The

Dave & Angela

McIllece Family

Home

Hong Kong

May 10-11, 2008

Airport Express When we landed in HK, we boarded the Airport Express train, which took us the 25 minutes to HK where we met Chris Johnson (OSC '06) and Mimi Waters (OSC '07, Taiwan). I loved this little progress tracker in the train, especially since we can't understand or read Chinese.	Port activities Hong Kong is definitely a Global City. Look at all these shipping containers... these are getting on the "slow boat from China"	Dim Sum Hong Kong's answer to British Tea Time. You drink tea and eat a sampling from these little bowls. The bowl closest to the bottom hold chicken feet. Yep, I ate one.
St. John's Cathedral	Check it out...	Beautiful inside
Notice how... clean and pretty (and upscale) everything is.	Wow! Look... a very tall building. It's been a long time since we've seen one.	Check out the public buses... I'm sure many people use them, and they are still clean... shocking!
China Bank building or Bank of China, can't remember. But, according to Feng Shui (wind-water balance) rules, this building is a "dagger in the heart of Hong Kong"	So... HSBC Bank built this Feng Shui-ily correct building and...	Cannons... placed these "cannons" pointed directly at the Bank of China building to protect the rest of the cities Feng Shui.
Happy Foot Chris, Mimi, Dave and I, got 75 minutes of blissful foot rubbing reflexology.	Finished... It was fantastic!	THE Escalator The Mid-levels Escalator is the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world, operating downhill until 10 am for commuters going to work, and then operating uphill until midnight. It consists of 20 escalators and 3 moving pavements. It is 800 metres long, and climbs 135 vertical metres. Daily traffic exceeds 35,000 people.
Former LDS Mission Home The church donated this back to the city when they no longer needed it.	Walking with Mimi	The Peak Tram We took the tram up to Victoria's Peak, now just called "the Peak"
The Observatory We walked through several levels of mall at the top of the tram to get to the observatory	View from the peak It was drizzling, as you can see from the water spots on the lens	For the visually challenged I thought these floors were ingenious. Blind people can use these to simplify their walking. The lines keep them in the right direction, and the dots signify an intersection.
Olympic Mascots... Beibei is the Fish, Jingjing is the Panda (not in photo), Huanhuan is the Olympic Flame, Yingying is the Tibetan Antelope and Nini is the Swallow	Dinner at Outback Steakhouse Yikes... oh yeah, that's HK dollars (divide by 8)	YUM! Our first Beef experience! Hooray!
The Outback group... Mimi Waters (OSC '07, Taiwan), Brian & Akiko Denaro (OSC '06, Guangzhou).	The Airport Express terminal We were able to check our bags for our flight to Japan at this train station 25 minutes away from the airport. It was amazingly efficient