2 Parks in 1 Day

After almost 3 months of living in Hong Kong, I have desperately tried to find pleasant open/ park space to relieve myself from the congestion of the city and eventually gave up. As the saying goes, when you least expect it, well you find it… or something like that. So in the midst of my compounding work load, constrained to my chair day in and day out, I accidentally managed to 1.) Run into the nicest park by my neighborhood and 2.) Be informed of a pretty large one near my office by my own boss.

Wow, what a relief. Nice park space does exist in Hong Kong after all and the funny part is that it's not that far away from where I live and work! Have I been blinded all this time? You may be thinking, why does she long so much for park space, is she an old lady or something? Well, the longer I live here the more I sense that relatively speaking, I am like a country girl to Hong Kongers...

I have yet to adjust to the speed of things. I can't stand crowds and it frustrates me when everyone just walks right thru me as though I'm a ghost, or someone stops suddenly in front of me. I feel overwhelmed when masses of people walk towards me. Last weekend, I waited for someone by the MTR stop and had to watch everyone walk in and out, I felt kinda dizzy after awhile. So I realize, I like to be alone sometimes, my sense of individuality is heightened being here. But everyone here does everything in groups, I mean large groups, its about the whole rather than the individual.
So in discovering these parks, I pleasantly spent my alone time in the open air, going back to the simplicity of eating a packed lunch... something you never hear of here, It gets really tiring eating out with lots of people all the times. Nobody cooks here,--I once spent 20 minutes explaining why I cook to someone--everyone eats lunch and dinner out. So I hide from my colleagues just to get away. And I enjoyed every bit of time facing that artificial pond, stretched out on rubbles of sand and grass, sloped towards the water, watching the sky and eating, alone.
So perhaps I'm not as Asian as I thought after all. No one here perceives me to be. And my interests are definitely different from the locals. The more I live here the more western I find my views to be. My sense of individuality, independence, simplicity and convenience are under conflict in my day to day life here. It’s a constant internal battle between east and west. And right now, west is winning hard.

'lil update

A little update on what I've been up to, since to some it seems like I have disappeared off the face of this earth hehe... fyi, no internet access at my new location and therefore no facebook, how I've suffered without access to the rest of the world... awww.

In any case, days here are getting a bit more comfortable, I'm starting to filter everything out, all the branding, crowds, seemingly chaotic spaces. I'm also starting to get into the routine of things and with work keeping me real busy, there's not much else that I've been exposed to... Fortunately, though I haven't had much time to make new friends, I've been in the good company of many old friends from Harvard. It's a nice and comfortable social GSD circle here, I've enjoyed getting to know them outside of the school context... so I feel that I'm def. getting to know them better. And I've even met extensions of networks into the local Taiwanese group while hiking the other day. My little excursions are semi- satisfying, I'm getting lil flavors of HK's natural environment.

So just wanted to keep y'all posted. I appreciate the comments from many of you and am glad that these blogs are keeping us in touch in one way or another. It's made my efforts worthwhile, and every now and then when I feel like I don't want to be writing about myself anymore, I think about how much I want to keep you guys updated and just write... Ok, gotta get back to work now... I think that my brain is all fried , not many thoughts at the moment.. just tired.