Category: Travel

I had to get up at 4.30 am to make it to San Francisco on a 7.30 am Alaska Air flight.   Then they make you go through security again on the way to the international terminal (grr) – shown in the picture below.   The international terminal is 10 years old this year.

The now-defunct Trans World Airlines plane is from a display case here, as is the picture from a brochure.   Those were the days .. I’m sure there was no security check point to speak of.   And is that a bicycle I see stowed in the overhead space? Good heavens!

Yes, it’s time for trip #10 to Hong Kong and mainland China.   I applied for a Global Entry pass (costs $100) .. US Customs does a background check before approving it.   Then upon arrival back in the USA at 20 ports of entry so far (Seattle is one of them), the traveler can bypass the passport check points and just have the Global Entry machine scan the card.

Meanwhile the reports say that Google received 75,000 applications for the 6,000 jobs the company plans to add this year.   Should I apply?  (I think I should).

And with the Superbowl coming up on Sunday, the Jay Leno Show is predicting that the winner will be the Greenbay Packers.   A Jack Russel terrier (very fond of biting balloons, are they all like that?) was let loose among an equal number of black (Pittsburgh Steelers) and yellow (Greenbay Packers) balloons.   The last one to pop was a yellow one!

First, I apologize for the rude picture from our Seattle alternative weekly newspaper.  It’s a traveler in the hated full-body scanner giving the TSA* the finger.  The report describes what happened to a Seattle guy that showed up at the airport with a boarding pass but told the TSA at the security checkpoint he did not have any ID to present.   He was arrested and put in jail and later accused of trespassing, disorderly conduct, refusing to obey an officer and concealing his identity.  This was in Nov 2009, and the first case of its kind ..  but all charges were dismissed when the case was heard recently.  It took jurors only an hour to decide.   The lessons for me?  Yes, you have all kinds of rights that technically the TSA cannot take away or enforce, but behave yourself nonetheless at the airport if you want to make your flight.   (I suspect this guy left his ID at home or in the car and wanted to ‘test’ his case !)

*Transport Security Administration, in charge of security at US airports

The first picture is from Hong Kong airport where the train arrives at the airport.    Next is the United 747 that brought us home sitting at the gate at Hong Kong airport, and happy Chinese New Year bunnies in the United lounge.  (I am sure only the hermit crabs in Hong Kong harbor do NOT know the Year of the Rabbit is about to arrive).     We made it in an hour ahead of schedule here at San Francisco airport just as the day was dawning.

We made it to The Peninsula shortly after noon for their dim sum brunch.   On the pricey side (of course, it is The Peninsula after all), but very nice.   I recommend it !   Then we walked by the Heritage 1881 plaza (see the rabbits hiding in the greenery?), and on to the Harbor City mall nearby.  It is Hong Kong’s biggest shopping mall.   The Arc de Triomphe is made of white chocolate, part of a display of chocolate artworks.   A sign by it said ‘Please Do Not Touch and Do Not Eat’. (! LOL).   The firecracker billboard is an accurate depiction of the Chinese New Year celebration : plenty of firecrackers going off !

We decided to get out of the city and go check out Stanley Market.   Stanley is a fishing village on the southern side of Hong Kong island.   To get there, one takes the island line on the MTR to the east most station and then hop on a little 16-seater minibus.  The drive to Stanley is along steep hillsides with lots of curves.  (Marked A on the Google map shot, and shown on the billboard on location there).  The first set of pictures were all taken there.  The temple is Tin Hau temple.   It think the picture of the sea is Repulse Bay, and check out the curved building overlooking it.   It was a very nice trip – the flea market is nothing different from what we’ve seen other places in Hong Kong, but it’s fun to get there and walk around.  I’m sure it’s packed in summer.

Then we went back to get some lunch in Soho, and went tea-shopping.   Expensive tea, not the stuff you buy off the shelf in the supermarket.   Ying Kee Tea Co. is on Queen’s Road in Central.   They sell tea that goes up to US$ 500 for 100g ! Yikes.    Some is sold loose leaf, others sold in big wheels of tea cakes.    The Year of the Rabbit is still on the way (starts early Feb) but I cannot resist snapping pictures of the rabbits in the city.

