First night - To sleep, perchance to fall in front of a bus.

Unpacked, showered and changed into more comfortable clothes, I headed back out to investigate the area. Below was my first sight of the nighttime Hong Kong skyline, looking out from the small parking area adjoining the hotel.

Home, sweet home

By this point, I was tired and sweaty enough to be relieved that it was time to check in to my hotel (rather stupidly, I hadn't switched out of the sweatpants I wore on the plane for comfort, and it was a moderately muggy 80-something degree day). So I retrieved my luggage and caught a cab. My hotel was between a five and ten minute ride away, partway up the mountainside in the Mid-Levels, an upscale residential area with lots of office types who work in Central below, a lot of them Western expats. My company had a really good rate there, or I'd probably have been in one of the fleabag youth hostels across the harbor in Kowloon.

First day continued: More buildings - PLUS!: trees and people

Behind the HSBC building you start to go up the lower slope of the mountain, and there's a nice parky area with trees and some of the few surviving old-style colonial buildings.

(Pics will be mostly bigger from here on out... still working on the technical side of this thing. Mark Zuckerberg I ain't.)

First day continued: Central, Statue Square, Occupy Hong Kong, etc.

A lot of streets and other locations have English (or, well, Scottish) names, but they all have Chinese names as well, with usually no relationship between the two. 

First day continued: The Temple of Mammon

In quest of lunch, or a late breakfast or whatever, I had my first encounter with HK mall culture. The entire place is littered with vast, glitzy, high-end shopping malls that are like palaces crossed with spaceships. Sometimes I would emerge into one from a subway station and have trouble finding my way out. This is the IFC Mall, right below International Finance Centre 2 and right above my Airport Express stop.

First morning, or "You're In $%^&ing Hong Kong"

Check-in time at my hotel was 3:00 p.m., so I checked my suitcase at a left-luggage office and set out bleary-eyed but wired for a full day of being a tourist. I think I kept saying to myself, "You're in $%^&ing Hong Kong."

Arrival

This is the luggage tag a co-worker gave me as a parting gift.
It aptly expresses how I was feeling as I left for my trip.