Hong Kong by www.born2travel.it

if you want to know more or see all the photos visit:

14. 11. 2008 Kowloon (HONG KONG)

Seven hours of flight have taken us to the far edge of the Asian world…

What a wake-up! It was in that moment, as we flew over the countless skyscrapers of this "city-state", that I realised where we really were! On the ground there were aircraft from all over the East and Oceania: Air China, Japan Airlines, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Dragonair, Macau Airways… We're a step away from Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, China, Australia…

We're in the former British colony… And it's precisely from the latter that they inherited the double-decker buses, driving on the left… Queen Elizabeth II, however, remains only a distant memory to be traced in some old Hong Kong cent…

The first impact was very picturesque… Majestic skyscrapers rising everywhere, some were real human beehives, you could glimpse hundreds and hundreds of little windows, almost as if they were cells piercing those immense buildings…

Walking along the famous Nathan Road, it felt like being in an Asian Edinburgh, whereas if you slipped into one of the many little alleys, then a Chinese Vietnam suddenly materialised, hundreds of stalls selling everything from the most useless junk to copies of all the best brands…

What an impression those big streets full of thousands of kids walking, chatting, sniggering, laughing and making a racket everywhere… Silence didn't exist and you could only hear a perpetual background murmur that in the end became deafening!

As we expected there were thousands of little shops selling cutting-edge tech items and when we asked if they had a one-Gigabyte memory card for a camera they started laughing and looked at us like cavemen: "At most, the smallest one is 4 Gigabytes!"

15. 11. 2008 Hong Kong Island (HONG KONG)

When you travel it seems the days never end! You go out early in the morning, a bit sleepy, and come back late in the evening, often for a quick shower and then out again!

Nick and I have fun and enjoy ourselves everywhere, even anonymous places like Doha can leave room for good memories, let alone a city that never sleeps like Hong Kong!

Today, a full immersion in the frenetic life of the place, begins with a visit to the Tin Hau Temple. Intense fragrances, strong colours, the incense that enveloped you, the fruit offered to the deities…

I watched those elderly women lighting incense sticks and praying… praying… and they believed in it! I, as usual, stood apart, thoughtful, marvelling at how strange the world was… A few days earlier in Doha you saw those Arabs with long beards who would get themselves killed in the name of their God (maybe not the ones from Qatar, more interested in money than anything else) and here, in the Taoist temple, people giving up their own food to offer it to statues…

We visit the flower market and then Yeun Po Street and its bird market! Bizarre to see the sellers of grasshoppers… How gross!!!!

After a long journey we finally reach the "Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin" Temple. Kingdom of no fewer than three religions: Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism; famous because here every question finds an answer and every wish is granted. What's evocative is that people would take a jar containing numbered wooden sticks, kneel before the various deities and, having asked the question or made the wish, start shaking the jar for so long until a stick fell out, the corresponding number being the answer! The ones in charge of reading it were the many fortune-tellers grazing outside the temple. We tried it too and no fewer than three sticks fell out for me (31, 25 and 92), only I didn't go to consult Nostradamus, I want to discover my destiny by myself!

From here, with the super-efficient metro that runs 70 metres under the sea and lets you always use your mobile phone, we head to another little island to meet Penelope, a local pen pal of mine! At our request she takes us to a characteristic little restaurant, one of those where only they eat, with menus written only in Chinese, with dishes that, to our western palate, were awful, but the authenticity of the place made up for the hunger we suffered…

Wandering around the financial centre we come across a nice Italian girl: Raffaela, here for a cosmetics fair attended by the company she worked for… How strange, an Italian here… Despite the initial scepticism, we welcome her into our group and spend a very pleasant afternoon wandering the countless streets of the centre!

In the evening, heading back to the hotel, I slip into one of the many venues where they were doing karaoke! The customers performed on a real stage singing Chinese songs… How much they care about karaoke!

[ continues on: ]