Hong Kong: Week One. Welcome to my blog.

Hong Kong makes me very confusion.

Arriving in a new city is always a bit crazy. I've managed to fall into the work environment pretty easily, so nothing to report there. That's boring away. The most important thing that's happened to me this week, is the beginning of the journey I need to undertake to come to terms with my status as an expat. Hanging out in douchebag, bogan bars that play 'Land from Downunder' with the kind of frequency that Irish sailors say 'fook'; buying a whole new life (new toothbrush -> new clothes -> new fridge); joining Facebook after 10 friggin years of total recalcitrance, hanging out with all white people, & eating Italian, Vietnamese, Aussie, barbeque, burgers, pizza, bacon & eggs (pretty much anything that isn't Chinese); etc.  It'll be a while before I truly accept my position as that loud nimrod with the disposable income that just drank four pints of Hieneken on a Tuesday night just because...

Actually, put in that perspective, all I've really done is changed the background...

Shit.

Oh well, other than the normality that has evidently followed me here, my life has been reduced to a handful of streets, my desk, & a rapidly growing number of restaurants as I begin to very gingerly expore my new adopted home.

Monday I get my Hong Kong ID card, the unimaginatively named HKID. What's wrong with 'HellaHonkerTicket'? Or 'China - the Good Bit' card? Or maybe even 'Human Jenga Permit'? As this card will allow me to get a phone, and a fixed address, I'm now being given the right to pay a small chunk of the Count of Monte Christo's booty to live in a space that most Australians would use to keep their outside shoes, car washing supplies & that spare thirty pack of cokes....well, at least I hope to. Perhaps they'll refuse to ID me. That'd be awkward.

Ah, this is a crappy first post. Essentially all you, the reader, needs to know is that I'll be updating this thing semi-regularly & detailing my exploits over the next two years as my life in Hong Kong unfolds. You can share with me the ups, the downs, the sideways, all that good stuff. Let's do a test post shall we?

Ahem.

Woke up this morning & immediately felt as if the right hempishpere of my brain was attempting to stage a coup. I'm fairly certain that the after-vitamin pee coloured 'beer' that I drank last night caused a vindictive little gnome to grow out of my forehead during my sleep who then proceeded to hack open my melon & belt the living crap out of my frontal lobe with a hot frying pan. Yes, I'm talking about a hangover people. A real nasty one. If I was George W Bush's administration I'd be bombing a small republic right now to make myself feel better about being attacked by unseen forces. Bastard beer lives here.

So anyway, I made a somewhat hamfisted attempt at combatting my agony by frying up some bacon & eggs. Had to prepare:
1. Make coffee
2. Sigh
3. Get dressed & head downstairs to the supermarket across the road to buy bread that isn't full of raisons like the raison bread I accidentally bought the other day & ate with scrambled eggs. It was labeled in english: "Raison bread". Brightest window on the floor I am most certainly not.
4. Go back upstairs.
5. Pop my ears & scoop my brains back up of the carpet after reaching the 26th floor in a gut-heaving 0.01 seconds.
6. Open the two doors leading out onto the balcony (a dizzying concrete plank jutting out of my apartment about 100 metres above the street) to avoid creating a stinky bacon fog.
7. Cook & create a thick, rich bacon fog.

Ate at my little side table for want of any other flat surface that isn't a floor. Found an incredible talent that I have for being able to complain audibly to myself while simultaneously groaning & chewing. Amazing. I'm like the Rahzel of hangover breakfasts. So anyway, being able to cook in a space that could pass for a queen-sized coffin is probably not a skill that will transfer very usefully back to Australia, but for now it's number one on the list of things to learn. I feel that the jerky, bleary-eyed cacophany of burns, curse words, elbows bashing into walls & tiny flying assassin grease blobs skidding through the air on a light-speed collision course with my eyes or nipples could have been better managed. The 'Tardis Cooking Project' begins.

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Yeah, that's I guess an idea of what I'll be talking about over the next few years. Maybe I'll even be sentient & capable of real emotions for some of my stories. Only time will tell!

Next episode: What the hell am I going to do with my time in Honkers?! Also, an internal monologue on the competing desires to learn Mandarin or Cantonese.