Hong Kong, the city where you can fall in love on an escalator

BarcelonaThere's a wonderful feeling: being in a movie. It may seem childish, all of it. But what would life be like without behaving like children or teenagers? Many of us find that, if we visit Hong Kong, we feel like we're in a Wong Kar Wai film. Although In the mood for love It's my favorite, visiting the city for the first time I felt more inside Chungking Express for a simple reason: the first tells us about a Hong Kong that has vanished, while the other is more contemporary.

The city breathes cinema. You'll find the magnificent Broadway Cinematheque in a modern building on the mainland. On Hong Kong Island, you'll find the local Film Archive, where you can see some of the costumes worn by actors and actresses by the director who once again placed Hong Kong at the center of the film world. A special, unique, independent city, capable of creating its own cinematic languages. Despite the Chinese authorities' desire for Hong Kong to be integrated into the rest of the country, it remains as independent as some of the actors in Chungking Express.

If you haven't seen the film, it's about two intersecting stories. The first one involves a policeman and a mysterious smuggler. The second revolves around a street food restaurant where a waitress manages to change the life of a man with a broken heart. For me, Hong Kong was like the character of the waitress played by the magnificent Faye Wong. You know those people you never quite understand, but you really like them? The city would be like that. Dirty and chaotic, Western and Eastern, traditional and modern. That's why I wanted to go to Midnight Express, the restaurant where the waitress rings the bell. California Dreamin' of The Mamas & the Papas and the Dreams by The Cranberries, with a Cantonese version. You have to go to the corner of Aguilar and Wellington. I love this, from Hong Kong: Cantonese directions to streets with European names.

But the area is worth visiting. There are no tourist attractions, only A lot of life. You sit on plastic chairs with homemade food and watch everything that goes by. The elderly woman doing tai chi, the young people playing on their phones, the workers in empire-waist T-shirts shouting. And so you can walk to the Central-Mid-Levels escalators, which allow people to ride up to the more vertical neighborhoods. The ones where the policeman in the film sees the flight attendant he falls in love with, dressed in uniform. More than 800 meters of covered stairs, a feat of engineering that did not escape the eye of Wong Kar Wai, who knows how to create beautiful sets that others might consider vulgar. There's no need to judge it harshly, this city where new things coexist with old ones. You have to do as with the characters in the film: you watch them fascinated, without knowing where it will all lead you.

Recommendation for traveling to Hong Kong

Film: Chungking Express

Author: Wong Kar-Wai

Year: 1994