We just went through a three day weekend in Hong Kong in observance of the Ching Ming Festival, a holiday also known locally as "Grave Sweeping Day." Locals pay reverence to departed family and friends by cleaning up their grave markers. As Lizzie and I know very few people in HK at this point, and even fewer who are deceased, we used the spare time to putter around the city and do some exploring.
The weather was mild so we decided to get out of the concrete jungle of Central and enjoy some of Hong Kong's natural splendor, which really is quite beautiful. We strolled along the Bowen Road trail, Hong Kong's answer to the Sawyer Camp Trail in the Bay Area, and stopped for a little family picnic. As super fit joggers whizzed by, we ate cheese and crackers on a bench beside a little waterfall.
But this trail is a gem of a find because there are not many places in the immediate vicinity of our apartment tower to go jogging without having to slalom through crowds of people or dodge speeding taxis. Too bad though that in another month an outdoor jog or stroll will be an afterthought as I can already feel the temperatures spiking.....the beastly humidity is just around the corner and the outdoors must be avoided at all costs....
Along the path we stopped to view ongoing construction of a 30-ish story building. As is the case with all/most buildings that go up in HK, they use bamboo and plastic zip-ties to build their scaffolding systems. Even the tallest of the tall skyscrapers use it! Tough to see in the picture, but we watched this guy (we'll call him Spiderman) climb all around this bamboo with complete confidence and no safety harness! Crazy stuff.
On Sunday we headed out to the other side of Hong Kong Island to the small community of Stanley where there is a cluster of outdoor restaurants, a popular hawker market and a pleasant boardwalk area to stroll the sea front.
We took in some history by checking out the Stanley Maritime Museum, a really impressive exhibit tracing the history of Hong Kong as a seaworthy trading city. They've got a really cool whiz bang hi-tech shipping simulator that allows you to sit in a modified bridge of a cargo container ship and navigate your way thru Victoria harbor to the offload docks, dodging all sorts of obstacles along the way. Easier said than done, and even the professionals get it wrong as there have been several tragic accidents in the harbour in the past couple months with deadly consequences.
The rest of our time in Stanley was spent sitting in a restaurant, dining and drinking al fresco.
Ingrid made a friend, a cute little girl named Grace (see Doppelganger post) and we chatted with her parents. The father was one of the few remaining British police officers on the HK force who stuck around after the handover. Interesting chat.
We also went shopping for a bathtub for Ingrid. She approved of our purchase.
In another sign that the world's weather is out of whack,Hong Kong is currently being hit by a Typhoon, the earliest the city has ever been hit by such a storm since records have been kept (and in China, records have been kept for a looong time). The signpost in the lobby of our building claims Typhoon Neoguri to be a No. 3 Signal event 
which is basically a big rainstorm with accompanying strong winds. Its the Signal 8+ typhoons that close the schools and send everyone screaming home from work to batton down the hatches. We look forward to those come August. But the city is taking Neoguri in stride. I just dropped Lizzie and Ingrid off at the Airport Express for their flight home to the States. The flight is still scheduled to leave on time so I suppose its not a major meteorological event.
Hong Kong is readying itself for Olympic glory when the Olympic Torch makes its way through the city on May 2nd. Today it held a full scale dress rehearsal for the relay and we were there! We're unfortunately not going to be in town when the real torch passes through so we saw the next best thing. There were no protesters, no track-suited paramilitary Chinese goon squad (sorry in advance...) guarding the runners, and no international television coverage. And most evident, there was no torch! The stand in for the torch was some sort of oversized cardboard tube that looked to have come from a roll of holiday wrapping paper. I could see Ingrid salivating just looking at it.
