Category: Travel

I have a lot of stuff to squish into my two bags!   One bag goes with me, and the other stays at the hotel.   I go home on Thursday morning.   Meanwhile there are news reports of Hong Kong airport ground personnel mulling a strike (but nothing noted on the airport’s website yet).   And I see Narita airport (my stopover to Seattle) is posting radiation measurements every day to calm public fears over radiation from Fukushima.     It is fine – there is no problem.   

Here are pictures of my jaunt to Hong Kong on Saturday :

I’m sitting in the taxi on the way to Luohu train station and border crossing in Shenzhen.    Look for the signs that say ‘To Hong Kong’ and eventually you will end up at the customs check point.    For some reason an inordinate number of Mainlanders wanted to cross today, so the ‘Foreigner’ section and lanes inside were just swamped with people as well.  But an official called the few of us that were obviously foreign :  ) out to a barricaded lane they carved out for us.  ‘Thank you, thank you’ I said as he let us through.   Once on the Hong Kong side where you pick up the East Rail Line to the city, it was smooth going.   I took it down south all the way to Hung Hom station in the heart of Kowloon.   The pink mural is from there, showing the wavy roof of the station.      Of course there is a bus terminal and taxi stands outside as well.    But I took the train to Tsim Tsa Tsui from there where the people picture was taken and where I ogled some Swiss watches in the windows.   (Which one is best?  The super square design from Jaeger Le Coultre, or the one with the Salvador Dali-ish numerals from Frank Muller?).    Then I bought some newsmagazines, a math book ‘Alex’s Adventures in Numberland’ and a few grocery items before I headed back.      The Shenzhen Shangri-la with the UFO restaurant at the top (in the center of the last picture below) is my personal landmark when I arrive back at the sprawling Luoho train station.

I tagged along with two of my colleagues to Luohu Commercial City.   It is a shopping mall right next to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border’s customs building (first picture).   Wikipedia says the place is notorious in Hong Kong for its bargains, and that many “one-day” visitors from Hong Kong venture no further into Shenzhen than the mall.  Most of the items for sale in the mall, however, are either counterfeit or cheap replicas of designer brands, and the mall has a reputation for selling low-quality goods through high-pressure bargain tactics.

So it’s not for people like me that 1. hate haggling over prices, and 2. want the real thing!   But there we were – and it wasn’t long before a ‘guide’ latched on to us, inquiring what we were interested in buying, and then taking us a store owner that sells it.   The guide was a nice young kid and I hope he gets money from the shop-owners he brought us to.   I am pretty sure he does.   We also stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall tea shop, and the owner sat us down and served up green tea, oolong tea and jasmine tea.   We loved the green tea and each bought a ‘brick’ of the stuff.   Then we hopped in the taxi and came back to Dameisha.

There is a tropical depression (named Banyan) off the coast of Hong Kong that has produced a steady rain the last three days out here.   This is bad news for the already-flooded areas in Thailand as well, I’m sure.   The arrow sign is at our turn into Ping Kui Road every day to work, and I wonder if there will be enough light energy collected by the little solar panel to make the left and right arrow flicker at night – there probably will be.   

Wednesday night I had dinner at the Denny’s across the street from the hotel one last time, then caught the Narita Express at 7am Thu morning at Tokyo station.    There’s the sleek machine in the picture,  gliding in and stopping so that the car doors line up exactly with the markers on the platform.    I learned of Steve Jobs’s passing away at the airport on CNN.    The picture is from a discussion of the iPhone 4S in Japan earlier in the week.  iPhones were previously limited to one carrier (Softbank), but will now be available from a second carrier (KDDI), similar to the at-first-exclusive-to-AT&T and then-also-Verizon situation in the USA.

It was rained all day Wednesday in the Tokyo metro area (picture from NHK TV station) and I had on-line work to do, but I still managed to run out to Akihabara.  It is also known as Akihabara Electric Town and located less than five minutes by rail from Tokyo Station.   As the name indicates, it is a major shopping area for electronic, computer, anime, and otaku* goods, including new and used items.   *roughly translates as geek; a person with obsessive interests in anime, manga or video games.   The store is gigantic : 7 floors of Best Buy, Toys-R-Us and Office Depot stuff.   The displays in some areas are just overwhelming but the store is very well laid out and run.   The friendly guy in the picture explains how to measure your wrist size for watch straps, the blond anime girl is from the floor in the DVD/ CD section – why waste floor space if it can be put to good use to advertise the merchandise?   The last picture is from outside.  By then my shoes and socks were wet in spite of the umbrella I borrowed from the hotel and I called it quits and went back. 

