Difu Shenzhen

... 1495;ה. כסוס הרץ אחד גזר, שקשור למקל. עם כל צעד וצעד שעשית 97; קדימה, (או שמא זה היה במקום?) הוע ...

What a contract from Ho Chi Minh.
Nowhere near as busy and everything orderly. Traffic stops at red lights, no scooters beeping. And no one drives onthe pavements!
Our hotel was on the Kowloon side and quite central.

The first night as we arrived late, we went to the park near our hotel and then onto the Night Market. The area was buzzing but unlike Asian markets we have been to the stalls kept with their clearly marked ...

Sunday 20th September - Shenzhen to Hong Kong
It was a relaxed start today as our train was not due into Shenzhen until after 10am. To kill some time we watched a movie on the laptop (what did we do before we had this amazing thing?). Shenzhen train station is actually part of the border post between China and Hong Kong so we just had to walk to thte right area and fill in the right forms to get across the border. Even so it seemed to take a while ...

... in a familiar environment. On reflection though, I think I can now see why Nigel was a little underwhelmed by my excitement that the plugs are the same as home! On our first (and only) night in HK, we went to look at the famous skyline and boy was it a skyline. Big cities always look pretty spectacular by night but this view was different. The most popular place to stand is down by the Star Ferry terminal which connects Kowloon to HK Island. There were many tourists there but ...

... worth the experience. The dim sum (dumplings, literally meaning "from the heart") are a speciality from the south of China, eaten in the morning until lunch time. See the pictures for some impressions! Then, again, I decided to go for another museum visit and chose HK's Museum of History, which was a good one. The permanent exhibition "The Hong Kong Story" teaches you everything from pre-historic times to the present. What I liked ...

... along w e dinner to toilet god. Holy cow! only 10 mins left to boarding & we're like quite a distance away from Gate D, so we practically ran e entire stretch of travellators & it took like 3 mins? to reach there. No sooner had we reached, we were told ...

... to the Space Museum, and on to the Heritage museum which had impressive exhibits. The trek back on the MTR required four different lines and endless stairs and escalators. Had enough of those! We picked up our refund for the Octopus card. That is an amazing system that makes travel very easy. You get a credit card which you can put in your wallet, then there are special scanners in places like 7/11 stores and at trains and trams where you just ...

... European food we have been eating for the past month. Next stop on our whirlwind tour was to take Matt to Temple Street Night Markets to show him a different side to this city. Kowloon side is where most of the locals live and is a very busy district with the typical neon signs hanging in the street and dirty apartment buildings with washing hanging from the windows above. It really is an assault on the senses with the visual assault of all ...

... in the air... peculiar. All of a sudden, as we should be landing, the captain gets on the PA System to announce we are no longer going to Shenzhen but must make an emergency stop in Guangzhou, 30 minutes away. At first, I though we were going all the way back to Hangzhou but this is an easy mistake when everything is translated. Not fearing we were in any real danger, everyone on the plane was up in arms. How dare they re-route us!! We were excited by the commotion as ...

... group of students. We ended up re-marking exams to a different standard and even re-wrote some of the answer models before sending them for moderation. In short, a bit of an embarrassing cover-up, but not a lot else could be done in the 24 hours we had before the holidays. All of this has been reported or mentioned in the appropriate places, but there's not a lot that can be done. It's a vicious circle where it's not in people's best interests to look too ...