SE Asia Escapade: Day 1

We've been in Hong Kong for almost 24 hours now, and wow, this city is effing wild...I don't know exactly how I'd describe it. There's an older more run down part (where our hostel is), and a really sick, new modern part down by the bay and around Hong Kong park that is more of what I imagined it to be like. I guess some of it reminds me of an (eastern) NYC, but that comparison doesn't really do this place justice--definitely a really unique and awesome place.

We got in late last night after a sweet 14 hour flight, where we met some pretty interesting people. We then spent a good two hours trying to find our hostel in the insane crowd of (small asian) people that is hong kong on a friday night (think manhattan, but all asians). The good news was that I'm approximately three feet taller than the next tallest person in this city which proved to be pretty helpful in finding this place...we're on the 14th floor of a shantytown type building, mixed with some run down apartments, hostel rooms, and god knows what else. It's a far cry from the upper middle class lifestyle we're used to, but it's actually pretty damn sweet. The hostel is clean (by the way, it's called the Ah-Shan hostel...um do you mean as-ian?), and the lady that runs the place is awesome--a funny/sort of goofy and hardworking little asian lady probably in her 30's.

Today we spent the day getting used to the city--in the morning we explored the area around our hostel and in the afternoon explored the more modern, and pretty incredible area around Hong Kong park near the bay.
A few quick notes/observations from last night and today:
-Most people here are friendly, polite, and willing to help tourists
-tall white people stick out like a sore thumb, but no one stares
-i saw exactly 1 black person today out of approxmately 1 million people...yes, he stood out even more than i did
-they use bamboo for construction instead of steel and it's really weird/awesome/seems sketchy...the construction workers climb up and down the bamboo effortlessly--pretty amazing really
-they drive on the opposite side of the road...i guess this should have been obvious since this used to be a british colony, but i didn't really think about it until i got here and noticed
-they definitely play basketball...i know this because i saw an urban cage court when we were walking around..way sick.

I'm literally falling asleep writing this (jet lag = real) so that's all for now, and sorry if any or all of this didn't make much sense. I'll have more in the next few days

Here are a couple of pictures:

A view from our Ah-Shan room window last night: Pretty sweet.