nick’s (n)-line life

“copy watch, copy watch, sir you want Rolex?�
… thus concludes my first week of work in Hong Kong. As I dodge the pursuing hawker and dive into a street-side bar to enjoy a cold beer and some much needed air-con, I have a few minutes reflect on the end of my first week working in Hong Kong.

Do I have anything deep and meaningful to say? Well no, not really, but here is as good a place as any to note down the garbled ramblings of my overheated thoughts. This week’s words of wisdom? Well, as I noted last time I’ve realised that a suit is incredibly impractical garment to wear in the tropics, that Lan Kwai Fong has some of the most expensive clubs I’ve been to anywhere in the world, and that work remains work wherever you are in the world.
I’m certainly happy here. I’m making new friends, working hard and generally making the most of a great opportunity to work so far from home. Other perks would be a new friend’s kind offer to introduce me to her sister!

Other than this life moves on at a surprisingly mundane pace. The firm I’m working for treats me as if I’m a trainee, which is fantastic as far as I’m concerned. It gives me the chance to really get down and dirty with the work and have at go at things I’ve never been able to do in the past. For example (and for obvious reasons, I can’t go into detail) I’m currently working on a very in depth letter setting out the whole of our case on a particular issue and reporting back to my supervising solicitor with my recommendations (which, last time at least, were accepted).

Hong Kong strikes me as a very interesting place to live; a real fusion point of east and west (and by that I don’t mean the sort of fusion that takes place all over Bangkok). It just makes me realise even more that I only scratched the surface of the place when I dropped in for a few weeks last year. I’ve always thought that working somewhere changes the way you think about a place and that’s certainly true here. Apart from the occasionally grating sound of Cantonese around me, and the neon-lit extravaganza that greets me every evening, this could be any international city in the world. Hong Kong is certainly a city where you’re unlikely to be bored!

And on that note, I’m off to catch the last of this evening’s rays and relax in warm waters of the Kowloon Park’s Swimming Pool Complex before another hectic week kicks off tomorrow morning…