Hong Kong: How I see it

Hong Kong is worth the visit, maybe two. Big, like New York City, and home to heaps of ethnicities predominantly Europeans, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and Indians. Great foods from everywhere. Beautiful parks, palm trees, flowers, mountains, beaches, and hiking trails.  Home to the greatest skyline in the world, tall buildings stand next to Colonial-era remnants, mosques, and tenement housing, the city has enough to keep the unentertainable entertained. It is clean, safe, and diverse in it's wares.

Now the bad news...

Hong Kong is expensive. Not as expensive as London, Maui or Japan, but pretty damn pricey. And that takes the fun out of things sometimes. Hong Kong is westernized. The Brits built it and the Chinese made it into what it is today. Posh, Glitzy, over-the-top Glamour shopping of all the ridiculously unnecessary and over-priced name brands like Rolex, Cartier, Armani, Channel, Omega, Christian-Dior, Rolls Royce, Ferrarri, Bentley, Coach, and Louie Vitton, run amock here like the plague. As for me, retail shopping of this nature does absolutely nothing for my soul. Unfortunately, there is so much of it here, it, sadly, has become the first, second, and third most popular activity in this town. Everybody is doing it. But I accept things for how they are, it was like this before I got here, and although I choose to not understand the logic in it, I contend that a watch that sells for 153,000 HKD ($19,741.94 USD) seems a bit extraordinary. And yes, there is a guard with an assault weapon standing outside the front door so if you want to die, try to steal something and you've come to the right place.

You take the good with the bad, and you enjoy a dimsum, or a night time stroll along Tsim Sha Tsui Promenade overlooking Hong Kong Island. You get a massage or a Chinese Green Tea and you take a day in the mountains or at the beach or in the park or on a boat ride while you ponder your existence and what's this life for?

I did not ask to be born, I was just put here, on Earth to rummage and roam and to play and to maybe eat some spicy foods on the cheap, while I take a leisure holiday away from Hawaii.