, I showed her my plans for the day. We're not talking Ash-style manila folder, here, it was simply a short list of interesting places.

Taking one look at my list, she started to laugh. As it happened, I had apparently plotted out quite a common tour path... through the ladies' markets. Bewildered, I told her that it was the markets I was looking to see. Patiently, she explained: there were two main market paths in Hong Kong, and I was not welcome on this one. There were the Men's markets (which, incidentally, also welcome the ladies wholeheartedly), and then there were the Ladies' markets (which no self-respecting straight dude ought to be caught dead in).

I'm quite glad that she explained this, since I really wouldn't want to end up in the female shopping districts of this city. As, she told me, was common with Southern Chinese ladies, women go to market primarily to buy weird, disgusting shit to eat and/or rub on their face, so as to remain ageless and unmarked by time.

Here, seafood does double-duty as medicine / beauty product, and ladies will eat and drink the most unusual of ingredients (birds' nests, for instance), so long as they contain the necessary proteins to help them remain beautiful forever. Having already purchased a 'dessert' aimed at the ladies (containing aloe and other herbal remedies) myself, a concoction which my roommate explained was not meant to taste good, I was just as happy to skip the ladies' market altogether. My roommate assured me that there wasn't some super-secret saucy lingerie section at the heart of it, so whatever madness they were cooking up in there, they were welcome to it.

As it turned out, the sexy lingerie was actually in the Mens' market, anyway.

The day was quite an adventure of city-wandering, and I took full advantage of having someone along who knew the city to give full reign to my explorer's spirit. Whenever I would wander off toward an alley of some sort, she would either compliment my good eye for bargains, and tell me that some new wonder awaited beyond, or she would stop me and point out in hushed tones that I should turn around and avoid looking directly at anyone.

With this kind of excellent advice, the day became an even greater success: I was able to get the full breadth of the market experience, and come out with both of my kidneys intact. Moreover, she even knew where the safe places to eat were, resulting in a day that was as delicious as it was educational.

Just about anything you can think of is on offer at these fine Hong Kongian markets. They innovate, however, not merely in variety but in price. Variety, after all, isn't terribly new here in this city. I don't think there is a desire my brain is capable of framing which I won't find sold conveniently somewhere within a 30 minute walk of my apartment.

In the markets, however, I can have it even cheaper - or purchase a reasonable facsimile at a bare fraction of the price. Whether it's a dinner, a lens, a live frog, a swiss watch or a backrub, you can't go far wrong with the deals you'll find down here.

One thing I noticed, however, is that while you're welcome to negotiate loudly all you like, merchants will get very offended if you ask them for prices on things. On the assumption that you will use these so-called 'official prices' to comparison-shop with other vendors, they refuse to put price-labels on most things, and require you to signal an intent to buy before they'll tell you.

Once you signal said intent, of course, they start on the hard sell, and they won't be satisfied until you pay them and then walk away with the item you want. One of them helpfully suggested that they were simply cutting out the middleman, for your convenience: "You get one price here, then maybe get another price over the street, you compare, you walk around - so much of hassle. Is why, here, we are not display all the prices. You want buy, we give you BEST price. Save the trouble. Simple as that, understand?"

While it's hard to argue with the BEST price, there's always a better price, and a couple little tidbits I learned today might help you out if ever you need to pick up a choice item in a street market.

Firstly, these merchants are allergic to letting a customer walk away - particuarly a foolish westerner who doesn't know the value of his moneys. Once you've watched them work a couple of times, it's easy enough to see what these merchants are doing. Initially, they are suggesting items largely to discover the price-bracket in which you are interested in buying. Once they're reasonably sure of this, they'll offer you a product in that bracket, all the while trying to inflate the ballpark figure through the careful administration of helpful, but ever more expensive product-suggestions and trade-ups in line with your apparent desire.

The catch is this: if you allow them to drag you toward a higher purchase, then question the competitiveness of their prices, start to walk away (to go compare prices), and then ask them again for a lower-priced item (seemingly as an afterthought), they will typically drop the value on that item significantly (as a loss-leader, though I doubt they make an actual loss), so as to attract you towards buying the more expensive item (unless of course it's a trade-up). If you play your cards right, working out the merchant's "script" can allow you to short-circuit the process by playing it out to where it's most beneficial for you, and then mercilessly cutting it off as the advantage goes back to them.

