Stanley Market

The best thing about the Coastal Defence Museum was the view. Which looks like this.

Afterwards, I went to Stanley Market on the South Side of Hong Kong Island. Stanley Bay looks like this.

Stanley market is geared for tourists and I'm sure there are bargains there although I couldn't see anything I wanted - except maybe a cashmere sweater - but who wants to buy a cashmere sweater in 28 degree weather and chimp it around Vietnam for a fortnight? Not I....

On the bus home across the aisle from me were a young English couple. They complained and bickered the whole way back to Hong Kong Central bus station. After a while they sounded like the third day of rain on your tent during a camping holiday. I'd like to apologise to the rest of the world if we all sound like this. Once, when we were taking over the world and stealing from places like China and India, the British were quite good at things like urban infrastructure and engineering. Hong Kong's kind of a testament to that, in some ways, I think. Nowadays, because everyone can travel, our world contribution is two dopey twats comparing Repulse Bay (sapphire coloured water and beautiful sand on the South China Sea) to Weymouth (tired Georgian sewage outlet on the English Channel) and a selection of adjectives that ran to one word: shit. Your camera is shit. What kind of shit point are you going to make now? This bus is taking the shit route. Etc.

One of the advantages of Britain being an island used to be that fuckwits like this couldn't get off it easily. I am so, so sorry.

Symphony of Light:

I didn't expect to like this. I wandered out to the water's edge looking north towards China at 8PM just in time to catch the nightly 15 minute-long symphony of light. From speakers somewhere around the convention centre I could hear the music and the narrative - in English and Chinese. The music was pretty naff, it started like some cheesy Canto-Pop and then morphed into something you'd expect to be playing during a Chinese documentary showing lots of landscapes. But that aside, the symphony of light is a light show utilising dozens of the buildings on Hong Kong Island and on Kowloon across the water. It was genius; whole sides of skyscrapers and museums lit up in perfect timing to the music - parts of one skyscraper here, a strobing hotel-front on the Penninsula Hotel there, a sparkling building facade hundreds of feet high somewhere else. I was mesmerised. Here are some stills to try to convey the scale of the light show. Anything with a spotlight on the roof, or any building with any distinctive coloured light was involved. The only thing I wished when I saw it was that either Lucas or Dave Byars could have programmed it to some decent music, but really, for the scale of it, it was pretty amazing.

The Hong Kong Island side....

And the Kowloon side...both sides worked in concert with one another too...