A day spent experiencing HK’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) is enough to put any urban-dwelling American to shame.

When I left NYC there was no evidence that the Sun exists. When I landed in HK, there was still none. The first ten days of my stay were filled with cumulonimbus clouds and grape-sized rain droplets. Stepping outside is like entering a sauna or breathing with a hot wet rag smothering your face. The CEOs here are taking three to four showers a day to gain short-lived relief from all the humidity-induced stickiness.

Some brief musings about HK:

1. HK (and China for that matter) is not ethnically diverse compared to NYC. The city’s 95% Chinese. 2. There are so many mega-malls that look exactly alike. Armies of cleaning staff ensure they are all freakishly clean.

These malls cause you to feel like a lab rat in a Escher-like maze.

Columbia University’s Center for Career Education (CCE) will, no doubt, post on its website photos of Columbia Experience Overseas HK interns who look like they’re having way more funthan anyone has a human right to by being treated to free Cantonese food and an open bar at an upscale bar/lounge. (You know Philia Lounge will be a nice place even before you go because of its website. There’s no way a bar that’s not doing well is going to deck out its website with Adobe Flash and eerie techno music.) But here are some additional flattering pictures of the CEO contingent.

Observe the twinkle in the eyes and the tight, two-handed clutches on the bottles. They are seriously looking forward to pounding down the contents.

Columbia’s Center for Career Education has provided us interns with free housing during our internships in HK. NTT International House is an eleven-story dormitory of Baptist University, which is nestled in the Kowloon Tong (九龍唐) district.

• airline: Cathay Pacific
• distance traveled: 8,066mi (12,982km)
• time to destination: 15hrs
• cruising altitude: 31,998ft (9,753m)
• outside air temperature: -49 degrees Celsius
• in-flight dining: terrible

Takeoff over Winthrop, MA

My seat in 36A is next to the window in the wing section. My mom once told me the wingbox is the strongest section of the plane, but I later found out it’s not necessarily the safest. You can die in a plane no matter where you’re sitting. Thinking about Air France Flight 447, I mentally plan out my escape plans for various scenarios: fuselage coming apart in midair (à la Lost), water impact, etc.

It’s t-minus ten hours before I wake up at 4am for a direct flight to Hong Kong via Cathay Pacific, and I am as excited as an intravenous drug user who’s won a lifetime supply of needles, to put it mildly. Here’s one reason why: a mere 2.0km from where I’ll be living in HK is a place that once housed one of the biggest dildo factories in the world. According to Martin Booth’s The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads,

In the 1980s, [Kowloon Walled City][1] contained one of the biggest manufacturers of rubber penises in the world: to visit the factory was like entering a bizarre, Salvador Dali-esque subterranean world, with racks of latex male organs hanging up to dry like sausages in a butcher’s shop.

Just imagine thousands of these

You wish you were going here

In preparation for my internship in Hong Kong, I’ve devoted the past couple weeks to learning basic Cantonese. A very useful resource I’ve found at my local library is Dr. Paul Pimsleur’s Speak & Understand Essential Cantonese. It’s a self-instructional set of five cassette tapes that gradually introduce everyday words and asks the listener to repeat and respond to the recorded voices. FYI: Dr. Pimsleur got his Ph.D. in French from Columbia University.

Although it’s interesting to watch a single, white mother struggle to raise her two sons with income derived solely from dealing marijuana to an entire suburban California community, I think I’ll stop. I finished the entire first season of Showtime’s Weeds in one day (my gratitude to Megavideo for illegally hosting them all conveniently here). Although the show has smart dialogue and engaging characters, there are aspects of it that don’t sit well.

Spartan33x saw his last team member die. The terrorist had emptied an entire 30-round magazine of .62mm bullets from the AK-47 into his friend’s body, which was now lying unrecognizable heap on the floor. The carnage was terrible. Shredded Kevlar and seared chunks of flesh lay strewn about the hallway as blood from the corpse slowly soaked into the carpet. But there was no time for grief.