It is October 17, 2010, and Mitchell, Margot, Dave, Marie, Phil, Elaine, Mark, Loretta, Albert, and Evelyn have arrived at the Hong Kong airport.

After 24 hours of connecting through Detroit and a 16-hour flight, we are coordinating to meet with Brian, Kathleen, John, and Polly.

The next day, the spouses are walking through Kowloon Park on the way to Nathan Road where the tailors are. They've got public art and some unusual huge buildings.

Kathleen, Loretta, and Elaine perambulate past the finely manicured maze.

The park also has security cameras. This one has a remotely-controlled windshield wiper and on the back, a water tank for the spritz.

There are impressive Banyan trees along this section of Nathan Road.

Most of Nathan Road is not lined with trees.

The next day, I took the high-speed catamaran ferry to Macau.

Here is the track log from my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch. It shows that the ferry left from the Kowloon Peninsula of Hong Kong and travelled west, initially at about 5 km/h for a few kilometres. When we left the harbour, we accelerated to about 35 km/h and once past Hong Kong Island we were going 75 km/h to Macau. As we approached the Macau harbour, our speed dropped to about 62 km/h in the harbour, and then about 5 km/h to dock. The total one-way distance was about 75 km.

Macau has many impressive casinos, but also huge old apartment blocks.

This is Dr. Carlos D'assumpcao Park, which was fine place to have my cheese sandwich.

Some of the apartment blocks seem to go on forever.

The bars over the balconies would indicate that high-rise crime is a problem (possibly facilitated by the sewer pipes running down adjacent to the balconies).

Outdoor sewer pipes would be much quieter for the residents, but certainly show that the outside temperature never drops below freezing.

The high-speed ferry was a powerful beast of a ship, completely sealed against the waves and water spray. The Macau ferry terminal has a helicopter landing pad on the roof, no doubt for people that can really afford the gambling.

The catamaran design of these ships allows the waves to pass underneath, so the ride is very smooth and you feel like you are flying over the water.

Some of the ferries look very unconventional.

Over the past 15 years or so, Hong Kong has gone through a huge transformation as the downtown airport was relocated 30 km west, and a huge amount of land was reclaimed by dumping dirt into the harbour. This huge development, called International Commerce Centre (at the left), and The Arch, in the centre.

At the base of the buildings is Elements Mall, which is huge and very high-end.

Water burbles down the sides of these chrome posts, and wraps around the base to drain through a gap at the floor.

This is the entrance to one set of washrooms, all of which are as fancy as could be and have full-time attendents. Here there is also a magazine rack and an electric shoe polisher complete with polish dispenser.

Here is a view looking west along Jordan Road to the north side of Union Square, and shows the overwhelming forest of 60- to 80-storey condominiums and the Elements mall.

To the east of Union Square is the construction site for the new MTR railway terminal. The cranes are working on the foundation (I suppose that must be tricky, given this is all relatively-recently dumped dirt, barely above water level).

This construction worker's hat has been combined with a straw hat. It is always hot and humid on Hong Kong.

While traffic was always very busy, it did move and we never saw a North America style traffic jam. There were massive apartment blocks, huge advertising signs suspended over the road (by rusty guy wires that didn't look very strong – especially given the area's typhoons), and double-decker buses. The big city noise and absence of any trees or birds results in a general feeling of dirty old concrete and steel.

The woman at the left was lugging these carts across the busy intersection.

As in the UK, the vehicles travel on the left side of the road, and the power plugs are the big UK-style.

There were many small construction sites, and they each had this standard sign. Note the posting of both the "Original Completion Date" and the "Anticipated Completion Date".

There are over 1,000 7-Eleven convenience stores in Hong Kong, in many places, literally on every street corner. In addition to the one on the left, there's another to the right of it, just across the road and a few stores down (just past the Circle-K convenience store).

At the Hong Kong Science Museum there is an interesting three-dimensional display where mirrors at the bottom half of this allows someone to stand up and appear to come out of the cup.

A promenade along the waterfront at the south end of the Kowloon Peninsula has a panormaic view of the waterfront and tall buildings of Hong Kong Island. LED lighting on many of the buildings provides a beautiful view at night.

The tallest building on Hong Kong Island is Tower 2 of the International Finance Centre , and behind that is the Peak.

We took a very steep and windy (look at that, windy and windy are spelled the same, those are homonyms) bus ride up to the Peak, where there is a 1 km walking path which has views in all directions.

Here is a view looking north from Hong Kong Island. The International Commerce Centre (to the north) and the International Finance Centre are the two tallest buildings, and are like gateways to the harbour. To the left of the International Finance Centre is The Center, and just to the left of the top of it, in the distance across the harbour is our hotel, the Royal Pacific.

Actually, the right-most of those four gold buildings is the Royal Pacific Hotel, and our room was on the top floor on the right side.

The panorama is something you just can't capture in a photograph (and my photomerge attempt resulted in the strange sky effect).

