Our first stop on the way to Vietnam for this trip was Hong Kong, where I had never been before.
Click on the photo to see several photos in this set posted on my Flickr site.
My extremism for environments came to the fore in Hong Kong. I have often said that I am an extremist because I love the wide-open spaces of Big-Sky Montana (my home state) where the density of humans per acre has to be one of the lowest of any U.S. state except Nevada. On the other end of the scale, I love San Francisco for its high density and high energy. I have trouble abiding anything in between, like suburbs. Why live there?
Hong Kong is the epitome of high-density living, and I loved what I saw. We had the good fortune to stay in the apartments of two different friends and therefore lived like the people of Hong Kong and Kowloon live. Both of these apartments were in Tsim Sha Tsui on the Kowloon side, with the highest density of humans in the world. Space is obviously at a premium, and these apartments were appropriately very small, but livable. Since cooking is difficult in such small spaces, people constantly eat out, which adds immensely to the high-energy street life.
And everywhere we went, the food was amazing. Beyond the tremendous variety of food available and in the ways in which a food can be prepared, the quality of the results was outstanding. We dropped into a small neighborhood place for a snack one late afternoon and was so surprised by the quality we stayed for dinner. And as much as I love San Francisco dim sum, the variety and quality we have experienced every day in Hong Kong and Shenzhen has been startling.
