Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York mashed together on steroids, that is Hong Kong. A wild place full of life and culture, full of glamor and grit. The pulse of Hong Kong is flooding with energy and and multi-cultural dynamics. Eric and I found a great nice hotel with a view and some time to spare. So that night we walked the streets, ate great and danced hard at the local hotspots. The next morning I was stoked to see what this Chinese Herbal Medicine Expo had to offer! I saw in my mind famous doctors mucking about the bear paws, tiger claws, piles of Ginseng and deer antlers- Ha! I was expecting to see things that I had never seen or even heard about. In fact the expo was a far cry from that little fantasy of mine. It was pretty down to earth and in fact there was less people there than I had expected. Eric and I were a bit disappointed but we had fun. We talked to people traded business cards with folks and met some interesting vendors. Actually right next to the Herb convention was the Tea convention which I could not pass up- so we flashed our buyer badges and made our way into the ocean of bodies and bickering tea merchants. It was pretty amazing, in fact for the next few hours all I did was get high on tea! I'm a tea dork and a Jew, truth be told I could have stayed there all day- every variety to put my lips to and FREE! They had Pu-er (raw and fermented), Longjing, Wu-long, Guanyin, whites, yellows, reds and greens, all the teas you could dream... The rest of HK was great! We perused the streets looking for great places to eat and Eric showed me what he loves about HK. We often wondered the herbal pharmacies geeking out over specimen quality and what-have-you. One thing I loved about HK is that there is Chinese medicine everywhere you turn. For example, there are these little "tonic" herb pharmacies littered all over HK that sell all these powerful herbal decoctions outside the shop- like a lemonade stand for herb fiends. You walk in, grab a cup and fill it with ginsengs or heat-clearing herb decoctions- toss a bit of change on the counter and walk on out...chinese medicine on-the-go! Most of the herbal pharmacies that consume the Hong Kong streets mostly sell strong qi, yang and yin tonics like abalone, shark fin, ginseng, turtle shell gelatin, deer horn velvet, birds nest etc...
The Hong Kong terrain in many ways looks as if it would be impossible develop. It made San Francisco look like the bunny slopes at a ski resort. It is truly conquered land and you can get a sense of that while you take an escalator... yes an escalator up a mountain to get to the Botanical Garden or Zoo or local restaurant. This was just a small piece of HK but I hope over the next few years I will be able to put the pieces together and understand it in it's many facets each time I go. Now, it's back to Taipei.....
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