Getting Settled

• We arrived 7pm on Tuesday.
  
• Had a warm welcome from our Cab driver who (in broken English) expressed his fear of American's... because of our death disease - H1N1 .
  
• Got dropped off in the middle of a narrow but bustling side street - which we will be calling home for the next couple months.
• Sat atop our luggage for 30 minutes or so waiting to meet our sublessor (whom we had not paid a down-payment to and only correspond with via email) hoping 1. he'd show up and 2. that we were in the right spot
• Finally made it inside the apartment and were glad to find that we are only on the first floor (not the 5th with no elevator... as previously discussed) and we are sharing the relatively roomy place with a French-Canadian girl (working on her PHD in diplomacy/rioter rights in HK), an odd British guy (who looks like an odd mini-wrestler), and an American from Cali (who we have yet to meet)
• Overall we seem to be in an "authentic" area of town... I'm amazed by how much it reminds be of mainland China... bustling and strikingly exotic - So far HK is not the "metropolitan"/culturally diverse city I've heard about... instead it has been an intense, unfamiliar culture where I am, without a doubt, the "foreigner" - but unlike mainland, the people don't seem to care. No one is staring and pointing. Similar to New York, you feel like part of the pack because everyone seems to mind their own business. I feel oddly included only because my "foreign" presence doesn't seem to matter.