Secondly, merchants have developed their script from long experience, and are resistant to change in the process. If you manage to rattle them, however, they won't know how to react, and you can pick up a great bargain if you're lucky.

The best way I have found of doing this, I discovered inadvertently. See, most merchants here speak a little English and a lot of Mandarin, but their main language is Cantonese, and this is how they're used to doing most of their negotiating. If you happen to have a handy roommate along who speaks Mandarin, and present yourself (the ignorant English-speaking foreigner) as the buyer, it's possible to give even the most canny of merchants a run for their money.

As an unreasonable, irritating foreigner type with altogether too many banknotes in his wallet, it will be easy for you to frustrate the merchant, as they attempt to bargain with you and you understand next to nothing of what they say, and/or deliberately misinterpret things when they happen to suit you. If, at this point, you begin to use your Mandarin-speaking friend as an interpreter, turning every bargaining exchange into an endless game of (quite literally) Chinese whispers, you can sometimes put the merchant off their game sufficiently to have them give up on getting a bit more cash out of you, and agree to some pretty ridiculous prices.

Be well warned, however. Trying to replicate these tricks (or develop them over the course of a day) may very well leave a few moths and a ball of lint in your wallet, where about a thousand bucks were sitting earlier that morning.

To round out this fine day of marketeering, I took my roommate's advice on a part of the market-visiting experience that could not be missed at any cost. That, she said, was to eat in a food-market.

Now, the term 'food-market' conjures up images of some kind of vast open space teeming with fresh produce. Far from it, however, an actual food-market in Hong Kong is much like any of the other markets: an unlicensed expanse of squatters with stalls, peddling whatever they like in the middle of the street.

Turns out, therefore, that what she really meant was that you haven't really had the full market experience until you've had to shuffle your table out of the way a few times to allow a large truck to drive directly through your restaurant. Luckily for me, it is an experience that's rather hard to avoid. See, the other advantage of such restaurants (for the operators) is that walking along the street is tantamount to stepping into their eating establishment. As such, you might be wandering around a corner in a dingy alley, only to be blinded by a glowing neon crab and - in your daze - accosted by a scruffy-looking dude in an apron who says "table for two?" while hustling you toward one, wiping it down with the other hand, then doling out the menus and overriding your objections by asking what you would like to drink.

At this point, you have the option of trying to explain that you were just walking along the street looking for an outboard motor (yes, they have them!), or just going along with this charade and saying "Coke".

Well, I mean, you can say whatever drink you want, but they don't speak a lot of English, so... chances are they're bringing you a Coke.

Remarkably, however, the food in these markets is actually quite delicious. I had yet another strange new taste that night in the form of seafood with a side of what I believe were super-spicy barnacles (perhaps scraped off the very hull of whatever ship caught the fish we had with them). None of the food was exactly the kind of thing I might consider eating if left to myself, but I couldn't deny that they fried up a pretty darn juicy little barnacle.

Overall, it was a fitting way to spend my last few Hong Kong dollars before staggering home with an entirely new suit of clothes, a lens cleaning kit, some weird Chinese trinkets, a big red silk wall-scroll, a stamp with my Chinese name (Li-Bu?), a fake Swiss Navy watch, some batteries and duct tape, a new iPod Touch (for my research...), and nothing but air in my wallet.

The next day, Ashnil decided that he had spent enough time at uni for the week (by his weird reckoning), so the two of us headed out together to see the sights.

Foremost on our list for today was Lamma island. Famous for beautiful views of Hong Kong's natural environment, a wide variety of wondrous sea creatures to marvel at (and then eat), and some of the more... 'uninhibited' beaches in the general area, Lamma island promised to be a rewarding sort of place to go and take some photoes. (I made sure to pack my zoom lens, just in case the beaches part was true.)

This trip started with a shorter trip, to the Central docks of Hong Kong, where we would embark upon our island journey. Here, just outside Central station, I cheerfully took some pictures of the colourful impromptu markets (to the locals' apparent disdain), before realising that this wasn't some kind of street market, but a large gathering of refugees. People weren't buying or selling, they were donating their old things... Tucking my camera aside, I quickly scurried away.

