Culture shock is a strange thing. You think you've been in Asia long enough to be past being very wide-eyed and then you take a couple of flights and you're in a totally different world. In seven hours I travelled from the country ranked 155th out of 183 for GDP to the country ranked 7th. That's a shock!
Hong Kong is incredibly, almost miraculously, clean. It could be said that anywhere after Dhaka would appear to be clean, but Hong Kong is especially so. There is almost no litter. There are rubbish bins all over the place, and people actually use them instead of flicking their plastic onto the floor because it will 'go away'. It's also quite pleasant not to be woken up by the sound of people hawking up large amounts of phlegm. Neither do people in Hong Kong empty their nostrils one by one onto the pavement, milometers from your toes. People queue in very straight lines at the bus stop, and the general feeling is of orderliness and organisation.
Hong Kong city seems to consist mostly of offices and vast shopping malls. I have never spent so much time in shopping malls as I have over the past few days. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not view shopping as an enjoyable recreational activity, but the malls here seem to exert some kind of magnetic force which sucks you into them against your will. It probably doesn't help that there are malls built onto a lot of the metro stations, or that many of the malls are connected to one another forming mega-malls, all of which gives you a shopper's paradise or a nightmarish hell of pre-Christmas consumerism. Yes, Christmas is big in Hong Kong. VERY big. There are piped Christmas songs almost everywhere you go, even in the metro stations which I find particularly annoying. The malls are adorned with huge trees and decorations, and the dinosaurs in the photos I posted are carrying gifts and eating roast turkey.
So far I haven't made it out of the city itself, but there is a lot of green space surrounding the skyscrapers. I only have three full days left before I leave for the mainland. Either tomorrow or on Tuesday I will have to go somewhere free of Christmas songs and tinsel, that would be very nice!