Hong Kong! (Part I)

My wife happens to be one of the privileged few who has her very own Alien Resident Card (ARC) and work permit. My legal status, however, is still uhhhh, how shall I say it... "under construction". My single entry visa expired upon leaving Taiwan for Chinese New Year and was replaced with a 30 day tourist visa when I returned. The temporary solution to my dilemma? Go to Hong Kong!

Generally our school will send people in this situation to Hong Kong or Macau for one night, which is generally enough time to take care of business. Heather and I decided that we might as well make a mini vacation out of it, so we added one wife and two nights to the standard itinerary.

Some history -
As a member of the Anderson family, I was initiated into a long standing tradition of heavy packing at the tender age of five (or somewhere around there). Although I can't remember it, I'm guessing it started with a family camping trip to somewhere like Moosehead Lake in Maine. We probably packed the car with everything you could possibly image to be useful on a family camping trip. Then we packed a few things that couldn't possibly be useful "just in case".

So now that you have a bit of background on my travel packing tendencies, you'll probably be very impressed to find that I packed everything into one standard size backpack. Including all my camera gear. While this rash act could be construed as moderate insanity by some (like my mother) I must tell you, it was a rush of liberation. The mobility was amazing. The speed was unmatched. Seriously, you gotta try this.

Now I know what some of you are thinking... you travelers out there who like to "be prepared for anything" by bringing everything, you're saying to yourselves, "I bet he got there and needed something really, really bad, and he didn't have it". Nope. Shockingly, I was fine. Turns out that most of that extra junk I normally bring just sits there. It remains in my suitcase for the entire trip just weighing me down. What a waste.

Day one started with me taking my first solo international trip. It was interesting wandering around, but seeing as my Cantonese is rather limited*, it was a pretty introspective day. Upon her arrival the next day, Heather commented that I was "rather talkative". My wanderings started in a night market searching for food and sweet deals, neither of which I found. I then headed to the camera/electronics district in an unsuccessful search for photo gear. (I really miss real photo stores like B&H). After several hours of wandering, I was exhausted. Hong Kong is so intense, just being there is tiring. The sheer mass of people is incredible. One of the areas I was exploring has one of the highest population densities in the world - 130,000/km² at one point.

*I know absolutely no Cantonese - it's a very different dialect of Chinese from what we are learning, which is Mandarin. The writing is all the same, so I could read a little, but unlike English dialects like American English and British English, the spoken language is so different that speakers of each dialect cannot understand each other.