HK at 2nd Glance

First impressions on our initial arrival to Hong Kong was that HK was a foreign country. Double decker buses zooming by, the presence of street vendors selling fruit/food, lots of beautiful people that weren't like us speaking foreign languages with accents, signs in Chinese, and boat rides taking you from one island to the next. Now after being in China and crossing back to HK, I realized how much HK was different from China, how westernized it was. It didn't seem like a foreign country at all. Things were orderly in HK. Vehicles stopped when the lights turned red. China brought a whole new meaning to slow and go on red lights. The crosswalks in HK were fun instead of an adrenaline rush to get across the death zone. In HK, when the light was red on the crosswalk, the tempo was slow while you waited. Then when the light turned green, the tempo sped up (although no one else generally did while crossing the street!). The toilets were clean, equipped with paper and soap, abundant and few of them were squatters. In HK, the dogs were leashed, not pregnant and didn't look starved. People were not constantly spitting up phlegm balls and to prove this there were not signs at the train stations saying, "no spitting.". There was no smoking on the buses. The signs were in English and Chinese, not Pinyin (A form of Chinese for Westerners I guess--Actually, Pinyin uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin Chinese). In China, we were lucky to have the street signs in Pinyin as well as Chinese. Food in HK was expensive and the vendors less frequent.

But in other ways HK was a foreign country just not like China. Since it used to be a British colony they drove on the wrong side of the street. I'd find myself looking at cars wondering where the driver was and then remember they were on the right side of the car. One night we walked down the street with an English man from our hostel; as we passed all the stores, people asked us if we wanted to have suits tailored. He told us that this would be illegal in his country. Emily does a really great imitation of him saying this.