Go East, Young Man!

An adventure in East Asia

By Ted Logan and Gem Stone-Logan

Copyright 2013 Ted Logan and Gem Stone-Logan. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Flying to Hong Kong

Traveling to Hong Kong

Lay ho, Hong Kong

The First Day

Defending the harbor

The Second Day

Cheung Chau

The Third Day (Christmas Eve)

Christmas at the Peak

The Fourth Day (Christmas Day)

The New Territories

The Fifth Day (Boxing Day)

A day without a plan

The Sixth Day

Hong Kong Disneyland

The Seventh Day (Disneyland)

Guangzhou

The Eighth Day

The Noonday Gun

The Ninth Day

Leaving Hong Kong

The Tenth Day

Provisional capital

The Eleventh Day

Sunology

The Twelfth Day

Living in the future

The Thirteenth Day

In the aeroplane over the sea

Traveling Home: Two Fridays for the Price of One

Epilogue

Introduction

[Jaeger]

It sounded like fun. And really, what else was I going to do with my bonus?

I don't think anyone I talked to really understood why I wanted to go to Hong Kong for Christmas of 2012. I found it difficult to clearly articulate the two years of research that gave me a deep appreciation for modern Chinese history, or the gaping horror as I looked down one single row of books in my friendly neighborhood academic library and realized there were more books there than I could read in my lifetime. I'd mumble, "It sounds like fun," and add something about the warmer sub-tropical climate and the British colonial legacy.

Hong Kong is like London with Chinese characteristics; it's crammed onto a rock overlooking one of the busiest river deltas in the world, packed with two hundred years of modern Chinese history that place China and its billion people on the world stage as the twenty-first century unfolds. And I wasn't going to miss it, even if it meant dragging my three-year-old on a series of aeroplanes over the sea.

Flying to Hong Kong

Thursday and Friday, according to Jaeger

My alarm woke me up at 02:30 MST on the morning of Thursday, 20 December 2012. I engaged in a bit of last-minute packing to rearrange my suitcase so I could squeeze under the 50-pound luggage limit; we ended up with two checked bags, one large and one small, which actually seemed respectable for three people spending two weeks abroad. (I always feel a little guilty when I can't fit everything I want to take, for any length of trip, in my carry-on suitcase, but usually don't let it bother me.)

Kiesa got Calvin up and we whisked him into the car in the well-before-dawn chill. The previous morning's light dusting of snow had melted away but the night was clear and cold. I double-checked to make sure we hadn't left anything on the floors of the main level, which were to be replaced with hard wood in our absence, and we departed for the airport.

Our trip to the airport was boring and fairly efficient. I exploited my silver status to bypass the lengthy check-in and security queues, which always makes me feel a bit pretentious. Once we boarded our flight to Los Angeles one of the flight attendants complained that the Go-Go-Babyz Go-Go-Kids (wheels-on-a-stick that convert our car seat into a stroller, which is especially convenient for wheeling both it and Calvin around the airport) couldn't go in the overhead bin. (It was our only overhead-bin bag; everything else fit under our seats. Kiesa packed several bags with various entertainment for Calvin that were all selected to fit under the seats for ease of access.) I pointed out that we'd flown, several times, on various airlines with the carseat wheels and had always put them in the over-head bin and no one had complained. The flight attendant told me it was an FAA rule; I was dubious about the FAA citation but didn't press the point because of the other FAA rule that requires me to "comply with all crew member instructions [regardless of how dubious]". There was no way we could fit the wheels under our seat, regardless of whether we had any hand luggage we wanted to remain accessible, so the flight attendant took the wheels to the first class cabin's coat closet.

The sun caught up with us as we flew to Los Angeles; by the time we descending into LAX I could look past Calvin (in the window seat) to see the Inland Empire in most of its glory. When we landed Calvin was enthralled by the planes and was especially happy when we ate breakfast at a restaurant with a window overlooking the tarmac between terminals 6 and 7. As we walked to our gate I pointed out the Theme Building (which looked as if it were about ready to walk away, but Calvin didn't seem to think so) and the air traffic control tower (which seems to me to be vaguely similar in visual style to Taipei 101).

We had a couple of hours to wait until our next flight, to Tokyo-Narita; when booking our tickets I had the option of a one-hour layover (and a later departure) or a three-hour layover, and chose the three-hour layover to increase our chances of actually making our connection. We turned out to not need the extra time.

I waited in front of the gate, still tired from having gotten up much too early, while Kiesa ran Calvin around in an attempt to burn off excess energy. The gate area filled up with passengers waiting for our flight to Narita and the adjacent flight to Shanghai; most were Asian in appearance but I couldn't easily guess how many of them were American.

At length we boarded the 777-200 and found our seats to settle in for the twelve-hour flight across the Pacific Ocean. I picked seats in Economy Plus that happened to be located right over the wing, so for most of the flight all I could see when I craned my neck to look out past Calvin was the bright white aluminum surface of the wing. (Most of the time we were flying over ocean, and there wasn't much to see anyway, but according to the in-flight map we did fly over San Francisco before leaving California, and we crossed a bit of Alaska.) We put Calvin in his carseat for the flight, on the theory that he'd sleep better in the carseat than in any other FAA-approved restraint, but the seat put him so high that he couldn't use the tray table, and Kiesa was paranoid he'd kick the back of the person in front of us. He stayed occupied playing on the iPad for the first half of the flight, until Kiesa decided to take it away to try to get him to sleep. He wasn't happy with that idea, and began to worry that he'd stay awake for the entire flight, but he stopped complaining quickly and fell asleep within a couple of minutes.

I envied his ability to sleep sitting up in the plane. I was exhausted from getting up too early, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. I set my watch to Tokyo time and knew I wasn't going to get a perfect sleep cycle, so I tried to split the difference between my old and new time zones and managed to get a couple of hours of fitful sleep somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

I woke up with enough time to watch The Bourne Legacy on the in-flight entertainment system, which was perfectly amusing for an airplane movie. (I paid special attention to the final chase set in the Philippines: I haven't actually been there, but I've been to India, and much of what I saw on the screen reminded me of what I saw in India, especially the move where the characters climb up rebar sticking out the side of the building.)

We began our descent into Narita and I caught glimpses of Japan out the window before landing. We followed the sun across the International Date Line, where it was Friday afternoon. (I tried not to notice that it was midnight back in Mountain Time.) I was glad to be on the ground after twelve hours but we weren't there yet; we still had another five hours to reach Hong Kong. Since we were transiting through the country, we didn't have to go through immigration and customs to formally enter Japan, but the first thing we did after disembarking was head through a Japanese-style security checkpoint before they'd let us catch our connecting flight. (Some of the details of the security regime were not immediately obvious; it looked like all the Americans were taking their shoes off while the Japanese were leaving theirs on.) Kiesa put her nearly-full water bottles through the x-ray machine without thinking about them but the security guard pointed at Calvin and said, "Oh, for the baby?" Kiesa agreed that, yes, at least one of the water bottles was for Calvin, and the security guard took the caps off the bottles to do a waving-the-fumes sniff test and declared them good to go.

We had an hour in Narita, which was just long enough to stretch our legs before boarding a cramped 737 for our final leg to Hong Kong. (I did not pay extra for Economy Plus seating on this flight; by the time I got around to it all of the adjacent seats with extra leg room were taken.) By this time we'd been in transit for nearly twenty-four hours and I was very much done with flying. Calvin slept easily, but I wasn't quite so lucky. At one point half-way through the flight I looked out Calvin's window on the left side of the plane and saw lights, which I presumed must be Taiwan. The winter solstice, and the end of the Mayan calendar, came and went without incident on board United flight 79. I can only presume the Mayans figured out how to get a new calendar so the world wouldn't end.

After an interminable flight, we landed at the shiny new Hong Kong International Airport on Chek Lap Kok. Our 737 taxied around jumbo jets and parked at a small outlying terminal where we had to catch a people-mover shuttle bus to the real terminal for immigration and customs. It didn't take the immigration officer much time to stamp our passports with "Visitor - permitted to remain for ninety days from date of entry as shown below" and we were inside the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China.

After a quick stop by the local ATM, we found our hotel's kiosk inside the airy arrivals hall and waited for a bus to take us to the hotel. We ended up on a bus that left the airport at 23:00 (Hong Kong time; it was Friday morning back in Colorado, more than twenty-four hours after we'd left). I recognized various landmarks as we drove along the highway on the north side of Lantau Island, past the container docks and Stonecutters Island, and under Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island itself. Calvin sat on my lap and was enthralled by the view and kept pointing out trucks as we passed them. Our bus stopped at six hotels in Hong Kong before finally reaching the Harbour Plaza North Point after midnight. We checked in, found our room on the 26th floor, and I dropped into bed totally exhausted at 00:30 Saturday morning, thirty hours after leaving home.

Traveling to Hong Kong

Thursday and Friday, according to Kiesa

On Thursday morning we woke up bright and early at 2:30 am in order to reach the airport for our 6:00 am flight to LAX. When booking the tickets, Jaeger had the option to choose a flight with a one hour layover in LAX or one with a three hour layover. To be on the safe side, we chose the three hour layover. When we woke Calvin up, he kept insisting that he didn't want to go to Hong Kong until it was morning.

We made it to LAX without any delays and had a fair amount of time to wander the airport before our flight to Tokyo left. We ate breakfast at a cafe that had a splendid place to sit and watch airplanes taxing back and forth. Calvin was entranced. After breakfast, we found our gate and I eventually convinced Calvin to expend some energy by promising to play tag with him. We found a fairly deserted spot and amused the window washers by running around after each other. One window washer suggested that Calvin may be wearing me out more than I was wearing him out.

Ever since we decided to take Calvin with us to Hong Kong I have been panicking about the long plane ride to get there. I have spent hours (days?) reading every bit of long-haul travel advice I could get my hands on. I carefully packed and re-packed our carry-on bags to try to maximize the amount of entertainment I could carry. However, in the end, it turned out that all the entertainment I really need to bring for Calvin was the iPad. We were very fortunate to have power available for the longest leg of our journey so I never even had to pull out our spare batteries.

On our flight to Tokyo, Calvin happily watched movies and played games on the iPad for at least 5 hours. However, a little over half-way through our flight he stated getting really cranky so I took the iPad away from him and told him it was time to sleep. He feebly protested but was asleep within minutes.

I had worried a little bit over when to let Calvin sleep in order to reduce jet lag. However, one blog I read suggested that it was best to let your children sleep on whatever schedule makes them happiest and only worry about changing schedules once you arrive at your destination. This advice seemed to work surprisingly well for Calvin, at least for the trip here.

Approximately eleven hours after leaving LAX we arrived in Tokyo. This time, we only had an hour layover and I was a little nervous once I learned we had to go through the international security checkpoint before we could continue to our gate. However, security was less painful than I have grown accustomed to in the US. They did specify no liquids were allows through the checkpoint. It was unclear to me if there was a similar exception for 100mL amounts like in the US and I stressed over it enough that I complexly forgot about the water bottles full of water I was carrying. My quart bag of liquids went through without a snag but my full water bottles were flagged. I felt kind of silly. However, once they saw I was traveling with a child they just did a perfunctory smell test (opening up a bottle and wafting any sent towards there nose) and when it smelled like water, they passed me through without any hassle. We actually got to our gate with around a half-hour to spare and got to checkout the nearby children's play area for a couple of minutes.

I had been especially dreading the Tokyo to Hong Kong part of our journey. Unlike our eleven-hour flight, this five-hour flight didn't have personally entertainment systems. Calvin played happily with the iPad and I continued reading a book I had been saving for the occasion. However, about half way through the flight I gave up and snoozed the rest of the trip. Calvin also fell asleep shortly after I did (I woke up enough to rescue the iPad from his hands) and stayed asleep until we landed. Apparently Calvin had seen enough airports for one day and we were unable to get him excited over anything we saw outside while we taxied to the gate.

I thought our long journey was almost over. We got through immigration and customs and headed off to find our hotel's shuttle bus. We successful found the hotel representative and, with a group of people, followed our guide to the hotel shuttle area. Our shuttle bus serviced at least five hotels and we were unfortunately the last ones to be dropped off. However, we did arrive and managed to drag ourselves upstairs to bed. I was very relieved when Calvin climbed into his bed with no fussing at all. Our 30 hour trip was finally over.

Lay ho, Hong Kong

Saturday, according to Jaeger

I slept fitfully in my first night in Hong Kong, exhausted from traveling but jet-lagged; my body clock told me it was Friday morning back home. (In the soul-catching-up hypothesis for travel, mine had barely made it to Seattle.) I eventually got up around 08:00 local time Saturday morning and began to get my bearings in our hotel room. On the theory that three people needed a bit more space than a simple hotel room, I'd booked a one-bedroom suite with a tiny kitchenette and a small kitchen table, though most of the kitchenette was disabled for hotel guests and enabled only for long-term guests. (The fridge had been reclaimed as a minibar, but it was large enough to put milk and orange juice in it for breakfast.) The main living area had a sofa bed where Calvin slept, and Kiesa and I had a small bedroom of our own. By the time I awoke, Calvin was awake (having happily slept all night long) and looking out the window onto Victoria Harbour. We were at the Harbour Plaza North Point, in the far eastern edge of North Point, a residential neighborhood east of the central business district of Hong Kong Island, and we looked out onto the old Kai Tak runway in New Kowloon, which was being rebuilt into a cruise ship terminal. Immediately in front of the hotel, on our side of the harbor, a dredge was operating around the piers for the expressway elevated over the water, and Calvin thought it was the greatest thing ever: a crane on a boat. He was transfixed, and probably thought we came all the way to Hong Kong just so he could watch the dredge.

We ate breakfast at the buffet at the hotel restaurant. The buffet featured a variety of breakfast comfort foods from Europe, North America, and Asia; I had congee (rice porridge) with peanuts in addition to my hash browns, toast, and coffee. We headed out to explore the city and found a Starbucks immediately across the street, and a small but well-appointed grocery store next door. We stopped by the grocery store, maybe a little bigger than an American suburban convenience store, and bought muesli and milk for breakfasts, on the theory that the hotel breakfast was fine but maybe a bit on the expensive side.

Our next objectives were to figure out the local mass-transit system ("MTR"); I missed the station exit down the side street and headed down the main street to find the Quarry Bay station entrance. (That was when I noticed that the center location of the metro stations on Google Maps didn't matter much; the station exits were only visible when I zoomed in.) Calvin was excited by the double-decker trams running down the middle of the street, and simply by the variety of traffic. (Kiesa was worried that we'd inadvertently raised a city boy. I tried not to get my hopes up too high.)

We found the station more-or-less where I expected to find it and bought stored-value Octopus cards that we could use on most mass-transit systems around the special administrative region, including the metro. Calvin got a reduced child fare but had to go through the gates himself; he eventually figured out how to scan his RFID card on the reader and go through the gates. We took the MTR subway train west into Central and wandered around in search of a shop where I could get local SIM cards. I had the address, and a good idea where I was going, but navigating the streets of Hong Kong on foot proved somewhat more complicated than I'd expected. There were skywalks going most places but they didn't always go exactly where I expected them to go, and my phone couldn't get a roaming data connection. (I successfully roamed internationally in India this summer, but I think they were serviced by both CDMA and GSM networks, and I only used the CDMA network. My phone came with a Vodafon roaming SIM for GSM networks, but I don't think I managed to turn it on.)

We ended up with a passing tour of Central, past the angular Bank of China building next to the inside-out HSBC building (with, according to some, better feng shui, with its back to the mountain, facing the sea), Statue Square (with its British colonial statues removed by the occupying Japanese during WWII), and the cenotaph honoring the British Empire's war dead in WWI and WWII. (I noticed they gave a Eurocentric start date for WWII, though to be fair, figuring out when the Sino-Japanese war that was eventually subsumed into WWII started is tricky; most historians cite the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, but the Japanese invaded and occupied Manchuria in 1931.) We eventually found the mall I was looking for, and the 3Shop inside it, where we bought local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Aside from figuring out exactly what we wanted, and getting our phones configured (including entering the unlock code I got from Verizon before leaving home), this required very little ceremony; we didn't have to show any sort of identification other than the credit card I used to pay. Just like that we had local mobile numbers and I had a cheap local data plan.

Kiesa picked up some snacks at a bakery and we contemplated our next move. It was mid-day, and we were hungry, so we headed in the direction of one of Hong Kong's premier vegetarian restaurants, Pure Veggie House, a couple of blocks away, though on the other side of a confusing network of skywalks. We passed the base of the Peak Tram, which advertised an hour-long queue, and headed through the botanical gardens to get to the restaurant. I was getting hungry, and feeling tired and jet-lagged, which was an inconvenient combination, but I managed to order enough tasty Chinese vegetarian food to satisfy us (though, being tired and jet-lagged, I wasn't able to eat very much of it).

We headed back to the botanical gardens and looked around a bit until we found the children's playground, where Calvin ran around and Kiesa and I sat down to take advantage of the free wi-fi provided by the government of Hong Kong.

I was feeling a bit more awake after Calvin had played for a while, so we headed down the hill in search of the Peak Tram. The queue advertised a 90-minute wait, so we decided to scrub that idea and headed instead to Hong Kong Park, which featured a giant enclosed aviary with massive banyan trees overlooking the skyscrapers in Central. I noticed the signs warning one not to feed the birds or come into contact with them, which I took to be anti-bird-flu warnings. All over the city there were also signs next to hand railings on stairs and escalators and elevator buttons saying that "this facility is disinfected every two hours" or so, which I took to be a reaction to SARS and the possibility of another outbreak of a pandemic flu in the densely-populated special administrative region.

We found yet another playground and I began to marvel at the plethora of public spaces in Hong Kong. I concluded that one needed public spaces to compensate for the lack of space in one's own apartment, and contrasted this to India, which doesn't do shared public spaces very well (in part because Indians have no sense of shared identity; instead, they stick to their own communities, as defined by their ethnic and religious groups (and, often, caste).

We let Calvin play for a while and headed off in search of the Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware, where I looked through the tea pots on display and exhibits about the history of tea and the various developments during Chinese history. Calvin was not especially enthralled by the museum but did appreciate the children's play room. We headed next to the adjacent tea house, where we ordered some tea and snacks and got an elaborate tea preparation with the oolong tea we ordered, which included pouring water over the tea pot to warm it up.

We took the street tram to get back to our hotel, winding along the main streets following the historic shore line, which has been extended over the last century by successive waves of reclamation. The tram was standing-room-only as we entered but as we traveled we got enough space to sit down. In my jet-lagged haze, watching the brightly-lit shops scroll by and the people bustle about made me feel like I was watching a movie.

Calvin fell asleep in Kiesa's arms on the tram as it bumped its way, slowly, east toward our hotel. We put him to bed when we returned, then barely managed to stay awake until 20:00 local time, which I declared to be a "plausible early bedtime" and went to sleep.

The First Day

Saturday, according to Kiesa

Saturday morning I woke up at 7:30 local time. Considering the prior night, I would have slept later but the clock in our room isn't illuminated in the dark and all I knew was it was light outside. Once I found my phone and checked the time, it seemed pointless to go back to bed.

We ate breakfast at the hotel buffet which was very good and included a wide variety of European and Asian breakfast items. At first, it looked like Calvin was going to demand noodle for breakfast until he saw the mini-pancakes. After breakfast, we went to the small grocery store across the road and picked up cheaper breakfast items for the rest of our stay.

With eating out of the way, our next task was to get an Octopus cards for MTR, the local subway system. I love this subway. It's the best one I've been on yet. Each train shows the route and has lovely flashing lights to indicate which direction the train is going as well as which station is next. Naturally, Calvin was enthralled with the ride.

After getting off the train, we wandered around in circles for a bit but finally managed to track down the store of a local cell phone provider. Verizon was kind enough to unlock Jaeger's phone for international locations and my cell phone was already unlocked so it was fairly simple to get SIM cards so we could make calls to each other while in Hong Kong. We also got a data plan with Jaeger's phone to help us navigate the city (though it's obvious that Google maps is a lot more comfortable in the US than Hong Kong).

Our next stop was lunch. We had been warned that it's hard to eat vegetarian in Hong Kong unless you go to dedicated vegetarian restaurants so we wandered, only in small circles, to a place to eat. The menu was a little overwhelming as it still seems odd to me to have more than a couple vegetarian choices to choose from. We ended up with a noodle dish, an interesting soy milk soup dish, and some dim sum. Unfortunately, it was way too much food for us but it was good.

Our original plan after dinner was to take the Victoria peak tram up the peak. However, when we got there the line was 1 1/2 hr wait. I didn't think Calvin could deal with that so we decided to try again another day. Instead we wandered around some of the parks and visited an aviary. Wandering around Hong Kong I've been amazed at how many communal spaces there are. There are beautifully landscaped parks and mini-parks all over the place. Also, there are tons of playgrounds. It seems like every time we turn around there's an entirely new playground. Naturally, Calvin wants to try them all but if we did that, there wouldn't be time to do anything else.

We ended the day going to a tea museum and then having tea. I got an Oolong tea that included an interesting preparation that involved, among other things, pouring some of the tea water over the pottery tea pot. By the time we left the tea shop everyone was dragging a bit so we decided to head back to the hotel.

