Three days. That is how long I had in Hong Kong in January 2025. I knew it wasn’t enough — nobody ever leaves Hong Kong feeling like they saw enough of it. But I also knew I’d seen cities for years, and sometimes three days of total immersion beats two weeks of half-attention.
Hong Kong moves differently from everywhere else in Asia. Faster, louder, more vertical. The moment you step out of the MTR the city is already at full speed. No warming up. No slow mornings. Just this constant, relentless forward motion that somehow never feels hostile — it’s almost exhilarating.
My first full day I went to Quarry Bay to see the Monster Building. I had seen photos of it for years — those five massive residential towers packed together so tightly they look like one single organism, windows and air conditioners stacked thirty stories high, laundry hanging from balconies on every floor. Standing underneath it in real life is something else. The scale is almost incomprehensible. You crane your neck back and the building just keeps going.
The official name is Westlands Gardens but nobody calls it that. The Monster Building became famous partly through architecture photography, partly through its appearance in Transformers: Age of Extinction, and partly because Instagram discovered it and turned it into a pilgrimage site. On the day I visited there were photographers everywhere — a Korean couple with a tripod, a French guy doing long exposures, a local kid with a film camera. Everyone making their version of the same image.
What strikes you most is not the size but the life inside it. Real people actually live in those apartments. You can see them — someone cooking, someone watching TV through a window, laundry on every balcony. It is not a ruin or a monument. It is a working building full of working people who have simply gotten used to their home being one of the most photographed places on earth. I wonder how they feel about that.
The food in Hong Kong surprised me. I had eaten Cantonese food in Thailand and across Southeast Asia, but the real thing is on another level. Dim sum in the morning from a place that has been open since before I was born, char siu bao that actually tastes like something, wonton noodle soup at a counter with twelve seats and a line out the door. Hong Kong has this particular pride in its food that you feel in every bite — like they are daring you to find better.
On my last day I took a junk boat across Victoria Harbour. I had never done it before and it turned out to be the best decision of the trip. From the water the city looked completely different — the skyline stretching the full length of the horizon, the IFC Tower rising above everything, the mountains behind Kowloon turning purple in the afternoon haze. Hong Kong from the water is a city that is impossible to comprehend all at once. You just sit on the boat and let it happen to you.
There is a thing people say about Hong Kong — that it is caught between two worlds, neither fully Chinese nor fully Western, and that this ambiguity is what makes it interesting. I do not know if that framing is right or fair. What I know is that the city feels singular. There is nowhere else like it. The density, the efficiency, the food, the harbour, the way twelve million different things seem to be happening simultaneously in every direction — it is a city that refuses to be summarized.
Three days is not enough. But then, neither is a month. Some cities you visit and then you understand them. Hong Kong you visit and then you realize you need to come back.
I am already planning the return.
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