Our hotel, The Harbor Grand, is fabulous, right on the water and our room looks right across the
Hong Kong bay. Plus you got to love a hotel with a breakfast buffet that includes both an egg and omelet bar as well as a “we will make you a nice bowl of soup with ramen noodles and tofu and weird shaped and even weirder smelling mushrooms” for breakfast. Not a “yum” on my list.We rushed out of the hotel for 1 ½ days of high paced scavenges …
so many great things to see… so little time. How weird is this? They built an entire cruise liner ship in the middle of the city and turned it into a shopping center.Fun scavenges…
(a) Proving that we were at the
NoonDay Guns at noon (a tactical nightmare as you don’t want to waste one minute waiting around but we had to be there right at noon).(b) Interviewing people on the ferry. We had to ask 5 strangers whether they would prefer for Beijing to rule Hong Kong or
to become an independent nation… and yes, Rainey chose only pretty Asian women as his sample population..Highlights of Hong Kong were:
(a) Lantau … where we had to take a cable car up to the Po Lin monastery.
The weather was grey and very windy so the cable car was swinging wildly in the gale force winds. I am petrified of heights and I admit it .,. I was so scared I almost wet myself. I spent most of the ride with my eyes shut and my fingers in my ears (so I could not hear the howling wind) .. in a full out panic. Meanwhile, in a true show of solidarity and compassion, Rainey, Heidi and Lily laughed uncontrollably at me. At the monastery we had to walk up 10,484 steps (or so it seemed) - to the giant Buddha at the top. But how cool is this.. the weather was so foggy that the stairs led straight up into the clouds (our own private stairway to heaven) until we reached the top, and the skies cleared, and there was this majestic and gigantic Buddha smiling down at you. Awesome… it’s like Bill (the producer of the event) personally arranged the weather for maximum impressive effect.(b) On the island of Macau, we had to find a hole-in-the-walls l
ocals-only restaurant (yes, for the Bajans reading this.. it was like having to find Marshall’s restaurant). After stopping dozens and dozens of people, we arrived to a very basic, serve yourself place with GREAT food and chatty patrons. Not a place that has ever been mentioned in a guide book or even a phone book.(c)
We had to get our “chop” made … a Chinese seal. And yes, there is an entire alley of stores (one right after the other) whose only product is seals… who knew that in this world of emails and internet there was still a thriving industry for chops to seal envelopes or stamp the bottom of letters / documents?(d) WOW .. we had to find the Foreign Correspondents Club (a members only place
for all of the karmically blessed people who get to be foreign media based in Hong Kong .. talk about a cushy gig). Because it is private, we had to talk our way in, and get a photo of the original picture of the last US helicopter leaving Saigon. In that same room, was the originals of literally dozens of unbelievably famous photos from the Southeast Asia conflicts. I was stunned.(d) We went to the High Court to see a trial. First, the woman on the elevator could not take her eyes of Rainey… not so much because he is so cute but because he was sweating so much from us running there that he was dripping onto the elevator floor (she had never seen such a thing in a government building).
Second, the lawyers wore the British white wigs and black gowns… and spoke in Chinese. It seems so wrong to be all done up in the English garb and speaking in Chinese. Unlike our attempts to watch a trial in Beijing in 2008 … when we were firmly turned away… Hong Kong does have an open court system that even lets in very sweaty foreigners wearing shorts.
1 comment:
the glass ride to the budha was terrifying (and Trav and some random Canadian family laughed at me the whole time as well). I'm sad we didn't do the fcc thing.
Post a Comment