Greetings from Hong Kong

---

We arrived in Hong Kong on April 23 at 10:30 pm and were glad to have a prearranged car to take us to our hotel. Hong Kong is overwhelming. Every sense perception is maximally stimulated without letup until you can find a refuge in some small, quiet space where the hubbub still continues, but from a distance. The next morning, we joined up with John Coker, David's lifelong friend, who spends about half his time living and working in Hong Kong. We fell into a delightful routine of exploring Hong Kong and Kowloon on our own during the daytime while John was at work, and then joining him and his gracious Chinese boss and various members of her lovely family for fine evening meals in their favorite Hong Kong restaurants. We rode the cable tram up to Victoria Peak and walked along the path for a 360 degree view of the island. We rode double-decker trollies, buses, and subway trains to see wet fish markets, fresh fruit and vegetable stalls, butcher shops with ducks, pigs, and the skinned bodies of who-knows-what animals hanging from meathooks, entire blocks of jade hawkers, alleys with stalls of fresh-cut flowers as far as the eye can see, and a street with live songbirds in homemade wicker birdcages for sale. We took the Star Ferry across the harbor. One day, we took a ferry, bus, and aerial cable car to a nearby island to visit Lin Po Monastery, the site of a gigantic statue of the Buddha. On the last day of our visit, we were driven across the border into China to the site of the main factory of John's employer for a fascinating tour of the manufacturing plant where the millions of plastic toy figurines which they produce are made. The photo of us was not taken in a surgical suite, but in the high tech clean environment where the final steps of the manufacturing process take place. After bidding farewell to our friends, we left Hong Kong and flew to South Korea where we are visiting Lydia. The report on that adventure will be the subject of the next blog.

---