If I had come straight
from Monkey Mountain, as I had planned, my stay in the Royal Park Hotel would
have been quite a different experience. I would have been reduced to a
gibbering, groveling, grateful woman and the bland anonymity would have been
complete bliss. ("What! A bathroom that is all mine? A walk without
wildlife to get to the MTR?")
But the massive monkey
on the trail, immovable and inscrutable, sent me off to the best neighborhood
in Hong Kong, where I had five days of therapy before I came back to Shatin. I
can't and won't say that I haven't appreciated this space that is almost as
large as my Seattle apartment. However travel is a learning process and this
weekend taught me a lot.
Wherever I go, I try to
immerse myself in my surroundings and I have given myself up to luxury for the
past two days, hot baths, Cinemax movies, sitting on the window seat staring at
the view of trees, river, and buildings, trying to impersonate Scarlet
Johansson. When I went out beyond the mall that serves as the hotel's
neighborhood streets, the contrast jolted my teeth. This comfortable capsule is
isolated to the point of being alienating.
Travel for me is other
people and in the past weekend, two people have spoken to me—a doorman who said
good evening and the waiter who brought my room service breakfast. I think of
the receptionist at the Lander Hotel who engaged me in a long conversation
about skin color aesthetics and the wonderful conversation I had with Michael
Tam, the owner of Cafe Sausalito, and the laundryman who knew my name after my
first visit. Then I think of the Christmas Eve twenty years ago when I went to
the Oriental Hotel's Bamboo Room and watched bored, affluent faces sipping
their cocktails. Now I know why they were poster children for ennui. Not my
bag--
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