My first mission of the day was to find the Tokyo branch of the Japan Mint store to buy a 2011 Japan coin set, and I succeeded.  Most Japanese streets have no names! and the addressing system is quite different from Western ones.   It is near Higashi-Ikebukoro station and I had to ask for directions twice.   This is the entrance of the store.   (I will show the coin set later).

Next stop was Akasaka station.   There is a Noritake porcelain show room there that I wanted to check out (sneak picture of porcelain with gold leaf is from there).   The Akasaka area sustained heavy damage in WWII and has been newly rebuilt : and it shows.    I loved the spectacular curved vanishing-edge building with the diamond window panes.  The area is also full of shrines.   I walked to the east from the orange area to find the Hie Jinja Shrine (next two pictures).    Finally the obligatory self-picture in the subway mirror with my iPhone 4.  I see there is considerable disappointment at Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4S (what? no iPhone 5?!).

Monday’s weather was perfect for being out and about.    This Ginza district lamp post with the Fenghuang (mythological bird of East Asia) on top has  a decoration with up-faces/ upside-down-faces on.   The Ginza street scene shows Matsuya Ginza, an upscale department store with a design museum on the 6th floor (white building on the right).   I love the chess set but didn’t make a note of who the artist was.   The Klein & More clock replica dates back to 1956 (a little pricey at  ¥ 47,250/ US$600, though).   Elsewhere in the store the Issey Miyake jackets went for $400 or so.  (Miyake was born in Hiroshima and witnessed and survived the atomic bomb at age 7 in 1945).   I ran into the Ichiro picture (from the Seattle Mariners) in the subway.  He is promoting Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and yes, that’s a Starbucks store name reflected at the top of the picture.    And back in the hotel I can watch high-definition manga animated stories.   The artwork is stunning, but of course the dialog is in Japanese!

Here is the Boeing 767-300 of All Nippon Airlines that brought us to Tokyo, at a wet Hong Kong airport.   (An ANA plane was involved in a hair-raising incident on Sept 6.  Flight 140 with 117 passengers en route to Haneda -Tokyo’s other airport- briefly flew virtually upside down after a co-pilot mistakenly operated a key steering mechanism.  Whoah!  Amazingly, just two flight attendants were slightly injured, and six passengers reported that they felt ‘unwell’ after landing).    Today I sat in coach but that didn’t stop me from enjoying a Kirin beer.   Wish I knew what the little sticker on it said ! of course I don’t !   So that was 4 hours in the air.   Then I took the Narita Express train to Tokyo (it’s been a long day, does it show in my face?).   It helped a lot that I have the Tokyo subway figured out and that I came to the same Marriott I stayed in, in May.

Shenzhen’s Civic Center is a great place for spending some time on a Sunday.   Only today it was rainy outside, so I took a few quick pictures of the sweeping roof of the Shenzhen Museum nearby, and then went inside.    The kids are dribbling and twirling their basket balls, waiting under the enormous roof for the rain to clear.     There is an art store for students inside the Center with portfolio books of reprinted artwork.    So the pictures are from those books : cranes in a pine forest, hoopoes in a loquat tree, and a portrait study.    The loquat tree is indigenous to southeastern China.   And so are the hoopoes with their cute tufty feathered heads, to my surprise.   We had them in the garden in South Africa; they are found in most of Africa as well.  To add a final twist to the tale of the hoopoe : it is Israel’s national bird.

Everything went fine and I am in the hotel in Dameisha/mainland China, ready to get a few hours sleep.   The ‘Welcome to Japan’ sign is full of Japanese icons (as it should be, of course).      There is the United bird (and old one with creaky seats!) that brought us into Narita airport, and the robot is from an airport toy store.

I’m at Seatac airport waiting for the flight to Tokyo (about 10 hrs duration).    The All Nippon Airlines website announced the first Boeing 787 Dreamliner routes : Tokyo(Haneda)-Frankfurt and Tokyo(Haneda-Beijing).    It also notes that Japan makes about 35% of the plane – the forward fuselage, the center wing, and some structural components. 

