It never happened to me to visit a city with such a clear and strong division in layers that can be perceived on the human size. After the first approach where I felt overwhelmed by the surrounding, I realized that I was going to discover an intricate maze of buildings, more similar to an open-air ants' nest than a city.
In the heart of Hong Kong, where the buildings are heaps of floors and they stand like pastels in a pencil holder, the verticality of the buildings is toned down thanks to the different levels of the terrain the city lies upon.
According to the guides, the high point of Hong Kong is the view from the top of Victoria Peak, one of the hills of Hong Kong Island and the closest one to the city center. It actually looks spectacular and could be considered one of the highlights of the trip.
In my opinion, the real show starts walking down from the Peak!
It is one of the best ways to experience the change of altitude, stepping down the mountain with the landscape on one side and the skyscrapers on the other side. Besides being an excellent reason to avoid the crowded and expensive cableway and the slow and sluggish bus.
Only when the descent begins you realize that you are going to learn the city from another perspective.
It is like taking a slow lift that brings you lower and lower, floor by floor. It is like assisting the skyscrapers revealing themselves through the everyday life of their inhabitants.
Seating at the table in the kitchen of the twentieth floor.
Brushing teeth in the bathroom of the tenth.
Chilling out in the green terrace of the fifth.
Walking down is a real journey: from the rich apartments with stunning views to the basic street shops and the modest life.
Hong Kong is a city of contrasts, where old and new, tradition and innovation, spirituality and entertainment meet and coexist.
The human scale gets lost everywhere: in the repetition of the countless floors heaped like a Lego construction, in the pattern of the buildings' elevations, in the groundings of the skyscrapers and in the relation between them and the surrounding landscape.
The built dimension is so huge that the gap is spectacular for the eyes of the visitors.
Perhaps difficult to bear for the citizens.
It is the city with the longest escalators system in the world.
Maybe the long mechanic stairs and the connective tunnels suspended between the skyscrapers, are the attempt to bridge the gap between the concrete giants and their little inhabitants.
In Hong Kong, you can experience rich brunches on the rooftop of five stars hotel next to the Avenue of Stars or cheap and succulent street food in Kowloon. After a stunning view of the city on the 100th floor, you can have the best crab and beer of your life seating on the low stools in a street restaurant next to Temple Street Night Market. Rags to reaches? Not really, you will enjoy both, especially because of their contrast.
The markets sell elegant orchids next to the birds' feed stalls, where insects of any kind, still alive, are ready to be sold in transparent "mono portion" bags.
The oldest Taoist city temple appears on the corner of the street after climbing several stairs. There, in the Man Mo temple, the atmosphere becomes beguiling in a blink and the air gets smoky: the overhead earth-colored spirals hanged on the ceiling burn no stop to make the worshippers' prayers become true.
The city doesn't make with the human proportions up even in its surroundings. Outside the urban area, at Ngong Ping, in Lantau Island, a tall bronze Buddha stands to symbolize the harmony between man and nature, somehow...
To reach it, a high panoramic cable car hangs loosely between strips of land.
The giant city is its redundancy of concrete, its excess of height and the difficulty to deal with the human scale.
I found myself unable of finding a reference to connect the built objects and the human beings living in and among them.
This lack attracts me a lot, maybe because it is a challenge to understand this massive city and its tremendous beauty.
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