Hong Kong

Wow, thanks for the zillions of comments everyone. I think I may have beaten Rob's record. To reward you all, you're going to get an extra long post with lots of nice pictures today.

I'm now in my host family's house in Chiba, having arrived from Hong Kong yesterday. HK is without a doubt the most ridiculous city I've ever visited - 7 million mad Chinese people crammed into somewhere the size of Norwich, all speaking Cantonese (conspiracy theory: I don't believe it's a real language. They were all making it up as they went along.) Everyone lives in huge, horrible apartment blocks that all follow an identical design but vary in the number of floors, and most of them seem to be held up by bamboo scaffolding. Here's a pretty standard example of HK architecture.
and here's a rather cool temple stuck in the middle of all this madness.
So, Mai and I arrived on Friday afternoon, went for some delicious dim sum, wandered along the quayside at Tsim Sha Tsui for a bit, then at night took a tram up to the top of Victoria Peak, where you get some incredible views of the whole city (some of my patented Birchall cool-panorama-thingies to follow, when I get round to it). Saturday, we went to that temple I just showed you, then headed off to HK Disneyland. I had been kind of forced into going there, but it turned out to be really good fun. The whole concept of a land of Disney is surreal enough, before you start filling it with grinning Chinamen!

On Sunday, we were feeling lazy so we stayed in bed all morning. Did some shopping in the afternoon, but that's not very interesting. Oh, also went to Murphy's Irish Pub for Guinness and cottage pie for lunch. In the evening, we went on the Panda bus. Cute, eh?

This was an open-top tour bus for Japanese tourists. As such, the commentary was in Japanese and the bus was full of 30 Japanese tourists and me. I felt extremely gaijin. Here's a picture of Mai and me enjoying HK panda-style.

And that's it really. It was short and sweet, and now I have to get down to the serious business of surviving in Japan for 3 months. Luckily, my host family is very nice and they speak a smattering of English, so I can have my basic needs catered for. I've got my first day of school today, so I'll report on that later.

Finally, in case you needed it, here is proof that Jackie Chan is an absolute joker.


Ooh, nearly forgot the haiku:

Hong Kong was wicked,
But now down to business -
Gotta learn some stuff.