I don’t know how many days its been since I left home and I’m not sure if I slept last night.  The journey to get here was long and anything but pleasurable.  Arriving in Beijing my texts home read “I just puked  in the airport trash-can in front of 20 people.” And then in Hong Kong read “On the third leg of the flight, I grew cankles.”

So upon touchdown in that demented state of mind, I decided to brave the public transportation to my new home for the next two weeks at Hong Kong University. Navigating through the subway was as extraordinary as my friend Jane had raved: Chinese and English signage, easy to understand diagrams of lines, and friendly locals recognizing and accommodating a tourist getting her luggage locked in the turnstile.

But as soon as I walked out of the HKU stop of the subway station around 10:30pm, it was a different story.  Double decker buses zipping by, taxi-cabs honking, pedestrians scrambling…it was a M.C. Escher madhouse of a city layout.  Still, I courageously decided to ride herd on my roller luggage and duffle bags up the curbs, down flights of stairs, over bridges, and zig zag through streets until finally surrendering to the dark narrow streets of Hong Kong and hailing a little red 1980s Toyota taxi-cab.  Before I could even shut the door and tell the driver where I was going he was hauling up hills and then flying down them with twice the speed. Fifteen minutes of hugging the curbs up to the foggy tropical peak where the university lies, I was grateful to have relinquished my jungle crusade and find a familiar University of Oregon face.