Three of us from work made it into Hong Kong on the company bus but we had many delays : waiting for someone before leaving, a random check by police at one of the toll plazas, traffic in Hong Kong.  So it took almost 4 hrs to get here!

We had a nice dinner  in the Soho area next to Lan Kwai Fong (in Central district on Hong Kong Island and also  party central for the expats).  That’s where we found ‘Elvis’, in a 7-11 store.  The Stella Artois billboard overlooks the main raod going down.  The Ice Vodka Bar has a freezer room where one is handed fur coats to wear while you have your vodka!   Yes, that’s a rabbit between the red lanterns.   And back in the hotel room there was a mean game of championship ping pong on the go on one of the TV channels.   That tiny table top might as well be a tennis court the way they play.

 

Sunday was pleasant enough to spend outside, and since I had to get away from work for a while – and Dameisha –  I took a taxi to Shenzhen’s Luo Hu station and on a whim the metro from there to the west side of the city to ‘Windows of the World’.   Nothing to do with Microsoft! – it is a very big theme park providing outdoor displays big and small of world landmarks, mostly scale models of man-made constructions, but also of natural landmarks.    The first picture is of the entrance (the monorail train car seems as old as the ones we have at the Seattle Space Needle!).  Scroll down and see how many of the other landmarks you recognize.  The answers are at the bottom of the post.

 

 

From the top down :

Eiffel Tower (of course), scene from Japan with koi feeding and Mt Fuji, Stonehenge, Lion Gate at Mycenae (full scale), Quell Park – the grounds of a house and estate in Barcelona that Gaudi designed and built for the Quell family*, African mask, 20 yuan (US$3) for a ride on the camel with the pyramids as a backdrop!, native American totem poles, the little pee boy from Belgium, the ‘official name’ is a little rude! (know what it is?), the Shwe Dagoon Pagoda from Burma, Chinese gate,  the Segovia Alcazar a fortress and magnificent castle from Segovia, Spain, and and Assyrian king Esarhaddon.

*my absolute favorite of the landmarks, trumping even the Eiffel Tower and the gorgeous Chinese gate.

The weather was nice enough late Friday to take a very pleasant stroll on Dameisha beach,  just a few blocks down from my apartment.     It is out of season, of course – so the activity on the beach is subdued.     But I did manage to catch some riders on a jet ski ( 摩托艇 ).    In summertime there is also parasailing – being towed behind a boat while you dangle from a parachute.

These pictures are from yesterday after I had returned to Dameisha from Shenzhen.    It is an outlet mall here that suspended its operations a year or two ago, and has now reopened (for some ‘happy’ shopping as the first picture suggests).     There is a nice collection of stores – all the brand names such as Nike Adidas Samsonite Levi’s Gucci and more – but not many shoppers.    Earlier Sunday had been a nice day but late afternoon the winter monsoon wind picked up again making it unpleasant.

The goddess in the chariot is Venus – the Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty and fertility.   I suspect the 2007/08 date on the plaque is when the outlet mall first opened.

P.S.  The shooting incident involving congresswoman Giffords in Arizona was covered for several minutes on the national news TV channel CCTV today.

Here is a selection of pictures from today.   Four of us took a taxi to Shenzhen.  First stop was at McCawly’s Irish Pub for lunch (shepherd’s pie with a beer for me, yum).  The next picture is from the Tequila Coyote Cantina next door, a Mexican restaurant also run by the McCawly’s owner.   The ornate front of the Lili Marleen Bar is on the other side.

Done with lunch, we headed to a dept store called Jusco in the Coco Park Mall.  2011 is The Year of The Rabbit, so get ready for many more rabbit pictures from me until the Chinese New Year celebrations are behind us in February.

