Home is where your friends are
People often ask me why I stay in Hong Kong. There are many reasons of course...some of which are the headline reasons that everyone likes Hong Kong: the low, simple tax system, the safety, the convenience, the nature, the opportunities, the food, etc. Over my two decades, I've built up a large number of friends and acquaintances ...some that I see regularly and others that I literally run into (physically) on the street. That community and the serendipity it brings with it are a large part of what makes Hong Kong home.
Take yesterday for example:
A friend messaged me yesterday (Saturday) to tell me he and his wife were going to take their daughter to Elements...the big mall next to Hong Kong's high speed rail station...to go ice skating. My son is only a few months old and too young to skate but we decided we'd still take him out to meet up with them after skating. We ended up spending a lazy, fun afternoon at the West Kowloon Cultural District...a grassy park with restaurants and museums on the northwest bank of Victoria Harbour.
After we parted ways with our friends, we were walking through the mall to get dinner before driving home. I heard someone shout out my name and turned around to find an old Blockstack colleague and his wife and child. We briefly exchanged pleasantries and made plans to get together with our families in the future.
Things like this - reconnecting serendipitously because of physical proximity - are a regular occurrence in this super-dense city. Just last week, I was walking around Causeway Bay outside the Apple Store face buried in my phone like all of the other smartphone zombies when I physically crashed into some one when I was about to cross the street. It turned out to be a friend from the Bitcoin community I hadn't seen in a year or so. He'd just picked up proof copies of a new book he'd wrote and he kindly gave me a copy to review.
Having lots of interesting friends and acquaintances in a big city like Hong Kong is one of the dividends that one is paid for making a long-term investment in one place. You get to see their careers, lives and families grow over time in a way that's more challenging as a digital nomad and impossible from a brief year or two stay. And this happens much more naturally in a place where almost everyone walks and takes public transit than it does when one lives in a place where people live in houses that are castles and travel between their castles in SUVs.