something clever to be changed later

so my stay in hong kong has just about wrapped up, and all i have to show for it is a new pair of sunglasses and a bad sunburn. but that's not quite fair. hong kong is easily my favorite city so far. besides the ridiculously hot and humid weather (i hear vietnam is worse), i think hong kong is perhaps the easiest city to be a tourist in. all the public transportation is easy to use, and they put up these signs all throughout the city with maps that tell clueless people like me how to find, say, the museum of art. also, everything is in english. i find you really learn to miss that in china. finally, you can get anything you want in hong kong, provided you're willing to pay for it, including indian fast-food, dental floss, and suncreen that doesn't unnaturally whiten your skin. i quite imagine that it is what shanghai will be like in another five or ten years.

oh, also, hong kong has style. china doesn't.

i'm not sure much interesting happened between kunming and hongkong. the train ride was actually quite nice, and included a brand new stretch with quite beautiful scenery. there was a whole group of women on the train going to some cosmetics conference in guangzhou. i couldn't quite figure out what their jobs were; it seemed like sort of an amco-type scam where they sign up to sell beauty products to their friends. anyway, they all ended up trying to sell stuff to each other and trying out eachother's make-up. the poor guy on the bottom bunk kept rolling his eyes at me the entire trip.

i didn't see any of guangzhou. i managed to get off the train and take the subway to the other train station where i got a local express train to shenzhen. shenzhen is china's most ridiculous city. (i might have previously given that award to lanzhou, which i now deem china's suckiest city). anyway, the train station is right next to the border, which is just overflowing with people from hong kong coming over to buy cheap crap and salesmen trying relentlessly to sell you cheap crap. the architecture is as bad as beijing's, but with even more sense of there being no rhyme or reason. beggars assault you at every turn, and everything is damn expensive as well. it's basically what happens when a bunch of rich people build a city with no rules. it sucks.

i'm up bright and early tomorrow to catch my flight to vietnam. hopefully all goes well on that front. i will update you all then.

p.s. i can actually read the blog here in hong kong, the first time since my very first post. i just want to say for the record that 1. even though i told you i couldn't read the comments i'm disapointed by the lack of them, and 2. durrell's scrolling picture thing looks horrible. good thing i couldn't see it in china or i would have kicked him off the blog.