Hong Kong

Since I had meetings with clients before and after the weekend, I had to spent a weekend in Hong Kong. The hotel was in the Western District on Hong Kong island. It was not close to a subway station, but was far away from people trying to sell you junk items as they do in Kowloon. Kowloon is the the part of Hong Kong that is accross the harbor from Hong Kong Island. Even though I checked in very late I got a room with a nice view.


The western district is located on the slope of the Victoria peak hill and has many narrow streets. Since the available space in Hong Kong is limited, the government impose a high tax at first registration of a car. Maybe that's why goods are frequently moved around with delivery carts.


By the end of the day these carts a chained to a fence near the bus stop. One of the carts has a wheel missing.


The densely populated Western District also resulted in an interesting Civil Engineering project. I think the people living in the high rise buildings are less enthusiastic about it.


I frequently had dinner in the hotel because I was a little suspicious about the quality of the food in the area around the hotel. For example the photo below show a local butcher shop. Shortly after I took this photo the guy in the brown shirt lit a cigarette, while he was still behind his working bench. The butcher shop also had fish, but these fish were still alive when they were sold to the buyers. When I passed the butcher shop, one of the fish jumped out of the plastic bag onto the sidewalk in front of me. One of the ladies in the shop quickly 'grabbed the fish with a kind of a net and putted it back into the client's bag.


In the US and Europe only the roof drainage is on the outside of a building where all other pipes are on the inside a building. Therefore at first I was surprised to see all the drainage pipes on the outside of older high rise buildings in Hong Kong. But why not? On more recently constructed buildings, all drainage pipes are on the inside of the buildings.