Of Time and the River, 2023 Edition
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Kathmandu, where we’re alternating between resting, then stepping out of our comfort zone, then resting some more. This city is stretching me.
Of Time and the River, 2023 Edition
This time last year, Lee and I rang in 2023 in Hong Kong. We were there for two weeks, encompassing the winter holidays, a long, chatty lunch with a friend, some art, some shopping, and a lot of dumplings. We walked and walked and walked, together and apart, exploring and discovering and generally reveling in the ease and comfort of one of the world’s most iconic cities. It was somewhere between an interesting experiment in self-assessment, and a compensatory do-over.
The first time we visited Hong Kong, you see, was on January 1, 2016. It was our first destination as fully nomadic nomads (we had given up our Miami apartment, the last thread connecting us to the US, the day before). It was our first European/nonwestern destination together.
It was also the scene of our first big fight on the road, which was a doozy (the kind where you’re yelling at each other on a street corner and stomp away in tears and don’t speak again until bedtime—no? Just us?).
We only stayed for a week, and it was a hard week. We had no idea how steep our learning curve was going to be, and back then, when we were baby travelers so far from anything familiar, without any perceived safety net and no one to rely on except each other, we were paralyzed by confusion and upset (and Chinese menus). At one point, seeing a teapot on our table, we each had a cup. Only later did we realize it was an extra pot, for rinsing the dishes, not for drinking. Everything was challenging (the washing machine, the metro, the etiquette, the dim sum), and we hadn’t yet learned to laugh at the challenges, so instead I cried.
This second visit to Hong Kong was different. The metro made sense (because they’re all basically the same, it turns out), we sent our laundry out instead of doing it ourselves, and it was somehow easier to find English menus. The one time we really screwed something up, trying to share an order of noodles and sloshing them back and forth between two bowls, making a giant mess, a waitress came running over, yelled at us in Chinese, and pulled out a pair of scissors to cut the pile of noodles in half. Eight years ago, I would’ve died of embarrassment. Instead, we had a good laugh, and went back to the restaurant twice more, just to wave at the waitress and have those amazing noodles again.
It’s impossible to know what has changed more, us or the city. Hong Kong has been through a lot since 2016, and so have we. Are the English menus a subtle move toward increasing tourism since the drop-off during the protests, and the complete stoppage during Covid? Or are we just better at finding restaurants that make us happy? I didn’t get enough of a feel for Hong Kong the first time we visited, so this time I had difficulty pinpointing exactly how the city was different. It’s impossible to understand a city as large and complex as Hong Kong (or anywhere, really) in a one-week visit. All we can really know is how we responded, and what we learned about ourselves. Our friend who was living in Hong Kong said it had changed; the media says it has changed. All I know is that I am a different person, and Hong Kong is a different place. Time is an ever-flowing river, indeed.
2023, for us, was a year of looking back, in order to see how far we’ve come. We went to quite a few places we’d been before (Saigon, Tokyo, the mountains of Austria, our favorite little fishing village in Turkey)—we even became repeat guests (a couple of hotels, and one Airbnb) which we’ve never done before outside of Bangkok. It was worth revisiting these places and remembering who we once were, in order to understand who we’ve become. Sometimes I worry that the accretion of so many experiences has jaded me, but sifting through my memories of this year, I realize (I think, I hope) that I am still open to growth and change.
Even Raleigh, my home for so many years, looked and felt like a different city than the one I left eight years ago. I spent our three weeks there counting new roads, rerouted roads, roads that went to places I’d never seen before. Had I just forgotten? Have I replaced my mental maps of Raleigh with mental maps of the Tokyo metro system? Or has the map of Raleigh really changed?
The answer is, clearly, yes. To all of the above. And that’s just fine by me. One of the great joys of life, I think, is our endless capacity to grow and stretch and absorb the changes in the world around us.
Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again—or even back to Hong Kong—without realizing that change is unavoidable. And that’s a good thing.
Happy 2024, friends: I wish for you a little stretch, a little growth, and a lot of happiness.
Take care,
Lisa
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