Hong Kong's ferries are highly convenient and, like everything else, can be paid for just by swiping your fancy-pants wireless Octopus Card (a sneaky incitement to lose track of spending if ever I saw one). With next to no wait times (in part because of Ash's anal need to plan everything down to the minute), we were quickly on our way.

The uniformly filthy windows of the ferry made it difficult to get a good photographic record of our journey, but I assure you that the sight of Hong Kong by sea, and the opportunity to pass through part of it's shipping fleet was rather enjoyable. I got a lot of pics of some fancy Chinese-type ships, but not a lot of them came out all that well, since my fastidious nightly ritual of cleaning my lenses does very little for the final grimy-ferry-porthole lens I was shooting through.

Arrival on Lamma island was a remarkably cheerful affair. In anticipation of our arrival, someone had had the foresight to put up some lovely coloured flags, and scrawl happy things like "Welcome to Lamma" and "All you need is love" on various surfaces in all the colours of the rainbow. The views as we arrived were quite spectacular: typical tropical island sorta stuff, with a strong cultural influence: net-casting fishermen in small, shallow boats and more adventurous types in dangerously swaying barges all scattered every which way, while tenements not unlike those in our Home Sweet Slum dotted the hillside.

It's quite odd, really, to see run-down apartment blocks with their washing hung out to dry in the kinds of beautiful locations one might otherwise expect to find a millionnaire's opulent mansion, hidden bat cave or yacht. People here lived a simple sort of lifestyle, and although my grandpa has already complained of my video-game references, I should nevertheless add that the bustling back-and-forth of townspeople in the village we entered reminded me quite a great deal of the single-minded peasants in an RTS. It was easy, here, to see the progression of resources: farmer produces rice, fisherman produces fish, foodstuffs are delivered to restaurant, chef turns foodstuffs into spicy dishes, spicy dishes are sold at a premium to stupid tourists, stupid tourists inject money into economy, mayor can build a new waterwheel.

Overall, it was a lovely and understandable lifecycle that I was happy to support with my own stupid tourist dollars.

As such, of course, Ash and I began our day of touring by sitting down in one of the many local restaurants and beginning the worthwhile process of marveling at, photographing and eating the local marine life. Despite the price-tag (which would've let the mayor build a few birdbaths or a statue at least) I heartily tucked into a heaping helping of fresh curried crab (amusingly, the waiter who delivered it, despite not speaking English per se, expressed his approval of my choice through a cartoonish "YUMMY YUMMY" gesture).

As we ate, however, the Sea God expressed his anger at our devouring his delicious creations. Rain began to patter down - at first gently, and then more insistently. By the time I was done crunching the bones of my crustacean prey, it was well and truly raining on Lamma island.

Concerned for my lovely, lovely camera (I doubted me getting rained on personally would be much of a problem in this heat), I purchased a big ol' umbrella before starting my tour of the rest of the island.

At first I was hesitant to take any pictures, and Ashnil and I passed through a lot of interesting housing and irrigation before I worked up the courage to pull out my photography equipment in the wet. Eventually, though, I took on a bit of a strange hunch-backed gait with my umbrella up, trying to get a good field of view for my camera while keeping it safe from the rain and making sure no droplets get on my lens.

With the unfortunate lighting conditions, just getting good photographs became a bit of a problem for me, and I was forced to start shooting in HDR. This, however, had the fine side effect of forcing me to develop my photography technique a bit further. I do love these difficult conditions! Nothing like it for helping you learn. Despite the foul weather, I think I got a few pretty good shots.

As the rain began to intensify, we considered turning back. Since it was to be our last day for some time that wouldn't be spent working almost 24/7, though, it'd take a lot more than bad lighting and a bit of rain to discourage me. After briefly getting lost and ending up on top of a water reservoir, Ash and I pretty much walked the length of the island, taking in the sights.

Overall, I've got to say that Lamma island seems a fine, simple place to live. It's rolling, hilly country, and most of the people seem to get around by bicycle in the narrow, awkwardly placed streets. Stores and houses and farmland and so forth are stepped randomly all up the hillside. When I first read that this island would have two large villages on it, I expected the modern equivalent: ie., basically a tiny city. Not so, however. I was pleasantly surprised that this place definitely maintained the character of a truly rural environment, complete with a council of elders, people's houses all jammed together in a messy jumble, farm equipment (and people's shoes) scattered all over the place carelessly, wild cats, nasty dogs and other animals roaming about, forest paths and rice paddocks, terrace homes and squatters' shanty towns on crumbling hillsides.

