Wonderland

My favorite part of Hong Kong is the Old Town — the stretch of Noho, Soho, and Poho that faces itself along the steep climb up to Victoria Peak. It's a place that manages to be both a sophisticated, sought-after destination and somewhere the most ordinary, everyday Hong Kong still breathes.

A traditional market butcher shop with non-refrigerated meat skewered and hung out to cure, a bustling Hong Kong-style open-air food stall packed with locals trying to make a meal with a bowl of noodles, narrow buildings over fifty years old with bamboo scaffolding propped along their exterior walls for renovations — this area, where such scenes stand back-to-back with Michelin-starred restaurants and cutting-edge galleries handling the most avant-garde works, is unchanging yet always new.

Like meeting an old friend who never stops striving to become a better person — personally and socially — while holding onto what is most purely themselves, their energy and passion, there is always something there that gives you a good kind of charge.

The unexpected harmony of clashing colors that seem like they have no business working together on the same street, the exotic smells that take hold of you, the languages of the world threaded through with Cantonese accents.

The novelty unique to Hong Kong — which shows a different face every day, driven by its most international sensibilities and distinctively local character — sparks curiosity and interest even in travelers who have visited the city many times before.

Kwon Juhan and I are such light smokers that calling ourselves smokers seems questionable — we don't finish a full pack in a year. Yet after a drink at a pub in Soho, without either of us saying a word, we find ourselves rushing to the nearest convenience store for cigarettes and a lighter. The desire to let go, just a little freely, or perhaps a little forgivingly, of the tension of maintaining our everyday selves — and simply look at what is around us.

To be the most Hong Kong while simultaneously being the most international.

To be inclusive without losing oneself.

In the sense that it keeps reminding me not to give up on that — Hong Kong is a city I want to return to whenever I can. Even for a punishing three-night, four-day work trip.