Calvin was upset that we hadn't taken the promised tram ride so to make him happier, we decided to take the streetcar back instead of MTR. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake. Calvin really enjoyed it in the beginning but the streetcar stopped often and it felt like it took an hour to get back to our hotel. Calvin fell asleep half-way back.

Back at the hotel, we successfully transferred Calvin to bed and then decided to claim that 8pm was a reasonable bed time for us as well.

Defending the harbor

Sunday, according to Jaeger

My second night in Hong Kong was much better than my first. I slept for eleven hours, and felt almost human when I awoke. I headed down to the Starbucks and Marketplace grocery store, right next to each other across the street from our hotel, and saw that both stores were closed. I remembered it was Sunday, and I hadn't double-checked they were open at all on Sunday morning (it was, after all, my first Sunday in the city). I called Kiesa from my mobile phone, and walked around the block to see if there was anything else obvious nearby (there wasn't), and by the time I made my way around the block Starbucks had opened -- they didn't open until 08:00 on Sundays and public holidays. (The "public holidays" thing proved to be important, since Christmas Day and Boxing Day were both public holidays. Offices were closed but shops and museums were generally open late, and there were large but generally-manageable crowds of people about, giving the city a festive atmosphere.) I went to Starbucks and got coffee for me, hot chocolate for Kiesa, and baked goods to go around, and then came back to the grocery store for orange juice and plasticware for breakfast in our room.

After breakfast, we headed out toward the Fireboat Sir Alexander Grantham, perched next to the water in a park in Quarry Bay. The boat served as the main fire-fighting boat in Victoria Harbour for half a century until it was retired about a decade ago, cleaned up and put on display. Calvin was fascinated by the idea of the fire boat (after all, it's a boat that fights fires) but wasn't quite sure what to make of the actual boat; he seemed worried about the edge of decks (even though they were well-protected against any possibility of falling), and he was resistant to my attempts to take pictures of him on the boat, especially in the position of manning the water cannons. Under the boat was an exhibition gallery in which we could see artifacts from the boat's history, including short videos available in two languages using Chinese characters (which I took to be Mandarin and Cantonese).

We left the fireboat and found a gigantic playground in the shadow of dozens of twenty-story apartment buildings. The park was packed with mostly Chinese children (though I think I spotted an Indian-looking family or two), presumably enjoying their Sunday morning in their neighborhood park. We let Calvin play while I tried to locate a suitable lunch. Google Maps found a vegetarian restaurant in the vicinity, and I managed to find the place, but the GPS registration (or the map itself) was not quite as accurate as I'd like; it indicated I'd passed the restaurant before I actually reached it. At least the address was given in English; all of the streets in Hong Kong had English names but Google Maps didn't always have English versions of the address. The street numbers were almost always given in Arabic numerals but I had some trouble picking out the rest of the address (with the exception of the district Central, which seemed to use 中, the Chinese character for "middle" or "center", (in Mandarin, zhōng), which happened to be one of the handful of characters I could recognize). (I wasn't always thrilled by the detail given to the skywalks and sidewalks, and don't get me started on the failure of the Google Maps app for Android to behave in any sort of reasonable manner when it doesn't have a bulletproof Internet connection -- especially when I was trying to overlay one of "My Maps" on the map.)

The small Chinese vegetarian restaurant had enough of an English menu that I could order some noodle and some fried tofu. The wait staff (all middle-aged Chinese women) fawned over Calvin, but he was a little uncomfortable with the attention. (I fear he may develop a complex with Asian women after all the extra attention he's getting as a little white boy in a foreign country.)

After lunch, we continued walking east to the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defense. After buying our tickets, we took an elevator up a massive modern tower that took us from street level up to the level of the historic fort, built by the British at the end of the 19th century to protect the eastern access to Victoria Harbour. Calvin asked what exactly it was all about, and we told him it was where soldiers protected the harbor against bad people (not wanting to get into the nuances of the British imposing their own imperial order on this corner of China in the 19th century, and glossing over the distinctions about who exactly the "bad people" might be). Calvin thought this was fascinating and latched on the idea that he wanted to be a soldier so he, too, could protect the harbor against bad people, leaving Kiesa and I to wonder whether we'd whitewashed the historic site a bit too much. There were various historic pieces of artillery on display, and as I looked around Calvin was worried that they weren't safe, as I tried to assure him that they were.

Calvin got bored quickly in the main body of the museum, built into the fortifications themselves, but with a modern tent-like roof strung over top to protect against the weather. (It was a bright sunny day, and looking at the forecast back home I was glad we'd come to Hong Kong, rather than suffer through six inches of snow with zero-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures.) The museum traced the history of harbor defenses in Hong Kong, starting with the late imperial period but focusing on the British history, since they actually built the fort. The last gallery focused on the Hong Kong garrison of the PLA, and I felt a brief moment of cognitive sheer as I remembered that Hong Kong really was under the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China, and that the People's Liberation Army was ultimately responsible for protecting Hong Kong against external threats.

I walked around the fortifications and tried to visualize the fort as an active military installation, not somewhat overgrown as a museum. The fort was invaded when the Japanese invaded during WWII, and some of the buildings on the way down had been left as ruins from the fighting.

We left the museum in the middle of the afternoon and contemplated what to do next. I was interested in seeing some sort of Christian religious service in St. John's Cathedral, a historic Anglican cathedral built in the 19th century. (Christianity was an important part of the British life in the colony, and I like to claim that I'm interested in all local religious traditions, not just eastern ones.) There were services throughout the week, especially on Sunday and for Christmas, and the best one looked like the "Festival of Lessons and Carols" on Sunday evening. We dropped by the hotel to change into nicer clothing and headed back to take MTR to Central. We stopped by a Pacific Coffee Company outlet in Central for a late-afternoon snack of hot drinks and baked goods before heading to the church.

We arrived a little late for a good seat but found two adjacent seats on the left side of the church, with a large pillar blocking our view of the front. (We were tempted by the presence of video monitors hanging from the pillars, but they did not turn on to give us a view of the front.) The service was interesting, with a mixture of English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and one or more languages from the Philippines, giving a sample of the languages spoken by the people in the church (and the various languages services are offered in). Calvin sat on our laps for the program and eventually laid down across our laps; after writhing uncomfortably for a few minutes he fell asleep, and stayed asleep as we took him home.

I was far more awake in the evening than the previous day, but I still turned in for an early night after taking some notes on what to do the following day.

The Second Day

Sunday, according to Kiesa

On Sunday, we decided to go see the Alexander Grantham, a retired Fireboat. It is located in Quarry Bay Park ( which appears to have at least two playgrounds, possibly more). Getting there was relatively easy, it was only one stop from our hotel. Calvin appeared to really enjoy the Fireboat but seemed nervous about falling off the side (which was well fenced-in so it would have taken real effort to "fall" off).

After, the Fireboat, we gave in and let Calvin play in one of the larger parks. As a plus, there was free government provided wifi so I had a chance to check email. We thought our hotel had free wifi but that turned out not to be the case. So, a chance to check my email was welcome. While Jaeger watched Calvin I also attempted to find lunch. However, as I've already mentioned, Google seems to have a hard time figuring out where things are in Hong Kong so it took both of us looking to find something.

We wandered into a section of town that, if not tourist-free, seemed relatively free of white tourists. When we arrived at the restaurant, the restaurant staff seemed very excited to see us, or, Calvin at least. They spent the whole time hovering over him. It was like having a celebrity in our midst. He was a little cranky and I explained that he was probably just hungry (though having that much attention probably didn't help). Upon hearing this, one lady bustled back and brought out a small dish of pickled zucchini which, I am sorry to say, Calvin turned his nose up at. Upon seeing this dish didn't meet Calvin's expectations, she went back and came out with a piece of chocolate which did indeed improve his mood.

Jaeger ordered food and made sure to include some noodle and tofu, Calvin's favorite things. However, the noodle was interspersed with skinny bean sprouts that Calvin didn't like. Not to worry, one lady helpfully took the serving chopsticks and moved the sprouts he had discarded to another dish and then gave him another helping of noodle, attempting to avoid as many sprouts as possible. She also served him some more tofu and cut it up into little bite sized pieces for him. I mostly looked on in bemusement.

After lunch, we walked toward the Coastal Defense Museum. I always find it educational to walk inner areas, sometimes overly educational but not in this case. In the parts of Hong Kong we had been in prior to this, everything had been meticulously clean. There were signs everywhere saying things like, "This handrail disinfected every hour" or "This facility is regularly cleaned." Our best guess is this is post-bird flu epidemic but we're not sure. The restrooms are always very clean, even if it's occasionally difficult to find a sit-down toilet (the handicap stalls usually have sit-down toilets). We haven't seen any panhandling and very little of obvious homelessness*. We didn't see any at all in the central area. On the way to the coastal defense museum we noticed several twin beds, complete with box springs, sheets, and blankets, under some stairs but that was about it and it was so nicely made up I had trouble deciding exactly what the situation was.

We got to the Coastal Defense museum, paid for our tickets, and then went up an elevator and our to a breezeway that took us on the path to the museum building. Along the way we saw various examples of cannons and other guns. Calvin seemed very concerned about the safety of them and kept telling us to be careful. The museum was a little above Calvin's level so I took him back outside and read stories on the iPad while Jaeger wandered around and learned interesting things. Here also, the middle-aged female security guards seemed enchanted with Calvin.

Jaeger thought it would be interesting to attend an evening Christmas service at the local Anglican church so after the museum we went back to the hotel to change. We stopped to have a light supper of hot drinks and pastry and then continued on to the church. In central there were massive numbers of people, mostly Filipino women, sitting down huddled in groups on the side walks. Apparently maids are very common in Hong Kong and most have one day off on Sunday. So, they all get together to play cards and talk on Sundays.

We arrived at the church a couple of minutes before the service started. It was packed and we had trouble finding seating, apparently all the foreigners had the same idea we did. Eventually, we found two seats and I set Calvin on my lap. This was a "lessons and carols" service and everyone in the congregation had lit candles. it proved to be an interesting balance act holding a candle in one hand and stabilizing Calvin in the other.

The service was mostly in English though they did have small parts spoken in Catonese, Mandarin, and a Philippiano speaker. I'm addition, the program was printed in English on one side and Chinese on the other. The congregation was invited to join in the singing several times. Unfortunately, we were in an alcove that couldn't see the platform and behind us was a very loud singer who seemed to have a different vision of tempo than the choir director/organ. As a result, our section was often woefully out of sync with everyone else. Calvin fell asleep before the end of the program.

Once again, I carried him home and tucked him into bed with only minor mutterings.

* Having been here longer, I now have seen people panhandling, though not a lot (certainly a lot less than Boulder). On my walk back to MTR one day I saw several people panhandling on one of the walkways I took. These were people with very obvious physical problems. It's possible that begging is more common in the evening, when I'm already back at the hotel.

Cheung Chau

Monday, according to Jaeger

Christmas Eve was a regular working day in Hong Kong, but there were still plenty of people out and about as we went on our tourist circuit for the day. I decided to take a ferry to one of the outlying islands; I had several to choose from and picked Cheung Chau.

This involved getting to the ferry pier. Successive waves of land reclamation have pushed the piers further out into the harbor and further from the business districts (and the sprawling Central/Hong Kong station complex), and as I was leading the way to the ferry it didn't help that I took a wrong turn on the nest of skywalks and ended up at the high-speed Macau ferry pier, on the opposite end of the ferry piers from the one I wanted. I eventually found the right pier and we boarded the ferry for Cheung Chau.

As we were pulling out of the ferry pier, I noticed the Fireboat Elite, which replaced the Sir Alexander Grantham (which we saw the previous day), docked at one of the piers, but Calvin did not seem especially impressed when I pointed it out.

The regular-speed ferry Xin Guang was a nice way to get to the island; I even got data coverage on my phone most of the way. As we were pulling into the harbor Calvin seemed less impressed by the boats and barges and cranes than I expected him to be, possibly because he was already overloaded on waterborne vehicles for the day. We disembarked on the main tourist strip, which reminded me of nothing so much as Pearl Street, crawling with tourists (most of them Chinese, of various descriptions) with tiny shops selling various knick-knacks. The most popular seemed to be small pillows shaped like buns; this island is the site of the annual bun festival, where the locals build towers covered with buns in front of the local Taoist temple and compete to climb the tower.

We headed down the main strip in search of the restaurant we'd chosen for lunch (in hopes of figuring out, in advance, where we could eat vegetarian food) but found it closed. We contemplated our options and bought a couple of buns from a nearby bakery and a couple of satsuma mandarin oranges from a grocery store and sat on a bench overlooking the harbor to eat lunch. The buns with sweet red bean paste were good (though Calvin wasn't especially enthralled), but some of the other buns had dubious (non-vegetarian-appearing) contents.

After our lunch-snack, we headed out to explore the island by following the walking tour in my Lonely Planet guidebook. (Kiesa was not impressed by the live fish and crabs in the wet market, and Calvin wanted to make sure the crabs wouldn't pinch him.) It took us to the Taoist temple dedicated to Tin Hua (the local version of the sea goddess Mazu), which I thought was fascinating but Calvin was not impressed by. Kiesa took him to the nearby playground while I continued looking around.

We continued looking around the island (fueled by an ice cream snack) and walked on a narrow road to the south-west side side of the island. (The island's roads are too small for full-size vehicles; I saw some vehicles the size of golf carts but most residents appeared to use bicycles and the occasional scooter.) The road climbed quickly into the outskirts of the island's inhabited region, where small houses clung to the hillside, then continued climbing into the jungle above. Presently the road entered a cemetery, sprawled across the hillside with innumerable little tombs arranged facing the sea with their back to the mountain (in what I took to be good feng shui), each bearing a name (in Chinese) and sometimes a photo. There appeared to be some work going on, though it wasn't clear what, and I saw bones sitting on top of one of the markers near one of the workers.

We walked through the cemetery and soon reached another village, which turned out to be accessible via a shorter route back to the ferry pier. We followed the signs to the alleged cave at the end of the island, which seemed to be mobbed mostly by courting couples. The trail led by the edge of the island, so we walked overlooking the South China Sea, with waves lapping on the rocks. I could see some of the other outlying islands through the light haze, as well as the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

The 'cave' proved to be a tiny crack in the rock where one could climb in, though it was deep enough that one would need a flashlight to explore in detail. I did not have a flashlight (nor a flashlight app on my phone, as most of the other visitors were using), so I climbed down into the first level and declared my exploration complete. Legend held that the cave was used by a major pirate in the area in the early part of the nineteenth century, until he gave up piracy to become a government official, but my guidebooks suggested the cave was a bit small to really have been of much use.

We took the shortcut on the shoreline back to the ferry pier and caught the Xin Fei back to Hong Kong Island as the sun was setting across the water. I looked for pizza for supper (in the hopes that we might find something a bit more understandable, in English, and also on the theory that I embrace a cosmopolitan diversity of cuisines that allows me to enjoy pizza while in Hong Kong) and found Pizza Express in Central. Now that I had enough experience on the ground to know precisely how to interpret Google Maps' directions, I found the place (next to the covered, raised escalator that takes people up and down between Central and the residential (but still high-value) Mid-Levels) and managed to get a table for an hour and a half, which turned out to be just enough time to eat supper.

As we walked back to the MTR stop to head back to our hotel, I noticed what looked like crowd-control barriers as if for a parade, and wondered what sort of Christmas-related event the local government was preparing, but with Calvin falling asleep (and Kiesa and I not too far behind, still trying to catch up on sleep from travel) I didn't want to stop to investigate in detail.

The Third Day (Christmas Eve)

Monday, according to Kiesa

I woke up around 4:30am Monday morning and lay asleep for a couple of hours before finally drifting off to sleep for an hour before everyone else got up. We ate breakfasts, stopped for coffee for Jaeger, and then took MTR down to central so we could catch a ferry to Cheung Chau Island. The ferry ride was a little less than an hour.

We got off the ferry and disembarked into a very crowded street stuffed with little tourist shops that would look at home on Pearl Street and seafood restaurants with their live seafood on display. By the time we actually got there, it was time for lunch. The island is known for seafood, not vegetarian food, but we had found online a couple of places that looked like they might work. Unfortunately, the first place was closed and we decided to just get fruit and pastries instead of fighting the crowds to find the other restaurant. We ended up with a stuffed sweet bun that had sweet red bean inside and some oranges. Unfortunately, Calvin didn't seem to be a fan of the bun and ate very little.

After that, we followed a walking tour in Jaeger's guide book. We first stopped in at a temple but Calvin wasn't interested so Jaeger stayed to look at it while Calvin and I went back to a little playground we had seen a block back. After Jaeger finished, we continued exploring the area right next to the ferry. It was very crowded and the smell of fish was everywhere. After a while, we left that area and started a several kilometer hike to visit a famous cave that belonged to a pirate (when I heard pirate, I was thinking dinky ship but this guy actually commanded 50,000 pirates so it was a serious operation).

When contemplating our trip back in the states, I had wondered the best way to transport Calvin. Calvin is notorious for wanting to be carried everywhere. We had already gotten rid of our strollers. Plus, strollers are a pain to carry everywhere. So, I bought a Boba carrier that was rated to 45 lbs. The advantage is the carrier had is it's a soft body so can easily be packed in our suitcase for travel. Unfortunately, it has no pockets so this makes Jaeger responsible for carrying everything but Calvin. The carrier has been working out very well and I don't think we would have made it to the cave without a carrier of some sort.

The walk to the cave took us up a hill and we quickly left the mob of people fish smells behind. That was the point were I started to enjoy our excursion. The path was steep and was surrounded by all sorts of plants and trees. There are no cars on the island but there are motorized carts. However, we mainly encountered other couples walking up the hill. There were houses most of the way up. Many of the houses appeared to be in bad shape but a couple were nice looking. Near the top of the hill we passed a huge spiraling cemetery that had very elaborate tombstones. It was a pretty impressive site. We were also amused to see banners, within the cemetery itself warning about Japanese Encephalitis and asking people to report mosquito sightings. For some, reason it struck us as amusing the signs were at the cemetery when we hadn't seen them anywhere else. It also made me a bit nervous that we had skipped that particular vaccination because it was considered low risk at the moment (though I didn't see any bugs or mosquitoes anywhere).

Have I mentioned there are playgrounds everywhere? On our walk we passed several and Calvin wanted to stop and play at each though, if we'd done that, we'd have never made it to our destination.

After the cemetery, we headed downhill back to the harbor and came to a larger group of houses. There were more tourists there but nothing like the mob at the ferry dock. Apparently we had taken the hard route as there is a flat road hugging the shore and bicycles were skimming back and forth. However, I think our hike was more fun.

At the village, we turned left and headed back up the hill for a short distance and eventually arrived at the cave. It was a cave. Neither Jaeger nor I had a flashlight so we pronounced it to be a cave and the headed back down.

We took the easy path back to the dock and then took the ferry back to central Hong Kong. It was getting dark by the time we arrived which allowed us to see the Christmas displays on the large skyscrapers. Many of the skyscrapers had huge murals made out of lights depicting Christmas themed pictures. It was quite a sight. As Jaeger noted, Christmas here seems more like a folk festival than a holiday like we have back at home. It seems mainly an excuse to have fun.

For supper, we found a gourmet pizza place to eat. It was very good. Calvin fell asleep on the way back to the hotel and we put him in bed when we got back. Calvin has been consistently falling asleep between 6 or 7 and then not waking up till 7:30 or later in the morning. It makes for very relaxing evenings.

Christmas at the Peak

Tuesday, according to Jaeger

Christmas in Hong Kong was more like a social festival than the serious holiday it manifests as in the United States; all of the tourist sites remained open. There was a modest attempt at commercializing the holiday, and there were various random Christmas decorations around the city, but the whole thing felt more low-key than the American version (which happened to suit my personal preferences).

We set out on Christmas morning to take the Peak Tram, a Victorian-era cable-driven funicular railway built up the side of Victoria Peak rising immediately behind Central. It was originally used by colonial administrators and other (self-)important Englishmen who lived on the peak to escape the hot and humid city below (which led me to conclude that Hong Kong had its own hill station built in) and is now used mostly by tourists, though they do sell a monthly pass if one wanted to use it as a serious form of transit.

As I hoped, the the line for the tram was short when we arrived in the middle of the morning. When the tram arrived, we were among the last people to board, so I ended up standing in the middle aisle, trying to balance myself on the floor (helpfully indented to provide a variety of standing angles depending on the angle of the car, and covered in an anti-skid surface) as the tram ascended. We climbed quickly, reaching and surpassing the height of the buildings in Central, and soon reached the top of the tram, on a saddle between Victoria Peak and an adjacent summit.

We disembarked, passed a Crocs store in the mall attached to the tram terminus, and looked around to figure out what to do. After dodging the attention of an overly-helpful attendant at the visitor's center, we took the escalators up to the top of the Peak Lookout, which gave us a commanding, 360° view of the surroundings, which would have been somewhat more impressive had it been a clear day. Instead, it was a little overcast, but we could still see Central and Kowloon easily, looking down at even the tallest buildings in the city. It was windy on the top, and Calvin was not impressed by either the wind or the windchill.