 

Done with Jusco, but not finding the charcoal Dave wanted for his outdoor grill at the apartment, we now head to another Jusco with the Shenzhen metro rail system.  The picture above is a romantic version of it as far as I can tell.   The one below is a 3D map of our exiting station’s surroundings.   It was hard to navigate to the second store.  The cutie pie kids are from a billboard in the station and the green Shenzhen Tong card is the equivalent of the Octopus card in Hong Kong, and the Orca card in Seattle.  I love the name of the Internet Cafe Lu Lu.

The kids on the street are looking at a dead rat.  A street vendor is getting her baked potatoes out .. a hard life, I hope she sold all of them!   Watch out for the snake coming at you in 4D  (hmm – not sure what the fourth dimension is!).  Rabbits in the stuffed toy machine, and – at last! – we found the charcoal in the second store.     Not sure what kind of building the leaning building is, this picture taken from the Citic Plaza 中信广场, as is the tall building under construction.   I don’t know why, but it made me think of the 1985 ‘We built this City’ song by Starship :

We built this city on rock and roll x2
Say you don’t know me, or recognize my face
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place
Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night ..

 

I believe this billboard is of Deng Xiopeng : a Chinese politician and leader of the Communist Party of China who as a reformer led China towards a market economy.   He was in office for some 13 years until 1992.  The last picture is just of a tall apartment building on the way back to Dameisha.

It’s past midnight Monday night here but I made it in.  We made an unscheduled stop at Anchorage airport in Alaska to off-load a sick passenger (couldn’t find out what ailed him .. apparently these was no doctor on the flight, either).  The first picture is of Anchorage airport through the airplane window.  Snowy and icy on the ground but the weather was clear.   So from Anchorage we flew over Alaska, the Kamchatka peninsula and Japan.    I was so happy to see my driver still there at Hong Kong airport, this is now three hours after our scheduled arrival time.   Without him there – I could have A. taken the train to the border and hope to get a taxi in Shenzhen at 11pm : a dicey proposition.  B.  The easier one : walk into the Regal Airport hotel right there and arrange a pick-up in the morning.    The final picture shows the exit point from Hong Kong territory.   I am in a van similar to the one on the right in the picture.   Right after the picture was taken we tried our luck and used the ‘Hong Kong Residents’ lane, and hey, they let us through.

There was a full-body scanner in my security line this morning, but they stopped using it before I got to the front, which was a relief for me.     (It’s the radiation that I don’t like).     Anyway, here I am waiting for the flight to San Francisco, and I am sure I will sleep since I had to get up at 3.45am.

I had dinner last night with my friends Bill Dave and Meredith in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard – a restaurant called The Hi-Life located in the historic Firehouse No. 18 built in 1911 (picture below).  It serves up American food and I had pot roast, carrots and mashed potatoes with beer.   Very nice!    And today Steve and Ken treated us to pork, sauerkraut, spaetzle, greens and a special corn bread : a feast.

But alas, my time home is over and I’m taking off for Hong Kong early in the morning via San Francisco.  We don’t have snow at the airports here on the West coast, so that’s a good thing!  And now I have to go and finish up with my packing.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

I’m home ! !   Yes, it’s still Saturday, since we crossed the International Dateline from east to west.  As I sat here on my couch woozy from the flying it was hard to believe it was ‘this morning’ that the tall apartment buildings in Hong Kong flashed by driving out to the airport where I snapped the cute Canon printer billboard.   We left a little late (the flight path picture shows our arrival) and I had to run to make my connection at Incheon airport.   I think the held the flight for us, though.   South Korea continues to be in the news over the latest spat with their aggressive neighbor to the north.   Seoul is uncomfortably close to the border, as the map shows.

We made good time through the Shenzhen traffic and the two border posts just at sunset yesterday (first two pictures) .. a bunch of us is here at the Courtyard Marriott, some (me!) leaving today and some tomorrow.    The blurry picture is our arrival into Hong Kong last night and the bad boy International Commerce Center building teased me with a glimpse of it that I caught just before we entered into the Western Harbor tunnel to Hong Kong Island.

