Day 59 – 3/14 – Hong Kong

Today we had to catch the bus in Beijing at 6:15 am to catch our flight to Hong Kong to meet the ship.

The Beijing airport was unbelievable. We’ve been in many airports around the world, but this on was uniquely grand. I’m sure that this had a lot to do with hosting the Olympics. It was huge, modern, clean, and efficient. I may post a couple of pictures, but it is hard to capture the scale.

Our flight to Hong Kong was 3-1/2 hours. We got into Hong Kong in time to have about 3 hours to shop. The ship was docked in the shopping district. In fact, the gangplank dropped us into a 3-story shopping mall.

We walked about 4 blocks to Nathan street: a famous area with over 2000 shops.

We did very little damage. Kathleen bought a carrying case for her computer and we bought wine.

I saw and almost bought the coolest camera that I’ve ever seen. It was a pen…ala 007. It was about the diameter of my finger, and wrote as a pen. However, you could clip it to your shirt pocket, hit the switch and it recorded up to 10 hours of moving picture and sound. It was MP9 format…that many generations beyond MP3. It was only $185, or $160 each if I bought 2. I should have bought and known that I could sell one. At another store I asked if this was in the US, and the clerk said “no” because it was developed for the Chinese secret service.

We left port at 10:00pm (now). We got some pictures of the cityscape as we pull out. All of the building have colored lights. I’ll post some if they come out well.