 

I’m leaving Saturday morning for Hong Kong, this time via Tokyo.   A United flight gets me into Tokyo’s Narita airport, and then All Nippon Airways will get me to Hong Kong.   (Picture of ANA’s iPhone app).    The flight track from today’s United flight is from Flightstats.com, showing the routing right over Alaska and across the Bering Sea.   I will arrive very late Sunday night into Hong Kong.  It’s still weird for me, the 24 hrs that disappear out of my local date and time reference, with these westward flights across the International Date Line in the ‘wrong’ direction.

The short connection in Seoul went well and the gate security was the usual hand search of our carry-ons, no more.  The pictures are from Saturday morning.  From the top: crossing the suspension bridges from Hong Kong mainland to Lantau Island (the airport’s location);  walking to Gate 24 to board; looking out the window at the Korean Airlines Airbus A380 getting pushed out to the runway;  I wondered for a moment how the dinner appetizer should be eaten (mushroom, mozzarella and cherry tomato with mint leaf garnish); then stuffed it all in my mouth :0).

These artifacts are from a display in Hong Kong airport.  Monday is Moon Cake Festival Day in China (those are moon cakes in the picture).   Carambola, or starfruit, is really native to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – but I have seen trees here with the fruit.  Now I have to run for the gate!    I have a short connection in Seoul, then on to Seattle.

It is finally cooling down somewhat from the August highs here in South East Asia, and in Japan.   The TV screen shot is from the Japanese channel NHK World.  It says ‘Forecast Lowest Temperature’ 予想最低気温 at the top* and the 22 ºC (72 ºF) is for Tokyo.   It still goes up to 30 ºC (86 ºF) some days there, but the Japanese government’s campaign to urge businesses to consume less electricity this summer was a resounding success.    Average electricity use in peak hours on weekdays in Tepco’s service area fell 20.4 percent in July and 21.9 percent in August from 2010, exceeding the targeted 15 percent cut.    Check out the manga character with the sad eyes.   And I like the pointer with the black blob that the meteorologist is using.   Somewhat different from the way our TV stations present the weather, no?

*the successful outcome of a guessing game I played in Google Translate,  plugging English phrases into its English-Japanese translator

Two colleagues new to the project and I took a taxi to Shenzhen’s electronics market on Huaqiang North Road.   The beautiful gazebo is close by and so is a large watch store that sells any watch one can imagine.    The ‘Rolexes’, ‘Omegas’ and ‘Cartiers’ are fake (prices are negotiable, between US$50 and US$200), but there is a very large selection of cheap and colorful quartz watches with Mickey Mouse, Batman, Astroboy and Snow White.    Then we hopped onto the one of the Shenzhen Metro’s brand spanking new lines, the She Kou line.  No Scottish Terriers/pets  :  ), no begging, no vendors, no littering and NO balloons!*.    The trains are very clean with animated displays that show the whole line and connecting stations.   At this moment we had arrived at Grand Theater station and are directed to use the open doors on the other side to exit.

*Because they pop and scare people?  More likely because the trains are typically crowded and the balloon or string gets stuck in the doorway on the way out!

A big coach bus takes us to work and back every day from Da Mei Sha.   This a snap shot of a road side scene in Da Peng, which is some 40 minutes to the east by road.   Da Peng is the community just outside the Daya Bay nuclear power plant.   The street vendors are selling a type of lychee native to South China, as well as a kind of flat bread.   In the background, a building has been demolished to make way for a new one.  (Yes, there is not a lot of space between the bus and the pedestrians !  We are definitely used to much wider vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-people berths in the USA! ) 

These pictures are from Saturday night.   The first picture is at dusk; I’m sitting upstairs in a street car (tram) from the hotel to the Sheung Wan station.    The nearest metro station is too far to walk to from the hotel.   All the other pictures were taken around the Sogo department store at Causeway Bay metro station, four stops east from Sheung Wan.

I took a bus from bus operator China Transportation Services to Hong Kong.   We changed from a 16 seater minibus into a full-size coach bus at the newly renovated (for the Universiade Games) Huanggang border crossing.   I was a little annoyed by this sticker – stuck on my shirt when we left by the ticket lady without my permission – but believe me, it certainly saved me from being stranded at the border crossing (there are no trains, and no taxis).   I was waiting for the minibus for 30 mins+ outside in sweltering heat when a little guy ran up to me and shooed me onto the big bus.     And here I am in the Marriott Courtyard, my comfy and customary hotel on Hong Kong island (view from the room I have on the 25th floor on Sat morning).