Man Longs to Meander: Missing Hong Kong
Locked inside during a January storm, with actual air temperatures cratering around -20 degrees Fahrenheit, I suppose it’s only natural to long for the days when I traveled more months than not.
Mostly, I miss the variety and history and lively bustle of Hong Kong.
I used to visit my team there for work two or three times a year. But when COVID came in early 2020, the curtain fell on my travel to Asia. I haven’t back since a glorious conference at the Rosewood in fall 2019.
But while I’ve enjoyed sky-high views and nights out on the town, I’ve always appreciated time off-the-clock to explore the city on my own. One of my ideas, wandering around the dive bars of Wan Chai and the crush of shops in Tsim Sha Tsui was the catalog the alleys and side routes, the paths tucked among crumbling buildings and the shortcuts through the shiny new facades.
I was struck, in his book Rats, at Robert Sullivan’s commitment to not only telling the story of that constant and much-maligned (many times, deservingly) companion to humanity, but how he told the story of New York from developing colonial outpost to world commerce center. He set up stakes at a hundreds-years-old alley in lower Manhattan and not only found out its history, but chronicled the everyday movements of its two- and four-legged visitors.
OK, so maybe I hadn’t intended to snap more than one or two passing shots as I headed elsewhere, which is often the lens through which we glance at alleys and other bi-ways. But these sights, in their collective accumulation of detail, might have told their own tales.
Until next time, then.
Dadsense 
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