Hong Kong & Macau

Hong Kong has lots of beautiful parks, including this one (Hong Kong Park) where you can also visit the Museum of Tea Ware. I really enjoyed visiting Hong Kong and it reminds me a lot of another favorite city of mine -- NYC.

An early-morning tai chi class on Hong Kong's East Promenade, near Victoria Harbor.


I also had a chance to take the 1-hour ferry from Hong Kong to Macau. In 1999, Macau was returned to China by the Portuguese, and it's largely known for its gambling. As my guidebook states, though Macau's often referred to as the Vegas of the East, "it might be more appropriate to put that the other way around."

Many Chinese love Macau, and on this particular Sunday it seemed like half the country was here visiting.

One of the displays at the Macau Museum was about cricket fighting. The first time I'd heard of this was just a few weeks ago at a museum in China. As part of the Macau display, there is also a cricket coffin (used at funeral ceremonies for champion fighters) and an engraved stone memorial for the cricket's grave.

Occupy Central, HK business district

This morning I took Hong Kong's famous Star Ferry across Victoria Harbor to explore Hong Kong Central, the city's wealthy business district. Due to Occupy Central, things are definitely not business as usual, and the demonstration here is even bigger than the one across the harbor in Mong Kok. Today Hong Kong's South China Post reported that the police will soon be moving in to move out the protestors, and a young Hong Kong dissident is quoted as saying that no matter how the protest movement turns out, "we will reclaim the democracy that belongs to us." Stirring words for sure, but if and when China gains full control of Hong Kong, there will be zero tolerance for pro-democracy movements like Occupy Central, and they will be promptly snuffed out, as evidenced by the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The Occupy Central movement, Hong Kong

It's only about a 20-minute walk north from my hotel to the Occupy Central demonstration in Hong Kong. I was kind of surprised how large the protest is -- several long city blocks are completely shut down in Mong Kok, a major Hong Kong business district. It's actually a calm, interesting area in which to wander around -- and traffic-free now thanks to the ongoing demonstration. I enjoyed my recent travels in China and found it to be a fascinating place to explore, but can completely understand why the people of Hong Kong do not want to be subsumed by a country with such a poor record on human rights, e.g., severe restrictions on freedom of speech, including heavyhanded censorship of the media and the internet.






The majority of demonstrators are fairly young, but there are also older people taking part as well.

One last jump over the Wall

This evening I'm doing my final jump over China's Great Firewall. The VPN (virtual private network) has been invaluable for blogging, checking email, getting news (e.g., the Hong Kong protests), etc. My 30-day China visa is about to expire, and tomorrow I depart for Hong Kong. My month of travels in China have been great and I'd gladly come back. One thing for sure, with a population of almost 1.4 billion people, China's not the country to travel in if you like lots of space and solitude, unless of course you make it a point to avoid all major urban areas like Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an, Hangzhou, etc.



I took this photo yesterday at Nanputuo Temple in Xiamen, on China's southern coast. The temple is a site of pigrimage for many Buddhists from Southeast Asia.


As with most people around the world, the Chinese love sweets.


Today is the first time I've ever seen a self-service library.


I did a blog posting a while back in Malaysia about one of these toilet-theme restaurants and here is one again in southern China. I still don't understand the appeal of, for example, a turdlike plop of chocolate ice cream served up in a miniature toilet.


Two of my favorite words when traveling

Hangzhou, green tea heaven

China has some of the best tea in the world, but it doesn't come cheap. A pot of good Chinese tea at a cafe goes for around $8.



Here in the Hangzhou region longjin tea, or Dragonwell, is grown. This is China's most famous tea, and is often called China's national drink.

An ounce of decent-grade Dragonwell sells for about $5 an ounce here at the tea shops.


Many public areas in China have hot water dispensers for tea, including at train stations and on trains.

Other than its longjin tea, Hangzhou is also famous for beautiful West Lake, which attracts hordes of tourists, even during these cold wet November days.



I snapped this shot early this morning in downtown Hangzhou. From what I could gather, it's a ceremony for the opening of a new shop in town.


Buddha in the land of Lilliput?

Photo taken earlier today at Yue Mausoleum near West Lake

As in many countries, it appears China also has a problem with wire thieves.

The rape of Nanjing

Nanjing, like Auschwitz and Hiroshima, is a name that brings to mind horrendous large-scale killing. In 1937 with the Japanese preparing to invade, the Chinese government urged citizens of Nanjing to stay put, saying, "All those who have blood and breath in them must feel they wish to be broken as jade rather that remain whole as tile." To further make their point, Nanjing's city gates were locked, trapping inside about half a million Nanjing residents. The result was a month and a half of relentless brutality by the invading Japanese, totaling about 300,000 deaths, and some 20,000 rapes. I took the photos (above and below) yesterday at the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre.




Due to China's shift from a communist system to what the government calls a "socialist oriented market economy" there are now several hundred Chinese billionaires.


And as one would expect, along with the billionaires comes a steady rise in income inequality.


Fuzi Confucian Temple in downtown Nanjing


Ming garden at Nanjing's Presidential Palace

I took this photo a few hours ago on the gorgeous grounds of the Ming Xiaoling Tomb.

Fruit kebabs with a cherry tomato on top?? -- well, tomatoes are a fruit after all.


Another motel along the way ...

Shanghai

With a population of 23 million, Shanghai is China's biggest city. As with places like Dubai and Singapore, it's a dazzling, high-tech city with iconic buildings and, some woud say, a lack of traditional culture.















Interesting sign in my hotel room, reminiscent of the old opium smoking days in Shanghai.



Getting the hell out before it's too late



Hmmm... I was a little leery about moving in too close for this shot.



From what I've seen as far as information flow here in China, most is heavily censored by the government (as is already common knowledge). In addition to the Web being tightly controlled, the news stations are also sanitized. The result is that unless the Chinese can somehow gain access to outside information sources, they're stuck with news that the government chooses to give them access to. Thus, with the Hong Kong protests, for example, it appears that due to biased one-sided news sources many Chinese believe they stem not from the desire for democracy, but instead from a devious plot funded by insidious unnamed foreign elements.