Nan Lian in Diamond Hill is an ideal traditional Chinese garden with immaculately kept grounds, golden roofed temples, and a tea house that sits over a quaint pond adorned in Lilly pads. I went to the garden just before sunset, as the light was streaming in perfectly, lightly dusting every surface with gold. I haven’t taken photographs of anything other than people in a while, and this was the perfect place to stray from that and go back to the way I shot when I was younger, with a simple sense of wonder towards my surroundings, not exactly looking for a moment but rather for a composition that was interesting to me all on its own.
“Contrast” this was what Chris and I dubbed our attempts to do things differently and not simply stick to the things we knew and liked while we were in Hong Kong. We spent 25 days in Sheung Wan then decided to mix up our HK experience by moving to another neighborhood four subway stops away. At the bottom of Happy Valley, Wan Chai is a very wet neighborhood steeped in liveliness. In the past it was nick-named Hong Kong’s red light district. I wouldn’t have guessed from my experiences there, but I was not out and about late into the night. Not every image in this post was taken in Wan Chai, some are from nearby places like Aberdeen and Central that we walked to during our contrast stint in Wan Chai. 
Mui Wo is a small village on the less developed Eastern side of Lantau Island. You take a 40 minute ferry from Central Hong Kong, and debark in a small windy fishing town. We stopped at a seaside market where we chose our own fish to be fried and 10 minutes later we were eating fish, prawns, and fried eggplant, and washing it down with cold Tsingtao. We hiked up in to the mountains, passing a rather unusual graveyard, multiple racks of fire beating sticks, and many tropical plants that reminded me of Hawaii.
If you take a bus towards Shek-O, the semi-fancy beach town on the South East side of Hong Kong Island, you will pass numerous signs for small villages dotting the windy coastal road. These signs ignited my curiosity, so I jumped off the bus a few stops before Shek-O and made my way down a steep incline to the tiny village of Lan Nai Wan Tsuen.
Until a few months ago I had been a vegetarian for about 14 years. Upon coming to Hong Kong I have eaten things like steamed pork buns, Yakatori chicken, and various dumplings I was sometimes unsure of the content of.. Being in a place where these things are a part of the culture, the way of life pulsing around me, I feel more okay with consuming it than I have before. Every street I walk down here has flesh hanging in some window, maybe an entire goose, maybe fish swimming in a tiny tank. People live in tiny apartments here. They eat out. They eat in parks, they eat together. These are the markets, as vibrant and social a step as any. The wet markets are loud and colorful, and they go well into the night as the city does. 
Right now I am living in a part of Hong Kong called Sheung Wan. It is very international, semi-dense, and highly multicultural. In the past week I have explored Central and Kowloon quite a bit and I have been happily inundated with the sights, scents, and sounds of the city. The people have been kind, the streets shockingly clean, and the air warm and humid. It is a place of activity. No one stands still. Interrupting the flow in a public place by being on your phone is called “phubbing” or “phubbering”. Still, people move politely despite the denseness that everyone talks about when referring to Hong Kong. I still feel that I have my space. 
Viola Jean Photography 