Summer Days End

Finally! I am officially caught up! and I am sure I just wasted some invaluable minutes of Steve's life for making him read this ;-)


When you are coming down in a plane to land in Hong Kong, you will probably think you are landing in Japan or better yet, YOU'VE JUST TRAVELED INTO THE FUTURE. At least I hope so, I hope all the cities in the world one day look like Hong Kong. I want them all to have green areas and mountains, gigantic bridges, thousands of commercial boats coming and going, skyscrapers, and I am telling you it all looks good together, it's like it all matches. Kudos to Chinese urban planners, we should send them all around the world fixing up cities.

Wednesdays are free museum days in Hong Kong, so we visited the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Science Museum (which was a freaking blast, there are tons of things to play with), and the Space Museum. In the HKMA we saw an exhibit entitled The Pride of China which exhibited the famous painting "Along the River During QingMing Festival".

Like the bird market in Indonesia, there is a goldfish market in Hong Kong. They don't just sell gold fish, they have all kinds of fish and ocean flora.

One evening Rodrigo and I went out with his friend Raymond from Hong Kong, we had a few beers and he told us a few interesting facts about life in HK. For example, did you know that when you buy a car you have to pay 200% of its price in taxes? it is so to encourage people to use the public transit system, which by the way is almost flawless. The subway trains are synchronized and are open from 6am to 12:30am, while buses run 24 hours a day.

In the couple more days we had left we simply walked around, ate some delicious foods and went shopping. On the last day the city issued a city wide typhoon warning (a typhoon is the same as a hurricane, only it occurs in Asia) and everything closed down and people were sent home. I say the subway is almost flawless because it was clearly not prepared to evacuate the millions of people trying to get home. My brother and my dad were stuck in a subway station for 45 minutes trying to get on a train. I saw it later in the news and it looked as packed as a rock concert, with a few people here and there crying out for help because somebody next to them had passed out.

I just realized we didn't really take that many pictures in Hong Kong....