Hong Kong is astounding, in a way that makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing anywhere else.
The difference between Hong Kong and Shenzhen probably makes the impression all the more striking.
Tonight I get on a plane for Shenzhen, arriving at about midnight. Tomorrow I’m going to spend the day in Hong Kong because my wife’s going to be working. Saturday through Monday I’m going to see Shenzhen with her. Monday night I’m flying back, arriving in Shanghai around midnight.
Tuesday morning, back to work.
My alarm sounded at 4am this morning. I’m planning to start biking to work, and I needed to know how long it will take. My route was:
Changning Lu + Zunyi Lu (where I live) > Yuyuan Lu > Jiangsu Lu > Fuxing Lu (with a 30 second detour on Huashan Lu that wasn’t apparent on the map) > Huangpi Nan Lu
It took 25 minutes of constant but not particularly strenuous biking. I now spend about an hour getting to work every morning, so this seems like a really good alternative.
At 4:30am the city is a totally different place. Lots of foreigners out and about, but I think I was the only one that had already slept a full night. There was guy carrying dozens of live ducks hung by their feet on his moped, and dozens carrying crates of vegetables stacked three meters high on the back of their flatbed tricycles.
On the way home I took a more circuitous route, biking down some roads that you wouldn’t really be able to bike on later in the day.
The stale smoke and beer stench from Windows Too wafts all the way out to Nanjing Xi Lu — what a hole.
Today I bought a bike for about 800 RMB. I rode it this afternoon just after lunch, and the sun beat down on me, and the wind went through my hair, and it was good.
I whipped this little character counter up today, in response to not being able to find anything decent of OSX. It counts ASCII and non-ASCII characters, and can be used (for example) to count the Chinese characters in a document.
This is one of the best blogs I’ve found recently.
