Lady Ho Tung Hikes Maclehose

Yes, this really is Hong Kong...believe it or not. Sai Kung Peninsula has some absolutely stunning hiking, such as pictured in these shots of my trip along Stage 3 of Maclehose Trail (marked "very difficult"--which I didn't find out until arrival at the trail head). The entire Maclehose Trail is 100km long and spans the New Territories. Yet another reason to be impressed by Hong Kong.

These flowers were budding and blossoming everywhere you looked, bushes and bushes of them. Absolutely gorgeous, the flower reminds me of the Albertan wild rose.

Lady Ho Tung stars in Shanghai Nights

Shanghai--land of neon lights, cultural delights and construction sites. I was really impressed by this quickly changing city. Modern China is arriving full blast in the form of bulldozers and construction cranes to revamp the old Shanghai with shiny new China a la huge skyscraper and shopping mall. Seriously, there are so many sides to this city--it's full of history, and has an excellent museum to boast it, has a mixture of architecture, is set on a river, and has all the modern amenities you can expect in a developed Chinese city (maybe even a western-style toilet!). Spent lots of time wandering around looking at buildings (partly the result of travelling with an engineer?)...actually, the whole first part of my blog was mostly shot by Antoine, for those of you who prefer my usual mishmash of random people shots, art and flowers...read on... they're after the psychedelic tourist tunnel.
Bright lights : Nanjing Lu at night is a shopper's mecca. The view from the Bund--the name given to the district of Shanghai located along the Huangpu river, across from Pudong (those tall buildings you see there). The Bund is where you find the old historical European-architecture buildings set up during Shanghai's boom days. Definetly a cool area now housing many fancy (if pretentious) bars and designer stores. The four lane highway running between the Bund and the river wasn't the best planning move if you ask me--maybe they took lessons from Toronto?
Jin Mao Tower. We had a drink on the 87th floor of this very cool, very tall building. It's the largest skyscraper in mainland China and the 5th largest in the world.
Oriental Pearl Tower--the tallest tower in Asia. The design's a bit cheesy, but distinctive. Shanghai's response to the CN Tower?Model of what Shanghai is to look like in 20 years at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. The amount of construction here is unbelievable.
Construction. Okay, you just went through the Psychedelic Tourist Trap Tunnel.....which means we're in Sarah's pictures now! Art, parks and random people:Bunch of Buddha's set in stone and displayed for your education and aesthetic enjoyment at the creatively named Shanghai Museum.

Spend some time, as usual, hanging out in local parks watching people. One thing that I love about China is how active the elderly people are. My personal favorite is seeing them taking care of their grandchildren, but you can also see them gambling (Mah Jong, Chinese chess, cards), doing tai chi, and generally just hanging out in parks everywhere.
This street was great. You can see strong European influence here in the architecture, tree-lined avenues.

The same two models that I met on the train-ride home from Guangzhou, taking coffee in lane-side cafe.
Antoine: still being cute, still being French, and still not speaking Chinese.

Beautiful traditional garden in the Old City. You can enjoy the beautifully balanced rocks and trees if you can see past the roving groups of Chinese tourists in colour-coordinated baseball caps.
This guy was trying to catch fish with his bare hands.
Lady Ho Tung finds her inner harmony.
Look closely, instead of using diapers little kids have holes in the bottom of their pants and when they have to go, parents find an appropriate place for them to go. Good thing, imagine if all the babies in China wore disposable diapers...

A rainy, rainy day in Shanghai.

Having suits tailored at the cloth market. Get ready BLG, Lady Ho Tung is coming down the runway! I got busted taking a photo of this man selling his dried foods... .
Lots of Chinese tourists in the Old City. Thought this old man was rather photogenic, same for the old temple.

Got a laugh out of this sign for "bottom sink type square." Lots of this Chinglish everywhere.

Now I'm off to finish up my last couple of legal assignments!

Lady Ho Tung in Guangzhou

This past weekend I visited Guangzhou. It takes about 2 hours to get there by train from HK. Unless you’re me and you don’t book advance tickets, and it’s a very busy Easter weekend, in which case it takes half a day and you wait in 10 different dead-end line-ups and end up taking the train from Shenzhen.

Not to worry, this delicious lunch cheered me up. You may hear from people that the food in HK is good…I will not be one of them, and I suggest you don’t believe others unless you enjoy anonymous meat in oily brown gravy (or maybe I should just stop eating at student cafeterias?). Spent some time in the Guangzhou Museum of Art, where I had fun playing in the sculpture garden...

...and enjoyed the installation of steel cut-outs displayed inside by Israeli-English artist Zadok Ben-David.

As always, Mao.
As always, the sleeping guard. Wonder whether they make them work all night, or who’s slipping sleeping pills to these guys because every guard I saw was asleep. They are much better at being photogenic than guarding the artwork. My travel companion, who speaks French. Not very useful with the Chinese dialect, I'm afraid. You may notice all the families in the background of this photo--white North American couples with little Asian babies. Turns out that Guangzhou is quite the adoption centre. There are little Asian babies everywhere, shops renting strollers, artists offering baby portraits, baby food sections in the restaurant menus. They are so CUUUUUTE. Don't worry, I didn't bring one home, although I was tempted. It's actually a rather lengthy process with couples staying in town for up to a month to complete the paperwork.
Here are some shots from a market in Guangzhou. As in all markets in Asia, there was the every-present, unmistakable, nasal-invading scent of dried fish. I think Bruce’s does it better (my family’s fish market). Detail of dried fish.Saw these fish being cleaned and it was more like chopping firewood than anything else. I wanted to buy this cat for dinner, but apparently it wasn’t for sale. These chickens were, though. And they were fresh… …so fresh that I lost my appetite. They are alive when they’re in those cadges there. Then the head is chopped off and they’re thrown in a bucket. I now that that the saying “to run around like a chicken with your head cut off” is true. So I lost my appetite for chicken, and settled for this tasty looking dried frog.
This woman playing in the park was a disgrace to Canadians everywhere, but the park itself was beautiful. Shamian Island, where this park is located, was where foreigners were relegated during Canton's trading heydays. The European architecture has been preserved, giving the place a quaint, if somewhat forced, feel.

Here are some shots of QingPing market. It sells everything that I don’t need: dried ginger, ginseng, dried mushrooms, dried scallops, dried fish (of course) and pets (at first we thought they were for food, but they were actually pets because pet-food was being sold alongside). Antoine with starfish. Watched this man pick out his goldfish. It’s an art.

I thought these bags of rice for sale in the street were pretty.
As the packaging for this "teast foods" assures me: "coolfashion need Cool taste, we like the newtaste, we need he quality Here you." Sometimes it's easier to just read the Chinese.
More market shots.A temple. Sorry, I was too lazy to climb the 17 stories up, so you'll have to crane your neck.Burning incense for Buddha.Grey skies, nothing but grey skies...all weekend long. No problem--life in China is teeming with activity to the degree that I barely even register the weather. If it starts to pour rain you throw a plastic bag on your head, buy a 2$ umbrella from a street vendor or better yet, affix one directly to your bicycle so that you can go about your business as usual. And while you're in town...why not take in a cheesy light show set to Disney-esque music.
The locals (or Chinese tourists?) love it. But I prefer taking photos of them to the actual show.I met these two models on the train ride home, they let me take their picture.