Dragon Boats and other Random Pictures

We made it to the Dragon Boat Festival last Tuesday, June 19th and it was a blazing hot day. Mark was miserable with the heat and the crowd, but I actually enjoyed strolling the beach and people watching.

Hong Kong can be a very small place sometimes. While walking down the beach, we ran into two friends, Leone and Nicki (friends who have that mini-dachsund puppy Morris I featured in a previous blog) Nicki and Leone were actually part of the Swiss dragon boat team even though they are both British. Nobody seems to worried about being on the wrong national team though.

There were teams for just about every country and teams sponsored by some of the big companies too. In honor of my Seattle upbringing, I took a picture of the Microsoft team and cheered them on.

Random Pictures
I've got an assortment of random pictures I've taken over the last few months whenever I see something that strikes me as "only in Hong Kong" Here's a few.

If you're a history buff, you know that Hong Kong was invaded by Japan a day after Pearl Harbor and within 16 days Hong Kong surrendered. Japan occupied Hong Kong for nearly 4 years. There's reminders of it all over. I found this headstone interesting and peaceful. It memoralizes 17 people who were killed in an air raid in 1945.

Here's an adorable picture of Bailey enjoying some corn off Mark's corn cob. So gentle.

Another thing I find fascinating in Hong Kong is although it seems as cosmopolitan as any big city like London or New York, you can still see things that make you wonder how they fit in the scene. Hong Kong is incredibly clean, mostly because there's an abundance of street sweepers like the one here, using bamboo brooms.

Many places on Hong Kong have streets so narrow, instead of garbage trucks, you often find garbage collectors like this. It always seems to be the oldest most feeble men or women doing the job which is an amazing testament to their strength.


Another common sight is the food vendors selling lots of deep fat fried things like stinky tofu, and various innards. The smell is overpowering sometimes.

The final picture is bamboo scaffolding. You see it everywhere and it amazes me it's powerful enough to support the construction it's built for. Of course, the huge buildings in downtown use regular scaffolding, but most other places you'll find bamboo, wrapped in green tarp. (to keep out the humidity?)