In his latest The Expat Life column, Alan Paul, who has been living in Beijing with his family for less than a year, explains what visiting Hong Kong was like:
Beijing is a city of over 12 million people, with a wide array of amenities growing by the day. Yet almost from the minute we landed in Hong Kong, I felt like I was leading a pack of country mice lost in the big city and awed by their towering, glittery surroundings. It seemed as if we had leapt from the mid-twentieth century into the mid-twenty-first.
This anecdote spoke to me:
We landed at the airport and took the train into town, lugging two big bags, three young kids and an assortment of carry-ons. At the central station, we took the elevator up two floors, ready to catch a cab to our hotel. Before we could head out, however, my wife, Rebecca, spied a bookstore on the other end of the floor and we all ran toward it like Bedouins spying an oasis on the edge of a desert.