Hong Kong to Nanning

On Sunday morning, we got ready by 8AM, met up with Christine and Paul, and headed into Hong Kong to see what we could in a four hour window. This is easier than it seems: despite having an airport out in the sticks, Hong Kong also built an Airport Express train that zips from the airport to downtown ("Central") in about 20 minutes. Imagine that in New York, San Francisco, Boston, or L.A.

Right outside the Central station is Jardine House, a mid-20th century modernist building with distinctive porthole windows. If my memory serves correctly, my grandfather had an office in this building when he was a stock broker. Also, I think my dad taught me that this building was once called "the building of a thousand assholes". It's much more memorable that way.

From Jardine House, we walked to the Peak Tram, which is a cable railway that runs to the top of Victoria Peak, the main mountain of the island of Hong Kong. At the peak, we went immediately to the tourist-trap restaurant with a view, which turned out to have surprisingly good food (I had the "traditional English breakfast", which included eggs, toast, and piles of yummy meat). I'll spare you the photos of the view from the peak.

From there, we backtracked to our hotel, checked out, rolled our luggage to the airport, checked in, and wandered through the vast shopping mall to get to our gate (reminds me a bit of Amsterdam airport, but with even more of a maze through shops). Buying bottled water in the airport is harder than one might think.

The flight to Nanning was uneventful. We were met there by Minhua, Lin Qing, and Frank, who are our nurse, facilitator, and facilitator, respectively. We also met the third couple in our group, Heidi and Steve. We rode about 40 minutes into Nanning's central area and our hotel, the Majestic/Xindu Hotel. The hotel has a surprisingly good restaurant with foreigner food, where we ate dinner. I violated my maxim of never eating water-washed cold vegetables in China--we'll see whether I end up paying for this later. And I'm starting to wonder that I've been surprised twice by the quality of the food in China--perhaps my expectations were set too low by the 1986 and 2000 trips I took here (through more rural places, too).

I'm also starting to get typical parental hygeine paranoia--I spent 15 minutes compulsively washing and soaping the marble sink in the bathroom of our hotel room, I've been looking askance at the carpet of our hotel room, and I've been staring at the windows of our room, one of which looks like it doesn't fully close, which means that mosquitos might get in. Plus, I killed a mosquito in the hotel lobby and another in our room yesterday. All of which sounds like exactly where my head should be, but I'm entertained that (except for the mosquitos) it's all stuff I would never have thought to do before.