Nobody explains the Hong Kong Sevens to you.
They give you a ticket, point vaguely towards a stadium, and allow the city to make its own arrangements.
I went straight from work on Friday in a suit. The suit is important. It suggested employment, judgement, and a basic command of events. It was excellent camouflage.
I am new to Hong Kong and still trying to work out the rules. I am beginning to suspect that the city considers them private.
I understood the broad idea. Rugby. Seven players each side. A stadium. Friday night: the starting point of a weekend.
What I had not understood was that rugby merely provided the legal framework for everything else.
Under the floodlights, the stadium felt less like a sporting venue than a badly supervised office exodus. Suits loosened, ties disappeared, and costumes began where sensible explanations ended. Sound came in waves—whistles, songs, laughter, then a collective roar when seven men did something remarkable and reminded us why we were there.
Rugby, apparently.
I watched some of it. I must have. There are limits to the evidence I am prepared to give under oath, but I have always liked rugby men. Better legs than footballers. Not central to the argument, but true.
The evening continued without consulting me. One moment I was a man who had come from work; the next I was a citizen of a temporary republic built on singing, standing up at the wrong moment, and following a crowd that knew exactly where it was going.
I did not get home until the early hours.
This should have concluded the experiment.
It did not.
On Saturday morning I restarted with very little food and the optimism produced only by fatigue. The sensible response would have involved water, carbohydrates, and several hours in a darkened room. Instead, I returned to the South Stand for a full day.
There may have been a wiser plan.
It did not make itself known.
By daylight the scale became clear. The South Stand is not seating. It is weather, with its own pressure system, migratory patterns, and moral code. Costumes appeared everywhere: wigs, uniforms, capes, rabbit ears, and concepts that had begun strongly in a shop and become less defensible on public transport. I have photographic evidence of enormous pink ears. I have no explanation for them.
The heat would not abate. It sat on us, thickening the air, softening the edges, and making every costume look like a personal grievance. People shone. Face paint moved south. Synthetic fabric revealed the true cost of whimsy.
And still everyone sang.
They sang across the spectrum: anthems, pop songs, school choruses, and things nobody fully knew but everybody performed with conviction. Then Sweet Caroline would rise above the noise, and the stand would find its shared responsibility: the “oh, oh, oh”. Songs travelled through the crowd, gathering volume, confidence, and entirely new lyrics. Harmony was optional. Commitment was not.
Every so often the noise shifted and we remembered there was a tournament taking place. Men ran onto the pitch with astonishing speed and excellent thighs, collided, scored, disappeared, and made room for the next seven. The rugby came in sharp, brilliant bursts. The frivolity was continuous.
I am twenty-six and had imagined that exploration meant going somewhere new and looking at it carefully. Hong Kong is suggesting otherwise. Sometimes you do not look at a place. Sometimes it happens to you.
I expected to learn the city through streets, buildings, ferries, and views, not while wearing yesterday’s tiredness in a stand full of superheroes and farm animals. Yet there it was: Hong Kong at full volume. Serious and ridiculous without contradiction. International, local, theatrical, and sweaty.
I still do not know what I am doing here. That is not existential; most days I genuinely do not know. I know where the office is, roughly how to get home, and that an Octopus is not always an animal. This feels like progress.
But sometime between arriving in a suit on Friday and standing hungry in the South Stand on Saturday, I stopped watching Hong Kong from a cautious distance. I stopped trying to understand the experience before allowing myself to have it.
This city does not appear interested in providing a briefing. It simply opens a gate and waits to see whether you will walk through it.
I did. Twice.
I am writing this with ringing ears, very little dignity, and a body that has begun issuing formal objections. I cannot tell whether I understand Hong Kong any better than I did on Friday. I am beginning to think that may not be the point.
The costumes sagged but did not concede. The songs blurred into one another. The light changed over the stadium. And somewhere below all of it, men with excellent legs continued running very quickly into one another.
Rugby, somewhere.
I think.