As it was approaching mid-day, we searched for vegetarian food for lunch, which proved tricky until we found a French-inspired bakery cafe with miniature pizzas. Properly fortified, we set out on the trail that circumnavigated the peak. Kiesa carried Calvin in her Boba carrier on her back (as was our normal mode of operation, except when we wanted Calvin to walk on his own), so we were able to walk fairly briskly, except when we stopped to marvel at the view. At our level, we were in jungle think with banyan trees and bamboo high above Central; we could look down at the skyscrapers and residential towers below. (Every time I see an aerial root hanging from a banyan tree I expect it to be prehensile and grab me as I walk by.) The trail looped around the mountain, showing different sides of the island in progression, until we were back at the upper terminus of the Peak Tram.

Calvin wanted a break, so we let him play in the playground next to one of the malls at the top of the Peak Tram while I picked up a snack from Starbucks. (I introduced Kiesa to the "short" size; in the United States one can order twelve-ounce short drinks but they're not on the menu; in Hong Kong they're not officially listed but small print at the bottom of the menu indicates that the short size is available for hot drinks.)

After Calvin had played for a while, we headed down the tram and looked around the Biological and Zoological Gardens near the base of the tram. It was packed with people on the public holiday and had a fairly nice assortment of primates. After studying the primates in detail, and looking through the birds (including a supply of flamingos, which Calvin thought looked funny), we headed to Pure Veggie House for an early supper but arrived during their mid-afternoon closure, so they asked us to come back in forty minutes at 17:30. We found a large (by Hong Kong standards) grocery store next door and picked up some snacks to eat in the park while we waited for the restaurant to open. (Calvin was amused by watching the live fish swimming in the tank and wasn't quite sure what to make of the dead fish sitting on ice immediately next to the tank.) When it did open we ate, and since I was feeling far more awake than I had been the first day, I actually ate all of the food we ordered.

After supper we stopped by the grocery store again and picked up more food, including dragonfruit and a knife to cut it with. We returned to the hotel, put Calvin to bed (he fell asleep on the way home) and began planning the next day.

The Fourth Day (Christmas Day)

Tuesday, according to Kiesa

I woke up bright and early at 5am but stayed in bed till 6. Calvin and Jaeger both slept several hours later. Calvin developed a distaste for eating breakfast in our room and kept insisting he wanted to go down to the hotel breakfast. Jaeger and I were not sure what to do because at home we certainly wouldn't have given in but a hungry preschooler is no ones idea of a fun travel companion. Eventually I bribed him to eat our muesli by promising he could eat his dessert that was included in the kids meal from the prior night (baked pizza dough balls with Nutella as dip).

The breakfast crisis averted, we considered what to do for the day. Both Christmas and Boxing days are public holidays in Hong Kong. Not, you'll note, Christmas Eve. Most of the activities in our book suggested we should avoid them on Sundays and public holidays which limited our options. Finally, we decided to go ahead and try the Victoria peak tram and hope for the best. On Saturday when we went past the line was 1 1/2 hr long. However, we decided to risk it and bring the iPad in case Calvin needed amusement.

To my surprise, the line was pretty short. Maybe it was because we'd arrived earlier in the day around 10am. The tram was stuffed full and we were one of the last ones to get in so all the sets were taken. However, as I was trying to figure out the best way to position Calvin, two people offered me their seats at the same time. I gratefully accepted one of them and sat Calvin on my lap.

Hong Kong may be a busy city but I have been amazed at how considerate they are to the elderly or those with special needs of some sort. Every single time I have boarded public transpiration with Calvin someone offers me their seat if there isn't one already available. Sometimes, like when Calvin is on my back and it would be hard to sit, I decline. However, when I'm carrying him in my arms and it's really crowded it is a lot easier to manage him sitting down. The same is true of anyone who is elderly or feeble. Someone always gives up their seat for them. I think there's some sort of informal pecking order going on. Younger and healthier people obviously give up their seats first. However, what would happen if you got a train car full of pregnant women and elderly people?

The peak tram ride is quick but interesting. At times, it goes up at a 27 degree angle. At the top, riders are deposited into the smaller of the two shopping malls at the top. We milled around trying to figure out what to do next and ended up being accosted by an overly helpful visitor center lady. Eventually we wandered off just to be able to think in peace. While the tram lines had not been bad, it was still quite busy up top. We went up to the top of the building the tram was into to get the 360 degree view. It was impressive but probably would have been more so if there had been less fog/haze. It was also windy and Calvin was grumpy so we left fairly soon.

Since Calvin was grumpy, our next stop was lunch. Vegetarian food is not overly abundant on the peak but we did manage to find some vegetarian pizza bread that was reasonable. The restaurant was at the larger mall. After lunch, we went in to look at the local English bookstore. However, the books were packaged so you couldn't look at them ahead of time. Picture book quality varies so much that I never take the risk of buying without reading the book first.

After the bookstore, we went out to walk the Peak Walk which is a circular trail that loops around Victoria Peak and is 3.5 km long. The trail is surrounded by lots of trees and other plants and the views are great. Once again, it was really nice to have the backpack carrier to schlep Calvin around in.

After the walk, we went and let Calvin play at a playground next to the mall. I was a little disappointed that we only saw one playground up at the peak and none on our loop walk. Though to be fair, maybe the city planners didn't think making a playground on the side of a cliff was a good idea.

Calvin finished playing which left us an awkward amount of time to fill. The peak is very commercialized and other than the walking trail, there isn't much to do up there other than shop. Eventually, we decided to head down and wander the free zoological and botanical gardens in central Hong Kong until it was time to eat supper. I'm still amazed by the amount of land devoted to park-like activities. The zoological area isn't as extensive as a normal zoo but it still has several hundred animals. Calvin especially enjoyed watching the monkeys.

We decided we were ready for an early lunch so went back to the vegetarian restaurant we had eaten at our first day. Unfortunately, we were a little early and they requested we come back in about 40 min. Since we had time, we explored some of the other shops in the area and found a grocery store in an adjacent building. This store was bigger than the one across from our hotel and included several exotic things we hadn't seen at the other place.

Supper was good and since Jaeger was feeling more awake, he ate a lot more than he did the last time we were there. I'm still not great with chopsticks but am getting better. We have discovered that the standard dishes one eats off are a bowl and plate about the size of our tea cups and saucers. This threw us the first time we ate there but after observing diners I think we have it mostly figured out.

Water isn't an automatic starting beverage like it is in the states. Instead, we have tea. At most restaurants we're given two tea pots. One with tea and the other with hot water. We believe the hot water is to refresh the tea in the tea pot whenever it gets low or too strong from sitting.

After dinner we went back to the grocery store and picked up more breakfast food. In addition, we splurged and bought a knife so we could buy and try some "dragon fruit" which is a fascinating item we've seen in most produce stands/markets. We're saving the experiment for breakfast.

Calvin wasn't quite asleep by the time we headed home but on the train he nodded off several times. As soon as I put him in the backpack to head back to the hotel he was asleep. I'm trying to stay up a little later tonight in hopes of waking up later but I'm not sure if I'll be able to hold out.

The New Territories

Wednesday, according to Jaeger

At this point in our vacation I started to feel like the vacation was getting ahead of me; there was only so much planning I could do in advance before the whole edifice would come crashing down around me and we'd be left somewhere in Hong Kong with no idea what to do or where to eat our next meal. (I was, at least, confident we could find our way back to our hotel, either by using the excellent MTR system or (if all else failed) hailing a taxi and handing them the card I picked up at the hotel front desk with the name and address printed in both English and Chinese.) On most days I typed up notes on what to see the next day (often including specific details on the transit route and specific page references in our guidebooks, Lonely Planet Hong Kong and Macau and Hong Kong For Kids) on my personal wiki and 'printed' it out onto a PDF that I loaded on my Nexus 7. I didn't always consult my notes in detail, but the simple act of writing them down was often enough to embed the plan into my memory.

Before setting out I studied the options available for doing our laundry and decided that, while our hotel laundry was expensive, it was probably easier than trying to find some other option for clean clothing.

Wednesday, Boxing Day, was also a public holiday in Hong Kong. Kiesa suggested the Hong Kong Heritage Museum in Tai Wai (an outlying area in the New Territories), which was handy because I'd planned most of an expedition in that direction. The subway route from our corner of Hong Kong to Tai Wai was a bit circuitous, so I suggested a different route involving a short ferry ride across the harbor. The only problem with the ferry ride was that it involved a good bit of walking to get to the ferry terminal in North Point and a good bit of walking to get from the ferry terminal to the Hung Hom Train Station. The ride itself was short and scenic, providing a new perspective of the Hong Kong skyline. Calvin didn't seem as excited as I'd hoped; he doesn't seem especially enthralled by boats unless they have containers or cranes.

Since Hong Kong was two-thirds of a day ahead of North America, the morning of our Boxing Day was the evening of Christmas Day back home. Before leaving the hotel I called Bethany to wish her a merry Christmas, and called my mother when we reached Tai Wo. (The international dialing rate on my local SIM card was much cheaper than international roaming on my Verizon plan would be.)

(While using my mobile phone in Hong Kong, I wondered about localization for phone numbers in other countries. My phone wasn't quite sure what to make of Hong Kong numbers; the special administrative region has no area codes and uses eight digits, separated into groups of two (like 1234-5678), but when I dialed local numbers on my phone, it displayed them as if they were the first eight digits of a US ten-digit number, 123-456-78. This worked just fine, but I found this a little awkward to read. I didn't see any obvious way to change the way numbers were formatted. I also wondered whether I could convince my phone to automatically add the appropriate international dialing prefix; the best I could figure out on short notice was to copy down the number from my phone's address book and then dial the international dialing prefix followed by the number. My phone seemed to recognize this as the same number; I wasn't sure if it actually recognized the dialing prefix or just did a string match on the last ten digits and called it a day.)

By the time we reached Tai Wo Station we were getting hungry and began contemplating lunch, though my official plan was to eat lunch at the Buddhist monastery that was our second stop. We found a tiny bakery right outside the train station and bought some snacks, including glutinous rice balls (in two flavors, filled with red bean paste or poppyseed), which Calvin didn't want to eat but I thought were sufficiently interesting. We found a bench on a bike path overlooking the local river to eat our snack.

After our snack, we headed to the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, which happened to be free on Wednesdays. Calvin got bored quickly so Kiesa took him off to some child-centric part of the museum while I looked through an exhibit of a specific artist's paintings and calligraphy, then the New Territories Heritage Gallery, which traced the history of the New Territories through the handover to the present, and included some discussion of the massive infrastructure projects undertaken to build the new airport on Chek Lap Kok, and the expansions to MTR currently underway. I already knew much of the subject matter (often in greater detail), but seeing it presented visually was interesting, as well as seeing precisely how the displays presented the material -- especially the handover of sovereignty to the People's Republic of China. I think Calvin would have found the whole thing a lot more interesting had he been of school age.

I skipped the Cantonese Opera exhibit and met Kiesa and Calvin for a quick pass through the gift shop before heading out for our next destination: the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery. The access to the monastery was hidden behind a multi-story shopping mall; once I found it we climbed hundreds of steps leading up the hillside flanked with gold-colored statues. (One, at least, appeared to be holding a Buddha's hand citron.) At the top we headed immediately to the vegan restaurant and ate a proper lunch. (Many places we ate -- this one included -- had a laminated menu printed with photos and text in both English and Chinese, which made pointing out the food one wanted to the wait staff much easier.)

After lunch we looked around the grounds, including the main prayer hall which (contrary to the name) actually held 12,000 tiny golden Buddhas on the walls. Calvin was not sure what to make of the site or the incense, and was sufficiently scared by the angry idol flanking the Jade Emperor in another building that I left him behind with Kiesa to explore the rest of the (still-under-construction) facility.

We headed down the mountain and took the East Rail Line deeper into the New Territories to Tai Wo to visit the small Hong Kong Railway Museum, which traced the history of the Kowloon-Canton Railway. The museum itself was in the old Tai Po Market Station and the adjacent grounds and had a few small historic exhibits. ("Due to political difficulties", it mentioned obliquely, "through service" (into China) "stopped in 1949 and didn't resume until 1979.") Outside there was a diesel locomotive named after Hong Kong Governor Sir Alexander Grantham (as was the fireboat we saw on Sunday; another engine was named after his wife) and several historic coaches. Calvin was not very interested in most of the trains on display, even the narrow-gauge tank engine, but was amused by the push-button-operated model train in the 'sitting-out area'.

As night fell we departed the museum and began our way back home. We took MTR all the way back, which was somewhat circuitous and involved three train lines and two changes. Since we had a large late lunch at the monastery we decided to eat a lighter supper in our hotel room of snacks from the convenience store in the MTR station before putting Calvin to bed and preparing for our next day.

The Fifth Day (Boxing Day)

Wednesday, according to Jaeger

Today was another public holiday which meant that many attractions were probably going to be very crowded. Based on that, I suggested we visit the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, which Hong Kong for Kids describes as "the best-kept secret in the territory", and then visiting the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery, which is in the same general area.

However, getting there from our hotel was a little more complicated than our prior trips. Jaeger suggested we walk to a nearby ferry to take us across the harbor. From there, we caught a MTR train. By the time we arrived at that station, it was nearing lunch time. 10,000 Buddhas had a vegetarian restaurant on site but we were planning on visiting that second. So we stopped at a local "bakery" to pick up some snacks. We got a raisin bread, which was pretty standard, and then glutinous rice balls in two favors, poppy seed and sweet red bean.

After buying the snacks we walked along a walking and bike path looking for somewhere to sit and eat. Cheung Chau had bicycles everywhere but that was to be expected as there were no cars. However, we hadn't seen many bikes in Hong Kong itself. However, this area seemed to have a lot of leisurely recreational biking (this would be the kind of biking that Boulder wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with because it was so haphazard and non-serious).

We eventually found a bench and sat down to eat the snacks. Calvin would barely take a small nibble from the rice balls but found the raisin bread, minus the raisins, fine. The rice cakes were interesting. I liked the sweet red bean ones better than I expected but the poppy seed ones seemed a bit more savory than I expected.

After we finished eating we continued on to the museum. It was practically empty which seemed kind of odd. I didn't have much opportunity to look a the regular exhibits because Calvin really wanted to see there Discovery Gallery which was created specifically for kids. It reminded me a little of OMSI on a very small scale. There were lessons about local sea life and what life was like in a small village, complete with costumes to dress up in. Over all, Calvin seemed amused but not totally enthralled with it.

After the museum we walked a bit to get to the bottom of the hill for the monastery. The trail to the monastery starts at the bottom of a hill and includes about 400 steps to get to the top. Lining the trail were many gold painted figures, about one for every 2-3 steps, that I didn't have the right background to understand their significance. I carried Calvin up the hill in my carrier, to what I perceived as the amusement of others, and was grateful to get to the top. At the top, we ate in a little restaurant that exclusively served vegetarian food. It was pretty good and I think I'm slowly getting the hang of chopsticks.

After lunch, we went into the temple which apparently has over 12,000 Buddhas in it. The sign requested we be quiet in respect for those praying. However, the din outside from all the tourists made me feel sorry for anyone who was actually trying to do any sort of worshiping. It reminded me a bit of all those cathedrals we visited in Rome where the tourists vastly out-numbered the religious people.

We finished with the monastery by the middle of the afternoon so had time for one more destination. We went to Hong Kong's small Railway Museum. This was obviously off the beaten tourist trail and after the chaos at the monastery it was very relaxing. The museum itself is quite small. There's a couple rooms with text and then some engines to look at as well as several train cars put together that the children can go through. There is also, in the "sitting-out" area, a model train that would run around a track when the button is pushed.

Calvin seemed to enjoy this museum even though it was fairly small. There were also a lot of other small kids though it was difficult to tell how many locals vs tourists there were. It felt like more of a local hang-out but I could be wrong.

Getting back to the hotel was also a production though this time we opted to use MTR the whole way instead of taking the ferry for part of it. The MTR station we started at was in a mall so I took the opportunity to try to find some Ibuprofen. The carrier is working fairly well but it is a strain my back isn't use to so I've been going through the Ibuprofen I brought from home a little faster than expected. I found the pain relief section but only found acetaminophen. I asked a local sales girl for ibuprofen and more than 4 sales people later, we concluded they had no idea what I was asking for. (Upon returning to the hotel we discovered that ibuprofen appears to be only available behind the counter at a real pharmacy, though maybe without a prescription??)

We arrived back at the hotel and, for once, Calvin was still awake. However, he promptly asked to be put in bed. He's certainly sleeping much better on vacation than he does at home, at least for now.

A day without a plan

Thursday, according to Jaeger

We didn't have a specific plan for Thursday, our sixth day in Hong Kong, so we took the street tram west to Victoria Park to look around at the park and the adjacent library. (Kiesa is not a major fan of the street tram, since it's slow, but Calvin liked sitting on the front of the second floor looking out at the street in front.) The southern part of the park was blocked off for some sort of festival, but we walked around to an alternate entrance and found a nice city park, with a mixture of playgrounds, fields, trees, a running track, and a swimming pool. I did not see a forest of people doing tai chi, though perhaps I didn't come at the right time. Calvin played in the playground for a while, then watched a high-speed model boat zip around the little pond dedicated for that purpose.

Given Hong Kong's proximity to 'mainland' China, I'd considered staging a visit to the People's Republic itself, but I wasn't sure I wanted to drag Calvin along (or, for that matter, Kiesa). The PRC is not overly enthusiastic about giving visas to Americans (unlike, say, Hong Kong, where I could show up with my passport and they'd let me in for ninety days, no questions asked) -- their official rules asked for plane tickets and hotel reservations before granting a tourist visa -- so I shelved the idea of getting visas in advance of our trip and decided to investigate the situation on the ground when we arrived. Reading the Lonely Planet's forums suggested it wasn't especially difficult for Americans to get a visa for China while in Hong Kong, as long as one planned in advance. I could visit the Chinese consulate myself, if I were feeling ambitious, but the forums suggested Forever Bright Trading Limited (whose Engrish website you should visit if only to see the 1990s animated gifs), who presumably knew exactly what I had to do to get a visa without invoking Kafka. I e-mailed them to confirm the details, as it wasn't immediately clear when their website had last been updated, and they told me that if I came by 13:30 on Thursday I could have my visa by Friday afternoon.

Kiesa had no interest to visit the mainland, and didn't seem especially adverse to the idea of my leaving her with Calvin for the day I'd spend in China (or the afternoon it'd take to head to Kowloon to get the visa), so I left her and Calvin watching the model boats and headed for the nearest MTR stop. I emerged in Kowloon and found the visa agency, on the ninth floor of a low-rise office building next to a modest plaza. I filled out the lengthy application for a tourist visa and handed it and my passport across the counter to a guy who worked some magic on my answers, whisked me in back for a photo (for an extra HK$30, since I didn't have a photo on the blue background the consulate apparently wanted), and assured me that my passport and visa would be ready by 16:00 the next day.

I found a nearby vegetarian restaurant for lunch, where I shared a table with another single customer and ordered mostly by pointing at the menu (printed in both English and Chinese); I didn't get exactly what I expected but the fried eggplant that came instead of the congee I thought I'd ordered was excellent. After eating I called Kiesa, who was still amusing herself with Calvin back on Hong Kong Island, and suggested we eventually meet in Central to try to do some (and here I hesitated to use the word) shopping for gifts and stuff.

I headed in the direction of the Star Ferry pier at the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula and caught the Twinkling Star across the harbor. It was raining slightly, obscuring the tops of the buildings in Central, providing a less-than-picture-perfect view that was still pretty good. When I landed in Central I made my way to the Hong Kong Planning & Infrastructure Exhibition Gallery. I rushed through the interactive exhibits documenting the planning and design for Hong Kong, including a display showing how the shoreline and skyline changed over the past two hundred years, and couldn't help but wish that Calvin were school-aged so he could appreciate the interpretive displays.

From the infrastructure gallery I found my way to the nearest MTR stop and waited for Kiesa and Calvin to emerge while I scoured my guidebook to figure out where to shop. On my way I found I recognized landmarks even when coming from the wrong direction: the nested skywalks that I found so confusing on my first day were finally starting to make sense.

Kiesa and Calvin arrived and we headed across the street to Starbucks for a snack before pressing on with our shopping. In observation of our presence in east Asia I had a green tea latte. We headed off in search of shopping and ended up at Mountain Folkcraft, a tiny shop crammed with antique-looking handcrafts, mostly from China. Nothing quite matched my aesthetic but I did manage to find a few small gifts. As we wandered on into the SoHo shopping district I began to ponder the problem of shopping in Hong Kong: They don't actually make anything; rather, they're a global transshipment hub. Global brands are readily available (including Boulder County's own Crocs and my personal favorite Columbia; both had ground-level stores on the main street in Central) but there's very little that's indigenously Hong Kong. Even the cheap tourist trinkets come from across the border in Shenzhen, or further inland.

Kiesa decided she'd had enough shopping and headed back to the hotel with Calvin, leaving me to fend for myself on the wild shopping streets. I found a little shop selling mostly Mao paraphernalia, including a stack of Little Red Books (one stack each for English and Chinese) and was tempted but managed to resist. I found many interesting things but didn't find anything that spoke to me so I declared my shopping complete and found supper at a pizza-by-the-slice restaurant in the shadows of the Mid-Level Escalators named Paisano's. I got back to the hotel just in time to read Calvin a few bedtime stories, then review my plan for the next day. I even managed to begin documenting our trip so far, starting with our flight out.

