Funny, what you can blunder into while trying to complete a mundane task. For example, a division from the Army of Northern Virginia decided to raid a Pennsylvania town in July of 1863 because men in the ranks had heard there were a lot of shoes there … and that turned into the Battle of Gettysburg.

Anyway, my little life isn’t remotely that grand, but the “accidental knowledge” I picked up today was of a similar sort.

We were looking for a decent map of Hong Kong. That’s all. A decent map of Hong Kong.

We’ve been here a month dealing with a really lousy map we picked up at a hotel, and using Google maps … which is fine for a specific locale or neighborhood. But if you try to put it into perspective with neighborhoods around what you’re looking at … you lose the specificity of individual streets when you pull out. Etc. It was impossible to have a sense of the size and density of, say, Sheung Wan in the west and North Point in the east.

It was bugging me. (OK, I’m a map guy, too.)

So, at lunch with a colleague today , I asked where the hell I could get a map, and he told of us a book store that would carry books with Hong Kong maps, as well as just plain ol’ maps. “Page One” at Times Square.

Yes, Hong Kong has its own Times Square. No newspaper named The Times ever was produced there, far as I know, but the idea is the same: An urban center meant to draw people to come spend money and just hang around.

So, we took the Island Line toward Causeway Bay, from Sheung Wan … and the subway suddenly got massively crowded. The tightest I’ve seen it since I’ve been here.

And then we got to Causeway Bay … and two-thirds of the crowd fought its way out of the subway, and we finally realized a big chunk of them were Kiwis and Aussies headed for a rugby match between their two national teams — and Hong Kong’s one stadium of any significance is in Happy Valley, and you uses the Causeway Bay subway exit to get there.

So there was that.

Then we were plunging into (without knowing it) what probably is the busiest part of Hong Kong, and doing it on a Saturday afternoon — when all those folks at work Monday through Friday, or at school, are out and about.

We found the mall the book store is in … and it turns out it is nine stories tall (above left). And packed with people. I have a photo here (above right) which shows a few of them going up and down the escalators.

And, of course, the book store is on the top floor, so it was eight escalator rides just to get there.

Thankfully, yes, they had a map. A big fold-up one of the old “service station” sort. And that made me happy. But we were still stuck with this mob of people, and about to find more.

We escaped the building, and decided to try to walk back to Tin Hau, which is one stop over from Causeway Bay … but the crowds just got thicker. Mobs of people. Scads. Shoulder to shoulder, front to back, standing at stop lights and looking across the street to more massed ranks of people — whom we would have to fight through to get past.

We walked around for about a half-hour, getting lost (and I had to break out the map to figure out we were swimming upstream in this river of humanity), and we turned around. Then it began to rain.

We were crossing a street back over toward Times Square, resigned to taking the metro the one stop over, and there were so many people — maybe 100 in a 10-meter-square pack — across the street that I tried to get Leah to take a picture of them, just to show when “crowded” becomes “suffocating.” But she was hot and sweaty and a little crabby by then, and she didn’t feel like fetching the camera.

Anyway, Times Square has something of a reputation for being the most crowded spot in Hong Kong. At least on weekends. And we walked right into it. We were so wiped by the experience that we took naps after straggling back into the Tin Hau place.

All because we wanted a map.

Now we know. No more visits to Times Square on a Saturday afternoon.

Not even for a map.