I arrived in HK on Tuesday November 21, 2023, at 7pm local time. After figuring out the public transit I made it to the hotel and immediately set about exploring my surroundings. I was staying in a region called Tsim Sha Tsui (Чимсачёй), and before we go further let's look at a map because this will be relevant as I tell the story.
I've circled Tsim Sha Tsui and Hong Kong Island in red, and I've pointed out the Kowloon peninsula, as well as the old airport and the new airport, which is slightly off the map to the west. Even though everything you see on this map is part of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), most of the developed area (the part that we would consider “the city”) is on the north eastern part of Hong Kong Island (that's where you'll find, for example the International Financial Center, 38th tallest building in the world, among many other skyscrapers) and on Kowloon peninsula.
Being in Tsim Sha Tsui, I went for a walk to the waterfront, where I was greeted with a spectacular view of that developed part of Hong Kong Island. The pin shows where I was when taking the video.
The skyline is truly stunning. The lights, the color the scale of it, the reflection on the water. The way it's framed from across Victoria Harbour. The backdrop of the hills… This was the start of my little adventure in Hong Kong!
The next morning I was eager to see what this city looked like in the daytime, so I went back to the waterfront for another video. This one was taken a little bit further down the waterfront.
This video really shows you the backdrop of the hills, and also the International Financial Center, which I hadn't captured in the first video.
Hong Kong felt like a bustling, fast-paced city. At least in the Tsim Sha Tsui area there were a lot of people around, and the audio signals for crossing the street really sounded like they were emphatically announcing the pace of the city.
So these were my first impressions of Hong Kong, but over the following weeks I would come to see that the city has many sides to it. Both light and dark, rich and poor, dreamlike and real...