Fl(cr)ying babies and meeting Utor

There I stand, watching a hundred skyscrapers bathing in light saying to me: “Welcome to Asia, things are a bit different here, but I am sure you will like it”. When will I realize the Asian world is my home for the upcoming half year? No idea, but until now it’s great. Let’s start at the start.

After saying the final goodbyes at Brussels airport, Dominic, Julien and I were ready for take off! I could write a full blog about the flight attendances of Quatar airways, who kept my attention for the entire air travel. Their hair: so perfect, their smiles: so honest, their food: every four hours a fucking feast! Flying is fun, I thought - At least, until we transferred in Doha (biggest airport one can imagine in such a small state). Our second flight took us right through the night, but I was unfortunately seated in the middle of a circle of five crying babies and their screaming mothers. Chinese babies are super cute, but they have no souls and their cries are from the devil himself. So not much sleeping there. The ladies’ hair remained perfect no matter what, and the meals kept on coming (even though for us Europeans this meant dinner at 2 and 6 o’clock in the morning), but their smiles also began to fade slowly after we got closer to our destination.

When the wheels of the plain finally hit the ground in Hong Kong, sparks of excitement, nervousness and insomnia ran through my veins: this is really happening! We were quite lucky to land in Hong Kong, since our good friend Utor (who will come up more in this story) almost send us to Taipei. We took the bus from the airport, and got a nice view on Hong Kong immediately. Dinner and Bed was all we wanted after that.
It is now a day later and I am sitting in the tiniest hostel room ever (7 m2 for three people). It’s really REALLY tiny: Dominic and Julien share a bed which is too small for even one of them. The hostel is located right above the Chungking mansions, an ‘interesting place’ described by Time as follows: “When the local tourism board refers to Hong Kong as "Asia's World City" it's referencing the well-ordered worldliness of big banks, fine hotels and a philharmonic — not the worldliness of Bangladeshi hash dealers and Nigerian men trading used PCs by the container load.” http://www.time.com/time/travel/cityguide/article/0,31489,1850110_1850124_1852107,00.html
Well, It may be very worldly, I am afraid they will steal my handbag or put drugs in it every time I leave the hostel. I cannot imagine a more shady place. But hay- we sleep super central in Hong Kong for a very cheap price. That centrality made that today we walked through the city for almost 12 hours, where we again met Utor. This typhoon has been raging over the Philippines and made the weather alarm go up from 3 to 8 in Hong, so this afternoon - when it went back to 3 - the city was alive again. And although we have to take in splashes of rain every so many minutes, Utor gives us beautiful views: the whole skyline of the city disappears in clouds of rain and mist, and then appears back again in a few seconds. I have never seen something that incredible.

It’s unbelievable I only left home three days ago: it feels like ages! No idea when the next update will be, this Friday we leave for the land without Facebook and there is a lot on our German friend’s to-do-list there.

Talk to you later!