…has been a motto of mine for some time. When you fly as much as I do (and I assure you, that’s a lot) succumbing to the rigours or air travel and time zone switching seems an extensive waste of precious time that could otherwise be spent looking at cool things, or drinking.

However this month I am trying something I’ve never even come close to attempting before – I am flying around the world. Due presumably to some sort of odd masochism I chose to do so by going east, thereby losing hours of time each hop until eventually gaining it all back in one large chunk en route from Tokyo to Honolulu when I cross the IDL. I am pretty certain I will spend this entire flight filled with the thrill of time travel as I leave Tokyo Monday night and magically arrive in Hawaii bright and early Monday morning. I simply cannot think of this as anything but incredibly cool.

The upshot of all this however, is that I spent every flight valiantly trying to sleep for 4 or 5 hours to readjust myself to morning once again coming significantly earlier than my body expects. Today – my first day in HK, my body reacted to this by waking me at 6am, falling asleep again at 10am, and fighting me for supremacy as I dragged its ass out of bed around 3pm. Today has, as you might imagine, been a bit of a loss.

Right now I am on a train back from Lantau island, where I spectacularly failed to see anything cool whatsoever due to my extraordinary tardiness in arising. On the plus side, I managed to buy (amongst other things) some cheese. Cheese is important. It is incredibly difficult to buy any sort of street food that does not consist entirely of rice or pastry, yet no-one here appears to be fat. Form this I conclude that Chinese people eat practically nothing, and have excellent metabolisms.

I really like Hong Kong. I tend to judge places by imagining whether I would like living there for a while, and so far this place receives a somewhat fascinated yes vote. I doubt I could ever have a relationship of any kind here, but then that goes for America too, and in this case cultural differences are extreme enough to be interesting instead of merely being annoying most of the time.