recent travels

Where to start?

Hong Kong was kind of overwhelming. I have never before seen a city
that seems to take skyscrapers for granted. It honestly must have the
highest average building height of any major city I've been to. I
should be able to illustrate this more clearly once I get back to
Korea. So that was a strange shock at first, though I did adjust
somewhat. Still, when I went to Shenzhen, though it seemed city-like,
the space between tall buildings made it seem awfully spacious, and
the skyscrapers looked all squat. Now that I'm back here after
HengYang it seems much more normal, kind of like Seoul, with a
concrete sea of smaller dwellings, the tall buildings standing proud
above them, surrounding, towering over-whelming the park where we went
this evening after dinner. HengYang has something of the same kind of
feeling of a concrete sea, but not quite, as most buildings there
aren't even 10 stories. It's still surreal though, looking out at all
the multitude of buildings at night, picking out the apartment
buildings (most of the buildings), then just looking at the rooms with
lights on (a good percentage), and thinking that each of those
represents at least one person, one life outside of mine, which I will
likely never encounter, but which is still doing things, participating
in the world. It feels almost like a new feeling here, these
buildings all being so monstrouly large, but I think back to other
cities and it reminds me too of driving out of San Francisco and
seeing the hills carpeted with houses, barely an open patch to be
seen, or being in Waikiki, with hotel after hotel, or being in almost
any big city. Honolulu though, I may have mentioned this, was the
most Asian-feeling US city I've ever been in, and not just because of
the demographics. The way the hotels are built so tall, and so close
together, interspersed with smaller concrete structures just felt so
much like cities here.

At least outside of the Waikiki and downtown it all turned to houses
though. While I was in HengYang Echo and I took a trip to Nan Yue, a
town nearby at the foot of a holy mountain (more about that trip when
I can share pictures). But the town felt almost like a city in the
way all the buildings were crowded together, identical concrete and
tile structure, same you see in any town. They're just shorter, only
3 or 4 stories. Even up on the mountain, the semi-traditional styled
buildings were obviously constructed the same way, and just had
fancier rooves and interior decorations. I don't want to be overly
critical, but I find it incredibly stifling and oppressive. Not in an
overt way, just in the way that it seems to unconsciously stifle
diversity of thought, giving builders a standard design to follow
instead of encouraging creativity, all over the country. There are
some regional variations, but for the most part, as far as I've seen,
buildings in towns are built on the same basic, cheap model, and
generally all compressed together. Of course, if the US had four
times its population and a comparable proportion of buildable land,
what would our architecture look like? As much as I prefer
individual, comfortably spaced, designed houses, maybe that's just not
feasible in the long-term. I hope not though.

Enough of that. I'll have more later on what I've been up to. For
now I'll close with another uniquely Chinese malapropism. This
afternoon we went to a coastal mangrove park, a park that's set up on
the water facing Hong Kong. Some very nice parks here, in HengYang
and Hong Kong too, the Chinese may be better about that than Koreans,
or I need to explore Seoul more. Anyway, there was a sign up listing
the rules of the park. Here's the rule that most confused me:

6. Prostitution, whoring, gambling, drug taking, feudalism and
superstitious or other illegal practices are strictly forbidden.

Right, because in other parks princes ride up with their coterie,
stake out a claim and start constructing a motte and bailey to defend
their new territory. What did they mean, vandalism? Pimping?
Drug-dealing? The last is what my friends/ex-students here thought it
might be. Something strange in the translation. Anyway, now
everyone's asleep and it's time I was too.