Steve's blog

Jo and I flew in to HK a few days early for the Linaro conference, so we got some time to ourselves for doing touristy stuff. That was a good plan - we got to see quite a lot of Kowloon for a couple of days, then we wandered over to Hong Kong island itself for a day. Jo also had more time during the week while I was in the sessions at the conference.

Hong Kong is a busy place, very densely packed at all times of day and night that we could see. The first impression we got on the taxi from the airport on day one was that it was a city full of tower blocks - huge numbers of apartments stacked very closely together for living space. That makes sense, I guess, with the large population in such a small space. There are houses around with more space for people to live, but they are understandably very expensive.

Later on in Kowloon, we got to meet lots of the local street vendors, mostly offering us "Copy Rolex", "Fake handbag" and the like. Even "Sharp trousers" at one point. We decided not to try them out... :-) We saw lots and lots of very expensive shops downtown, crammed into huge shopping centres in the tourist area. As an antidote for all of that, we headed up to the "Golden Computer Arcade" to go browsing around the vast array of tiny technology stalls and shops there. Picked up some nice cheap laptop memory and some SD cards there. Yay!

Across on Hong Kong island itself on Sunday, we found my grandfather's grave then rode around on the trams for a while to get a good view of the city, including a democracy protest that happened to be on that day! We had a quick look around Tin Hau Temple, where we found a very specific set of rules for visitors:

I can only guess that they must have been terrified by gangs of kids racing their RC cars at one point!

We finished the day by heading up to Victoria Peak for the sunset view and some dinner, then back to the hotel. Killing time in a shopping centre waiting for the bus to turn up, we found a truly astonishing little item on sale, a Solar Queen!

solar queen

Apparently this gift has a solar panel on the handbag to provide power to a little motor in the Queen's hand to make her wave to her subjects. We decided that we'd somehow have to live without such a delight in our lives... :-)

HK was a cool place to visit. It still feels very British in some ways, as you'd expect from an ex-colony (power sockets are still the same as ours, driving on the left, everybody spoke English, etc.) but utterly alien in others (the climate, working public transport *grin*). I look forwards to heading out there again!

22:12 :: # :: /travel :: 0 comments

Comments

Your Comment