Like an idealised view into the country's past, this place put me in mind of something of an ideal old-timey Hong Kong. Cultures blended easily here, and everyone had plenty of fish to eat. Chinese curios and Western niceties mixed together in the stores scattered about, everyone spoke just enough English to communicate, but still spoke it badly enough to give you that authentic "This is weird! I'm in China!" feel. The place was cheerfully festooned all over, people left their doors wide-open, children played in the streets, it basically felt safe and friendly, even in the weird back-alleys (yeah, I know, I promised not to go into them...).

Unlike on any other such island I've been to, the human element of Lamma made no particular effort to blend into the natural environment, or even to be particularly presentable. It was all a bit like a shanty town, and people wandered to and fro on their own business, ignoring us touristy-types. Most people and places seemed to be saying: "Yeah, enjoy the natural beauty or whatever, just don't get underfoot." Most indicative of this whole attitude was the fact that many of the nicest, most majestic views on the island tended to feature a huge and unsightly power plant, factory or reservoir of some sort... to the extent that one of the nicer beaches we saw was pretty much a pleasant, well-tended stretch of sand placed right at the foot of the biggest darn smokestack I'd ever seen.

Standing on the beach, your field of view was half idyllic seaside resort, half massive industrial complex. What, no-one thought that that might be a bad place to put it?

I mean... It's a giant power plant for Christ's sake. A coal power plant. Position doesn't much matter... in fact, that was probably a terrible position, from the point of view of shipping in coal. Couldn't they have, like, stuck it out of sight somewhere, instead of building it to loom darkly over one of their few pristine beaches?

Baffling. But certainly not the only instance.

The big ol' walking track across Lamma island turned out to be a whole lot longer than expected, perhaps because of the raining part... or the treacherous-cobbled-path part. Anyway, it took us a fair while to get across the island, and by then we weren't too eager to go on the second, twice as long, leg of the journey (in a circle around the island center). We wandered the village at the other end for a while, peering at fish and watching the fishermen. We then started a little ways down the path, stopped, started again, slowed down, stopped, went back, started again, got growled at big a big ol' dog, turned around, and decided to just head back to Hong Kong.

Disappointing, I know, but it was raining too hard to get good pictures, the views all seemed to be oddly industrial, and this old guy was trying to sell us some kind of disgusting oyster-cupcakes every darn time we went past. Whenever we returned in his direction, he was sure we had come back to try an oyster cupcake (YUMMY YUMMY!), and I wasn't sure I had the heart to go by one more time without actually eating one (which would probably kill me).

As such, we never did see the remainder of the island, although we may very well return when it's more sunny. As it turns out, there's a ferry straight to the halfway-point where we stopped our walk, so there would be no problem picking up right where we left off, in better weather. Maybe the big dog will be gone too... and the man with oyster cupcakes. Overall, that seemed a much better idea for the time being. Besides, loathe as I was to actually DO it, I actually had a great deal of work to get on with, and despite not actually eating the oyster cupcakes I was feeling a lot less chipper after the day's walking than I had in my walk all over Hong Kong's markets the day before.

Besides, despite having been fooled before in Washington (where the "Japanese Pagoda" I was going to see turned out to be a tiny-ass shinto carving, also apparently known as a pagoda), I had been tricked yet again on this island as the 'pagoda' advertised in the Lonely Planet guide turned out to be an old and rather shitty Chinese-style gazebo overlooking another fine industrial complex by the sea. Certainly the licentious beaches weren't likely to be the source of much fun in this kind of weather, and who knew what the other Lonely Planet 'sights' would turn out to be?

As such, both tired, footsore, and a little queasy, we hopped on the ferry back to Hong Kong to get a bit of much-needed sleep.

I know it was the right decision, because I was immediately rewarded by the Gods. When we touched down back in Hong Kong, the rain let up for a while, it was pleasantly warm, and I discovered that the Octopus Card also works on ice-cream trucks!

Best of all, flush with soft-serve, snoozy from walking, and having discovered how much softer the sofa is than my bed, I rounded off the day by watching cartoons and forgetting entirely to do any work, or write this travelogue.

Overall, it was a pretty good day.