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If last week marked my first serious travel since the big move, this week marked my proper first holiday - and with it, more travel. Thursday was a bank holiday and together with Friday made for an extended “long weekend”.
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This week in data:
- Maximum height: 332.6m
- Kowloon Dairy products consumed: 7
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After work on Tuesday evening I went to the top of Landmark 81 - the tallest building in Vietnam, the 2nd tallest in SEA and the 17th tallest in the world. It is also, by at least 100 meters, the highest I have ever been. Reaching the top, they strapped me to a pole and let me walk right up to the edge, where I took a few precarious photos and a selfie, right before scurrying right back down to ground level. Gorgeous view though, well worth the nerves.
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Wrestled with some NodeJS meta-programming which I really didn't enjoy. Sometimes I think we had it good with n-gage.
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And on Wednesday, REDACTED. All I’m saying.
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On Thursday I packed up, picked up some laundry, had some emergency banh mi, and swatted away the biggest cockroach you ever did see, before collapsing into an airplane seat. Onboard I watched The Apprentice (2024), which I really rate, it’s a very good movie. Solid 3/5.
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Where to? Hong Kong, meaning roasts, dim sum, and those egg tarts that people who’ve never heard of pasteis de nata rave about.
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I love Hong Kong. If you were to slice London off from the rest of the UK, and to place it in southern China, you’d end up with, well, Hong Kong. Immediately after landing, while taxiing to the terminal, I saw the familiar outline of UK-style ambulances and had to pinch myself. After leaving the airports all the road-signs and the preponderance of M&S/F&M/etc. just feel uncanny.
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Friday was mostly retracing my steps from my last (and only) visit in 2019: Seeing which things had changed, and which things had not. While some wonderful business had closed or moved on, many things were the same and I even roughly recalled how to navigate Central. Most striking [after some events] was just how much cleaner everything seemed, right down to a feeling that there was far less street art.
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Michelin star dumplings though.
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Hiked “The Dragon’s Back” which was a pretty delightful trail. Strava botched the recording. Ran back to Chai Wan afterwards.
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Exposure to grade 1 kanji led to a few “oh huh that’s cool” moments where I could """understand""" some written Chinese, or more accurately, spot when the translation into English was different. This is — to anyone who knows me — something I am remarkably excited about because not even six months ago this felt impossible.
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Took some nice photos. I thought so at least.
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Some of the conversations you overhear are just - fantastic. “Sometimes I just have the impulse to get off at the wrong stop, I'm just spontaneous like that, you know?”
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Nearly went to a party with an interesting line-up, only to discover that it had also happened in Tokyo the night before, only there that I knew the promoter, and it was 1/3 of the price. Or in more familiar terms, it put even the priciest of London based clubs to shame!
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This trip was too impromptu to make any real plans, but I did manage to coincide with LF, and we did a lot of catching-up, walking and eating. We made it from Sheung Wan to Causeway, and to Tsim Sha Tsui the long way around.
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We had breakfast/lunch on my quest for omiyage before stopping for lunch at “that dingy place in the train station”. You know the one. Being excited to see Dim Sum at a reasonable price, I ordered nearly the entire menu, leading to an funny situation where our neighbouring table accidentally helped themselves to some tea - and when we encountered them to take more - they were so mortified that they debated (not in English) buying the same type of tea to pay us back.
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Walked across Kowloon to the megalith that is Kowloon West train station, frankly in awe at the scale of some of the more recent construction work. One day I want to take a train from here going north.
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Nice to see UK plugs. Funny to see them next to Huawei ethernet ports.
