A fond farewell

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A fond farewell,

Well, I am on my way back to the states! It is a bit of a tug of war with my emotions. There is nothing more important to me than my family, heck I even got a tattoo that says “family” while I was here. That being said, my favorite thing to do is travel and explore. So with those two things heavy on my mind, my adventure here has come to an end, but I can’t be more excited to see and hug my wonderful wife, kids and family. I feel satisfied that I did all I could do while I was visiting Hong Kong. I have made some friends and contacts that I will hopefully be able to stay in touch with for the rest of my life. I have been to what I consider the most beautiful natural place to swim in my life. I saw nearly everything I came to see and a whole lot more. By the end of my trip, I had people who had been here years, asking ME what to do. My adventurous spirit took me places that were not on the tourist list and to places that are permanently ingrained in my mind. I will never forget Hong Kong and I hope to bring my family back here with me when the time is right. I have to say my favorite thing I did was go to the Tai O Infinity Pool which was a beautiful 3 mile hike from Tai O. Two of the main things I will take home with me, other than items bought at the “Ladies Market” in Tsim Sha Tsue, is that the world is accessible and freedom is amazing. In PRC, the rules are just so different than in America. For instance, when you buy a house in PRC, it is only yours for 70 years, and then it returns to be government property. Google is blocked, YouTube is blocked, Facebook is blocked, we have to wipe our iPhones as soon as we get back into HK as the PRC will take your iPhone address and take all of your data. It is a great place, I had a great time in all three Chinese cities I visited, but it is vastly different than HK. Just a mere border crossing changes so much. I have attached a few of my favorite pictures from my adventure.

As for the important part of my trip, the airplane. Let me give you a bit of background. In the states, with an airplane of this status, ask for ANYTHING and it happens as soon as humanly possible. Do some maintenance on the engines and you need to do an engine run. If the engine run took 20 minutes, the whole process of towing the a/c from the hangar to the ramp and back to the hangar may take a couple of hours IF the line crew is very busy. In Hong Kong, the airport is so busy, and there are so many customers, that nobody seems to try very hard to give us great customer service. We had not flown the airplane in over 10 days so we needed to run the engines. It took 2 days to accomplish this task. We had to schedule a tow slot to get the a/c out of the hangar, but that tow slot had to coincide with a slot at one of the run-up slots. Ok, so we get that part done, now we need to access the taxi way that parallels the active runway. Long story short, once we got on the a/c it took 3 hours to tow the a/c, and only 15 minutes to run the engines. The Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) is used before and after a flight to provide air conditioning and power to the a/c while the engines are not running. On my last aircraft the APU had 4500 hours and the engines had 8300 hours. On this aircraft, because of the way we operate in Asia, the APU has nearly twice the number of hours as the engines. We have to run the APU for hours to tow the airplane from our hangar to our departure space at the airport. It took some getting used to, my learning curve was very steep at first, but thankfully I am very patient.

The expats. I lived in Discovery Bay while here in Hong Kong. Discovery Bay (DB) is across Victoria Harbor to the East of Hong Kong. DB is mainly English speaking expats that are either in finance or aviation. I believe there are 10,000 pilots that live in DB. The result is a melting pot similar to any large city I have ever been to. Mainly British, Aussie, and American expats which is a benefit and a drawback. The drawback is that there were hundreds of families together at any public area of DB. This of course made it more difficult to be away from my family. The benefit is that there are plenty of people to meet and have conversations with without a large language barrier. Discovery Bay has the North Plaza and the Pier area which both have numerous restaurants, a grocery store, and a large public area to hang out. There is a ferry every 30 minutes to Hong Kong, every hour to Mui Wo, and a bus system that can take us to either Tung Chung or Sunny Bay MTR stations. Cabs and cars are not allowed in DB, so locals use public transportation or golf carts. Yes, the roads are shared by large city busses and golf carts. DB is very expensive to live in so families typically have one working parent, one non-working parent and a helper. There is a running joke about the “Real Housewives of Discovery Bay.” A helper is around 700 USD per month, they live with the family, take care of shopping, kids, laundry, cooking, cleaning etc. For the most part, they send the money back home to their home countries. An interesting point about the helpers is that the Gov’t mandates that they have Sunday off. As a result, Hong Kong is absolutely overrun by the maids on Sundays. Any area that is shady is taken up by maids enjoying their day off. It is a social event like nothing I have ever seen. In Central, all of the Philippine maids gather, Tsim Sha Tsue is where most of the Pakistani maids gather, and Causeway Bay is where I noticed most of the Indian maids gather. They are typically laughing, eating, napping, and doing each other’s hair or nails. It is a scene for sure.

I’m sure many of you heard about the election process that Hong Kong residents are trying to pass. We were told to stay away from Central for a few days and of course we were happy to oblige. The election process now is basically non-existent. Beijing picks the Executive of Hong Kong and people in HK want to be able to elect their own Executive. Beijing has come up with a plan to offer up three options and then for the HK residents to select from the three. This is Beijing’s answer to the election idea however; HK residents obviously know that Beijing will only offer up three VERY pro-China options. The protests were generally very polite; however, there was one event where protestors threw paper airplanes at the Chinese Gov’t building. Tear gas was used and it was big news here in HK. I did not personally see any protests, but I can certainly understand why HK residents are opposed to more Chinese control. I know, Hong Kong is part of China, but please believe me when I say that Hong Kong is extremely liberal compared to China. Hong Kong almost feels “Western” in relation to freedom, their desire to be Democratic, and safety.



In all, I absolutely LOVED my time in Hong Kong. I would live here long term for sure. There is an endless supply of people to make friends with, things to do, and culture to soak in. I have learned so much about how important some things are and how small the world is. Hong Kong is almost half the planet away from my home in CT, yet it only took me about one day to get here. 16 hours in the air is not that bad when you think about it. I hope I can travel more with my family in the future and give my kids the same desire to travel as my amazing parents gave me. Thank you all so much for reading my blog and for responding. It gave me extra drive to go do everything I could while I had time off. I hope you all take every opportunity to see the world that you can. If you do have a chance to travel and you only get to pick one place, you will not be disappointed by Hong Kong. Give it at least two weeks and be prepared to take a few days off when you get home to recover from the adventure.

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