A blog about home

After a long, very long time, I finally gathered enough courage and energy to start writing this blog, a tool that should help my close friends, family, and anyone else with an interest to follow up my “new life”, back to Asia. Writing a blog is not an easy thing, or at least, it has never been for me. The last attempt was probably almost 10 years ago,  when I proudly opened my first ever personal website: “Loloworld”, which basically had no content at all. More recently, I was considering writing a blog during my exchange year at HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), but instead, I simply posted pictures album on Facebook with somewhat extended comments, which however became thiner and thiner with time. Anyhow, I still have a greater interest in capturing visual impressions, and thus I shall also post some of the numerous pictures I already took along with the text posts here.

Writing a blog is difficult, and a first difficulty for me was the choice of language. Unfortunately, I have received lots of negative comments on my english lately, which seemingly has become worse after lack of practice (with native english speakers or I should say, non-chinese english speakers). I still chose to start writing my blog in english. The second difficulty is then to accept a medium quality posts… Anyway, I may later write in french, and who knows, in Chinese?

Anyway, let’s come to the real thing.

My third visit to Hong Kong, actually the fourth if considering a stopover on the way back from Australia some 4 years ago, began with several familiar feelings. It all started very soon, with a distinguishable Chinese flavour in the airport’s air. I might have made that smell up, or it may have been carried by the passengers. Anyway, anyone who has travelled to Asia must agree that exotic perfumes are always here to remind you where you are. The big face-on-sticking smile is now well known among the typical Hong Kong syndroms, and I hardly noticed the stretching of my cheeks as soon as I took my first step back in the familiar environment. I should not have been surprised by the first breath of “non-conditioned” air out of the airport gates either, but the first gulp of the thick, heavy atmosphere, so different from the fresh Swiss mountains air a few days before still gave me a chill. Once these first basic feelings passed, I took the same steps as in February visiting Eesa, although this time, I took them together with her. I was happy to find back the busy apartment at 183 King’s Road, 14th floor. We’ve lived there alone for more than a week, as one of her roommates has already moved out, and the other was spending some time at his home in mainland, some 2 weeks after our arrival back to Hong Kong, we moved from Fortress Hill to Eesa’s new apartment in North Point : only a 10min walk from each other.

Fortunately, Luck has smiled back at me for a few months now, and indeed the stay in Hong Kong has had a much better start than 6 months ago. At that time, I basically had the same experience as in “Le Poisson”, a novel by Nicolas Bouvier (tribute to my highschool friends if they happen to read this blog) in which the Hero catches a nasty illness while travelling in a far away foreign country, lost somewhere deep in Africa with a high fever, hallucinating in a small hut with nothing like a comforting hand nearby. All points of reference lost, a little bit of a Hell. In my case, it was a serious stomach problem which took me back then, after overestimating my digesting skills in a Japanese food all-you-can-eat buffet in Shenzhen. I may not repeat the same mistake. Next time, I will just devour everything in the buffet avoiding the frozen sushis (hic…) and seafood. Anyway, this time is better and way better.

And as every story about magnificent Hong Kong begins with a picture of HK Skyline, I shall not break with the tradition.

Hong Kong Skyline from the Golden Bauhinia Square

Advertisement