The Sixth Day

Thursday, according to Kiesa

Originally, I was thinking today would be a good day for Disneyland. However, the weather forecast suggested there might be rain so Jaeger convinced me we'd have better luck trying tomorrow. Unfortunately, most of the other things on our list were also outside activities. Eventually we decided to make it a lazy day and visit Victoria Park and then the library.

Naturally, Victoria Park has several playgrounds. Calvin and I settled down at one while Jaeger explored the rest of the park. Then he came back to watch Calvin for a bit. We had talked about Jaeger taking a day trip to mainland China (I have no particular desire to go there) so Jaeger hunted around and found a place that claimed to be able to get him a visa for China by tomorrow so he headed off there while Calvin and I stayed in the park.

After a while, Calvin got tired of the playground. We wandered a couple of meters away and came across a man-made pond specifically designed for model boats. There was an orange speed boat that whizzed around and caused splashing to Calvin's great delight. We stayed there more than a half-hour, possibly even a full hour. Fortunately, I had a book with me to read while Calvin watched.

Eventually Calvin was done watching so we wandered off in the general direction of the library. It was almost lunch time though so I kept a lookout for food options. I didn't have internet so I couldn't find the closest vegetarian restaurant so I settled for a lunch stand-in from my youth when we couldn't find anything vegetarian to eat: ice cream.

I saw a Haagen Daz in the mall and figured that would provide enough calories until we met up with Jaeger again. What I didn't realize is that Haagen Daz in a bit city, at least Hong Kong, is a sit-down dessert restaurant. However, I had already promised Calvin ice cream and didn't want to reneg on our deal. So we sat down and I had a look at the menu. I let Calvin pick and he chose a dessert that featured a snow man made out of ice cream, crem brle topped with strawberry ice cream and a strawberry and some sort of frozen berries (maybe currents?). They also offered ice cream fondue, which we didn't order, which is little balls of ice cream that you dip into chocolate fondue. It looked interesting but was 3-4 times the price of the dessert we got.

After dessert lunch we headed to the library. I knew that you had to make a reservation to play in the "toy library" within the library. However, I didn't realize there would be nothing at all to play with inside the library other than that. I guess I've been spoiled by the libraries in Colorado since all of them have some sort of activities for kids to play with while the parents look for books. We left fairly quickly because there wasn't enough things to keep Calvin's attention.

Jaeger had returned from his visa expedition at this point but we decided that he'd go look at the infrastructure gallery while Calvin and I would go explore one of the other playgrounds in Victoria Park. Calvin had a lot of fun at the park and we spent an hour or two there. Then Calvin said he needed to go potty, right away. I should have scouted potty sites out ahead of time but hadn't. I raced wildly around and eventually found one which turned out to only contain squat toilets. I tried to convince Calvin this was a perfectly respectable way to go potty but I think he was dubious. As an aside, squat toilets appear to be the old-school preferred toilet option. However, newer facilities are grudgingly putting in place sit-down toilets (though often with at least one squat toilet stall also). Also, sometimes there isn't any toilet paper in the stalls, you have to grab some near the sink before you actually go into the stall. This probably works better when you're grabbing toilet paper for yourself instead of a preschooler.

I called Jaeger and we agreed to meet up at central station. I put Calvin on my back to hike to the nearest MTR station. On the down escalator a man with a cane and a bag in each hand slipped and fell while we were about half-way down. He couldn't get up by himself so a person in front of him tried to help. However, he fell again when we reached the bottom, having not completely gotten on his feet. I was one person behind the man and was quickly running out of room. The lady in front of me tried to dodge to one side which left no room for me to maneuver. I grabbed the man under his arms while the person in front pulled and somehow he got off. However, several people behind me stumbled and fell do to the blockage. I think I was quite lucky and was happy Calvin had been on my back instead of on the ground in front or behind which could have been bad. Fortunately, the man appeared to be ok, at least he was standing, though I couldn't tell for sure because he didn't speak any English. I was quite relieved when we met Jaeger several stops later with no further incidences.

Jaeger proposed going souvenir shopping which I was a little dubious about since neither of us shop well (I'm ok in a thrift store but don't have a huge amount of patience shopping other than that). We wandered around and Jaeger found a pretty nice place suggested by his guidebook. However, by that time Calvin had fallen asleep so by the next shop I decided it was time for Calvin and I to head back to the hotel. Naturally, Calvin woke as soon as I started heading back.

I successfully found an MTR station and headed home. Once back, I stopped by the grocery store and picked up some things for supper. I also picked up some more Dragon Fruit. We had seen dragon fruit sold in most produce stores but couldn't figure out what they were until we looked them up. We ended up buying a cheap kitchen knife just so we could try it out. You cut the weird purple fruit in half and then can scoop out the insides. It tastes kind of like a very mild and slightly bland kiwi. It's very interesting and, assuming you have a knife and spoon, relatively easy to eat. I suspect it'd taste great slightly frozen, kind of like a sorbet.

Calvin was awake when we got back, probably because of the nap. He ate well for supper and managed to demolish almost an entire carton of hummus by himself. While Calvin finished eating, I started doing laundry in the sink. Apparently there aren't laundromats in Hong Kong because everyone has their own maid (or something like that). There are places to take laundry but it's inconvenient so I was stuck with the choice of washing in the sink or paying exorbitant hotel rates. At the moment, we're hand washing the lighter stuff that'll dry easily and having the hotel wash heavier stuff that would take too long to dry on it's own. The difference in humidity is pretty significant. Things that would have dried overnight in Colorado are taking closer to a day and a half here (and we have an air conditioned room!).

Jaeger got back while I was doing laundry. He read Calvin some stories and then convinced him it was time to go to bed.

Hong Kong Disneyland

Friday, according to Jaeger

I think it was Kiesa's idea to visit Hong Kong Disneyland as Calvin's first visit to a Disney-themed park. (There is, of course, a Disneyland much closer to home, but this Disneyland is smaller and cheaper, and seemed like a more pleasant introduction to the franchise. As amusement parks go, Hong Kong's indigenous Ocean Park is supposed to be much better, but it appears to be geared more towards older children (and teenagers and young adults) rather than Calvin's demographic.) We picked Friday for its warmer-and-sunnier weather forecast and ended up with fantastic weather -- the temperature was well into the seventies (Fahrenheit; let's call it the low twenties Celsius), much warmer than the zero-degree-Fahrenheit-with-six-inches-of-snow the forecast called for back home.

Hong Kong Disneyland is located out on the outlying island of Lantau, in the general direction of the airport, and is served by a dedicated MTR line, but we had to change trains twice to get there. The final line in our journey is dedicated to Disneyland; the windows are shaped in a Mickey Mouse outline, and the carriages featured various Disney icons inside. We followed the throngs of people heading toward the park, bought our tickets, and entered the Magic Kingdom.

The first thing in the park, like its namesake in California, was Main Street USA. This seemed like an odd choice to me, since east Asia has so much local history to draw on (and idealize), but I was willing to suspend disbelief until it started snowing soap bubbles. We watched a parade, which Calvin seemed to enjoy, and as soon as it was over Kiesa hustled us over to a shop selling Mickey Mouse-shaped waffles. I was a little more interested in the anti-bird flu warnings about not feeding the birds, which didn't seem to actually have any effect on the number of tiny sparrows flying around looking for a handout.

We took Calvin through the Winnie the Pooh ride; I found the story a little hard to follow until I remembered it was a direct adaptation of the animated Disney movie, including the (non-canon) dream sequence that utterly confused Kiesa (having never actually seen the animated Disney version). (I was impressed how the rocking of the vehicle we were riding in felt like were floating on water during the flood scenes.) Calvin seemed to enjoy most of it.

Calvin didn't like the Chinese-speaking Merlin who appeared in front of the sword in the stone, and wasn't interested in the carousel, but did want to ride in the Mad Hatter's teacups as we walked by. (He enjoys spinning around to the point where, sometimes, he makes me dizzy.) We didn't spin very fast until the end, when Calvin wanted to go faster.

After the ride, we headed to It's A Small World. (I did notice, on the Chinese spelling of the ride, the character 小 (xiǎo in Mandarin), which I recognized as "small".) Calvin became a minor celebrity in the queue as the Asian girl ahead of us took a picture of him with her tablet. The ride itself was amusing, and not quite as shrill as I feared.

It was time for lunch, so we discovered just how small of a world it really was by visiting the "Tahitian Terrace", which seemed to have all of the dietary restrictions they didn't know what else to do with; it had Indian veg as well as a selection of halal meals. The thali plate was fine, though since we were in Hong Kong they called it a "set meal".

We took a raft to visit Tarzan's island treehouse, which Calvin found amusing, then queued for the jungle boat cruise, which seemed to combine all of the world's great jungle rivers into one. There were three queues for English, Mandarin, and Cantonese; each boat was narrated by the guide in one of those languages. Our guide could barely stumble through the script in English, but it was amusing to watch the animatronic elephants and other wildlife as we floated past, at least until the headhunters attacked and the volcano threatened to envelop us and scared Calvin.

We took the train in one complete orbit around the park as a palate cleanser after our jungle cruise and were about to head off to Toy Story Land in search of a snack when Calvin spotted the Dumbo ride and insisted on riding it before the snack, so Kiesa headed off to get frozen yogurt with weird little mango-flavored candied balls of juice that burst when one bit down on them. Calvin enjoyed the ride and wanted to stay as high as possible, using the control lever that let us pick our altitude, until the ride was over.

By this point it was approaching 16:00 and I was thinking about picking up my passport and visa before the office closed at 18:30. We headed to Tomorrowland but got caught on the wrong side of another parade, this one with dancing Toy Story characters. As soon as the parade passed we hurried to the Obitron ride, which was almost identical to the Dumbo ride except with a space theme, and each car held four people so Kiesa could join us. Calvin enjoyed this ride as well, and again wanted to stay as high as possible.

Calvin was still enjoying the park, but I needed to pick up my passport, and Kiesa thought it'd be best to quit while we were still ahead, so we bid farewell to Hong Kong Disneyland and took MTR back in the direction of the city.

I left Kiesa and Calvin on the train to take a different route to Forever Bright Trading Limited in Kowloon to pick up my passport. I handed over the little card with my passport's tracking information and a sizable chunk of cash (covering the visa fee from the consulate, the processing fee, and my photo), and received my passport with a brand-new visa for the People's Republic of China, good for two entries (of thirty days each) for six months. Until I actually saw the visa in my passport I wasn't absolutely sure I was going to get it, and now I was really going to China.

After picking up my passport, I wandered around Kowloon for a bit looking for supper. As the sun set I found myself on a main street, packed with tourists, and the touts came out in force. In the space of a single block two people asked if I wanted a guest house, two people asked if I wanted a suit, and one guy asked, more surreptitiously than the others, if I wanted cocaine or marijuana. (I did not take any of these touts up on their offers.) This was a level of touting I hadn't seen since India; I'd been in Hong Kong for a week hadn't experienced anything of the sort. (The only time anyone had spoken to us on the street was a saffron-robed monk wishing us a merry Christmas as we passed him in a park in Central.) But this was the first time I'd been much of anywhere without both Kiesa and Calvin in tow; I presume that, when obviously traveling with my family, I present a different appearance. (We'd also spent most of our time on Hong Kong Island; Kowloon attracts a different sort of tourist.)

I jumped into the next MTR entrance I saw and headed for the familiar environment of Central. I ate at the pizza-by-the-slice restaurant Paisano's again while I began cramming for a one-day visit to Guangzhou. (I didn't really want to get my hopes up until I actually had the visa in my hands, but that meant I had my hands full to plan a significant day trip on short notice.) After eating I returned to my hotel and continued planning until I thought I had a workable plan for the next day.

The Seventh Day (Disneyland)

Friday, according to Kiesa

Today we went to Disneyland. Getting there required three different trains but other than that, it was relatively easy. The last train was Disney branded and had Mickey Mouse shaped windows.

Calvin didn't know what Disneyland was and I had a couple moments of doubt where I wondered how much he'd get out of it since he hasn't seen any of the movies (Cars, the original, is the only Pixar movie he's seen and they don't appear to feature it very heavily). However, Calvin did seem excited about a trip that was exclusively for his benefit.

We arrived at Disneyland and merged into the throng of people. There were a lot of people but I suspect it wasn't as crowded as the US Disneyland. One of our first stops was going to be a stand that made Mickey Mouse shaped waffles to fortify us for the experience ahead. However, just as we entered, a parade started which stopped everything in its tracks and prevented us from going to the other side of the street where the food was. On the plus side, Calvin got a good view of the parade up on Jaeger's shoulders. Disneyland is still in Christmas theme so all the Disney characters were dressed up for Christmas. Calvin grinned and seemed to enjoy it a great deal.

After we ate our Mickey Mouse waffles we headed to fantasyland which our guidebook recommended as a good place for small children. The first ride that caught Calvin's attention was Winnie the Pooh. He hasn't watched the Disney movie but we have read some of the original stories together. The line wasn't too bad. We got in the little boat and Calvin seemed to enjoy most of the ride, especially Tigger's appearance, but became less enthusiastic when we went through a stormy rain sequence.

I thought the Small World ride would be a little more pleasant for him so we headed that way but got distracted when we passed the twirling tea cups ride. Calvin decided he wanted to go on that and it was an unqualified success. We next went to the Small World ride and a girl in line ahead of us took the opportunity to get some photos of Calvin, making me once again feel like I was with a minor celebrity. The small world ride was interesting and I was amused by the rabid stereotypes embraced for every culture. The middle east had people flying on carpets and harem girls, Scotland was portrayed with bagpipes, and the US with cowboys and Indians (not fighting each other though).

While lines were short, it still took time to get through so by the end of the Small World ride we went looking for lunch. I had been concerned about vegetarian options in the park but learned online that the Tahitian Terrace restaurant had a Vegetarian Indian option so we headed over for that. The food was really salty but other than that it was decent and much better than I had expected to find in the park.

After lunch, we took a "raft" over to Tarzan's Treehouse. The Treehouse was large and sprawling and consisted of many steps and platforms. Calvin seemed to enjoy it but was quite disappointed when he learned there was only one "treehouse" rather than several to explore. We got on a raft back to the mainland and then queued for the "Jungle River Cruise". This was a boat trip around the "river" that showcased fake animals moving in relatively realistic ways. I was a little bemused by the excited picture taking of many of our fellow tourists. It made me wonder if there would come a point where animated fake animals are the best our children will ever get to see. The boat ride also had a bit of a scary moment which the program did mention but I had failed to notice. Calvin really didn't like that part.

To do something calm and non-threatening we took the Disney train that circles around most of the park. Another tourist snapped a picture of Calvin which I keep finding amusing. As an aside, last night, as we were standing in line at Starbucks, a young women pointed to Calvin's face and said something. I didn't quite catch what she said but I figured she was telling me he had a snotty nose or something similar. However, I eventually figured out she was asking if I put makeup on his cheeks. I shook me head and she said in amazement, "oh, it's natural!". This reminded me of all the times when he was an infant and people commented on Calvin's "rosy" cheeks that were really just rashy.

After the train, we decided it was time for dessert. Making sure enough calories are making it into the respective Logans sometimes feels like an activity by itself. However, before we made it to dessert Calvin got distracted by the Dumbo ride which involves elephants "flying" around a pole. Each elephant only took two passengers so I decided to duck out of line and bring back dessert.

I went over to Toy Story Land which is apparently a fairly new part of the park. It was also mobbed, more than the rest of the park. However, I found a stand selling frozen yogurt with toppings. One of the toppings I got was mango flavored little balls of juice that broke once they were bit open. Calvin really enjoyed the Dumbo ride he also seemed to enjoy the dozen yogurt. The weather ended up being much hotter than we expected so I found the dozen yogurt to be particularly nice.

We decided we had time for one more ride so headed over to Tomorrowland. However, once again we got stuck by a parade, this time at the tail end of it. After it was over, we bobbed over to the Obitron ride which was almost exactly like the dumbo ride except it had a spacecraft theme and there were four seats for each pod. Calvin also really liked this ride.

Jaeger had to go back to Kowloon and pick up his visa for tomorrow before 6:30. In addition, Calvin looked like he was loosing energy so it was time for us to leave. Calvin seemed very disappointed but I think that's the best time to leave, when you're still enjoying yourself.

Jaeger split off at one of the stops on our second train and Calvin and I headed home. We ate a small supper and then Calvin put himself to bed, though it did take a while for him to actually fall asleep.

Guangzhou

Saturday, according to Jaeger

And at the Buffeteria, well-fed customers were tucking into dishes called "Yes, Sir, Cheese My Baby," "Bacon your Pardon," "A Legitimate Beef" and "Ike and Tuna Turner."

- Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

Most western tourists, if planted in Hong Kong and in possession of a tourist visa to the People's Republic, will simply walk across the border into the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and wander around a bit before heading back to Hong Kong. I am not, as you may have noticed, most western tourists; I've spent the last two years or so studying China and its history and I wanted to see some piece of that history. That's why, armed with my brand new visa, I headed to Guangzhou (known historically as Canton), the third-largest city in the People's Republic of China and the site of many interesting things in Chinese history, from the Opium Wars to the early post-revolutionary governments after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911.

My alarm woke me up at 06:00, early on Saturday morning, so I could get to Hung Hom Station in Kowloon in time to catch the 08:15 through train to Guangzhou. The easiest (though not cheapest) way to get to the station was via taxi; I found a taxi waiting in the taxi stand in my hotel's ground-level garage and headed through one of the cross-harbor tunnels to the train station.

I picked up my tickets and waited at Starbucks overlooking the corner of the station concourse dedicated to through train departures. At the appropriate time I showed my ticket, then went through passport control to formally exit the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. I waited a while longer in another waiting room for the actual departure of the train, then took the escalator down to the train waiting at the platform. I found my seat, on the upper level of one of the double-decker carriages, and the train left promptly at 08:15.

I watched out the window as Hong Kong glided by, starting with the urbanized areas of Kowloon and the New Territories, then the near-wilderness areas closer to the border. We crossed the border into China without ceremony and I watched Shenzhen out the train window. Our train was reasonably fast but not quite as fast as the official high-speed train running from Shenzhen to Guangzhou; China has upgraded the line on its side of the border but Hong Kong is still working on an ambitious project to build a new high-speed line into Kowloon.

The train arrived in Guangzhou East roughly on schedule around 10:12. The train was populated mostly by ethnic Chinese, though I couldn't begin to guess where they held their passports. There were a couple of westerners on the train, including a pair of backpackers who spoke German. We shuffled towards immigration, past a health-screening checkpoint that estimated body temperature using infrared cameras, and I wondered briefly about my visa, but the immigration officer stamped my passport without a word and I was formally admitted to the People's Republic of China.

I did not have any of the people's currency in my wallet when I arrived, so I needed to find an ATM. This proved easier said than done; the one ATM I spotted on the main concourse of the train station refused to take either of the ATM cards I brought with me. I spent the better part of the next hour wandering the sprawling train station trying, and failing, to find another ATM; then wandering around on the streets outside trying to find an ATM that would actually take my card. (I probably should have paid more attention to the card networks supported by the ATMs, but I've never actually had a problem with that before so I didn't pay enough attention.) At length, just as I was wondering if I needed to exchange all of the US and Hong Kong dollars I happened to have in my wallet in order to get enough cash to look around Guangzhou for a day, I found an ATM in a building across the street from the train station that took my card and spit out a collection of 100 yuan notes, each with Chairman Mao's face gazing placidly out onto a China he wouldn't recognize.

My next challenge was to figure out the city's expansive metro system. I wanted to go to Whampoa, the site of the legendary military academy run by Chiang Kai-shek, which appeared to have a nearby metro stop on a recently-expanded line, but to get there I needed to purchase a single-journey ticket. The automated vending machines didn't take my large-denomination 100 yuan notes, and wouldn't take the ratty 5 yuan note I got in change for buying a bottle of green tea at a tiny convenience store in the train station, so I found a bakery and bought some baked goods as a snack and got the change I needed for the vending machine. (I could have talked to a human at the customer-service window but I wasn't sure they'd speak enough English to help me. I was also confused by the existence of the 5 jiǎo note (which turned out to be worth half a yuan, but I didn't know that yet).)

The vending machine spit out a small plastic token with an RFID chip that I tapped on the gate to enter the paid area of the station, then dropped into the slot to exit the station. There was enough English to figure out where I wanted to go, though I was a little confused by the bifurcated line 3 (my train terminated earlier than I expected it to terminate, forcing me to make a cross-platform transfer to another train). I ended up taking line 5 most of the way to its terminus to the Yuzhu station, which the network schematic in the subway car indicated would interchange with line 13 but a tiny footnote pasted on the bottom of the schematic warned that "lines 6 and 13 are under construction".

I emerged from the station onto a flat slab of concrete in the midst of a clearing, at least a hundred meters in every direction, on what looked like land that had been cleared to build the metro station and hadn't yet been redeveloped. A queue of men on motorbikes waited in front of the station soliciting riders in a sort of single-rider taxi service. My map suggested it was only a short distance to the ferry terminal that would take me to the site of the military academy, and I figured I could walk there, but this seemed faster. I hailed a driver and asked him to take me to Whampoa and he wasn't sure what I was asking for (probably because I used the English pronunciation based on an archaic Romanization; I should have said "Huangpu", though that refers to the whole district) until I pulled out my phone and showed him the place on Google Maps. He nodded; I climbed on the back of the motorbike and we took off.

