No matter how much I travel, it’s still a shock when you’re halfway through your flight and you suddenly realise you’ve left your comfortable world behind. This time it was flying low on approach over the Tokyo suburbs that did it: cars were moving along lit ribbon roads through (surprisingly) wooded areas and it could have been anywhere, even home. But every driver in those cars lives in a totally alien culture compared to ours. This is especially scary when the external trappings are so familar at first glance.

Got into HK okay and caught the last bus into town, just in the nick of time. The guesthouse is good by backpacker standards but the manual-reset toilet seals and phone-booth-sized shower-cum-bathroom has Nazma worried and consulting the guidebook for more luxurious digs (we’ve actually found a “business hotel”–and not that kind of business, we hope–to stay in for the remainder of our time).

We’re staying at a guesthouse, which is a room in a flat in a “mansion”. In any other context, going from a “mansion” to a lowly hotel would be a step down, but here, “mansion” denotes any number of monstrous, Blade Runner-esque apartment/retail/everything concrete complexes, replete with silk ties for CAD$3, screaming babies glimpsed through kitchen windows, telescope stores, South-Indian sari shops, and touts, touts, touts. It’s like a third-world microcosm. Capitalistic, overcrowded, decaying, and full of character. One mansion takes up an entire city block, with a central courtyard and open-air corridors. Clothes hang drying everywhere.

Weather is far cooler than I’d expected but still t-shirt weather (15-19°C maybe, though my thermometer keychain seems stuck on 24°C). Still, everyone’s in scarves and wooley coats.

Nazma is in danger of being all shopped out already, even though we haven’t actually bought anything yet, and the night markets haven’t even opened yet. It’s unbridled capitalism and it buzzes.