Hong Kong: Day 1

Hong Kong, for us, was a big downer.

We came to this place for three days of recuperation after Australia and before going back. People told us many things about Hong Kong, which is a true city-boy's city, and I, being a city-boy, was truly excited going in to it.

However, coming straight out of beautiful, sunny Sydney, which is my idea of heaven, nobody prepared us for the weather of this place. In the plane, I finally got around to reading some of the material we prepared in advance for this trip, and I was rather shocked to realize that we're going in to Hong Kong at the peak of its rainy season, its Monsoon season.

Immediately upon reading this, I drew Orit's attention to this fact, joking that I hope we don't run into any Typhoons in the three days that we're there.

Ha, ha. Very funny.

It was the middle of the night when we landed, and everything was drenched. Water was pouring out of the sky in buckets, and even inside the terminal building, somehow there was always a place where they managed to seep in. Nothing was really dry.

A man went up to us, as we were trying to phone up the hotel to see if there's a shuttle. No, the last shuttle just left the terminal. The man, however, turned out to be a cab-driver, and offered us a ride at a reasonable price.

We said yes and followed him out. Rivers of water, as high as the side-walks, were flowing all around us. The cabby, however, knew a path that left our socks mostly dry. After a few minutes of walking he told us to wait where we were, and ran out into the rain, holding a newspaper over his head. By the time we saw him enter the car, it was mostly papier-mache.

Soon, however, we were safely in the car, (Water still managed to seep in around the rubber insulation surrounding the windows. Unbelievable.) and I turned to ask the driver: "We're going to be here for three days now", I said, "What's the weather going to be like? Is it going to clear up soon?"

I had to repeat this question three or four times in different wordings, raising my voice above the clatter of water drumming on the roof of the cab, before the driver, who could speak no English, but only that thing that passes for English in the far east, finally understood. He answered me, but as he, in answering, was using that strange dialect of English, at first I could not make out a word. I had to ask him to repeat it. Then to repeat it again, more slowly. On the fourth time, I understood the words he was saying were: "Say maybe yellow storm, la." And that didn't sound too good.

It didn't look too good either. The sky was darn low. Clouds that were dark and heavy, looking like smoke coming off an explosion blocked away the tops of most buildings. The buildings themselves were prong-like: much too tall for their width. The yellow lights coming off the windows reflected from the clouds, only contributing to the feeling that all was burning. I couldn't help but being reminded of the way medieval painters used to depict hell. This wasn't so very different, except here we were in a car, water up to its hubcaps, pushing our way in what was ostensibly a highway, passing miles-long bridges from which all you could see were more miles-long bridges, and from the front window all you could see was the wipers doing overtime in order to clear up glimpses of this morbid vista.

Reaching the hotel, the cabby pulled over, right under a plastic canopy that connected the driveway to the hotel front entrance. Unbelievably, water was pouring straight through the plastic, falling from every light fixture that was drilled into it almost as heavily as the rain outside. As if all this wasn't enough, as soon as we stepped out of the air-conditioning of the car, the heat-wave struck us and we immediately began sweating, our clothes already sticky on us from the water. Completing the final touch on the whole effect, I noticed then that the water landing on the pavement immediately billowed up again in a puff of smoke, reacting to the intense humidity all around it. "That's it," I thought, hurrying into the building of the hotel, "Hell and no mistake about it."

When finally we made our way into the lobby, (Dry. The lobby was dry. Only in very few places in the hotel could you feel a small drip-drop falling on your head from the ceiling, and I was counting my blessings.) I turned to the front desk employee, who spoke in Oxford English as he handed us our key-card, and asked him what the forecast for the next three days is, hoping to get more details - or, perhaps just better details - than what we got from the driver.

He said "rain", wearing a quizzical expression that was almost comical, but I didn't think it was funny. He answered in the same tone of voice that people answer the question "What year is this?" when asked by either Doug or Tony in the old Time Tunnel Sci-Fi series. It was uncanny.