qin qian qong in hong kong

Kopee woach? kopee henbaak? heer, kopee byee kopee(copy watch, copy handbag madam? here copy buy copy)- 'original fakes' business is going well in hong kong - I can see the effectiveness as my roommates are sporting shiny Rollexes on their wrists (it's for my brother but I need to check it out first). Hong Kong Kowloon is a place where the east is at the west's feet, all that shopping glitz goes for a head-on crash with delapidated stench of narrow streets, but where everybody sweats no matter where they come from in a painfully still air of local summer.
You would think that a metropolis like that would timidly try to hide its stinky interior. KOWLOON, however, shamelessly does full monty - one glance up and you're flying among the shabby blocks, one step aside and you're with the poor of a side street.
Here you waltz through the day: one, two, three, please buy meee. Blinding is the sparkle of a new mobile phone, tempting is the fetish of a super fast laptop. It's so hard to resist...I give up and after a hard haggle I go downtown straight away to check out my new photo toy.
Looking at China through HONG KONG perspective makes it a soft landing in Mao's reality successfully blurred by the hubbub and consumerism of Kowloon. That's why it wasn't long before I felt the pressure to push on towards THE WALL. It seemed so easy - just buy a Hong Kong-Shanghai sleeper, get enough reading for a 24h journey, stretch on the berth and gaze at the horizon looking for the shadows of Shanghai skyline. Well, things that are thought to be easy might be very misleading since they're often based on coincidence. In my case it meant a 72h patience lesson that had to be humbly taken...