That is a big fat understatement so let me rephrase.
Hong Kong, you unabashed mecca of shameless consumerism, I am both disenchanted and enthralled!
I must have hoarded and gargled on the naivete cocktail because of my stupid assumptions that a decade will not lend significant dents on your topography and personality. Familiar pockets of neat little discoveries are now gone. Alleys of cheap beers and exotic souvenirs are but faint wisps, landmark ghosts, and in their places now stand the proud winking temples of global greed, seducing, pouting, cajoling the impressionable into mindless consumption.
The grit is still there, no doubt, but I am a perverse optimist in my belief that chance encounters with fascinating strangers are the most welcome outcome, and, I suspect, the very core of many expectations on why people can't sit in one spot two years in a row without getting butt sores or yield to the inescapable famine for adventure.
Yet, my naive assumptions notwithstanding, my three days in your dizzying labyrinth of unapologetic sleekness, is one of the brightest spots in a dreary blur of deadlines that has so overtaken most of my recent days, fogs spilling into midnights, swallowing new dawns, that I have totally forgotten that all it takes is to pop a bottle of beer with a friend and unlock a stream of refreshing conversations and inconvertible truths.
I am exhausted today. I had to hit the ground running when I got back. Yet some stories cannot be abandoned or contained.
They swell from the recesses of memories into proper rivers.
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