Once upon a time, when Chaz and I worked for Brown’s newspaper, he was a news editor and I was a features editor. He covered the hard-hitting issues and I covered, as he once put it, the fluff. In accordance with tradition, I’ll leave the factual details of our time in Hong Kong thus far to him, and I will instead paint a more flowery (literally) picture.

We started our morning by heading into downtown HK (the Kelshes live in Repulse Bay, on the quieter south side of the island). What immediately struck me was how tall the apartment buildings were, and how many of them there seemed to be. Before I left, my mom commented that her first impression of the major Asian cities was that they were “teeming with humanity.” After seeing the soaring buildings, I could not agree more.

And then, out of nowhere, was a beautiful garden. Smack-dab in the middle of high-rises and surrounded by a freeway was a Buddhist garden filled with golden temples and magical-looking rocks. We explored the greenery — somehow silent, despite its surroundings — before heaving a vegetarian lunch in the gardens.

The beauty of a vegetarian meal is that I have zero fears of what might be on my plate. With meats, things can get a little creepy (i.e. the mysterious animal feet I saw in the markets today), but  I will take on any vegetable with gusto. And that we did.

Following lunch, we visited the Buddhist nunnery that sponsors the gardens and the restaurant within. We witnessed a lot of incense, fortune telling and a game that seemed like the Eastern equivalent of a magic eight ball: asking a question of a jar of incense sticks, and then shaking them until one fell out. It seemed to be a do-it-yourself art though; one woman shook her jar about five times, clearly unhappy with the answer she had been given. I didn’t know that the spirits have a “sorry, try again later” option.

Following our calm respite, we hit the open streets for sheer mayhem. For the full portrait of what we saw, it’s best to go the picture-says-a-thousand-words option and just check out the slideshow. There were foreign fruits and foreign meat products, and a whole lotta people.

More photos and stories coming soon (the 12-hour time difference is creating a whirlwind of jet lag), but as a sneak preview, you can expect a bus teetering along cliff-side roads, a whole table full of dumplings, a high-rise whose elevators shut down at midnight and another full day of adventures.