smoke and concrete and sweaty crowds: surviving kowloon with one functioning brain cell
it smells like fried noodles and exhaustion here. i just checked and it's 20.56°C right now, hope you like that kind of thing. feels like walking through someone’s lukewarm bathwater. the weather app says 71% humidity but my hair says 110%.
you know that scene in blade runner where everything’s claustrophobic and glowing? kowloon is that but with more grandma’s yelling at fishmongers. i counted seven neon signs before my eyes started twitching.
someone told me mong kok’s dumpling stalls are ‘life-changing’, which i think means ‘you’ll burn your tongue and cry in public’. did it anyway. zero regrets. if you get bored, hong kong island’s fancy skyscrapers or shenzhen’s weird tech markets are just a short drive away. not that you’ll ever be bored-kowloon keeps slapping you with wet heat and staircase alleys that go straight up like someone forgot gravity exists.
the rain here isn’t romantic. it’s monsoon-season-meets-angry-sky-god. 47 km² of ‘why did i wear these shoes’. but then you climb lion rock at 6am (still sweaty) and see the harbor through fog and think ‘ah. this is why people do this’.
also there are stairs. so many stairs. kowloon doesn’t believe in elevators. it believes in earning your egg tarts through suffering. speaking of-kowloon city’s dai pai dongs sell this shrimp paste noodles thing that’ll make you forgive the guy who stepped on your foot six times on the mtr. mostly. still thinking about it actually. p.s.: someone told me ‘the air tastes like traffic’ here. they weren’t wrong. bring inhaler. and patience. mostly patience.