I could not check in on line but Asiana Airlines wishes me a Happy Happy Christmas.    Seems a requirement that even a cartoon Santa character needs to have a thick white moustache, right?

These pictures are all from around the restaurant where we had our team dinner Tue night, in the Futian district of Shenzhen. 

Pictures :  Those are little Santa Clauses on my head, and reindeer horns worn as a ‘scarf’ by my colleague;  yes –  that’s Harry Potter on the display screen for the movie theater inside Coco Park shopping mall;  plenty of bars such as the Lili Marleen bar and 1877 bar; some skyscrapers at night time are lit up with cool lighting like the diamond pattern on the building in the distance.

P.S.  The blue and red figure from Sunday’s post is Pres. Obama, of course .. did you get that? (I didn’t at first).  In American politics blue means Democratic Party and red means Republican Party. 

I had a hunch I need to make it out to Times Square out by Causeway Bay since that shopping mall hosts great exhibits year-round, and I was glad I did.     There is a collection of giant spray cans and figures outside to invite passers-by in, and inside the atrium of the mall there is a giant rotating wooden head, surrounded by an exhibition of giant wooden figures as well as little doll figures.     The one with the bandaged head and crutch is called ‘No War’ and makes a political statement, I’m sure.

I believe the International Commerce Center building in Kowloon has now opened its skydeck but alas – the smog in the city this weekend was terrible.   Check out the picture second from last that I took from the taxi on the way back to Shenzhen.   The apartment buildings are about 50 stories high.   The ICC building visible between them, goes up for another 60 stories : the skydeck is at the 110th floor.  But of course the view can only be appreciated on a clear day.

The last picture is the view if one looks back immediately after setting foot in mainland China after customs.   This building is newly renovated; on previous trips I found it covered up with scaffolding.

It should be no surprise that Christmas is embraced by the retail industry even though it’s a holiday with no religious significance in this part of the world.   So here are some pictures from Saturday.

Love Christmas, Love Hong Kong (and spend money in the process, of course!).   Don’t want to pay your supertaxes? Off to jail with you. (Looks like the rich are off the hook with paying super taxes in the USA anyway!).   These Monopoly floor decorations in Central Station is for a promotion by McDonalds.   Yes, they still sell the board game in the stores.    Tai Koo station is far out east on the Island Line and there I found a nice store called Muji (behind me in the reflection) with Japanese products.     I bought a white bone china dinner plate – to actually use in my apartment.   US$20 for the plate instead of US$1 for a cheap porcelain plate in China BUT the China plates are not flat – it’s really a shallow bowl. AND it’s not bone China, see?  The little toys clamoring for their escape is a scene straight from a Toy Story movie, also at this mall.

Click on the Visa billboard picture to get the original big size one and check it out.   Surprisingly, no USA icons : no Statue of Liberty, no Golden Gate Bridge.  What’s up with that, Visa?   The staid and uppity Peninsula Hotel did a good job of its Christmas decorations – the snowflakes seem to float in 3D since they are suspended by thin black cables.   Picture of a ‘Betty Boop’/ modern worldly girl that needs no handsome prince (is that him in the moonlight? no, looks like a monkey on the horse!) from the Peninsula Arcade next door.   Finally two pictures from the mall in International Finance Centre 2.    (Did Pinocchio play a trumpet in the original story?  I don’t recall that he did).

It’s Friday and I didn’t think I’d make it to Hong Kong : we all really thought we would be grounded and ordered to work this weekend.     We start the first round of system testing on Monday and we were struggling to get everything in place, 12 hour workdays notwithstanding.     But there we were, in the van : Willem, Will and William.   I hitched a ride to Hong Kong airport with the other two Wills.   The first picture shows a road sign in Shenzhen with live traffic densities, the second just another Shenzhen building.    Mickey Mouse in his Santa outfit is from a giant wall mural in Hong Kong train station, and the final picture is inside the train just before the last stop.   For the last few blocks to the Marriott Courtyard I took the tram even though I had some luggage to handle, since the taxis were in short supply.