Recent Hong Kong Pictures

This is a picture of Repulse Bay.  The picture is actually taken from the top of my appartment building.  A very nice veiw from up there.  It has been quite foggy and cloudy pretty much since I got here.  I am looking foreward to going down to the beach and just hanging out.  The beach actually already fills up on the weekends, I can't wait to see how packed it gets durring the heat of summer.  This, I'm told, is the best beach in Hong Kong.  The water is pretty polluted though, so not a whole lot of people actually swim in the water.

I took this picture as I was being trampled by a small tributary of a sea of people fighting to get a view of a fire works display off to the left.  I had no chance but to stand next to a pole and survive.  There were so many people there.  It was really crazy.  It seems like it is crowded everywhere here, all the time.  This was the craziest, I heard on the news the next day that the turn out for both sides of the bay was estimated at over 750,000.  Quite a crowd!

This is a picture of a sunset from the beach in Repulse Bay.  As you can see there are numerous islands off the shore, we don't get many waves, but during the typhoons that is actually a good thing.  There are constantly huge ocean liners and cargo boats off in the distance.  I don't think I have ever seen such large boats.  There is also a small temple to one side of the beach, it has over fifty statues of numerous Gods and stuff.  The weirdist thing is that in the middle of the temple, the focal point of the entire area, is a concesion stand.  It is convieniently placed next to the god of wealth.

While in China one day I went to a park that had these two temples in it.  The statue on the left is of Shiva, a Buhdist God.  The one on the right is a temple of something or other.  I really don't remember.  When I was in the park I had my picture taken with over 10 locals, it seems that they had rarely seen westerners in this park.  I was told later that lots of tourists from northern China come here and I may be the first white person that they have seen.

When I went to China one day we took the ferry.  It took like 2 hours to get there. It just so happened that there was some American fire power in the Hong Kong harbor.  I was surprised at the size of the air craft carrier, I expected them to be bigger.