Take 3!

I have attempted to blog before and haven't been very successful. My first blog was all of 10 lines still languishing in my drafts and discussing it further will actually give it more credit than it deserves. My second attempt was much better, since i was inspired by a really wonderful and thought provoking trip to Beijing and THE wall. I resolved to start documenting all our vacations moving forward, capture little details which might go blurry in our minds as time passes, focus on how we felt in all these strange and wonderful lands we would visit. Both my husband, Gireesh, and I are avid travelers. Nothing pleases us more than getting lost in a brand new county, soak up the atmosphere, revel in it's beauty, relish it's food, empathize with it's culture, walk its roads not taken. We are, as I said, travelers, not tourists - so preserving our experiences are just as important to us as the experiences themselves. And being based in Hong Kong gives us pretty good access to places all around the world. The sky is, literally, the limit (though Gireesh did kind of breach it in New Zealand, but i digress.)!

So my second blogging attempt was supposed to be just that - a faithful document of our travels to serve as memento to us and a handy guide to anyone who likes our whacky travel ideas. However, before it could go really far (all of two posts I think), we discovered the power of images - photos almost always speak so much better than words when introducing a new place (ok, maybe the Dickensians will disagree, but I am talking about mere mortals here!) so our travelogue quickly became a photo-log, which we update quite meticulously and take a lot of pride in. Our travel photos show exactly who we are and what each of the places we've visited have meant to us. Unfortunately, we've only started doing this a couple of years ago and quite a few of our trips, most of them in the beautiful and vastly underrated innards of Japan, still need to be documented. But that's another project! We are still thinking of how we can preserve and share our photo-logs better - right now they are in the usual but often abused confines of Facebook and Picasa.

But with all this focus on showcasing our trips abroad, I think I've been quite negligent of this quirky little place which we call home. Hong Kong is such a study in contrasts - a little piece of land struggling to hold on to it's British antecedents while still desiring to be a part of the revolution that is China. A place where wizened old ladies still call me Missy (and I still love it when they do that!) but garrulous taxi drivers keep yelling on one of a dozen cell phones while negotiating the hairiest of bends, where real estate prices are shooting through the roof in one of the biggest concrete sprawl in the world but small ten-home agrarian villages still dot most of the exhilarating hiking trails around the region, where noise, light and air pollution spawn heated debates but 70% of the green and hilly land is preserved and out of bounds for any kind of construction. There is still so much I haven't seen about this little big place, so much that's exciting and explorable.

So here goes Take 3! This one will be dedicated to everything that surprises, interests, disturbs, upsets, pleases me about Hong Kong, little mundane things that no one would probably notice or care about, but which affect me in any way while I go about my business here. Hopefully this will expand on to include any other place we end up calling home. Because I honestly believe traveling is a state of mind - there are things to explore and learn everywhere and its no less worthwhile just because it's your own backyard!