Not that there was any running involved. It was more like limping. Or walking very slowly across lots of uneven roads towing a crappy samsonite wheelie bag thingie that I will never look at again without reliving the embarrassment of knocking my half-full cup of vanilla latte off the top of it and watching it burst open on the airport’s shiny marble floor in front of 40+ travellers who looked like they were relocating their entire village with them in tarpaulan knapsacks. Such were my travails.

Causeway Bay shopping area

I wouldn’t have gone to Hong Kong at all if I could have avoided it, but the Chinese Government, in their infinite wisdom, bless the Chairman, decided that last year’s Olympics was the perfect time to clamp down on generous visa laws and make it so that innocent, well-intentioned, unemployed, ungrammatical Mandarin-speaking writerly layabouts like me must journey out of the country every three months to apply for a new tourist visa. And with my first three months in Shanghai almost up and all other dodgy, semi-illegal visa extension methods exhausted, I bit the bullet and booked a plane ticket to Hong Kong. Now in most circumstances visiting one of Asia’s shopping captials would be an exciting prospect, but I had several very good reasons for not wanting to leave Shanghai, and chief among them were:

a) I was sick In complete and utterly excellent health, thanks for asking, Mr Quarantine Officer

b) I was suffering from the type of female complaint that means you can’t go swimming

c) I’m going to Hong Kong next month anyway

d) Getting up at 3.50am in freezing conditions to go to Pudong International Airport is not my idea of a fine time

e) I would rather have spent the cost of the return plane ticket on a slice of pizza (those prices are about comparable in China)

f) I have only just reached the halfway point with my current manuscript, and now I only have a month to write the other half

g) I don’t know anyone in Hong Kong. Not a soul. Well, with the exception of Khalil Fong. He and I have an undertsanding, you see. Sure, that understanding may be limited to the contents of my iPod, but our connection transcends megabytes, all right?

h) NO INTERNET ACCESS FOR TWO DAYS!!!!????

You begin to understand my reluctance. Everything turned out smoothly, though: I didn’t miss my plane, the plane didn’t crash, I found out those ocker, swearing Australians in front of me were from Sydney and the world made sense again, I got a nice caffeine kick from a Starbucks vanilla latte that didn’t taste anything like coffee, and I sorted out my visa issues by giving a huge wad of Hong Kong dollars I’d just coerced out of an airport ATM to a Chinese visa service lady who said she would have my new visa ready in 7 hours. Great, but my plane didn’t leave until the following night, and I had a reservation at a guest house in Causeway Bay, so I figured I might as well go and at least take a peek at the city.

First thoughts upon leaving the airport:

• is Hong Kong an island or an outcrop of land connected to Mainland China? (no, seriously, does anyone know?)
• Cantonese is icky. Possibly because I still don’t know a single word of it, not even “hello” or “thank you”. Though I seem to recall someone in Guangzhou trying to teach me the numbers, and number 5 sounded like the sound you’d make rubbing your tummy after eating a particularly good cheese croquette.
• Wow, all the guys here are hot. Even the ugly ones are metro enough to confuse you for a few seconds. Excepting perhaps the grandpas, who were all wearing the Uniform of Dag endorsed by the Universal Society of Geriatric Men, Dress Code subsection 4b.
• Hungry. So very hungry.

So after consuming a mango/sago concotion and a waffle from a street vendor I checked into my room at the guest house, chosen for cheapness and its nearness to the visa agency I was originally going to use. Perhaps it is telling of my personality that the room’s lack of a shower upset me less than the fact that the TV only had four channels, and the only thing on in English was a Candadian kiddies program about Egyptian mummies. Right. Hope the host was wearing sunblock, because she looked like she’d tan lobster-style.

