Photos of Hong Kong v. 1

You would not believe how hard it is to get a few minutes away to blog.  Don't people here know what's important?  ;-)

Although I've been to HK many times, I've not really done an adequate photo shoot.  So, here we go.

These images are all stored on Flickr, so you can go get the larger versions should you desire.

Hong Kong - Random Glimpses

	We came to Hong Kong to celebrate the birth of my new niece Sophie.  She was the fifth IVF attempt for my brother-in-law Roy and his wife Judy.  They magazines came out for a whole photo shoot of the new family, calling her a Million Dollar Baby, as the five IVF's ran them about $1Million HK.
	While it's not too exciting, the completist in me wants to put shots of our hotel room, where the room and the bathroom are both equally large.  We are staying at the Marco Polo Gateway in Tsim Sha Tsui.
	Being an early riser, I am up and before 8 am.  In HK people wake up late and stay up very late. Here is 8 am in Tsim Sha Tsui and then 10 am. Hong Kong is very clockwork.  In the next set of pictures I'll show HK at 1 am.
	Just to show that HK isn't all the small, windy streets, HK has a very clear designation of street types.  In the US, you often can't tell the difference between an arterial and a local street because all our streets are so damn wide.  In HK, local streets are very thin while arterials, like this one, are appropriately sized.  (This was also at 8 am)
	Hong Kong has the cleanest, safest, smoothest, nicest subway on the planet.  The signage in here is gorgeous.  I'll have a separate post on signage in HK.  I'm also planning one on wayfinding in general.
	As you can see from these two photos, the HK subway (The MTR) is double doored.  This not only has the benefit of being safe, but also makes the stations quiet and cleaner. In addition, the station air quality is higher and you lose the stale "tunnel air" that you often find in subways.
	Every doorway on every train includes a status / subway map which shows the direction of the train, the upcoming stop, transfer points and the appropriate side of the train to exit from.
	This is a shot for my mother.  When we were kids, my mother used to belong to the Junior League - a do-gooder group of housewives of the upwardly mobile. One of their events was a charity bowling league thing.  Since housewives of the upwardly mobile had kids, they needed daycare and the Ponderosa Bowl in Omaha had daycare.  In there they'd give the kids toast and Coke. My mother thought this was ridiculous. "But the kids love it." the bowling alley daycare people said.  So here, in HK, I found this menu holder clearly showing the international love of toast and Coke.
	Here's a rare photo from my camera with me in it on the Peak Tram, which is a counterbalanced cable car that hauls people to and from the Peak - a neighborhood and destination high above Hong Kong
	At the peak, you can see down into Hong Kong and across the harbor to Kowloon.  On this day, there was a storm heading in, which trapped the air pollution against the mountains (sort of like it does in Denver) and you can see the result here.  It appears Hong Kong is on fire. The locals have confirmed that since we were last here, the air pollution has more than doubled.  Some people blame it on Mainland China, but it isn't hard to see HK's two coal burning power plants (with no air scrubbers) and multitude of unfiltered diesel engines as adding to the problem.  It's pretty much 1973 Los Angeles here at the moment.
	Here is the peak tram coming up to the station on the peak.

I'm gathering specific food, transit, wayfinding, nighttime and other photo groups, which I will blog in due course.

Now I'm off to talk to some dharma masters at a local Buddhist temple.  Then I am having dim sum.  Later this week, I meet with some people at the HK government to discuss some Intelligent Transportation Systems projects that are coming up.

Technorati tags: hong Kong, urban planning, babies, IVF, junior league, omaha, MTR, subways

Blogged at A Starbucks in Tsim Sha Tsui Hong Kong  Using Windows Live Writer and my newly installed flickr, text template and table plug-ins.

Comments

[Mary Austad]

We are at Barb's and just looked at the pictures from HK. Very cute baby!!!! Keep us posted. I'll check your site out more now that I know how to get there. Take care, Love Me and you mom

[Webomatica]

Awesome photos... have to add Hong Kong to my list of places to visit before I die. Luckilly I should have a few decades left...

I can understand not blogging when you see sights like that!