(I was able to access Google Maps on my phone thanks to global data roaming on my phone. When I crossed the border from Hong Kong, I switched my phone from GSM back to CDMA so I could roam on the Chinese CDMA network on my Verizon plan. Voice calls would have been exorbitantly expensive, at US$2/minute, but I didn't need voice. I signed up for Verizon's US$25/100 meg global data roaming and ended up using six megabytes during my day in Guangzhou. I'd expected some service disruptions using my favorite social networks, Twitter and Google+, from behind the Great Firewall of China, but both -- along with Google Maps -- seemed to work fine all day long.)

We headed down an access road to a main road, then crossed the main road at what looked like a dubious crossing, while I clung somewhat precariously to the back of the bike. The motorbike itself made very little noise, so I took it to be some sort of battery-powered bike. We turned off the main road onto another feeder road that ended in front of a tiny building serving as the ferry terminal. The motorbike driver pointed to the ferry terminal and asked for five yuan; I paid and walked up to the ferry window to buy a ticket. The grizzled woman behind the counter didn't speak any English but handed me a slip of paper in exchange for five jiǎo. I joined other passengers in a queue and ate the pastries I'd bought at the train station for lunch but started to get nervous when I realized there were in fact two queues, and the other one was being serviced. I asked the guard standing between the queues which queue I ought to be in (using mostly Google Maps and a bit of pointing) and I was in the right place, but the guard indicated I needed a different ticket. I headed back to the ticket window and gave back the ticket I had for five jiǎo and eventually figured out the woman behind the counter wanted another yuan to give me a ticket for Whampoa. (It didn't help that I still didn't understand the distinction between yuan and jiǎo.) It was about at this moment where my predicament, being deep within a foreign country where I didn't speak any of the local language and the locals spoke very little if any English, threatened to overwhelm me. Hong Kong had been an easy crutch; its colonial legacy (and status as a first-class world city) meant I could do almost anything without speaking or reading a word of Chinese.

The other ferry came and went twice before my ferry arrived. I joined the assortment of other passengers and looked out onto the Pearl River. Immediately in front of me were several small ships docked at a pier, and behind them was a container dock with several small barges with cranes loading and unloading containers. Across the river were several military vessels that I took to be destroyers. My shutter finger itched at the sight of the People's Navy but I didn't think the locals would appreciate a laowai photographing their ships, even if they were sitting out in the open on the river. As we sailed up river and toward the tiny ferry pier on the island I spotted what looked like a half-dozen stealthed littoral combat vessels, built to cruise quickly on twin hulls within range of land.

We docked on the island and disembarked. I followed the crowd and ended up in a small museum dedicated to Sun Yat-sen, whom both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China revere as a founding father. The museum was built around the room he allegedly stayed in while visiting Whampoa, and the whole museum was signed in both Chinese and English.

I found the body of the Memorial Hall of Whampoa Military Academy Former Site, which was a reconstruction of the military academy on its original site. Most of the buildings were signed in both Chinese and English, but there was a portrait gallery signed only in Chinese where I was reduced to guessing the person's identity based on their birth and death dates. There was what looked like a fantastic gallery discussing Chiang's army's time in Burma during WWII that was also entirely in Chinese. In addition to actually visiting the historic site, I was interested in looking at the signage to see what they chose to highlight and what they chose to downplay. The mentioned Chiang Kai-shek only once but played up contributions by Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese Communist Party leaders who were active at the academy.

I left the site satisfied with my appointment with history and took a quick look at the giant statue of Sun Yat-sen on a large plinth before heading back to the ferry pier to head back across the river. I waited some time for the ferry to return, including a sudden rain storm (for which I was glad I'd brought my rain coat; it had been mostly-overcast all day long). As I was waiting I noticed a toddler walking around in open-crotch pants that gave him the freedom to eliminate whenever the need arose. I'd heard of such thing but never actually seen it in person, and tried not to gape openly. The ferry arrived and I joined my fellow passengers on the passage across the river, then caught another electric motorbike for the short ride back to the metro station.

By this point it was late afternoon; my first and only stop so far had taken up most of the day. My next objective was the large Temple of Bright, Filial and Piety (Guangxiao Temple), where, my guidebook tells me, the founder of Zen Buddhism came to teach. I arrived at the temple close to 17:00, which my guidebook listed as its closing time, but it was open and I saw a large group of observers repeating a monk's chants inside the main prayer hall. (I also saw a number of cats wandering around -- white, orange and spotted -- and wondered if they could catch mice.)

I headed east in the general direction of the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, wandering through narrow streets and alleys and around blocks of six-story-high apartment buildings, and found the main gate being closed to visitors at the end of the day. I peeked inside but didn't see much, then wandered back in the direction of the main road. I saw a bunch of shops adjacent to the temple selling various idols and trinkets (mostly Buddhist, some Taoist; but I did see a few icons of Mao) and looked through a few of them in search of something interesting. I passed up the idols but bought a neat clay teapot in a little tea shop.

Night fell as I was shopping, and I had enough time to eat supper before heading back to the train station for my train back to Hong Kong. My guidebook (the tiny chapter on Guangzhou at the end of my Lonely Planet Hong Kong guidebook) listed People's Cafe; I headed back to the main street and walked through the crowds of people and past tiny shops selling mostly electronics to find the nearest metro stop. I took the metro to Martyr's Park and walked past the giant Guangzhou Uprising Monument in the misting rain. The park was an island of dark in the well-lit city. The monument itself was a massive obelisk of a soldier's hand holding a rifle into the sky -- as the chairman said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

I found the cafe (with its glossy menu printed in both Chinese and English) and ate supper before heading out into the metro one last time to head back to the train station. I regretted having to leave so quickly; my time was up just as I was getting the hang of the city, though I'd need to know a lot more Chinese to thrive on the ground, even as a tourist. Compared to Hong Kong, Guangzhou was dirtier and bigger and far more Chinese, and I understood far less of what was going on around me -- and for that reason it simply felt more interesting to me. I could live in Hong Kong without knowing a word of Chinese and forget that I was even in East Asia. Guangzhou would have a much steeper learning curve -- and because of that, I'd learn much more, and probably be better for it.

I formally bid the People's Republic of China farewell as the immigration officer stamped my passport in the departure hall, then waited to board the train for the two-hour journey back to Hong Kong. I spotted Shenzhen out the train window, then border guards holding the gate open so the train could pass, and then I was back in Hong Kong. I switched my phone back to GSM to use my Hong Kong SIM as we continued south through the SAR. Hong Kong immigration stamped my passport to readmit me to the SAR and I caught a cross-harbor taxi to take me back to my hotel. I returned at 23:00, sixteen hours after I left, just as North America was coming online Saturday morning, and went to bed, happy to have visited the People's Republic at last, and beaten everyone else in my immediate family.

The Eighth Day

Saturday, according to Kiesa

Jaeger successfully got his visa for China yesterday so today he got up a little earlier than usual and left on his own. I had no particular urge to drag Calvin to China so we stayed behind.

My original plan was to wander the many Hong Kong parks and let Calvin play while I took advantage of the wifi. However, upon looking at the forecast and noting their predicted heavy rain, I decided a different excursion may be in order.

I looked through our Hong Kong for Kids book and decided to try Bumble Tots. It's an indoor playground designed for kids 10 and under. The downside is it took 4 train changes to get there. I think Calvin has had enough subway trains at this point that he's getting a little blase about them. I was hoping to grab an early lunch before we got there but failed to find the nearby food the guidebook suggested should exist. Calvin and I were both getting grumpy on the extended hike so I gave up on that suggestion and hoped the cafe within the facility actually had food we could eat.

Calvin had a lot of fun at Bumble Tots. It is a very large playground-like place that has ball pits for kids to scramble through, large trampolines, and numerous other things for Calvin to play with. The guidebook warned that it could get very crowded on weekends and I thought since it was raining, we were likely to get extra crowded. However, it wasn't bad while we were there. Calvin ran around like a crazy person. We managed to sustain ourselves on muffins and apple juice from the small cafe until I decided it was time to leave around 2pm.

My next stop was a library, which was on the way back to the MTR station. I planned to stop there just long enough to email my latest journals and make sure there wasn't any urgent email. It took a little longer than I expected because wifi kept dropping off but Calvin managed to amuse himself looking through some sort of Chinese grade-school reader.

As we were leaving the library, Calvin said he wanted to go play on the playground in the nearby park. I was a little dubious since the rain was pretty heavy but figured we could try it. The playground had a covered area

with benches so I sat there while Calvin joyfully scampered around in the rain. We stayed there for more than an hour till I finally decided it was time for us to leave. Calvin was completely soaked. I was only mostly soaked.

Getting back to the hotel involved the same 4 trains and it took close to an hour to get back to the hotel. We picked up more food for supper and then came back to the hotel and flopped down exhausted. Calvin ate supper and then climbed into bed, though it took him quite a bit to actually fall asleep. Even so, I'm getting spoiled with how easy it is to put him to bed these days. I am not looking forward to back home when we have to cajole him forcefully to stay in bed.

The Noonday Gun

Sunday, according to Jaeger

After I returned from Guangzhou, we had one full day left in Hong Kong and only a handful of things left that we wanted to do. We took MTR to Causeway Bay and ended up in the basement of the Sogo department store, where we found a little bakery where we bought a snack, then took it down the street to Victoria Park to eat while overlooking the model boat pond, which was notably missing any model boats for Calvin to watch.

I wanted to see the Noonday Gun, which was a few blocks away on a little inlet, surrounded by reclaimed land, that used to be a promontory in the harbor. The gun is fired every day at noon by Jardine Matheson, for ambiguous historical reasons that have been entirely replaced by tradition. I had some trouble actually finding the site; Google Maps on my phone showed what I thought was a pedestrian walkway over a busy road but I couldn't actually find it on the ground and walked an extra hundred meters to an overpass I could see, arriving with only a few minutes to spare. A crowd had assembled to watch the spectacle: a guard loaded an artillery piece mounted on the ground with a blank shell, rang the bell signaling the end of the watch, fired the gun, rang the bell again, and let the spectators back into the site so they could get a closer look at the gun. It was almost anti-climatic, but also amusing, but Calvin was not impressed by the loud noise.

On our way back I discovered that the pedestrian crossing I saw was an underpass that we'd walked past because the entrance was hidden in a hotel basement with a door that opened into an alley. Had we been coming from the other direction we would have seen the sign but apparently no one expected us to come in the direction we chose.

Despite having recently eaten a snack, we decided to go ahead and eat lunch at Kung Tak Lam Shanghai Vegetarian Cuisine. Finding the place was easier said than done; even given the location and Google Maps on my phone I had trouble figuring out exactly how I was supposed to enter the building and ended up going around the block the long way. Once we were in the building we were confused by the elevator access until we realized that they were double-decker elevators, each stopping on alternate floors, and to get to the tenth floor we had to go down to the ground floor and catch the elevator there. I thought the food was good, and the view of the harbor from the tenth floor was nice, even though we were seated on the opposite side of the dining room.

My plan was to take the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour from Causeway Bay, and then back to Central, so we could get the authentic ferry experience on a clear day, but Calvin thought he'd had enough ferries, so we took MTR instead. I wanted to visit the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Museum, to get a Hong Kong-based perspective on the revolutionary leader, especially after seeing the People's Republic's view in Guangzhou the previous day, so we took MTR to Central and took the covered Mid-Level Escalator high above Central and the harbor on our way to the museum.

The museum was in a building that was historic in its own right, and the displays went into the history of the building, but Calvin was not especially enthralled by the building or the displays but was amused by watching the animated video (narrated alternatingly in Mandarin and Cantonese, and subtitled in English, but Calvin didn't want me to read the subtitles to him). Kiesa found a children's play room with some coloring materials for him while I looked through the rest of the museum at a somewhat more rapid pace than I might otherwise have preferred. I knew most of the history but the artifacts and other displays were interesting. One gallery was dedicated to Sun's experience in the Chinese community in Singapore, one of the places he found support for his revolutionary ideas.

After I finished looking through the museum it was late afternoon. We'd finished my list of things I wanted to see, and we decided we owed Calvin a playground, so we headed over to the playground at the Hong Kong Zoological And Botanical Gardens, walking through a gathering that might have been a religious service or might have been a protest to get there. While Calvin played I took advantage of the free wifi to sync my tablet with the rest of the world.

Having eaten a large lunch, we didn't feel the need for a large supper but did want a snack of some sort, so we went to Starbucks for drinks and baked goods before heading back to the hotel one last time. I suggested that we take the tram back, and Calvin liked the idea, but Kiesa didn't like the slow street tram and took MTR back instead. Calvin and I walked to the tram stop and waited for a tram to arrive that had enough space that we could actually board it. Several trams later we actually managed to board one, and climbed to the second floor in hopes of getting at least a view if not a seat. After several stops a seat opened up, and the people standing near the seat offered it to Calvin and I since Calvin was a small child. We sat in the seat and looked out at the lights of the city roll by. My first experience on the tram, heading back to the hotel in a jet-lag haze eight days ago, felt like an eternity ago; our time in Hong Kong was almost up, but we still had another four days in East Asia before flying home.

Back at the hotel Calvin went to sleep while Kiesa and I packed to fly to Taipei the next day for the last part of our adventure.

The Ninth Day

Sunday, according to Kiesa

Jaeger got in around 11pm last night and we had no specific plans for today so spent a leisurely morning waking up. Eventually, we made it out of the hotel and found a great bakery near one of the MTR stops for 2nd breakfast. We ate it in Victoria Park while Calvin watched model boats meandering around the little pond.

After that, we walked several blocks to hear the Noonday Gun which, predictably, fires at noon every day. Apparently exactly why it fires at noon is somewhat debatable. We almost got there a bit late having had trouble crossing the busy road. Google implied there should be a way across but it wasn't obvious. We did make it there on time and only, as we were leaving, realized the route meant going under the road, not over. If we'd come from the other direction it would have been obvious but the secret doorway was too easy to miss coming from Victoria Park.

After that, we went for lunch. Yes, we'd recently had second breakfast but when planning the day it wasn't obvious they'd be so close together. I thought it was prudent to go ahead and eat at a place we'd already vetted than hope for the best later on in a new location. Lunch was good and Calvin managed to keep his mess to a reasonable minimum, which was good because we had real tablecloths.

The plan after lunch was to take a ride on the Star Ferry but Calvin announced himself to be tired of ferries. I'm afraid we're using alternate transportation enough these days that he's starting to get rather jaded. So far, we've gone through trains, planes, and ferries. He still seems to have some enthusiasm for the tram, probably because I think it's inefficient and have been avoiding it.

Since Calvin wasn't interested in the ferry we moved to our next item which was visiting the Dr. Sun Yat Sen museum. No doubt Jaeger will talk in length about him so go read his entry once he's written it. It isn't a particularly child-friendly museum but they did have an amusing animated cartoon for kids summarizing his life as well as some coloring pages. Calvin was entranced by the cartoon though the audio alternated between Cantonese and Mandarin so I'm not sure how much he got from it. There were English subtitles but Calvin always gets upset when I try to read subtitles to him so I've stopped doing so.

We had some unscheduled time after the museum so went to the playground in the zoological gardens which was fairly close to the museum. There were a lot of kids and at first Calvin just hung out around the edges but eventually started getting involved.

For supper, we went to Starbucks and had drinks and a pastry each. Jaeger has introduced me to the "short" hot chocolate size which is perfect because I think it's an actual 8 oz rather than the over-sized cup you get otherwise. It doesn't appear on the menu but if you order it, they provide (though always appear a bit confused when they learn it's not for a child).

For our return trip Jaeger suggested we take the street tram back. As previously mentioned, I'm not a fan of it so I suggested he and Calvin take it back while I take MTR. Jaeger agreed and I took the opportunity of stopping by the bakery we found that morning to pick up more items for tomorrow. In spite of my detour, I still beat Jaeger and Calvin back by a significant margin.

Calvin must be getting acclimated to this time zone. He voluntarily climbed into his bed but is still singing to himself and occasionally asking us to do things for him.

Leaving Hong Kong

Monday, according to Jaeger

After ten days in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, it was time to bid the former colony farewell and head across the South China Sea for a few days in Taiwan on our way back home. I think we spent about the right amount of time in Hong Kong, enough that we could see what we wanted to see without feeling rushed and not so much that we got bored.

We ate breakfast in our hotel's restaurant, finished our packing, and checked out, leaving a sizable charge on my credit card. (In preparation for this trip, I found a Bank of America Visa chip-and-signature card with no international transaction fee. Every time a merchant used the embedded smart card to complete a transaction, rather than using the magnetic strip, I felt smug.)

We took a taxi from the hotel's taxi stand (barely fitting our luggage into the tiny Toyota; I believe the driver used a bungee cord to hold the trunk shut, and I had visions of our luggage strewn all over the road) to Hong Kong Station, where we checked into our flight (at the train station, still on Hong Kong Island) and learned that we didn't have a window seat for Calvin's car seat, so we had to check it. We took the Airport Express train from the station straight to the airport, then bumbled around a bit trying to find the baggage storage counter (which I expected to be easier to find), where other passengers seemed horribly confused by the whole process and took much longer than seemed strictly necessary. We walked through the cavernous halls that we'd first encountered when we arrived ten days prior, which seemed somehow less foreboding in the late-morning light when we'd actually had a decent night's sleep.

By this point it was late morning, and our flight didn't depart until early evening, so my plan called for us to visit the giant Buddha in the middle of Lantau Island, a short distance from the airport. We caught a bus that meandered through the airport and the adjacent office buildings before finally depositing us in front of the Ngong Ping 360 cable car (really, a gondola with a funny name). I gaped when I saw the line, snaking up and over and back and forth a pedestrian bridge, and inquired how long the wait might be. An hour and a half, I learned, which would eat up almost all of the time I was actually planning on spending at the top -- assuming we could actually get down in a timely fashion (which seemed unlikely, given the number of people that were likely to be at the top). This seemed unworkable, so we retreated to have a pre-lunch snack in the sun while we waited for my glorious plan to catch up with reality. This accomplished, with no other options presenting themselves, we looked around the local nexus of commerce in search of something interesting and failed; there was a mall with a sizable (and packed) food court but nothing looked especially vegetarian.

This left us with nothing to do but head back to the airport, a couple of hours early. We caught the bus back, picked up our luggage, and ate an acceptable lunch at a French-inspired deli on the arrivals level before taking the escalator up to the departures level, where I looked through a bookstore and eventually bought a copy of The Economist. Then we spotted a restaurant with vegetarian entrees clearly marked on the menu and decided to reward their good behavior, even though we weren't exactly hungry from our earlier lunch.

While we ate, I tried to get an actual seat assignment on our flight leaving Taiwan at the end of the week. This gained new urgency when we were reminded that Calvin needed a window seat for his car seat (even on a wide-body jet, where we could hypothetically put him in the very middle and have direct aisle access on both sides), but I was also a little worried by the note on the website of Taiwan's immigration service that US passport holders needed a confirmed seat on a flight out of the country to be eligible for visa-free entry. We had a confirmed flight but not a seat because the first leg of our trip home was a code-share on ANA. (When we checked in to our flight to Taiwan, the airline agent carefully scrutinized our onward flight and entered some of the information into the computer. I booked our major intercontinental flights on one, open-jaw United reservation and booked a separate, one-way ticket from Hong Kong to Taiwan.)

Some of my Internet searches had led me to believe that I needed to call ANA to ask for a seat. (They'd also suggested trying to log into ANA's website using various combinations of my name, including "THEODOREMR", which I tried, repeatedly, to no avail.) This was on my list of things to do before leaving home, but not being a big fan of calling strangers in call centers and asking them for things, I prioritized Verizon (to get the GSM unlock code for my phone) and Bank of America (to make sure my credit card worked in Hong Kong) higher than ANA. So I dug up the Hong Kong number for ANA reservations and called. The customer support representative, once I got through to a human, answered in Cantonese, then tried Mandarin, and finally switched to English when I started talking in English, but told me she "couldn't touch" the seats and told me to call United. I complained that the universe was not providing the positive reinforcement I needed for my valiant effort at making a phone call, so Kiesa took my notes and called United, who said, no, we can't give you a seat on an ANA flight but we can ask ANA for one. Just for good measure she called ANA back and they told her exactly the same thing they told me. I wanted to lock both customer support reps in the same room and let them both out when they agreed to give me a seat, but, unfortunately, that didn't seem like a viable option.

(Kiesa later found some forums that suggested that United owned blocks of seats on its partners' code-share flights -- the seats that my ANA representative "couldn't touch" -- and that these seats were released twenty-four hours in advance of the flight. This seemed to match our experience: we were assigned our seats, including a window, almost exactly twenty-four hours before our flight departed.)

With our second lunch completed, we headed for security (where it felt, somehow, wrong to walk through the metal detector with my shoes on) and immigration (where we formally departed the Hong Kong SAR with decisive stamps in our passports) and found a children's play area for Calvin to amuse himself while we waited for our flight. We made our way to our gate, where we found a Hong Kong Airlines A330 waiting to take us to Taiwan.

