Hong Kong Sighting

Hong Kong is an amazing place.  I'm still getting acclimated here, but already I have some first impressions:

• The average taxi ride here costs HK$25…which is about $3.00 in US dollars. And no tipping. So your taxi fare across the island is HK$25, but the Starbucks you buy when you get there is HK$31.
• I don’t know if it’s my experiences in San Diego or what, but every time I hear another language, I revert to broken Spanish [WTF]. Imagine the confusion when this tall, white American walks into your shop screaming… “Hola”, “Gracias”, “Por Favor”.   Seriously…I have to reach UP to be a tourist.
• If you are non-black-headed here, you stick out like a sore thumb. The constancy of the jet-black hair is startling [the hair color aisle at Walgreen’s is only 3 colors deep]. There are 7 million people in this city, but I only see a brunette/blonde about twice a day. [And for some reason…I always check to see if I know them.]
• People here randomly wear face masks [like the surgical kind]. I had assumed it was virus protection of some sort. [By the way…which pandemic are we on now? Still swine flu?] But someone said that it had more to do with the air quality than tourist repellant. Does breathing the air through a mask make it better? If so, that doesn’t bode well for my workout.
• The humidity is straight out of the movie Platoon. Yesterday it was 83% humidity…but if there was 17% dryness, I didn’t find it. It rains here “from the ground, UP,” as the saying goes.
• With the exchange rate and how cheap things are…you lose track of real money. Today, we almost got mad at a pedi-cabber for the exorbitant charge of HK$100, until we realized he pedaled the biggest woman he’d ever seen across the island for US$12.

…more tomorrow on the discoveries of dim sum.