This is inside my hotel room, from in front of the windows:
Yes, that is the bath/shower. You have privacy on one side and none whatsoever on the other. Failure to draw the curtains before having a shower could have devastating consequences for public decency.
This was available from an urn in the conference room:
It looks like pea soup, but it's actually Starbucks' green tea latte. I love it! I would so get that if they sold it in the UK. I liked it so much I actually bought one using my own money when I was wandering around on Sunday.
There was pigeon on the menu at the end of the first day:
Those are indeed pigeon heads. There were three on the plate to start with, but only two when I took the photo. I guess someone must have eaten one. No, I was not that someone...
This is the carpet in the hallway outside my hotel room:
It stretches off into the distance there, but has a non-repeating pattern. Anyone willing to manufacture a 50-metre length of carpet with a non-repeating pattern is out to impress, I think. It worked on me, anyway.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong has a really nice view over a bay. This is it:
Well, it's almost it. A couple was using it as a background for their wedding pictures, so I couldn't get a decent shot. some people just don't take other people's views into account...
Here's something that was on the dinner menu the next day:
Those are chicken claws. People ate them, too. Thank goodness by this time I had established that I don't like chicken, so was spared having to sample any.
Here's another chicken from the same meal:
I'm sure that if I were to look really closely I'd be able to make out tyre marks.
When I first saw all these people sitting down under the awnings of a building, I thought it was the Hong Kong Occupy movement, especially as I could hear some very out-of-tune singing coming from a woman with a megaphone:
It's nothing of the sort, though. It was just people having lunch. Well, when I say "people" I can actually be more specific: "women". There must have been 200 of them there and zero men except for a security guard and the occasional man using the space to get from one side of the building to the other.
This is the view of Hong Kong island from the Peak. Those clouds were very, very close:
With 7 million people crammed into a small space, pretty well every building is a skyscraper. I counted rows of housing towers that each had over 50 floors. The towers in this photo are just a small fraction of the total. It's all towers. As my younger daughter said when I showed her this picture, "if one of them were to fall over into another...".
Here's another view from the Peak:
This shows something rather odd about Hong Kong. Either the land has skyscrapers on it or it has nothing on it. There are hills all over the place showing an astonishing among of greenery, but they're not built on except maybe for some electricity pylons. When you look around, you see towers everywhere that stop abruptly at the bottom of green hills. Except, some hills are covered in towers just like the valleys. This hill/tower combination is my enduring memory of Hong Kong. It's very not-Singapore.
This was a sign in a centre I went into:
There was also a Sincere Alterations, a Wonderful alterations, a Dorothy Alterations, an Alice Alterations and a Jenny Bakery (what was closed). I suppose people in Hong Kong buy clothes they like the look of then get them altered so they fit, rather than simply buying ones that fit. Or maybe they mug people for what they're wearing?
Here's a typical alley between tall buildings:
If there's space, they don't like to waste it.
Topshop is so popular there's a queue to get in:
I didn't see this for any other shop, just Topshop.
These adverts were in a number of prominent places:
Like FOAD but at a lower level of profanity.
This was after the air was cleared by a thunderstorm:
No wonder I was drenched in sweat.
Does this lion look goofy to you?
This is a statue that I'm sure appears in the album of anyone who has been to central Hong Kong:
When I first spotted it, there was a crowd of people in the way and I didn't see the guy holding the elephant up. I thought it was a statue of an elephant taking a dump.
Someone was having a laugh when they named this street:
This is a typical view of central Hong Kong, but atypical in that it came out well enough to see all the features:
Raised roadway you have to climb up stairs to cross; towers everywhere; distant green hill; incoming rain cloud: yes, all present and correct.
The buildings have such evocative names:
It's that slight awryness that I always find amusing: the word "ineffectual" must be used a hundred times for every use of the word "effectual", but that doesn't show when you look up the latter in a dictionary.
I almost didn't show this picture because it's so shaky, but I think you can probably make out the important part:
You'd trust your life to a medical practitioner called Porky Chan, wouldn't you? Of course you would!
Here's a view of the kind of signs you see at street level:
I'd have shown you the street too, but the road it was on had morphed unexpectedly into a haunt of streetwalkers so I thought better of it.
Shops aren't confined to street level, either. Here's a typical example of what I mean:
I ate in a Pizza Hut that was on the third floor (UK numbering — third above ground). They're stacked one atop the other, space is so short.
Finally, I took this photo in protest at the way southern newspapers spell swearwords spoken by people with northern accents:
This is why phonetic spelling is not a good idea.
So that's Hong Kong. I go, so you don't have to.