Last Quick Update?

- Only one more day in Hong Kong, so this might be the last of the updates. I have mental notes on a bunch of things however, so I am probably going to write quite a bit when there is some Christmas down time in Baton Rouge.

- Hong Kong is great. Probably the most "international" city on earth. It is certainly Chinese, but the British influence is still very strong here. There seems to be a large Ex-Pat community in the mix as well. It is certainly as easy as anyplace we have been to get around with English here. Almost everyone seems to speak it quite fluently.

- Pete was nice enough to use hotel points to put us up in the Conrad Hotel for the first three days. Needless to say, staying in a high end hotel in Hong Kong is pretty nice. He also has a gold card so we got free breakfast and evening drinks, really great food as well.

- Speaking of great food, we have enjoyed a great Lunch and Dinner courtesy of our family friend Bob's sister Cecilia and her husband Hans. As usual with Asian cuisines they have meats and ingredients here that are just not available back home. The food was so good I even enjoyed eating a whole fish, which is pretty unbelievable for me.

- We had the latest night out of the entire trip in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong's nightlife district. Great place where you can drink on the street and there are loads of bars. There was also a charity event going on where for 300 HKD (about $40) you got a Santa suit and 10 free drinks. As you can imagine this resulted in a whole street of drunk people in Santa suites, definitely a sight to see. If we had gotten there earlier, before we had a bunch of drinks ourselves, I would have thought about forking over the 300 HKD.

- Another strange thing. Often on this trip we have tried to avoid what we call "Human Zoos". By this we mean a tour where you go to see tribal people, boat people, etc., and seeing the people is really the only attraction. In Lan Kwai Fong there is a very mixed crowd of drunks, but a good amount are westerners. This results in quite a few rich Chinese and Japanese tourists walking down the street doing the human zoo tour of drunk westerners, snapping photos indiscriminately. Weird to be on the other side of the glass.

- The amount of money spent on luxury goods in this city is crazy. A Louis Vitton or Channel store is about as common as the Gap is in the US. It is kind of annoying because they do not really have regular shopping centers. A mall of the Copley Place quality is as low rent as it gets here. Evidently most of this consumption is fueled by mainland Chinese. Definitely boom times out here.

- The currency of Hong Kong is the Hong Kong Dollar. Interestingly it is issued by one of three private banks, Standard Chartered, HSBC or Bank of China. This makes it a little confusing because the notes from the three different banks all look different, but are the same basic color, based on the amount. There is something a little strange about money that is not issued by the government. I was thinking that if we had a similar system in the US banks would probably start printing the bills with "Free Checking", "New Low Rates on Home Equity Loans" or some other form of advertisement.