That four months took forever.

That four months went by in a blink.

Well, actually, it seemed like a long time. I wrote back at the end of October that the month just concluded seemed like the longest 31 days of my life. And I can’t say any of the next three months sped by any faster. Something new and different seemed to happen every day, and that made all the time seem new and fresh. Never old and recycled.

I left Los Angeles in the first hour of Oct. 1, and now I am on the way back in the final minutes of Jan. 31.

My elder daughter, Drew, spent the final week with me.

I’m going to ask her for her thoughts, while I summon mine for a later entry.

First, I will ask her for a half-dozen Hong Kong “keywords.” Then we will go from there.

(By the by, I’m on a free wireless network here in the Hong Kong airport, which makes LAX look like a salvage yard.)

Said Drew: “Tin Hau,  Kowloon, Victoria, Peninsula, dim sum, Star Ferry, Big Buddha, Lantau Island.”

Now I’m asking her to vamp on her Hong Kong experience.

“I loved how it’s very cosmopolitan, very international. Very nice. It was crowded but people weren’t rude. It was clean. It didn’t smell bad. I felt safe. It was really colorful.”

I asked her for highlight moments.

“The Chinese New Year fireworks were fantastic. The Big Buddha was really cool.  It was really neat seeing my friend, and my contemporaries building lives here and traveling through Southeast Asia.

“I love how urban it is, but how in 10 minutes you can be in a subtropic area.  And I love the ocean right next to the skyscrapers.”

Drew just powered through six days here. She compressed into not quite a week what I did in four months. Well, actually, she didn’t work five days out of seven for 17 weeks, but she got as much done, nearly, as I did on the tourism side.

“I loved during Chinese New Year how jovial everyone was,” she said. “It seemed like such a fun time to be there. Especially taking the bus up to Po Lin Monastery, where the Buddha was. I made friends, a woman named Cherry. People were smiling and laughing. It was just a good time to be there.

“It was fun to see the city, and meet people my age and see how they are living and working here. It’s a place with really good energy. And for my friends who are here, a lot of possibilities, which is refreshing with the economic climate in the U.S.”

Drew got here Monday morning, and she is leaving here Saturday night. In the interim, she saw Chinese New Year, with the big parade on Kowloon on Monday (“It was quaint, almost home-grown in a sense, but it seemed to symbolize all of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong marching band with the Hong Kong cheerleaders.”) and the fireworks on Tuesday. Earlier Tuesday, she went to Lantau Island, where the Big Buddha is.

On Wednesday she went with me on our not-quite-planned visit to Chueng Chau Island, and we had “hot pot” at the restaurant around the corner from the apartment that night. It’s good comfort food, and it was a little chilly. But we had trouble making ourselves understood, and of the four items we ordered to dunk into our (literally) hot pot of soup, only the pork dumplings came, and then when we finally noted to someone, 25 minutes later, that we were missing some items … we get the other three items twice each. Too much food. But we didn’t have to pay twice.

On Thursday, she went to Kowloon and visited the jade market and the bird market and the flower market. And the ladies market. Supposedly, old men bring their birds to the bird market to “walk” them, but she didn’t see any. That night, she met up with a relative of a friend and her husband at the enormous IFC building in the Central District, and had an eclectic Chinese meal at the Jade Palace, which is known for its steamed soup dumplings. Afterward, they went up to the rooftop bar for drinks, while looking at the view of the channel and Kowloon.

On Friday, she met up with the husband of her friend and took the escalators through the tony Mid-Levels area, up to the end of the “travelator” (which I never did in four months), and walked the final length up the mountain to Victoria Peak. It took her a half-hour, and was a serious climb, but it offers an unparalleled view of most of the island. Then she came back down from the peak on the impossibly steep tram … and then found the bus to Stanley, on the south side of the island, and did some shopping there, and admired the stunning slow pace of life on the other side of an island that is so jammed and busy on the north side.

Later that night, she came over to the IHT, and had a look around, and we took a cab over to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, and looked inside the famous old place, and then went to the Fringe Bar next door snd sat on the roof and had a couple of beers and listened to my (now former) co-worker tell stories. Then we took a stroll through the infamous Lan Kwai Fong neighborhood, just behind the FCC, and saw the expats at their worst — drunk and disorderly.

And then today, we checked out Victoria Park (perhaps my favorite part of the island, an expanse of greenery in a stretch of pavement and concrete). Then we stuck our heads out at Causeway Bay, where the shopping area known as Times Square is just plain crazy, even on the first Saturday of the Chinese New Year.

Then, in the afternoon, we did the High Tea at the Peninsula Hotel, which is on the “1,000 Things to Do Before You Die” list. It’s a little overrated, but when it comes to echoes of a lost (British) empire, it’s the thing to do.

Then it was back to the little apartment in Wan Chai, some packing, turning in our Octopus cards, taking the fast train to the airport and now chilling out for our (scheduled) 11:45 p.m. flight to LAX.

So, yeah, pretty intense. For both of us. And she jammed a lot more activity into a far shorter span of time.

If things work right, we will be in LAX “before” we leave here — at 8 p.m. Saturday.

I’ll think of more of this. Anyway, I was glad Drew came over for a week, and got a chance to look around. I wish more of my friends and relatives had been able to pull it off, but I know it’s hard to pick up and leave.

So, now it’s movies and 12-13 hours inside a tube. And maybe some sleep.