 A Visit to Hong Kong
Pictures and musing from a teacher in Hong Kong Last Day |
Presentation in Sha Tin
|
 A three-hour
talks was arranged and opened to any teacher who would like to attend. A fee was
charged for admittance. The talk took place in a school auditorium. As it was
Saturday, the children were in school. I watched them playing basket ball between
classes. The three men at the corner set up the projector and sound system for
me. The man in the middle is the school's Director of Technology, and the ones on
either side are his network administrators. |
Time Off
|
 After dinner, my hosts and I
went to a nearby temple. Helen tried to explain the purpose of this particular
temple, but I did not fully understand. It was to an ancient general, rather than to
a god or profit. Helen, purchased some insence and took them up to the alter where
she paid a very old woman to pray for her. The woman wailed the prayer waving the
stickes of insence in the air. Then she placed them in a vase and we went on into
the temple. I was not allowed to take pictures inside, but in the middle stood a
giant statue of the general, which must have been nearly 40 feet tall. Helen picked up a wooden box with about 50 sticks in it, each with different Chinese characters. She knelt on some cushions and prayed as she shook the box. When a stick fell out, she set it aside and then prayed again, shaking the box. For each prayer, she shook out a stick. Then she took the sticks to a woman in a booth, who interpreted the sticks in terms of Helen's prayers. She learned that her mother, who had been ill, would be getting better soon, and that her job situation was not certain. (Three months later, Helen go a new job working with technology integration).
|
| After the
temple, we drove north to the Chinese boarder. There were quite a few tourists
there, but down the hill you could see the check point, and traffic was very freely moving
across. Hell said that even though legally I would need a visa to go across the
boarder, I would probably be able to drive across and do some touring with no problem.
|
  Finally, we tried one more time
to get to the top of Victoria Peak, and on this day we were successful. The trams up
the mountain were crowded, but once we got to the top most of the people were interested
in shopping, so we had an easy time with the siteseeing. From the top of "The
Peak" we could see much of Hong Kong, though never all of the city. It is just
too large. |
 We
also saw one of the few remnants of earlier years of emperial Englands opulence. |
| Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Day Five | Last Day |
My last full
day in Hong Kong began with a ride out of the city to the north into the New Territories.
This area was claimed by Britain after one of the Opium Wars as a buffer to protect
their colony in Hong Kong. Sha Tin is mostly a residential area, a suburb of Hong
Kong.
After the
talk in Sha Tin, my work was mostly over. We had dinner, more Dim Sum, with P.C.
Wong, a principal of a local school, and Cheng King Leung, or Sir King, as his students
call him. King demonstrated a program that his students developed for teaching the
basics of volley ball. The program is a simulation of the game where you place the
players strategically, and the game is simulated based on the decisions. It was
quite impressive.
Helen said that the last time
she had been at the boarder had been 15 years ago with her parents. At that time,
she said, there had been nothing bus farm land, not even a town. This is a picture
of a city that has appeared and grown in just the last 15 years. The Chinese are
serious about modernizing.