It was a few short years before Hong Kong was released back into Chinese control after British rule. Everyone hoped that life would continue to flow as it had for the past decades. Streets like narrow arteries ran with human activity. Busy corpuscles about their business, driving by the beating of a religion of money and commerce.
A sort of shopping fever accompanied the sticky summer heat. I had caught the malady when I realised how many shops Hong Kong had to offer. It was hard to stop turning corners, hurrying with the crowds, window shopping.
The condensed lifestyle was contrasted with life back in my homeland of New Zealand. The speed and colour of the street life stimulated my senses and the insanity of dawn to dark buying and the inability to deny my own part in it. Everyone was doing it. Here was a highly developed consumer culture, wealth evident everywhere. Poverty, squeezed into the cracks, like a grime in an aging skin.
My hotel was in the Mong Kok area, a part of Hong Kong that was less westernised and a lot of the old culture still remained. I decided that it was probably a little less prestigious than staying nearer to the waterfront, whether on the Kowloon side or on Hong Kong Island. But the package holiday had been a bit cheaper staying in this hotel, and it was a superb hotel nevertheless. Inside was quiet and spacious. Outside, a mere step away from the foyer, humanity seethed along the footpaths jostling together tightly on the pavement.
At night it was no different, until about ten o'clock when the markets had finished and people had more or less stopped eating. Right outside the hotel, food hawkers sold everything from tiny, fried frogs to chicken's feet and sweet pastries.
The sounds of the city erupted as the hotel lift doors glided open with car engines and voices. Along with this were the high-pitched tones of traders summoning customers and the collections of electronic gadgets emanating bleeps and pips. Alarm clocks seemed to be a popular item and every one of them was set to demonstrate the shrill wake up call.
As soon as the rain started, umbrella sellers appeared from nowhere on every spare space shouting and bartering with buyers. Shops competed with each other providing upbeat music to entice frantic shoppers into buying faster and to convince their prey that this store had the most up to date equipment. Sight and sound exploded. The buying traps were set.
Restaurants came in all forms, from rather shabby little kitchens, busy with men in grubby aprons, laughing through toothless mouths. Everywhere there were busy men, working over hot steaming pans. And there were huge multi-storied buildings proclaiming 'seafood specialties'. The blazing neon and fluorescent painted messages came in Cantonese and English. Often the messages were in Cantonese only and these restaurants were the ones I would have liked to have visited most. I wasn’t sure though, if I would be able to communicate enough to know what to order.
I visited on of these restaurants with a Chinese friend. It had been easy that night because my friend interpreted for me and ordered all the dishes. Just as I had guessed, the food was a far cry from any 'Chinese' food I had sampled at home. Delicious morsels of foreign looking ingredients were served before me, each an adventure of delicacy and delight.
I would have tried more of these local places but it was often hard to tell which was best. I did try the authentic local 'dia pai dong' food outlets. They were jumbles of tables out in the open air, with plastic table cloths and makeshift kitchens turning out all sorts of delicacies.
At home I would never have suffered a cockroach competing for my dinner but here it was something to try to ignore, for the sake of the experience. The food was the best to be tasted anywhere in Hong Kong. It was harder to disregard some of the other patrons. Two old men were talking and pushing food into their mouths at a rapid pace. They stopped only long enough to spit the bones onto the floor at their feet. Something was biting at my leg.
I chose from the English menus. 'Fried cows organs with noddles' or 'three treasures with long pork insides'. Dishes which conjured up strange pictures in my mind, but the food I chose and ate was delicious.
It was hard to believe that in a fewshort days I had walked as much as I had. The heat had been almost unbearable but I discovered that I could drift into a department store or a hotel to cool down for a while before my next onslaught. I'd used up three underground passes racing into the main shopping area and then across to the Island. Every corner had to be explored.
