After a bit of a hiatus, spurred on by a ridiculously busy past month-and-a-half, you’ll be happy to know that this blog has returned to its regularly-scheduled update cycle (2-3 per week). I know most of you have been stumbling through your daily lives in somewhat of a daze over these past few weeks, so consider yourselves liberated from your zombie-like existences. Add this to the list of things that you are thankful for during this holiday weekend.
So, despite my many travels over these past several weeks, the main concern of mine more recently has been welcoming Lizzi to her new home in Tokyo. I’m happy to report that she is settling in nicely, adequately filling the closet space I set aside for her with 12,000 pairs of shoes as well as my stomach with tasty dinners (I’m a big fan of taco night). She arrived in Tokyo about four weeks ago and seems to be adapting well. She has started private language lessons and has even managed to make some new friends, which puts her well ahead of me in the branching-out department since my friends are largely confined to those met through work. Thusly, she has been appointed as the social chair of our household, a job in which I suspect she will excel.
With Lizzi’s arrival, the apartment now has more of a personal touch. This basically means that it actually feels like people live here; the previous manifestation represented more of a long-term furnished rental than a place one would be compelled to call home. Hell, I didn’t even own any pots/pans, and I only had a couple of bowls and cups in the way of kitchen supplies. Now we’ve got plenty of both (thanks to a not-so-cheap shopping trip to Ginza the other day) and, for the first time in my life, I actually sit down to a proper dinner at home. Admittedly, we do our fair share of ordering takeout, as well as visiting a fine eating establishment or two, but it is nice to know that we’ve got all those kitchen supplies should the cooking mood strike us (or, more accurately, strike her). The bottom line is that our place now feels more like a place to hang my hat, which is most certainly a welcome feeling. We still have plenty to do in terms of decoration, but we are well on our way to setting up a proper homestead. Once we get closer to a finished product, I will be sure to post photos for everyone to see.
We spent a few days in Hong Kong a week or so ago, which I thought did well in providing Lizzi with some perspective. I told her before we went that she would appreciate Tokyo more once she got a taste for other major Asian cities, and Hong Kong did not disappoint. There are surely things that I like about the city – most notably its international feel, which lies in stark contrast to the homogeneity of a Japan whose foreign residents comprise only 1% of its population – but visiting Hong Kong is the traveling equivalent of attending a sold out concert at a massive football stadium. The ambience usually sucks (crowded, loud, dirty), the food is hit or miss, there’s a decent chance some foreign substance will find its way onto your shirt/shoes/etc., you’ll probably end up fearing for your life for at least one brief, terrifying second (a huge fight broke out behind me two rows back and bottles are flying/this taxi driver is a complete lunatic with whom I am incapable of communicating and who may or may not have plans to drug me and remove a kidney for underground trade), and it’s rarely as good as it looked or sounded on video/TV/iTunes. You always feel compelled to go (can’t miss this show/can’t miss this biz trip), and you don’t necessarily regret making the trip, but you’re always happy to leave and make your way home when the show is over.
Hong Kong is a rough and tumble place compared to Tokyo, and it certainly takes on more of the wild west feel that best captures the feeling behind the recent economic upsurge across Asia. As one of our friends put it to us over a nice Shanghainese dinner one night, “it’s like the boom times of the U.S. and Japan during their respective economic explosions – I need to eat more food, drink more booze, have more sex and buy more stuff…it’s all about more, more, more!”. The place is buzzing with activity and the local populace appears to have subscribed wholeheartedly to the concept of capitalism, with people peddling their wares at every corner and more Prada, Louis Vuitton, Ferragamo, etc. than you could shake a stick at. In fact, the Chinese to me come off as incredibly profligate in nature, leading me to believe that China’s pursuit of communist capitalism is decidedly more tilted towards the latter in practice. Of course, Hong Kong shouldn’t necessarily serve as a barometer for what’s happening on the mainland, but my stay in Shanghai a few years back as well as other bits of anecdotal evidence suggest that things aren’t all that different in the other large metropolitan areas further inland.
I don’t mean to suggest that you should never visit Hong Kong. It’s just that it comes as a bit of a shock to the system when we leave the comfy, Zen-like confines of Tokyo. Hong Kong certainly has its charms, and it’s easy to feed off the energy of a city at the center of the Asian rebirth. To be honest, it’s kind of cool to be living in a region of the world that is truly in the midst of a renaissance, and visits to places like Hong Kong enable us to feel like we’re witnessing history. Asia is becoming more and more relevant in a macroeconomic and geopolitical sense, and it feels like we’ve got front row seats to all of it. Too bad Japan continues to treat water while the rest of Asia catches fire around it, but that’s a story for another day.
