S/V Tavarua

Back for a day in Hong Kong and camped out at the Cathay Pacific lounge at the airport. The Hong Kong airport is one of the great airports of the world. The place comes off as serene, calm, sparkling new and is filled with a pile of restaurants and shops. (Now if only the Cathay airlines could adjust a ticket in less than two hours or two days or within the year… but I digress into a cesspool of amazing inefficiency and that is not very good for keeping your forehead cool for passing by the SARS temperature scanners… and therefore I’ll stay away from the torpid topic.)

The weather here is fantastic, a fine 70 degrees. We scored a night at the Mandarin Oriental for half price. Had a blah Hunan Chinese meal for dinner but made up for it with dim sum over at Maxim’s in the midst of many bridal parties. It is Saturday and the Maxim’s in the City Hall building is doing a booming business with those getting married. We counted six brides in beautiful white dresses with their grooms, each with a crush of family, posing outside the building in the Shrine Memorial Gardens for pictures and two brides with trailing dresses exiting from the restaurant with a stream of people following behind them decked out with corsages and boutineers and concern as they tried to keep the trailing dresses out of way of the dim sum carts.

This is in contrast to that snow that we left in Seoul. We found on the BBC Weather site and it had this to say:
“…Seoul in South Korea has had the biggest March snow storm for 100 years. Snow blanketed the central region of South Korea overnight, forcing schools to close and bringing traffic to a standstill on Friday.

The storm deposited more than 18cm (7inches) of snow in the capital Seoul. This amounted to the largest one-day snowfall in March since the Korea Meteorological Administration began keeping records a century ago.

The snow is still drifting with a further 5 to 10 cm likely in Seoul today.”

This may explain why we were seeing the folks, approximately 20 of them, in front of the hotel shoveling snow into standard-size garbage cans, dragging the heavy monstrous loads over to the main road and dumping them causing one lane to be blocked. The guys from Chicago were dumbfounded. We had not really considered it any odder than much of what we have been seeing on this trip, but we did converse with them over the efficiency of it all for a few minutes bringing us around to the topic of elevator buttons. Lotte Hotel is the only place that we have ever encountered which allocates an elevator as soon as you press the button… giving you escruciating amounts of time to discuss snow removal and other mundane topics with strangers.

Back to Hong Kong.. we passed a woman on the street under the highway overpass with a good deal of young girls looking on with interest. She had a small altar set up and a good deal of red cloth decorating her outpost and was making a racket with a shoe. This is what we learned of the situation later:
“You may pass women on the streets making a bit of a racket banging on the street. If you really dislike a person for some reason, you can bring a piece of paper with that person’s name written on it and these women on the street will beat the name with a slipper against the concrete and this is supposed to punish this person or do bad to them!” And so now we are guessing that there is a gentleman out there that is currently having a very bad afternoon.

Now that I’ve indulged with a few minutes of Internet time and posting, I guess it is back to the benumbing project of fixing our tickets. Whimper.

We had a good connection from the hotel today, so we uploaded pictures. Probably too many in total, but a few of them are good. My favorites so far are the pyramids and a few of the lion pictures from the Serengeti. We won’t be going professional anytime soon from the results, but hey, we glory in our amateurness… although Derrell is still getting caught up in telephoto upgrade dreams.

Hong Kong is an insane city and we love it. There is too much neon, too many people, too much good food and too much consumerism. When it is all thrown together it becomes just too good.

We stopped and stared down the streets at the oversized flashing neon signs, flowed without being bumped through hundreds of shoppers, lunched on too many barbeque pork buns and got caught up with buying a VCD or two. My head is reeling from it all. Derrell is mumbling about a camera upgrade with a wild-eyed look in his eyes. He keeps seeing the Canon EOS 10D advertisements and starts wandering erratically down the street looking in the shop windows.

We are clearing out of here tomorrow and heading up to Seoul. They have a hefty import tax on electronics, so I’m confident that we’ve escaped the camera upgrade demons. (What on earth would you do with a nine pound camera with a lense competing with the size of the Hubble telescope while you are traveling?!)

Travel light, ruin a few shirts by using a faulty iron… that’s my motto today.