Hong Kong

 Dear Family, It has been an eventful week. Lots of work and lots of play (we had a holiday for the dragon boat races).  This last Thursday, the two of us went to the original site of the Kowloon walled city. This was a city within the city of Kowloon that was at its height when I was serving here as a missionary (50 years ago). We were not allowed to enter this area because of the amount of lawlessness and crime. It was also the most densely packed, highly populated couple of acres in the world -- over 50,000 people lived in these densely packed buildings. This is a model of the interconnected buildings. The buildings were razed in the mid 90s and the area now is a beautiful park. There were a bunch of these unruly, semi-cared for bonsai trees. I thought I would share them with you. On Saturday we attended the international dragon boat races. They went on all day Saturday and Sunday. The races took place in three different locations. These races took place in the harbor just ...

Dear Family,  It's Double Duck week in Hong Kong, it's the event of the decade here at the harbor! Ten years ago the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman took the art installation Rubber Duck on a world wide tour to harbor cities. Intended just to make people happy it was apparently a real hit. To celebrate the ten year anniversary he has brought it back to Hong Kong but doubled the fun! they are intended to be positioned in the harbor to represent the symmetrical chinese characters of happiness  (‘囍’) and friends (‘朋’),   Here's a picture of them being towed into place...they're huge!  They're on the other side of the harbor but we can see them every time we go walking. We went over to see them yesterday and this picture barely does them justice. You have to look at the boats that are out there to get a good idea bout how big they are. But if they were intended to make people happy, they succeeded. There was something about the absurdity of these giant rubber ducks in th...

 Dear Family,  It's been another very busy week. Lots and lots of work. But it has been good work -- fascinating issues. So our pictures are just a bunch of miscellaneous things. Here we go. This is our view of the swimming pool from our front room window. Another "Be Real" photo of the subway on the way to work. It can get pretty crowded on the way to work. Everybody is on their phone. We saw this woman on the cable car yesterday. She impressed me -- very elegant. So, I took her picture. This is a picture of Cindy and Mom at our ping pong night. She showed up in this outfit she wore to go down to the sauna. She would not let me take her picture because she thought the outfit was silly. She is hiding her face with her ping pong paddle case. Here we are  at a work lunch where we welcomed a new lawyer and his wife to work in the OGC. We were also saying goodbye to one of our support staff -- we were all so sad to see her go. You can see her in the small picture. One more fo...