We walked up the MTR underground station stairs, both of us carrying our 20kg bags and cursing our jet lagged brains for not keeping up with our legs. A wall of humid heat hit us and before we knew it we were out in the open, standing on Kweilin Street, Hong Kong. Of course we didn’t know it was Kweilin Street until some time later when we were forced to decend back into the MTR underground to try and find our flatmate who was meeting us; he had already been here two weeks. Our phones were dead or not working for some reason and we didn’t have an address of our flats building so it was all down us to find him. Although I wasn’t to bothered about getting lost, I wasn’t so keen about getting two heavy, annoying bags lost with me. We had specific instructions to meet him at the Pie and Tart Shop, but we were so disorientated we could hardly even read our own language and anything over 2 metres eye line meant severe visual stimulation that our brains found quite hard to handle. It must of been fate, but eventually we found our friend and so we were off, back up the stairs into the heat and away along the street; along the Kweilin.
Hong Kong is a throng of energy like nothing in this world. A heaving, cluttered pulse thats fueled by consumerism, and loves it. Stuff is cheap and there’s a lot of it. People selling cheap clothes and fashion items in the street, entire streets full of food markets, multistory computer super-warehouses and gradually getting more and more up class the closer you find yourself to Hong Kong Central. Living in West Kowloon, the mainland, is a far cry from the shimmering glass and tall sky scrapers of Hong Kong but every bit as exciting and buzzing. A quick stroll through Sham Shui Po reveals a man selling power tools piled to the ceiling in a shop front thats the size of a small garage, a market of light, every conceivable part of a pig sold straight over a counter in the street or an entire road simply littered with old kitchen appliances ready to be stripped of their valuable metals and materials.
This is home for 3 months.