Hong Kong

Hi all, I have successfully loaded our first pictures from Hong Kong... yahoo! I had put our blog on my memory stick with the photos and just figured I could quickly copy them to the blog and badabing badabang be done but.... all word documents read in chinese characters here sooooo unless you all have a new language talent I don't know about I will have to try to remember what Mira wanted to tell you about. So here goes...

We have arrived safely. It is warm (humid) about 30 degrees and very smoggy. Kate spent most of the day complaining about the heat - "its hot, too hot, I don't like hot" and the walking - "I am tired here!" That said she was a real trouper. I mean it all went surprisingly well given that we have serious jet lag of +15 hours and the kids were faced with dumplings and noodles for breakfast. Which of course brings me to why I am on the lobby computer at 5 am. We are all up. Up since 3 am or so (Paul since 2 am). The hotel is beautiful if not a bit out of the way. It has an electronic card to open the door and it is used to power the room. You have to stick it in a small card reader on the way in... we discovered that the hard way after feeling our way around the room in the dark after the 14 hour flight at 2 am our time! Anyway, this morning, Paul left at 2 am to surf the net and when the girls woke up they were not happy to hear me growl at them to just lie there... when Paul came back he had chips and juice... You are the best best best papa!!!! exclaims Kate... I think we are going to have to worry about scurvy.

Anyway back to our first day.....
We travelled the subway - got to be the cleanest and the most efficient in the world to Hong Kong Island and experienced the markets - fish, vegetable and antiques. Kate loved the fishmongers - very very smelly. She thought she could watch them all day. They throw the fish all about. When a fish is selected it gets tossed back to another fella who de-scales it and cuts off its 'ead... "Tool!" says Kate. It is interesting to see folks poking through boxes of frozen chicken parts with their bare hands. I dish out a lot of hand sanitizer.

The kids are great at walking. We wandered to a temple full of incense - Man Mo Temple. It is been renovated and full of bamboo scaffolding. The scaffolding is impressive and can get very high. Paul and Mira spent more time examining that frame than the temple. Kids weren't too impressed with the smell of incense or the sense of time (very old temple).

We used the escalators, great people movers, to get us up a very steep hilly part of the city and then walked to the Hong Kong Botanical Gardens. A beautiful oasis in the middle of a very busy city. Lots of animals, flowers, butterflies and plants. And lots of rules... no spitting, eating, drinking, feeding the animals, etc. Mira and Kate got in trouble for playing on the grass... ooooh.

This is Mira infront of a fountain that Kate wanted to jump into... No climbing or padding was the sign on this fountain. People are quite taken with Mira. She has been asked to be photographed with folks already.

This is the view from our hotel window.

A few early observations: No one eats on the go - no coffee in hand, sandwich in mouth; No one talks on the subway, except my kids who talk non stop; no tattoos on young folks and lots of smells.

Well I am off. Wish me luck on sleeping... sharon