We weren’t exactly ambitious about this.

It was a bit cold, Leah’s back was twinging and the idea of pitching ourselves into an enormous crowd when dealing with crowds is everyday life here … well, that held little appeal. We were not going to make an effort to get to the local version of Times Square (at Causeway Bay) for the countdown, and not even down to the water to see what we could see as 2008 turned to 2009.

But, we could at least make the effort to be on the street when the old year became the new, so at 11:58 we walked onto Thomson Road.

First impression? Hong Kong culture apparently doesn’t include any of the local restaurants staying open till midnight.

The Tex-Mex across the street was shut up tight — right down to the metal rolling door being pulled down to street level. The huge, two-store-front, Chinese-Chinese place was closed.

The street was nearly empty.

We walked toward O’Brien Road, which goes left off of Thomson, at the subway entrance … and that is when it hit midnight. We knew because the circling cab drivers began honking their horns. And we could hear a bit of shouting, from a distance. A big crowd, many blocks away.

And then we could see the reflection of some fireworks sailing high into the air. (They had to be high in the air, because when you’re at ground level, on Thomson, it’s like you’re living at the bottom of a canyon of high rises.)

The little (but wildly popular) stuff-on-a-skewer street restaurant was open (I’m not sure it ever closes), and one of the women there was quite excited. She made little yipping sounds and almost seemed to hop onto the street,  from behind the counter, and was pointing at fireworks and clapping.

The big fireworks show, over the harbor, could have been seen from the shore, or if you were on a higher floor of a building, and neither of those concepts applied to us.

But we could see a few pops of fireworks above a big building to our left, toward the hills,  over on Queens Road, I’d guess … and a message rotated around its upper floors and was just readable from our vantage point. “Happy New Year 2009.” Over to our right, toward the water, we could see some red and white fireworks, from time to time.

Mostly, what I will remember, if I remember any of it … was how empty the street was … but how the few people on it seemed genuinely excited. Like, pointing-and-clapping-and-hopping excited. I didn’t know the Chinese cared that much about the global new year, not when they have their own coming up, in 24 days.

I’m told Chinese New Year is not a big deal here, that HK empties out (well,  comparatively) as lots of people return to their ancestral homes. I will see, when New Year’s HK Style Take 2 rolls around, Jan. 24-25.

For us,  a few minutes on the street was enough. Things calmed down very quickly, and it was a little nippy (maybe 50?), and the “30 Rock” marathon was still going on. We walked down the middle of the empty street, climbed back up to the little room and watched Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin do their thing.

It was interesting to think that it was still 2008 in most of the rest of the world. We were already on the other side of that great divide, seven hours ahead of Paris, 13 hours ahead of New York, 16 hours ahead of Los Angeles.