At length we queued, boarded, and departed for the two-hour flight to Taiwan. I was sitting in one of the middle seats of the middle column of seats, thwarting any hope I might have had of seeing anything out the window, so I had to trace our progress on the map on my entertainment system. I'd also forgotten to check whether I could request a vegetarian meal (not being used to getting meals on anything less than a major intercontinental flight -- this flight was technically international, but not really any longer than flying to Seattle), so when the meal came Kiesa declined hers but I gave it a shot; I ate the thick noodle (with, I noted with disappointment, a fork) and skipped the mysterious balls served with it.

I spotted a few lights out the window on our approach into Taipei but didn't really get a good look as we landed and taxied to the gate. We shuffled out the plane into the international arrivals hallway and eventually into the immigration queues. I was carrying Calvin since we didn't have his car seat and its stroller wheels, so the guard overlooking the queues quickly waved us from the "foreigner" queue to the "carried babies" queue, which was so short I barely had enough time to grab our passports to present them to the immigration officer. He did not inquire as to the nature of our seat reservations for our departure and simply stamped our passports and let us into the country.

Once we retrieved our bags (our car seat seemed to take a while) and walked through customs we found a driver, sent by our hotel, holding my name at the arrivals gauntlet. I stopped by the local ATM for some New Taiwan Dollars (which I promptly put in my wallet next to the People's Currency I still possessed) and headed out to the curb to wait for our driver to pick up his car and pick us up. We drove from the airport to the city and I marveled at the giant, still-under-construction concrete viaducts on both sides of the divided highway. I caught my first glimpse of Taipei 101 as we drove.

We checked into Ambience Hotel Taipei, a small boutique hotel with a modern decor, that was almost nothing like the generic-but-comfortable hotel we left in Hong Kong that morning. We ended up with one king bed for the three of us, which Calvin thought was great as he settled into bed. I checked in with the world to verify that it was still there (and that my home country was still running, head-first, off the fiscal cliff) and tried to figure out if I was ambitious enough to go find somewhere to watch the massive fireworks show on Taipei 101. I finally decided that, no, I was not quite ambitious enough to brave the crowds in a city I didn't know just to see a giant, 188-second New Year's fireworks display, and went to bed.

The Tenth Day

Monday, according to Kiesa

Monday was the last day we were going to be in Hong Kong. However, our flight left a little after 5pm so we had a bit of time, theoretically. We got a taxi from the hotel to the Airport Express station, which is near central Hong Kong, where we were able to check-in and drop off our checked in luggage. Unfortunately, we learned they didn't have any window seats left on the flight so we had to check Calvin's car seat as well.

Once we did that, we took the MTR train to the actual airport where we dropped off a couple of our carry-on bags with a "left luggage" service. Then we got on a bus and with the plan of taking the Ngong Ping 360 cable car to the Tian Tan Buddha. Unfortunately, when we got there, it appeared that everyone else also wanted to take the cable car. The line was at least an hour and a half long which might have left enough time to make it across but wouldn't let us do anything once we got there.

We ate the pastries I had gotten the previous night in hopes of it inspiring some great plan. However, the options available were not good. Eventually we wandered around the adjacent outlet mall looking for something vegetarian for a real lunch and couldn't find anything. So, we found a bus to take us back to the airport. The upside of the journey is it was a double-decker bus and we got to sit on top at the very front. Calvin definitely enjoyed that part of the trip.

We got back the airport, grabbed our left luggage, and headed over to terminal one. We found a deli we had eaten at before and ordered some sandwiches. However, they were less satisfying than we hoped (The vegetarian sandwich consisted of a baguette with lettuce, tomato, and hard-boiled egg. I'm not vegan but I don't like egg when I can taste it).

We wandered closer to security and discovered another restaurant that had vegetarian items clearly marked on the menu (a very rare event). We felt the needed to reward good behavior so we decided to eat there too. We got a little pizza for Calvin, a lasagna for me, and Jaeger got a curry. The curry was pretty good. The lasagna was completely overwhelmed by massive amounts of cheese. I do like cheese but this was going behind what I was able to consume, especially since I wasn't really hungry.

While there, we tried to get seats for our flight from Taipei to Hong Kong. Jaeger booked via United's website but this leg of the journey was flown by ANA. Unfortunately, each airline claimed the other one was responsible for getting us seats. We called ANA, then United, then ANA and never got a satisfactory response. This is important to me because we do have reserved seats for all other legs and I really want to bring Calvin's car seat on with us.

Our flight for Taiwan departed and was fairly short. We arrived in the Taipei airport and walked past a line specifically for disabled people and those carrying babies. We started to queue in the normal non-resident line but one of the immigration staff people saw us and indicated we should go in the almost non-existent carrying baby line. It is true that Jaeger was carrying Calvin at that exact point but we had thought he was a bit big for the exception. Due to the special line we made it through immigration faster than I ever have anywhere before. It was magical.

Most of our luggage arrived promptly except for our car seat which made me nervous. However, it did eventually arrive and we headed out past customs to find a driver for the hotel waiting for us. It was a fairly long ride to the hotel and Calvin fell asleep just a couple of minutes before we got there.

The hotel itself is very modern-looking, not quite my style. However, the staff are very friendly and so far seem to speak excellent English which is nice. Also, they have a tub! Our hotel in Hong Kong, while nice, only had a shower and as a result, Calvin hasn't had a bath for too many days. It was too late for a bath the night we arrived but I am hoping that we'll have a chance to use it later.

Our hotel in Hong Kong was a suite. However, the one in Taipei is only a one-bed room. However, the bed is a king bed so we're all trying to sleep in it together as one big happy family. Calvin is ecstatic though the rest of us are a little less excited and hope it'll actually work out.

Provisional capital

Tuesday, according to Jaeger

I woke briefly to the noise of the fireworks celebrating the dawn of 2013 (at least, in the local time zone, GMT + 8) and vaguely regretted not watching the display, or at least picking a hotel where I could see Taipei 101 out my window, then went back to sleep.

By the time we drug ourselves out of bed in the morning, I was afraid we'd missed the hotel's breakfast (included in the price of our room), but when we headed down to the lobby to solicit recommendations of somewhere else to go for breakfast we found that breakfast was still available (until ten, we were told), but they didn't actually have any room for us, so the woman in the breakfast area took our room number and promised to call us when there was space. She did, about a minute before ten, so we headed back downstairs to eat. The breakfast was not quite as expansive as the hotel breakfast in Hong Kong, but it was more than adequate to get us started in the morning. (Also, the price was good.)

I grabbed a tourist map (in English) from the display in the hotel lobby, then headed out into the streets to begin exploring the city. My phone wouldn't roam on the local GSM network, where it would (allegedly) get some data coverage, so I was stuck navigating the city without my trusted friend and advisor Google Maps. (Taipei did have a desultory, voice-only CDMA network where I could at least send text messages to Twitter, at US$0.50 each.) We were located somewhere between the Zhongshan and Zhongzheng regions of the city, in a neighborhood that looked mostly residential but had a fair number of shops at ground level, closed for New Year's Day. (Taiwan, in its guise as the Republic of China, celebrates 1 January as Founding of the Republic of China, which happens to coincide with New Year's Day on the Gregorian calendar. They count years from the foundation of the republic in 1912, so most of our receipts gave the year as 102.)

We found a nearby metro stop; Taipei's metro system used the same three letters we were used to from Hong Kong but in a different order, so we had to get used to calling it MRT. This system's payment scheme was nearly identical to the Guangzhou metro: I bought single-journey plastic tokens from a touch-screen vending machine, usually paying somewhere between NT$20 and NT$30 for each adult ticket (between sixty US cents and a dollar). Unlike Hong Kong, on this system Calvin was free because he was under six. (Kiesa began to wonder if we should have been traveling in Taiwan earlier to take full advantage of the deference they gave to families with young children.)

We took the metro a couple of stops to the 228 Peace Park, which was first built as a park during the Japanese colonial administration (1895-1945) and was dedicated to the victims of the Nationalist's military rule, starting with a demonstration on 28 February 1947 (hence the "2/28"). We wandered through the park in the light rain, then headed to the museum that gave the context for the events, housed in an old radio broadcasting building. I picked up an English audio guide, which was handy because almost all of the text inside the museum was in Chinese only, leaving me to wonder at times exactly what I was looking at. I knew enough of Chinese history to have a reasonable idea what was going on but I hadn't studied this event in detail, so I actually learned a fair amount in the little museum. Calvin got bored quickly (the subject matter was far above his pay grade) so Kiesa took him out to a playground on the southern end of the park.

When I finished looking through the museum, I found Kiesa hiding under a large concrete slide while Calvin played in the light rain. It was clearly lunchtime, so I scoured my guidebook for hints and found Loving Hut, a vegan Chinese restaurant chain on the street adjacent to the park, so we walked in search of the restaurant and found it a couple of blocks away. Like most of our Chinese meals, I tried to order two main dishes, something with noodle and something with tofu, in hopes that Calvin would eat something and Kiesa and I would eat the rest. Calvin never had much chopstick technique to begin with, but Kiesa's chopstick technique seemed much improved well into our second week in East Asia.

After lunch we walked back through the park in the direction of the massive Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. This took us across several streets, most of which featured crosswalks with an animated man (lit up in green LEDs) to indicate the phase of the light. When the light changes, the animated man starts strolling, but as the count decreases he starts running. (Here's a video on youtube, if you're into that sort of thing.) (While waiting for the train in one metro stop I saw an ad on the television suspended above the platform in which the animated man jumps down from the crosswalk light and proceeds to run around the city.)

We walked through the massive classical Chinese gates to see, framed in the distance opposite a large walkway, the massive monument dedicated to Taiwan's iconic (and controversial) leader. It was obvious that we weren't in Hong Kong any more because of how much land in the middle of the city was being used by this one monument; in retrospect the layout reminds me a bit of Rajpath in New Delhi or the National Mall in Washington, DC. I cursed the rain that would make any attempts at photographing the monument as we walked toward it.

The main steps leading straight up the outside of the monument were closed for renovation, so we walked around to a side entrance and took the elevator up to the main hall, featuring a giant bronze statue of the Generalissimo on a large pedestal in the massive hall, smiling benevolently from his perch. He was flanked by two stony-faced honor guards wearing helmets polished to a shine, carrying bayonetted rifles. (Calvin chose this opportunity to ask what the knives on the end of their guns were for; I equivocated.) We were about fifteen minutes from the elaborate changing of the guard at the top of the hour, so we went down one flight of stairs to look at some artwork and calligraphy on display before returning in time to see a trio of guards march slowly in from a side entrance. (I put Calvin up on my shoulders so he could watch the spectacle.) The changing of the guard was, as had been advertised, elaborately choreographed; the new guards marched in and proceeded to salute, swap rifles, and eventually marched into place on their positions flanking the statue while the guards they replaced marched out. Once the new guards were in place a handler in a suit came up to straighten each guard's coat and tassels so they were picture-perfect for the next hour.

With the spectacle complete, we headed down to the ground floor and looked through the gift shop (which put Chiang's face on everything imaginable and almost seemed to rival Mao in the cult-of-personality contest; and also put the Nationalist star on the trinkets representing the entire island of Taiwan, which I thought a good chunk of the population might not appreciate) before getting a snack at the local cafe. I tried bubble tea, which was interesting but not entirely compelling. I left Kiesa and Calvin in the cafe and looked through the exhibit hall, which showed artifacts from Chiang's life and told an edited version of his life in convenient bilingual signs. (As an amateur Sinologist I thought their choices in what to leave out were just as interesting as the artifacts they included.)

Content with my appointment with the Generalissimo, at least for this trip, I found Calvin in the cafe evading a tourist's camera and tried to convince him to show his face for the photo but failed. We left the temple to Chiang and headed to the nearest metro stop, which we took to Longshan Temple, a massive combined Buddhist and Taoist temple near the river in an older section of the city. We arrived at dusk and found the temple packed by worshipers, most of whom seemed to be waving lit incense about. Many had left offerings of food to the icons distributed around the temple. I found a pamphlet in English describing the temple and learned that one of the icons in back was Mazu, the local goddess of the sea, known in Hong Kong as Tin Hau.

We headed back to the metro in search of King Join, a vegetarian restaurant my guidebook recommended several stops to the east. I made a wrong turn navigating a roundabout joining two major boulevards and ended up walking down the wrong side street but managed to fix my mistake and sneak up on the restaurant from the other side. This restaurant advertised cuisine from imperial Beijing, but I was insufficiently well-versed in Chinese cuisine to tell the difference, except that I enjoyed eating it. (This was the first time that I've ever paid for dinner with a single thousand-dollar bill, worth about US$33.)

We took the metro back to our hotel and settled in for the night.

The Eleventh Day

Tuesday, according to Kiesa

Today was our first full day in Taiwan. The prior night was New Year's Eve and had been pretty noisy. Lots of people talking and we could also hear the fireworks from Taipei 101 (I believe Jaeger briefly contemplated going to see them but decided it'd be too much work and bed would be nicer). The king bed is technically more than big enough for the three of us but Calvin squirms a lot. Eventually, I figured out that he was too warm under the covers and put a little blanket we had brought with us on top of him instead and that seemed to reduce, though not eliminate, his thrashing. In any case, we all woke up fairly late.

The hotel provides breakfast but I thought when we checked in they said it ended at 8:30. That seemed kind of early to me for New Years Day but I was fairly certain that's what I had heard. Since Jaeger didn't stir until it was past 8:30, I started looking for alternative breakfast alternatives without much success. Once everyone was ready Jaeger also looked but we eventually concluded that we'd have to ask the hotel for recommendations.

We got down to the reception desk and learned that breakfast was still ongoing. However, all the tables were full so they requested we go back to our room and they'd call us when ready. Right about the time we were worried they had forgotten us, they called. We went down and had a really good breakfast. The pickings were a little slim compared to what had obviously already been there but I think it's the best free hotel breakfast I've had. I was expecting something like a continental breakfast but this was a full buffet brunch.

After breakfast we set off to explore Taiwan. It was immediately obvious there was a lot less English compared to Hong Kong, not too surprising. Also, I am amused by their crosswalk signals. The crosswalks have animated green men that "walk" when it's time to cross the street. However, when it gets close to turning red, the little animated man stops strolling and bursts into a run.

We found the subway system here (which is the MRT compared with Hong Kong's MTR) and got tokens for our destination. Hong Kong's system seems to have more bells and whistles but this one still works well. Our first stop was a visit to the 2-28 Peace Park which I'm sure Jaeger will discuss more. The park looked nice but there was a steady drizzle so it wasn't very comfortable. We went into the 2-28 museum which Jaeger was interested in. Calvin and I wandered around in it a bit but I kept having trouble figuring out how to explain the concept of war to him at an age appropriate level.

Eventually, I gave up and shepherded Calvin out to the nearby playground and huddled under some scanty covering (the drizzle had turned into real rain) while Calvin amused himself. Eventually, Jaeger came out and we contemplated lunch.

Unlike Hong Kong, we didn't get a SIM for Ted's phone so we were cutoff from cheating with a live Google maps. However, Ted found, and successfully navigated us to a vegan chain restaurant called "Loving Hut." The food was good and we set out again. This time our objective was the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.

I was really surprised when we arrived. I was expecting another museum-looking building but the architecture of the complex is amazingly grand. I was quite disappointed that the weather made taking good pictures extremely unlikely.

Inside, we wandered around for a bit and had a chance to see the changing of the guard. The ceremony is fairly elaborate and Calvin got a good view on Jaeger's shoulders. However, the highlight for me was when the new guards had positioned themselves like statues at either end of the very large commemorative statue. A security guard came out and, while the guards stood as motionless as mannequin, moved their hands just a tad, tugged the uniform into precisely the right folds and basically ensured that the guards in their stationary position were picture perfect. It was kind of odd to watch.

We wandered around a bit more and got some hot drinks for snack. While Calvin was still nursing his large-to-him hot chocolate, Jaeger wandered off to another gallery. I stayed and read while Calvin finished and then, deciding Calvin wasn't up to more museum, decided to let him watch a tv episode on the iPad while we waited. Eventually, I decided we had spent too long hogging the bench so I started to gather our things together. As I was placing things into the backpack, a man sheepishly approached me and said his sister, who did not appear to speak English, would like to take a picture with Calvin. I sad they could try but warned Calvin was very shy. Calvin, predictably, squirmed and I'm not sure of they got a good picture of not but by then Jaeger appeared and we wandered off.

Our last tourist stop was a Buddhist temple a couple of subway stops away. Unlike the ones we had seen in Hong Kong, this one was actually packed with worshipers. It was a very elaborate temple and very interesting but it was crowded and much of the walkways weren't covered so it was pretty wet. Because I mostly carry Calvin on my back I feel very large and have trouble navigating many of the smaller spaces we end up in while sightseeing. Unlike a backpack, Calvin's legs and arms can randomly shoot out and cause unintended havoc.

After that, we found supper at another vegetarian restaurant. I wasn't very hungry but didn't want to discourage Jaeger from eating. We made a wrong turn but did eventually find the right place. The food was good but when we finished I was relieved to be heading back to the hotel. Once back, we gave Calvin a bath and put him to bed but he seems to have fully adjusted to the time change (which is the same as Hong Kong) and resisted falling asleep for quite a long time.

Sunology

Wednesday, according to Jaeger

On our second of three days in Taipei, the weather looked warmer and drier than it had been the previous day (or would be the next day), so I shuffled my plans and decided to visit the outdoor-heavy things I wanted to see in Taipei.

On our way to the metro I spotted an odd display of public art under an elevated expressway that, when I looked closer, I realized was a bunch of PC motherboards arranged in an artful fashion. I crossed the street to get a closer look and saw a sign written in Chinese but for the brand name Asus. It was a concrete reminder of a more recent development in Taiwan's history: the ascendency of its electronics industry, which started as a low-value-add manufacturer (like Shenzhen today) and successfully climbed the value-add ladder (and is in the process of reinventing itself, once again, as portable PCs are replaced by mobile devices).

Our first stop was the Taipei Zoo, in the outskirts of town at the end of the brown line on the metro map. This line turned out to be more of a people-mover than a 'proper' heavy-rail metro line; it ran automated cars on concrete rails on a viaduct elevated above the street. The zoo's admission was cheap with the help of the exchange rate: At NT$60 per adult (Calvin was free), our entire family paid about US$4.

We headed straight to the zoo's premier exhibit, the giant pandas. The exhibit was clearly set up for crowd control, but on a Wednesday morning there were only a few other zoo visitors looking at the pandas. (One of the guidebooks I read suggested that office workers might also get the day after New Year's Day off, so I had expected some more people, but there were far fewer than the zoo was designed to handle.) One panda was lounging in the outdoor habitat, and another panda was lounging in the indoor habitat. Neither did very much, so the whole thing was a bit anti-climatic, but I did appreciate being able to see a giant panda in East Asia.

We walked past a koala perched in a tree (which Calvin was not even the slightest bit interested in) and headed to the children's zoo, which was populated mostly by domestic farm animals (with a Taiwanese twist), many of them first introduced to the island by the Dutch colonists hundreds of years ago.

We stopped for a snack at the 7-11 inside the zoo (and I searched for sweetened green tea by checking the calorie count; I recognized the character for tea, 茶 (in Mandarin, chá)), then headed through the section featuring Taiwanese animals. (I decided to skip the North American animals further inside the zoo, since I don't have to go very far from home to see raccoons or coyotes.) They had an assortment of indigenous deer and pigs and bears, plus a large habitat with a colony of monkeys being fed small chunks of banana by a zookeeper as we passed.

When we finished looking at the Taiwanese animals it was noon and time to start thinking about lunch. There was very little in the way of suitable restaurants for lunch in the vicinity of the zoo, so we looked at the cafe in the building housing the panda exhibit and ate lunch there, which was quite good by captive zoo-food standards. We bought Calvin panda flip-flops in the little shop in the panda shop, which he seemed amused by.

Our next stop was the Maokong Gondola, climbing from the zoo to a tea-tourism area in the hills above Taipei. My guidebook cautioned the wait might be excessive, but like the zoo, staging our visit in the middle of the week meant there was basically no line whatsoever. We decided to skip the transparent-floor option and go for the traditional, boring, opaque-floor gondola cabs. The gondola whisked us up over the jungle and up and down the hills, ultimately climbing 275 meters in 4 kilometers, with two stops along the way.

As we climbed, I studied the jungle-covered hills and the surrounding countryside, bisected by a major superhighway that disappeared into a tunnel to go under the hill under the gondola. It was still hazy, so I couldn't see the entire basin in which the city of Taipei sat, but I could see the apartment buildings and houses clinging to the edges of the valley below and Taipei 101 peeking coyly above the ridge, floating ethereally in the haze. (It's visible over my left shoulder in the photo below.)

At the top of the gondola we found ourselves perched on the side of the hills to the south-east of Taipei in a flock of tourists. Taiwan is known for its partially-fermented oolong teas, and the region we were in once actually grew tea but is now dedicated to tea tourism. We headed out in search of the Taipei Tea Promotion Center along a road that wound its way roughly to the east. We found the center closed, presumably for the extended holiday, and headed back in the direction we came. I wanted to stop at a tea house for some local oolong tea but I needed an English menu, being not quite adept at ordering in Chinese. I looked at one menu, clearly in English, that didn't actually serve tea but had a good selection of Celestial Seasonings herb teas. I found another, somewhat-more-authentic tea house with a helpful English menu. I ended up with a High Mountain Oolong, which turned out to be iced, which was quite good. Kiesa ordered fried sweet potato for a snack.

