Back to Hong Kong

We realized that with the constraints of the IDEA conference schedule, that we hadn't done much sightseeing in Hong Kong. We flew back from Beijing instead of taking the train. No more trains! Air China was great, BTW. Travel arrangements are weird in China. You have to pay for everything in cash. So you book your train or flight and then trot across the street to the Bank of China and sign over your travelers checks or your debit if your bank will clear you for that much in one go and then trot back to the travel office with your RMB 4500 or whatever and pay up. It's nerve-racking at times because you can't do it much in advance (4 days or less) and you've made hotel reservations and other plans that are time sensitive. That was the worst part of the trip -- the not having all my tickets in hand from the get-go. Hong Kong to China and vice versa counts as international travel which complicates things too.
We popped back to Kowloon and found the flower market and the bird market. Amazing. Blocks of flower shops with giant fronds and tiny bonsai that ran into a little side street where cages of colorful and sweet singing birds are hung and stacked. I saw one lady heading home with 2 covered cages. The wild sparrows come visit the caged birds. Are they teasing them or just looking for the free food? Markets are the thing here. Food markets, bird markets, flower markets, and souvenier markets are part of the tourist attactions.


We were so glad to be back in Hong Kong where we could easily maneuver around the city on the MTR. I should have had a little more cash in HK dollars though to get from the airport. It was nearly HK$400, and I only had HK$300. So I had to run into the hotel and change a US$20 to pay the taxi. We would have taken the MTR from the airport if it hadn't been for the enormous amount of luggage we had. The regular commuters would have hated us!

That afternoon we went back to Pacific Coffee Company and noticed a big sign on the bar across the street (made famous in some James Bond movie) saying, "Welcome to Hong Kong, U.S. Navy!" That's why I heard so many American accents as I walked to the bank.