I also bought supplies for the next two days at a local supermarket called “Wellcome”, and after being distracted by a Pokémon toy dispensing machine at the store’s entrance, managed to come up with my dinner and all of tomorrow’s rations, which consisted of:

1. A sack of unripe Australian oranges (which I thought were tangerines until I got back to the guest house and tried to peel them with my fingers)
2. A cylinder of Pringles (I’m still picking Pringle shards out of my luggage)
3. A packet of sunflower seeds
4. A packet of peanuts (not honey roasted)
5. A box of water crackers
6. An assortment of spreadable cheeses
7. 2 gallons of drinking water, or whatever god-forsaken system of measurement they use over there (possibly the same one as in Australia, but that doesn’t make it any less godforsaken)

I had a bad dream that night. I had paid for two hours of karaoke at the local parlour in Shanghai and was nobly trying to bring up sodagreen’s 融雪之前 (Before the Snow Melts) on the booth computer’s screen but kept getting distracted by everyone, including an0ther_dreamer trying to show me her Merlin fanart of a cat photoshopped onto a castle turret. But none of that really signifies.

Nice of the Causeway Bay Harbour people to think of me, but I'd really much rather take the metro

The next morning I staggered out of bed, spiked my hair up with water until it no longer looked like thatch, and checked out of the guest house with my luggage in tow. I hadn’t slept well and I still had 6 hours or so to kill until I had to be back at the airport, so I took Hong Kong’s subway, the MTR, to Mong Kok station, which anyone who can read real Chinese knows should be pronounced “wang jiao” (I jest, I jest). I’d bought an octopus transport card the day before (which I somehow got into the habit of referring to as the “Octopussy card” in my head), so transport was never a real issue. Money was though. Not that I had a terrible lack of it, in fact I still have plenty left over for when I go back with vgag next month, but I was having a hard time figuring out how to covert Hong Kong dollars back to Australian dollars, and then figure out how that compared with Chinese Ren Min Bi, with the result always being: expensive. Everything was equal to or more expensive than it would have been in China, which kind of makes me wonder why so many young Chinese women fly there to go on shopping sprees in the first place (though any excuse to get out of one’s own country for a while is good enough, I suppose).

So after one and a half days in Hong Kong I ended up buying: an SPCA charity t-shirt, a Lonely Planet Japanese phrasebook (for use in January), a purple hoodie from UNI QLO, a purple umbrella (do you see a theme developing?), mutlicoloured shoe laces and a space invaders shoulder bag that I clearly paid too much for because the woman I was “haggling” with agreed to my first offer.

Fluffy bling earmuffs that I'm pretty sure must contain State secrets judging from the reaction of the shop assistants to me taking photos of them

By noon I was starting to think that the pavement looked like a good place for a lie down, so I took myself off to KFC to use their toilets (a time-honoured tradition, and if the English left one good thing behind them in Hong Kong when they decamped, it was Western toilets) and then found the nearest Starbucks. I’m not a fan of Starbucks generally (or of any large USian corporations besides Nintendo and Apple), but after a cold day of museum-hopping in Nanjing a week ago I was in need of a caffeine hit and caved, and have since become an Expat Convert, which is at least what I’m terming the phenomenon of my weak-willedness. So I bought an overpriced, oversized Starbucks coffee, settled down in a chair with a view of the passing parade through the window, and spent the next few hours finishing Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Great book, could have used some more plot at the end, but anything that can still make readers laugh two hundred years after it was written has got to have something going for it.

By the time I got to the airport to collect my new visa it was almost time to board the plane back to the ‘Hai, though I did browse through two duty free bookshops on the way through and was amused to see Dan Brown shelved under “history”, and less amused at the prices they were charging for everything. Still, I found volume 26 of a Chinese-language manga called Air Gear that had “restricted to persons over 18″ stickered all over it, which convinced me there and then that I had to get a copy for the trip home. Unfortunately its restrictedness had everything to do with unnecessarily naked female characters and nothing to do with yaoi, but I added ten new words to my vocabularly list care of its speech balloons by the time the plane touched down in Shanghai.

An hour and two taxi rides later and my ears were still ringing from the aeroplane pilot’s crappy descent, but at least I was home, in lovely Putuo district, with a shiny new visa that will last me to February in case I decide to defect from Australia (has anyone actually done that before?). It turned out the adventure wasn’t over though when my key to the apartment building snapped in half when I tried to turn it in the lock. It was that cold. But still no snow.

When it snows here I really will have something to write about.