Obligatory airport photo.
Cathy got really excited when she saw this ad for YKK zippers; she even wanted to take a tour of the YKK factory. They make almost ALL zippers everywhere!!! Wooo! Proof that it isn't actually all that hard to out-geek the guy with the PhD in Robotics.
Us posing next to the stylized Communist revolutionary statues in the ground floor of the Langham Place Hotel.
One of the hallmarks of HK restaurants and butcher shops is that a variety of dead animals are usually hanging in the front window. Flattened chickens, in this case.
Bamboo scaffolding is not exactly high-tech, but I guess it woks!
One nice thing about HK is that amid the overwhelming hustle bustle there are very relaxing "sitting parks" with trees and benches that are just for sitting around and doing nothing. A bird crapped on me at this one, but whatever.
This clothing brand is kind of an east Asian thing, although they did launch a haute couture line in the West called "rhinoplasty."
The lady running this stall basically has a gigantic wok filled with glowing charcoal, into which she buries the eggs and yams for a while. Due to some sort of communication mishap, she was hell-bent against Cathy taking a photo of her operation, but later relented. Maybe the baked-egg-and-yam business is more cutthroat than we think.
View from our hotel room on the first morning we woke up there. As in so much of Hong Kong, there were gigantic skyscrapers mixed with dumpy little low-rise buildings with people living on the roof.
Hong Kong streets are awash in cantilevered signage.
I wonder if the joke on this backpack has some sort of hidden meaning for the Chinese that I just don't understand.
Miles and miles of fruit are for sale on HK streets, especially citrus fruits, tropical ones like mangoes and papayas, and dragon fruit (the pink ones in this photo).
Helpful illustration of what the inside of a dragonfruit looks like. Lots of seeds!
Don't be under that Stanley sign when it falls off the building.
Cathy takes a big snort at the HK flower market, where several blocks of storefronts are overflowing with every kind of flower imaginable...
... like these...
... and these. Orchids, roses, you name it.
Owen poses at the entrance to the Yuen Po Street Bird Gardehhhhh.
Birds are highly prized in HK for their singing abilities more than their looks. Vendors at the Bird Garden stack up these little yellow birdcages in honeycomb-like grids in front of their stalls.
The name of this store translates into English as something like "Crazy Eddie's Discount Birdcage Showdown Extravaganza!!!"