We headed back to the gondola and took it back down the mountain. We let Calvin play in a playground near the base of the gondola while we sheltered from the light drizzle in the covered portion of the play equipment. I looked at our time and decided we had just enough time to see the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (including another changing of the guard at the top of the hour), so we headed back to the metro, braving the early-rush-hour traffic, and scurried into the massive building just as the changing of the guard was getting underway. As this was apparently the last guard change of the day (at 17:00), all of the guards marched slowly out, leaving the giant statue of Sun Yat-sen unguarded.

My guidebook indicated that this site is popular with tourists from mainland China, since Sun is regarded as a founding father of both Chinas. We were clearly not the only tourists there, though we may have been the only white-skinned tourists, as a flock of women descended on Calvin as soon as the changing of the guard was over and tried to take his picture, with varying levels of success. One woman handed me her phone to try to get a picture of her with Calvin and I noticed it was made by Huawei, and I wondered how popular Huawei phones were in Taiwan or if this was a clear indication that its owner was from the mainland.

Once the flock of tourists subsided, Kiesa took Calvin outside and I took a quick look through the galleries displaying various artifacts from Sun's life. One gallery tried, with what I can only assume was a straight face, to draw connections between Sun and Taiwan (which was, during Sun's life, a Japanese colony). Sun is the "father of the Chinese nation" in the sense that Taiwan is the Republic of China, which tries to impose a national identity on Taiwan and its people that is based on a pan-Chinese identity. While contemplating this at the museum I barely resisted the urge to start taking notes for a dissertation on "Sunology" and nation-building in Taiwan, comparing Taiwan's experience as a Japanese colony to its takeover by the Nationalists immediately after WWII and their attempt at imposing their own national identity.

I exited the hall to the south and immediately saw an excellent view of Taipei 101 across the fountain and plaza forming the grounds of the memorial hall. As I sat there watching the fountain and the tourists milling around, the honor guard appeared to my right, marching out of the memorial hall in the direction of the main flagpole on the other side of the fountain. (There were flags everywhere in the grounds around the memorial hall: they were planted every several meters around the fountain and on many of the main walkways. Some streets in the city had just as many flags. I couldn't help but wonder if the flags wax and wane depending on which party holds power in the city or national government.) They lowered the flag while music played (which I took to be the national anthem; Kiesa and I decided we ought to stand up like everyone else), then marched off the scene, attended by a couple of handlers in suits who managed crowd control.

(We saw on display two of the three essential national symbols by Willy's reckoning: a flag and an anthem. To see the third we needed to drive to the airport: a flag carrier with a 747 and landing rights at Heathrow.)

We headed back to the metro in search of our selection for supper, a small restaurant I found on the vegetarian restaurant listing website Happy Cow called PP 99 Cafe. I carefully recorded the location on the Google map, as reported by Happy Cow, in my notes for the day but did not actually transcribe the address, so when we got off the metro stop and headed down the road indicated on my map in search of the restaurant and came up empty-handed I wasn't quite sure what to do. We turned back, and headed down a side street at random, and just as I was beginning to wonder what our backup plan was, I spotted the restaurant, two blocks away from where the map had (apparently incorrectly) placed it. I wasn't sure whether to attribute the failure to Google Maps' difficulty parsing Taiwanese addresses, or a transcription error in the address, but I couldn't help but wish I had a proper data connection for my phone. (Or at least the ability to download the map for offline use -- Google Maps unhelpfully told me the area was 'unavailable' as an offline map.)

The restaurant itself was a Taiwanese take on a European cafe, serving mostly American dishes with vegetarian Chinese characteristics. I ordered the Ma-Po tofu burger, which was basically as advertised: spicy tofu on a burger bun, and was good, if not exactly what I expected to find when I decided to visit Taipei.

After supper we headed back to our hotel, put Calvin to bed, and I worked on planning our last day in Taiwan.

The Twelfth Day

Wednesday, according to Kiesa

Tuesday night was a lot more restful than our first night in Taiwan. I figured out Calvin slept a lot more comfortably if he had his light blanket I had brought from home rather than the down duvet. As a result, his thrashing was fairly minimal, except when he fell off the bed, which turned out to be an excellent time to take a potty break.

We woke up in time to make it to the hotel breakfast and then came back to plan our day. Jaeger's original idea was to go to the zoo on Thursday but there was a 70% chance of rain for Thursday and only 20% for Wednesday. So, we changed plans and went to the zoo on Wednesday instead. The zoo is insanely cheap. Children under 6 are free and adults are only $2 US. One of the main attractions of this zoo is the pandas. Various reviewers imply the line to see the pandas can get very long. However, the zoo was almost deserted when we arrived so there was no line. One panda ambled a bit outside while one slept inside. They weren't especially exciting but they were interesting to see.

Next, we decided to go to the children's area which has more domestic-type animals. (Though, they also included camels and some monkeys in this exhibit.) On the way to that section we passed a Koala but it was sitting still so we had trouble getting Calvin interested in it.

After the children's area, we looked for snacks at the in-zoo 7-Eleven. There were many interesting looking things but there was little English on the packaging so we played it safe and got a couple containers of chocolate milk and Jaeger got tea. I also bought what I thought was going to be a fruit snack but, if it was, it was very processed and more candy-like than fruit like.

Our last stop in the zoo was the animals native to Taiwan. Since we were in a Taiwan zoo, it seemed to make sense to see those animals rather than the ones imported from the Pacific Northwest. The monkeys were particularly interesting but it was time to start looking for lunch.

There isn't much around the zoo so the food choices in the zoo itself seemed like our best option. We went to a cafe above the Panda area and ordered spaghetti and risotto, both with creamy-vegetable sauce. It was fairly good, for zoo food, and we didn't ask any questions about what was in the sauce. All identifiable bits were vegetarian though they seemed overly fond, from my point of view, of fungi (which seems to be a common failing with Asian cuisine).

After lunch we exited the zoo and took the nearby Maokong Gondola. The start is near the zoo and there are several stops till it finally ends at Maokong, which is known for it's oolong teas. From beginning to end the Gondola goes a little over 4 kilometers, maybe a 20 minute ride, and it goes up and down several hills and ends up around 275 meters from the starting station. The ride provides some fantastic views. Taipei 101 coyly peaks over the hills.

At the top of the gondola there are oodles of tea houses. There's a narrow rode that takes about 20 minutes to walk to its end. We thought we were going to go to a tea promotion center that sounded like it was a small museum. However, it did not appear open when we got there. We went looking for a teahouse to drink tea at. There were many to choose from but a lot of them appeared to be exclusively in Chinese, making it difficult to order. We found one place that look promising and received an English menu. To our surprise, there was almost no tea except for some Celestial Seasoning offerings. It was a little surreal to be on top of a hill in Taipei, known for tea, and be offered herbal tea from Boulder. We did eventually find a place to drink tea and had deep fried sweet potato for a snack. I ordered without thinking and then was a little surprised when Calvin enthusiastically ate it as he claims to not like sweet potato.

We wandered back to the Gondola station and took it down to the bottom. Then we traversed the subway to the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. This would be the third place that Jaeger visit about Dr. Sun Yat-sen but only the second for us. I believe Jaeger was amused to get the Hong Kong, People's Republic of China, and Taiwan view all in the same vacation. We hurried and got there just in time to see another changing of the guard ceremony. It was similar to the one we saw for Chiang Kai-Shek but it was apparently the last one of the day as all the guards marched out together.

The changing of the guards is a great photo opportunity for tourists and many tourists, most we think from mainland China, were gathered around and happily snapping pictures. Once the guards left, they turned their picture-taking attention to Calvin. I lost track of the number of Chinese women that took pictures of Calvin and tried to get him to pose with them. Calvin was not excited about this but played along better than I expected.

After we managed to extract ourselves from the picture taking Calvin and I wandered outside to watch the fountain, which seemed to be choreographed with classical music, while Jaeger continued wandering around the memorial. Just as we were getting ready to leave, we noticed that the guards were marching out to take down the flag. We stayed to watch and Calvin seemed to enjoy it.

After the flag ceremony, we wandered off to look for supper. Once again, Google led us astray but, with a bit of luck, we found our destination, PP 99 Cafe. They're a vegetarian restaurant that serve burgers and other American-type fast food with an Asian twist. For instance, Jaeger got a Ma Po Tofu "Burger" while I got one that was suppose to be vegetarian duck. We got a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich for Calvin. It was really weird but the vegetarian duck sandwich tasted like Adventist food to me. Fake meat is really big in the vegetarian restaurants in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The duck fake meat tasted a lot like the Worthington Chicken Roll which made me wonder about the feasibility of setting up a fake meat store co-run by Buddhist and Adventists.

Living in the future

Thursday, according to Jaeger

I had one big thing I wanted to see on our last day in Taipei: the National Palace Museum, featuring the finest artifacts from Imperial China that the Nationalists moved to Taiwan in advance of the Chinese Civil War and eventually put on display. Getting there involved a metro ride followed by a bus ride. On the metro ride we met a friendly student who introduced himself under the assumed name Elias. When we told him of our plans for the day, he mentioned he went to school down the street from the museum. We got off at the right metro stop but missed the bus stop and Elias ran to catch up with us to point out our mistake. Once we found the right bus he asked if he could join us in the museum to practice his English, and we agreed.

The museum was an imposing building set back from the road in a large complex. We walked through the light rain, up the steps, and into the lobby, then (after buying a ticket and checking my backpack, which was apparently too large, which I found a little irritating because it contained, among other things, an emergency change of clothes for Calvin) entered the museum itself.

Inside the museum we were faced with three stories of galleries packed with historical artifacts, explained in both English and Chinese. (If that wasn't enough, each gallery had pamphlets available in more languages describing the collections in greater detail.) We started in the small display of religious artifacts, which was mostly bronze Buddhas of various descriptions, then headed up to the third floor in hopes of escaping the crowds of tourists. This proved foolish; we ended up in a very long queue to see one of the museum's finest pieces, the Jadeite Cabbage with Insects, which turned a flawed piece of jade into a serious work of art, with the bright green portion carved into the head of the bok choy (a cabbage with Chinese characteristics) and the whiter portion into the stem.

From there we followed the crowd into another gallery displaying intricately-carved bamboo and other works of art. Calvin started to complain that he was hungry, so we skipped the rest of the floor and headed up to the tea room on the fourth floor for a snack. We got drinks and dim sum before heading back into the museum.

While waiting in the queues we talked to Elias about a variety of topics. He mentioned that some of his teachers called politics out as a sensitive topic, and Kiesa and I agreed that it could be sensitive, but we were not generally the sort to get overly worked up about the topic. (We may also have indicated some level of support for our newly-reelected president.) I was also interested in Taiwanese politics; I know what I read in history books, news articles, and on the Internet, but that's a far cry from actually talking to people on the ground. I probed the topic delicately and Elias seemed to indicate broad agreement with the Nationalist thesis that there is one China and Taiwan is part of that China (and, presumably, that the Nationalists ought to be in charge).

After our snack we headed down to the second floor to look at the pottery, and we'd barely made it into the second millennium before Calvin got bored. Kiesa and Calvin left to run around outside, and Elias went with them to pick up his backpack from the same bag-check that I'd left mine in. I worked my way through the galleries, skimming the descriptions and letting the intricately-crafted pottery wash over me. In the sterile setting of the museum it was hard to imagine that the pieces had ever been actually used. The museum arranged the collection chronologically, and traced the evolution of Chinese pottery through the dynasties, ending with the final collapse of the Qing dynasty.

I left the museum after the pottery, skipping the bronzes and many of the other fine works in the museum. I felt that I'd barely scratched the surface, and I could spend a week here without seeing everything the museum had to offer. I headed out to find Kiesa and Calvin and wished we had working accounts for our mobile phones. (Unlike Hong Kong, my guidebook indicated that getting local SIM cards was something of a hassle (though, it appeared, less so than India); I didn't think we were going to be on the ground long enough to bother, but it did restrict our freedom of independent movement somewhat.)

We took the bus back to the metro, then took the metro to the Taiwan Handicraft Promotion Center, which featured four stories of goods produced all over Taiwan. Unlike Hong Kong, which barely makes anything but transships everything, Taiwan makes everything. As a result the store was packed with everything from mass-produced trinkets to teapots to jade carvings to replicas of pieces held in the National Palace Museum. The store even included a few Cold War relics in the form of Kinmen knives produced from artillery shells fired by the People's Liberation Army onto the offshore island held by the Nationalists. (I did not see any of the high-tech products most relevant to my day-job, though.) While wandering around, my attention was drawn to a collection of screens meant to emulate classic Chinese designs, offered for a few US dollars each. I was almost dissuaded when I noticed they were plastic, but that seemed somehow even more authentic.

We stocked up on gifts for the end-of-the-year birthday and Christmas season, and I picked up one more trinket for myself: a small vase, carved out of stone to look like bamboo.

We ended up with two large shopping bags full of stuff that we really didn't want to drag around with us for the rest of the day, so I set out to drop them off at our hotel. I didn't feel especially inclined to juggle them through the metro (or walk the non-trivial distance back to the metro stop, then from the nearest metro stop to our hotel), so I hailed a taxi and got a quick ride back to the hotel, then took the metro back to the 228 Peace Park to meet Kiesa and Calvin. (I might have suggested meeting them at our next destination, Taipei 101, but I didn't know the layout and wasn't sure I could reliably meet them there without a phone.) We headed back to the metro and took it toward Taipei 101, the erstwhile world's tallest building.

We had a bit of a walk from the Taipei City Hall station to the building. It was later afternoon, almost sundown, so I hurried through the light rain in hopes of reaching the top before it was entirely dark. As we approached the building I began to appreciate how truly massive it was. When I bought our tickets to the eighty-ninth floor observatory I learned that we'd have to wait before they'd let us go up, so we headed back to a restaurant on the fourth floor of the mall at the base of the tower for an expensive snack, then headed back to catch the elevator to the top.

The elevator to the observation deck took less than a minute to climb eighty-four floors in what they advertised as the "world's fastest elevator". I was careful to clear my ears as we climbed, and walked a bit shakily out onto the eighty-ninth floor.

The lights were dimmed to allow a better view of the surroundings. At times clouds threatened to envelop the tower, shrouding our view of the surroundings in a white mist. Darkness had fallen while we were waiting to ascend, so we couldn't see the hills surrounding the basin, or the East China Sea, but the entire city was lit up and laid out below us. I picked up an audio guide in English and walked all the way around the tower, listening to the descriptions of what I saw below. I tried not to get too close to the windows, or to notice the almost-imperceptible wavering of the floor beneath me, or let my fear of heights get in the way of enjoying the engineering marvel I stood on or the majestic view of the city in front of me.

When we were done circumnavigating the observation deck, we took the stairs down one floor to get a closer look at the tuned mass damper on our way to the exit. The stairwell was a basic internal stairwell, climbing or descending half of a flight in one stretch, then turning back on itself, so one would zig-zag back and forth once to descend a single floor. As is my normal habit in such stairwells, I carefully looked down the two-inch gap between the railings for the up and down stairs and saw the stairs vanish into infinity below. I assumed they descended for eighty-eight floors, but I had no particular desire to find out personally. It looked like a science fiction special effect rather than something real that had actually been built in my lifetime that I was looking down.

On the eighty-eighth floor we found ourselves face-to-face with the giant tuned mass damper that stabilizes the building in typhoon winds. The audio guide pointed out that, not only was it the largest tuned mass damper in the world, but it was also the only one on public display. The mass basically swings on giant pendulums and pushes back, slowly, when the winds push the building out of alignment. This felt like another artifact out of science fiction, or at the very least a research project sitting in a lab, rather than something actually in production out in the real world. I got the uncanny feeling that I was staring into the future, and that the nerds had come out to play.

(When Yanthor texted me on the morning of New Year's Day (local time) to wish me a happy new year (in GMT), I texted back "It's already new year's morning in Taipei. Asia is so far ahead of you Americans it's hard to understand how you cope." I was referring specifically to the time zone but standing in the erstwhile tallest building in the world made me think that Asia really was living in the future.)

Immediately opposite the real tuned mass damper was a large statue of the tower's mascot, a "Damper Baby". After taking the elevator back to the bottom we stopped at the gift shop to buy a small plush Damper Baby for Calvin.

By this point it was time for supper. We headed down to the basement of the mall and scoured the food court for vegetarian food in English, which proved easier said than done. We found an Indian restaurant in the food court with a handy English menu and ate supper.

After supper I decided the easiest way back to the hotel would be to take a taxi, rather than walk to the metro and then walk back to the hotel. I found the taxi stand and we queued until a taxi arrived for us. Kiesa was worried about sitting Calvin in the seat without a proper car seat and ended up sitting Calvin down between us in the back of the taxi. She was worried by the television playing on the dashboard (which looked like a badly-dubbed historical drama or historically-inspired kung fu movie; it was a little hard to tell), and afterwards we debated whether the driver was actually watching it or not. I didn't particularly care about the television; I paid more attention to the fact that the driver was actually staying in his own lane and everyone seemed to be observing the traffic rules, which did seem to generally be the case in Hong Kong and Taiwan but was definitely not the norm in India.

Back at the hotel at last, we put Calvin to bed and packed to fly home the next day after nearly two weeks in East Asia.

The Thirteenth Day

Thursday, according to Kiesa

On our last full day in Taiwan we started out by going to the National Palace Museum. On the way there we met a student named Elias who started a conversation with us in order to practice his English. He decided to wander around with us at the museum and it was interesting to get to talk to someone from Taiwan. I thought if we started up at the third floor of the museum the crowds would be smaller but I didn't realize the most popular exhibits at the museum were on the 3rd level. So, we ended up herded into a queue of people and we dutifully waited in a line so we could see the Jadeite Cabbage with Insects which is a jade carving in the shape of bok choy. Obviously, bok choy is more popular with the Chinese than it is with Calvin. We got to talk with Elias while queuing which made the wait more interesting.

We wandered around to a couple more exhibits before Calvin started complaining of being hungry. We went up to the top of the museum and found some vegetarian dim sum to order as well as some drinks. Calvin insisted he wanted Plum juice even though Elias warned it was a little sour. I tried to convince Calvin he didn't want it but eventually gave up and ordered plum juice for him and carrot juice for me. As I expected, once the drinks actually arrived Calvin was happy to switch with me. I thought the plum juice was pretty good but definitely not as sweet as the juice I'm use to.

After snack Calvin regained all his energy and started acting up in his carrier. I decided it was time for a retreat outside the museum. Elias and I went outside to let Calvin run around while Jaeger stayed to see a couple more exhibits. Outside, there was a light drizzle and it was probably in the 60s (Fahrenheit). A little later Elias had to run off for a class. Jaeger came out fairly soon after that and we continued to our next destination.

In Hong Kong it was difficult to shop for touristy things because Hong Kong doesn't make many things. Taiwan, on the other hand, makes many things.. We headed off to the Taiwan Handicraft Promotion Center which was four levels of various Taiwan products. We wandered around and Calvin actually stayed pretty quiescent in the carrier. I was extremely grateful to have him in the carrier where he couldn't accidentally break something expensive. We bought a couple of things and then Jaeger took a taxi to take them back to our hotel while Calvin and I wandered over to a nearby park. We found a covered area and I let Calvin watch some stuff on the iPad while I read. There was a playground at the park but the rain was coming down steadily and there wasn't a nearby place I could stay out of the rain and watch Calvin play at the same time. Once Jaeger got back to the park we headed off to see Taipei 101.

When Jaeger first started talking about the trip to Calvin, he mentioned Taipei 101 enough that Calvin seemed to get the impression that the city itself was called Taipei 101. The actual building is quite impressive. It's currently the 2nd tallest building in the world, it was the tallest back in 2003 when it was completed. It also has the fastest elevator in the world. The lower section is a mall. We went up and got tickets for the indoor observatory and went to a cafe to get snacks. The snacks ended up being a bit smaller than we expected, barely bite-sized, but very tasty. We queued and then took the elevator up to the 89th floor. There's also an outdoor gallery on the 91st floor but it was closed to take down the fireworks display from the new year. Once we got to the top we were giving free audio-guides that provided a commentary about the city from the various windows. It was interesting but I felt like I should be more excited. The building is so high up I felt the view was pretty similar to what one would see from an airplane. Calvin didn't seem particularly excited and didn't look out the windows much. I think it would have been more interesting in the day. It was very pretty at nighttime, with all the city lights below, but it was hard to see all of the landscape.

What was particularly interesting was the tuned mass damper which stabilizes the building and is open to the public to view. We finally figured out what the weird cartoon figures we had been seeing everywhere were, they were the mascots for the damper and were called damper babies. Now that we knew what they were, they seemed much cuter. After traveling back down to the fifth floor we stopped by the gift shop and picked up a little stuffed "damper baby" which Calvin proclaimed was something that he had always wanted.

For supper, we investigated the food court which was large but mainly bereft of vegetarian options. Eventually we found a fast food Indian place which provided a larger meal than I was expecting. After supper we took a taxi home which I personally found disturbing, to Jaeger's great amusement. Our driver had a little TV screen mounted on his dashboard that he watched as he drove us back to the hotel. However, as Jaeger pointed out, the driver obeyed all the traffic rules and did seem a competent driver. Jaeger kept telling me that I should never go to India, which I already knew.

Once we got back to the hotel we packed our bags in preparation for an early departure in the morning.

