My grand­ma’s apart­ment is in Kowloon City, a very old area of Kowloon, char­ac­ter­ized by dirty build­ings and slum­my areas. There’s so much char­ac­ter here. It seems like every shop has a sto­ry, and every street a his­to­ry. My dad told me that since it’s so hard to find park­ing, some restau­rants have a valet park your car for you if you go in.

Since it’s a long-estab­lished area, there’s pret­ty much every­thing you need with­in a cou­ple blocks, or a few min­utes walk. This includes:

• fruit stands
• car deal­er­ship
• restau­rants of many eth­nic­i­ties
• Chinese med­i­cine shops
• snack and pas­try shops
• a toy shop
• a mod­ern shop­ping mall
• butch­ers
• a famous park
• a shop­ping mall
• elec­tron­ics and appli­ance stores
• mag­a­zine stands
• gro­cery stores
• den­tist
• scrap met­al stores
• cof­fin shop
• tire shop

One of Hong Kong’s famous real estate agents said that liv­ing in such high den­si­ty is a habit, and that Hong Kongers could expand out­ward (instead of upward) if they want­ed to. I can under­stand why this is true, because every­thing is so close and con­ve­nient. When you live in the mid­dle of all this, you real­ly feel like you’re part of the city’s pulse.

Everyone car­ries an Octopus card in Hong Kong, because it’s used every­where. When you take the bus, you pay the fare by tap­ping your wal­let (with Octopus card in it) on the scan­ner; the fare may change depend­ing on whether you take it before or after cross­ing the har­bour. Subway fares aren’t flat-rate either, so short­er routes are cheap­er. The dis­tance you trav­el is tracked by scan­ning your card when you get on and again when you get off, and the appro­pri­ate amount is deduct­ed.

Even vend­ing machines, park­ing meters, con­ve­nience stores, and restau­rants have Octopus scan­ners used to pay for their ser­vices. It’s also used as an iden­ti­ty sys­tem, where stu­dents sign-in to class by tap­ping their cards on door scan­ners, or res­i­dents enter their apart­ment build­ings with­out need­ing a key.

The Chinese name for the card is “eight arrived pass”, because eight has spe­cial mean­ing in Chinese, espe­cial­ly when it comes to direc­tions. The English name comes from an octo­pus hav­ing eight ten­ta­cles, and the logo is an infin­i­ty sym­bol that’s also in the shape of an eight. So clever.