At six-thirty the city is already awake, but not yet loud. A tram rolled past Water Street with only four passengers on board, and the metal sweepers were still tracing the rails with deliberate, almost ceremonial patience.
The useful thing about walking Hong Kong too early is that the scale resets. The towers stop reading as towers and start reading as walls, slopes, drains, retaining blocks, and windows with laundry clipped into impossible corners. Delivery vans idle in narrow lanes, tea shops rinse their first glasses, and the smell changes every hundred meters.
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I took the first minibus out because the forecast promised clear air after rain, the kind of washed-out visibility that makes the harbor look almost staged. Sai Kung was already busy with hikers pretending not to be hikers, but the pace near the piers stayed reasonable until close to ten.
A good Hong Kong morning is usually two things at once: efficient in motion, unhurried in detail.
I had fish ball noodles in a shop with six tables and a fan that rattled whenever the door opened. The broth had the kind of restraint that only seems easy after you fail to reproduce it at home three or four times.
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When the rain starts in Mid-Levels it does not arrive all at once. First the air cools in the footbridges. Then the handrails go slick. Then one building across the road disappears behind a sheet of gray so thin it almost looks polite.
By the time I reached Caine Road the downpour had settled into the steady kind, the sort that keeps everyone moving but nobody moving quickly. A delivery rider waited under the edge of a tower podium, reading messages with two fingers while the front wheel dripped on the tiles.
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