In the aeroplane over the sea

Friday, according to Jaeger

I woke up early enough to check out of our hotel at 06:30, when a car was waiting to take us to Taipei Taoyuan International Airport. After our experience in the taxi the previous night, Kiesa was relieved to be able secure Calvin in a proper car seat. Our driver took us straight to the departures level, where I marveled at the number of mainland Chinese airports that operated at the airport, proving that scheduled air transport between the two Chinas was alive and well, despite the official stance of the two governments to each other.

We queued to check in at the ANA counter for the first leg of our journey home, a relatively short three-hour flight to Narita. (After our attempts to convince either United (from whom we purchased our tickets) or ANA (who was operating the code-share flight) to give us seats (preferably together; ideally with Calvin sitting in a window so we could use his car seat) we were finally assigned suitable seats twenty-four hours before departure.) The ANA agents at check-in were not quite sure what to make of the Go-Go-Babyz wheels we had attached to the car seat (they may have thought it was a stroller, since that's how it appeared from behind the counter) and gave us a luggage tag for it so we could gate-check it. I wanted to confirm it'd really work like a gate-checked stroller (in that we could have it as soon as we stepped off the plane in Narita, since it was a key part of our strategy for handling Calvin and his car seat in the airports as we transited) and the agent kept using the term "ship-side", which I eventually decided meant the same thing.

We waited for our bags to clear the luggage scanner, then tried to figure out where to go to get to our gate. There was a very long line of people sprawled across the back of the terminal, and as we tried to track the line it eventually emerged that it was, in fact, the queue we were looking for. Just as we were about to turn around and find the end of the queue a security guard flagged us down and beckoned us to follow him. We did, and ended up at the diplomatic/crew lane, where another guard checked our boarding passes. We weren't quite sure what to make of the whole thing, since neither guard really spoke much English, when another passenger (whose flight was leaving soon, and had been routed through the special lane to increase his chances of making the flight) started translating, and then when the second guard and the other passenger noticed Calvin we realized we'd hit the magic Taiwanese deference for parents with small children and headed through the special security lane.

After the security checkpoint we passed through passport control to formally leave the country, then entered the departures lounge. I was starting to get hungry and cranky and needed something to eat. The terminal maps indicated that we would find concessions along the way to our gate, so we found a cafe next to our gate selling bagels and coffee and decided it'd be our best bet.

After breakfast we headed to our gate and presently boarded the ANA 777-200 (tail number JA710A) waiting to take us to Narita. Our last little bit of code-share-induced drama was the in-flight meal: United listed the flight as meal-free and apparently didn't bother to pass on our request for a vegetarian meal, so we ended up declining the meal ANA offered. Otherwise the flight was smooth and fairly boring, though we appeared to fly right over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which I was reading about in The Economist at that exact moment.

We landed in Narita just after 13:00 local time. Kiesa rushed to take Calvin to the restroom after we landed, leaving me to drag the car seat out of the plane and find the car seat's wheels waiting for us, "ship-side", right where I expected. We queued to pass through a Japanese security screening, then entered the international terminal without formally entering the country. We found our departure gate and began charging our electronics and I posted the changelog I wrote on the plane documenting the first day of our trip. It was now time for lunch; Kiesa headed off in search of something to eat while I watched Calvin and our electronics. She returned with some tiny (and expensive) pizzas and edamame, having successfully used our credit card to avoid getting Yen cash. (I already had currency from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and the United States in my wallet, with the People's Currency sitting uneasily between the currency of the running dogs of the imperialists and the currency of the imperialists themselves.) This wasn't quite enough to sate me, so I headed off in search of food and found a restaurant selling udon noodles. The plain udon looked fairly safe (I was not going to ask any questions about the broth) but there were two words I didn't recognize, so I looked them up on my phone and learned that the plain udon was served with tofu skin and a sort of green onion. This sounded great, so I ordered (paying ¥1000 with my credit card), and enjoyed the noodle when it arrived.

Next to the noodle restaurant was an origami museum and shop that I walked through, gaping at the creations made only out of folded paper, remembering discovering origami as a child, and the legend of the thousand paper cranes. My fingers itched to fold a paper crane but the shop did not have paper available for such spontaneous offerings, though they appeared happy to sell me a pack of paper.

I returned to our departure gate and suggested to Kiesa that we take Calvin to the children's play area near the noodle restaurant, which was the same play area we visited briefly on our outbound trip. As the time of our departure approached we headed back to the gate and eventually boarded for the long flight eastward over the Pacific Ocean to Seattle.

This Boeing 777 aircraft featured the older 2-5-2 seating configuration, unlike the other two 777s we'd flown on during the trip. (When I get a window seat I prefer this configuration, because it means there's only one seat between me and the aisle. I ended up across the aisle from Kiesa, which meant both of us had easy aisle access but I could see even less out the window than normal.) The in-flight entertainment system was also dated; aside from the choice of movies, it appeared basically unchanged from the in-flight entertainment system I first encountered on my first flight on a 777 in 1997, with a choice of several channels, each of which would restart after playing the movie. I already missed the video-on-demand system from our outbound flight but chose the in-flight map and didn't actually watch anything else during the flight.

We took off without incident and set out across the Pacific Ocean towards Seattle. During the beverage service a flight attendant served me a red can of ginger ale, and when I studied it she commented it looked different than the green cans we expected, and I told her about the can of ginger ale I received flying out of Delhi that was printed entirely in Urdu.

After the meal, when the cabin lights dimmed for the flight, I settled in to sleep and managed to get a modest amount of sleep.

We landed in Seattle at 08:40 Friday morning, local time -- before we left Taipei on Friday morning, thanks to crossing the International Date Line. We stumbled off the plane and were suddenly faced with the prospect of taking Calvin and his car seat (and the rest of our hand luggage) down an escalator -- but just as Kiesa picked Calvin up and I picked the car seat up and we boarded the escalator stopped so we reverted to the stairs next to the escalator. The immigration officer seemed a bit more chatty than the last few US immigration officers I've encountered on the wrong side of a long-haul flight, perhaps because I written on my customs card that I'd visited China, or perhaps because I was traveling with a three-year-old (which, I expect, is not exactly common), or perhaps because he simply wanted to talk. (As I answered the officer's questions I couldn't help but think that he was simply looking for anything "hinky" -- out of the ordinary -- in the words of the immigration officer in Port Angeles who thwarted a bomb plot in 1999.) He pointed us to the elevator to go down one more level to baggage claim and customs, where we waited for the luggage to recover from some unspecified blockage. When, at length, we'd collected our checked bags we headed for customs. "What kind of tea do you have," the customs officer asked, reading my customs form, "green, black, or white?" "Oolong," I replied.

We rechecked our bags, went through a small-but-efficient security checkpoint dedicated for international arrivals, and took a series of three people-mover trains to get to our next gate at the north satellite. It was time for breakfast, again, so Kiesa queued for bagels and I queued for coffee at Starbucks (where I found I missed the 中 on the menu; it was the first monolingual English menu I'd seen in two weeks). Kiesa checked her voicemail and learned that Xcel had experienced problems with the gas distribution system in our neighborhood the day we left and that we might be coming home to an unheated house.

I spotted the plane we'd just flown from Narita on waiting to go back to Narita.

We boarded our last flight back home to Denver, which was almost entirely uneventful until I remembered, half-way through the flight, that I'd left my Nexus 7 tablet in the seat-back pocket of our last plane. As soon as we got off the plane in Denver I hunted down the customer service counter, where the agent told me that all lost items get sent to Houston and that I should submit a form on United's website. I was not exactly impressed (I'd hoped that they might be able to call Seattle and double-check whether it'd actually been pulled off the plane) but took the offered slip of paper to fill out the form later.

When we got to our car we discovered the battery was dead, apparently because I'd turned on the dome light in the trunk because I couldn't see otherwise. (Kiesa has the nasty habit of turning the dome lights off because she doesn't trust them, but I like being able to see, so I turn them on and occasionally pick the wrong setting.) Kiesa called the parking service company for help and we waited for help to arrive. There were other people coming in and out of the parking lot in other lanes, but only one young woman came down our lane, and when I asked if she was in a hurry she said she was.

At length a parking service guy pulled up in a pickup, asked me to sign a waiver, and pulled out a tiny battery to jump-start the car. It worked, and we thanked him and he drove off. We followed, driving out of the parking lot just as the sun was setting over the mountains. For us, it was the second time we saw the sun set on Friday.

We drove home and found the house a chilly, but not frigid, 50°F, which was apparently what the flooring installers had set as they were venting the house. Our brand-new wood floors looked amazing, though the air was thick with the acrid stench of the VOCs they used in the finish. We drove to supper at Native Foods, Kiesa's favorite vegan fast-casual restaurant at the missing-hyphen mall (experiencing the tiniest bit of culture shock as I drove to a restaurant and parked in the car park parking lot), then returned home for an early jet-lagged bedtime, back home at last after an amazing two weeks in East Asia.

Traveling Home: Two Fridays for the Price of One

Friday, according to Kiesa

We woke up on Friday in time to catch our 6:30 car ride to the airport. On Wednesday, since the phone attempts had failed, we had emailed United and ANA asking for clarification on what was going on with the seats for our first flight. On Thursday we did hear back from United and ANA. United claimed they couldn't request specific seat arrangements because they don't have the seat maps for ANA. Fine . . . except we learned from ANA that they aren't allowed to touch United seats until the 24-hrs immediately before the flight takes off which United hadn't mentioned every time they told us to ask ANA for seats. I think perhaps the 2nd ANA person I talked to on the phone had been trying to explain this to me but we were having a communication problem (Calvin was screeching in my ear which made it harder for me to interpret everything).

Anyway, we made it to the airport and stood in line to check-in. From what I've read, having children ride in car seats in cars in fairly uncommon in Taiwan (though I think this is changing) so taking the car seat on the plane is probably unheard of except for crazy foreigners like us. In any case, we somehow managed to confuse the flight attendant that checked us in so it took longer than we expected but eventually we thought everything was figured out. Because the iPad entertained Calvin so well on the way out, I reduced the number of other toys I brought out and was able to consolidate Calvin and my carry-on bags to 2 (versus the three we'd used on the way out).

After check-in was over we headed over to the security line which I discovered was huge. I'm not sure if it was longer than the security line at Denver but it was certainly organized less well. Instead of a large official queue, there was a smaller queue section with people lined up past all the check-in counters queuing for the queue. As I was looking at it in disbelief a security guard came by, saw Calvin, and motioned that we should follow him. We followed him and he passed us off to another security guard. Neither really spoke English so we weren't entirely sure what was going on until someone who's flight was soon, and thus was getting priority security screening, explained that because we had a child with us, they wanted us to skip the line and go straight into the priority queue. Once again, I felt a little sheepish about it but didn't try to pass up the opportunity. As a result, we passed through security and immigration fairly quickly.

We got breakfast at one of the terminals and then managed to board our plane, with Calvin's car seat. I was very glad I had gotten our carry-on down to two bags as the area under the seat only fit two bags (on my prior flights I was able to fit all three bags under the seat). The flight served a meal but we had booked through United, which claimed the flight didn't have a meal, so we weren't able to request a vegetarian meal. Personally, I am not pleased with how United integrates with its airline partners. There's got to be a better way to do it.

The flight was unexceptional and we landed in Tokyo. Unfortunately, Calvin decided right at that point he needed to go potty. Calvin and I rushed off the plane leaving Jaeger to deal with the car seat. We dashed towards the nearest restroom, which wasn't nearly close enough, and I almost despaired when I saw there was a good 10-15 women ahead of us. However, then one women pointed out a room specifically for the handicapped and children and I rushed in. It was a little too late but at least we got there before Calvin started actually dripping onto the floor, or me. The bathroom was amazing. They had all sorts of contraptions, for what I'm not sure, but it looked like a very useful room if I had any idea what some of the stuff was for. The extra large sink with a hose attached looked great for a diaper explosion but I'm not sure that's what it was intended for. The toilet momentarily confused me as there were all sorts of functions on a control on the seat, all in Japanese, but finally I figured out the flush was on the wall. Because Calvin hadn't had any accidents on the way out I had reduced my extra clothes down to 2 spare pair of pants and 4 pairs of underwear. Given how much flying we had left to do, I was nervous about having to use up one pair of pants already.

After I got out of the bathroom we queued for the international security screening. This time I remembered to make sure my water battles were emptied and we passed through without any incident. As an aside, of all the screenings we went through, the US was the only place where we had to take off our shoes. When I asked at one security point if I had to take off my shoes they looked at me like I was insane. Pass security, we found our gate and plugged in our electronics to charge. Jaeger stayed to watch them while I wandered around looking for food. The vegetarian options were grim. Eventually I found a place that had edamame and pizza (very sad pizza) so that's what I brought back. After we finished that, Jaeger left in search of better food in a different concourse while I continued to watch our electronics charge. After Jaeger got back we went to the little play area we had visited on the way out and Calvin played for a bit. A few minutes before our flight I took Calvin on another potty break and I once again got to figure out Japanese toilets. This toilet had a panel on the side that buttons labeled in English. One button said it was a "flush sound". Since I wasn't immediately finding a flush button, I experimentally pushed the flush sound thinking it might just be a translation error. No, it just made an electronic sounding flushing sound. Later, Jaeger posited that this was to cover up the sound of using the toilet. I looked it up and seemed to find collaborating evidence that claims Japanese women didn't like the sounds of using the restroom and so would continuously flush to cover it up. Ok, that's fine. But, why did the cover-up sound have to be flushing? Surely there's another sound that would work just as well and be more pleasant.

I did eventually find the correct flush button and Calvin and I were able to exit the restroom. When I relayed my experience to Jaeger he noted that in his restroom you had icons on the stalls indicating what kind of toilet the stall contained (squat, sit-down, or enhanced sit-down) so I probably accidentally chose a stall that contained an enhanced toilet. In retrospect, I regret that I didn't document the various toilets I found more thoroughly. There were some that I really liked. For example, one family restroom I used had a regular toilet a tiny divider, and then a preschooler-size toilet next to the large one. Then, they had a large sink and a little sink. It made using the bathroom with Calvin much quicker and easier. Also, I really appreciated that most of the toilets we used did not automatically flush. I'm sure automatic flushing toilets can make people feel more sanitary, or something, but they really scare Calvin. I always scary post-it notes with me to place over the sensors of automatic toilets so they don't prematurely flush.

Eventually, we boarded our plane to Seattle and took off. This plane was obviously older than the one we flew out on. The entertainment system was a little on the older side. We each had personal screens but instead of having movies/TV on demand, each channel had a movie that repeated the entire flight. So, it was a little tricky to catch the movie at the beginning. However, this wasn't a huge problem because the movie selection was very dismal. Fortunately, the iPad entertained Calvin until I asked him to try sleeping, which he did. It helped that it was dark outside so he felt it was a legitimate time to try sleeping. Calvin did go through one-more pair of pants though he claims, perhaps correctly, that it was water instead an accident. I was a little bored but it wasn't too bad. I felt I should nap but had trouble doing so and spent a fair amount of the flight listening to an audiobook on my iPod. Even though this plane didn't have electricity I didn't have any need to pull out the external batteries for the iPad. However, I hadn't been as vigilant in making sure my iPod was charged so I did end up using one of the batteries for that.

We arrived, bleary-eyed, at SeaTac. Because of the time change, we arrived in Seattle before we had left Taiwan. So, we had two Fridays in a row. We made it through immigration fairly quickly. However, they asked hard questions like "what do you do for a living?" that was hard to answer coherently with the amount of sleep I had gotten. We had to wait for our bags because there was a jam in the system. Eventually it came out and we made it through customs. I was concerned that we'd have to go through normal security but was pleasantly surprised when they had a screening security area setup just for international arrivals (maybe this is normal but I swear I had an international flight that made us completely exit and deal with horrible security on the other side). We got breakfast at a cafe and were excited to be back at a place where we understood everything the menu boards said.

I turned on my phone and picked up my messages and was appalled to learn that Xcel, our gas company, had gas line problems the day we left for our vacation. They had an automated caller who told us that it may have interrupted our heat and to let Xcel know if we needed our furnace or water heater turned back on. Jaeger had said that it had gotten well below freezing in Colorado while we were gone so I had horrible visions of our pipes breaking and a huge water mess to deal with when we got home.

Eventually we caught our plane and arrived in Denver. Unfortunately, mid-way through our last flight Jaeger realized he had left his tablet on the Tokyo plane. After getting off the plane at Denver we went over to a United Customer Service center and after waiting a while talked to a service rep who told us we'd have to submit the lost item to United's website and hope they had found it on the plane. We got our bags and went to our car only to discovery the battery was dead. We called the parking service company and they sent out someone to give us a jump (with an absolutely adorable portable battery, I know want one) but all that took time so it was sundown by the time we made it back home. The furnace appeared to be set to 50 degrees, though we weren't entirely sure, but the pipes seemed to be in tact so I was relieved.

We also got a chance to look at our new wood floors which are gorgeous. Unfortunately, the place where the fridge gets water had a slow leak which caused some problems and we may need to see about re-replacing that part of the floor. That part is still better than how our old floors looked but the rest of the flooring looks so good it's more obvious. Anyway, that's something to deal with later.

Because our appliances were still in the garage, we went out to eat supper. It was amazing driving in a car and going to a place where everyone spoke English (though we were tired enough it didn't always feel like they were speaking English). We came back home and managed to stay up till a reasonable bedtime

Thus ends our great Hong Kong/Taiwan holiday experience.

Epilogue

[Jaeger]

I returned from East Asia a committed Sinophile. Exactly what I do with my interest in China remains to be seen, but first I need to learn more Chinese than nĭ hăo and 中.

Further Reading

[Jaeger]

Our primary guidebooks on the ground in Hong Kong were Lonely Planet's Hong Kong and Macau and Hong Kong for Kids: A Parent's Guide by Cindy Stephens. For Taipei, I read The Rough Guide to Taiwan. I also spent many hours reading Wikipedia, and even went to the trouble of creating a Wikipedia-based ebook with all of the entries that seemed interesting, concatenating all of them into a big epub file using the book creator.

I started reading about China two years ago, not long after returning from my first trip to India. Working my way out from India, I read For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose, then dove into my introductory text to China, The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence. I read Nixon and Mao's Week that Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan, a fascinating look into Nixon's visit to China, with an extensive bibliography that kept me busy for months. For some nineteenth century context, including the seizure of Hong Kong, I read The Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates by Peter Ward Fay. Both the People's Republic and the Republic of China rever Sun Yat-sen as their founding father; his standard biography is Sun Yat-sen by Marie-Claire Bergere. (This was the book that Willy saw me reading and observed that I'm the only person he knows who reads academic monographs for fun.) Much of the twentieth century in China was dominated by the struggle between two groups claiming Sun's mantle; The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor tells a good chunk of that story.

As I began to nail down our final travel plans, I focused on Hong Kong specifically and read A Modern History of Hong Kong by Steve Tsang for an academic history of the colony, and City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong by Leo Ou-fan Lee for the observations of the people who lived there. For some cultural context for the People's Republic after the Cultural Revolution, I picked up China in Ten Words by Yu Hua. (The last book I read before leaving was Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary by Gao Wenqian, but that wasn't especially relevant for my trip. I also have Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel waiting, unread, on my shelf.)

Upon my return, Willy reminded me of the quote from Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer that I felt compelled to include at the beginning of chapter on Guangzhou. The book is twenty-five years old this year but its observations on China's reactions to Americans and the spread of American cultural imperialism are still entertaining.

Despite my best efforts, my reading list continues to grow and shows no signs of shrinking any time soon.

Index

10,000 Buddhas Monastery 1, 2

228 Peace Park 1, 2, 3

Bumble Tots 1

Cheung Chau 1, 2

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall 1, 2

Crocs 1, 2

Disneyland 1, 2

Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall 1, 2

Ferry 1, 2, 3, 4

Fireboat Sir Alexander Grantham 1, 2

Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware 1, 2

Forever Bright Trading Limited 1, 2

Guangxiao Temple 1

Guangzhou 1

Harbour Plaza North Point 1, 2

Hong Kong Botanical Gardens 1, 2, 3

Hong Kong Heritage Museum 1, 2

Hong Kong International Airport 1, 2

Hong Kong Library 1, 2

Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defense 1, 2

Hong Kong Park 1

Hong Kong Railway Museum 1, 2

Ibuprofen 1

Jardine Matheson 1

Kowloon-Canton Railway 1, 2

Laundry 1

Longshan Temple 1

Los Angeles 1

Los Angeles International Airport 1

Maokong Gondola 1, 2

Mazu 1, 2

Memorial Hall of Whampoa Military Academy Former Site 1

Mobile phone 1, 2

National Palace Museum 1, 2

Noonday Gun 1, 2

Peak Tram 1

Pure Veggie House 1, 2, 3

SARS 1

Shenzhen 1

Shopping 1, 2

Statue Square 1

Sun Yat-sen 1, 2, 3

Taipei 101 1, 2

Taipei Taoyuan International Airport 1, 2

Taipei Zoo 1, 2

Taiwan Handicraft Promotion Center 1, 2

Tokyo-Narita International Airport 1, 2, 3

Touts 1

Tram 1, 2, 3, 4

Victoria Park 1, 2, 3, 4

Victoria Peak 1, 2