The buildings go on and on.

We took the tram down. It is a remarkably steep descent, and the Wikipedia article has excellent detail (as Wikipedia has for most everything we saw).

Even though it is a super-steep slope down, and everyone must wonder what would happen if the brakes or cable failed, the ticket agent is seated just past where the tram stops (she didn't seem concerned).

Here is the view out our hotel window, looking south-west. At the right is the dock for the high-speed ferry to Macau, and across the harbour is Hong Kong Island.

Typhoon Megi was developing during the last days of our trip, and because Tropical Cyclone Warning Signal 3 had just been issued, the chairs are being brought in.

For blocks and blocks, the Ladies Market had stalls on both sides of the street leaving only a narrow path between them.

In addition to yet another 7-Eleven, the cross-streets have hotels that can be rented for either 2 hours (that may not be just to get over one's jet lag), or overnight.

At the north end is this sign, which reads:

Ladies' Market (Tung Choi Street)
Tung Choi Street, thesite of the present ladies' Market, was once an area of market gardens near the ancient village of Mong Kok. When the area was cleared for development in 1924, some of the new roads were given names associated with vegetables that had previously been grown in the area. Tung Choi Street, for instance, means Water Spinach Street. Much of the development of the Tung Choi Street area took place between 1924 and World War II and it mainly became a residentail area. It only became a commercial centre in the 1960s. During the international oil crisis of the early 1970s, unemployed workers were allowed to establish street stalls here. This led to the trade in inexpensive, but fashionable women's clothes and accessories, which moved here from its Temple Street location in Yau Ma Tei. Ever since then, the Ladies' Market has developed a reputation as a great place to shop.

More huge grimy buildings and garish advertising.

Ah, now for something high-end. We're at the base of Langham Place which is a 12-storey shopping mall.

All large buildings post signs when a storm signal has been issued, but people didn't seem to act any differently even though this was predicted to be the strongest typoon in over 50 years.

The mall is magnificent.

A few multi-storey escalators take you to the 12^th floor and then you walk down a spiral to the bottom, past all the stores. It is like a vertical shopping mall.

At the top is this sloped stone water feature, with water slowly cascading down, and amazing views out the windows.

Looking west, the adjoining Langam Place Hotel is to the right, and again, this panorama just can't capture the view.

This narrow apartment building is at least 25 stories tall, and looks like it will fall over if anyone sneezes.

At the 17^th floor, someone has made a balcony (maybe for storage, maybe an extra room) supported by bamboo poles. I can't even think of anything to say about that.

I just wonder what these apartments look like on the inside.

On the side of the building beside the Langham Place Hotel are two cellular telephone base station antennas. Typically, these are downtilt antennas, as the coverage is ground level, but most unusually, the antenna to the right is mounted horizontally and is aimed up &ndash to provide cellular telephone coverage inside the hotel.

Did I mention that most of the huge buildings are rather grimy.

While walking back to the hotel down Nathan Road, I came across this job site. Most contruction scaffolding is bamboo (there was even an exhibit on best practices at the Science Museum), rather than steel piping. I suppose bamboo is lighter, doesn't rust, is traditional, is less expensive, and is available locally.

But check out these construction safety practices:

• These guys are three and four stories up, and have no safety harnesses, safety ropes, or hard hats.
• There's no protection for pedestrians walking along the sidewalk under the work.
• I just can't see how the scaffold is secured to the building.

They are taking down the scaffold. The blue guy at the top has a sharp knife to cut the ties at the intersection of the poles, then he hands the pole to the orange guy below, who then hands it down to a guy at street level.

For shorter poles, the blue guy at the top just drops it and the orange guy catches it (one hopes!).

Then the orange guy on the bottom drops the pole to the guy at street level.

And farther down Nathan Road, an even taller scaffold – 13 stories high!

The four guys at the top again have no safety harnesses, safety ropes, or hard hats. The rope and pulley is only used to lower the bamboo poles down to street level.

The base of the scaffold is stabilized by tying it to nearby street signs. Again, pedestrians are free to walk under all this.

I suppose this provides the valuable information that cars can hit pedestrians.

Our hotel had this beside the elevator:

• On the left is a map showing the surrounding area, including the southern part of mainland China, the South China Sea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The white semi-circle shows an 800 km radius around Hong Kong, and the red arrow indicates the current centre of the storm and its direction.
• The circle in the centre shows the compass rose, showing the directions for North, North-northeast, northeast, and so on.
• The chart on the right describes the official storm warning signals, which are conveyed (in this case) as a number ("3"), words ("Strong Winds"), a symbol (a very heavy ⊥ symbol), lights (three vertically stacked lights, top is green, centre is white, and bottom is green), and a description ("Strong winds are expected or blowing in Victoria Harbour with a sustained speed of 41-62 km/h. Gusts may exceed 110 km/h. Winds are normally expected to become generally stronger in the harbour about 12 hours after the hoisting of the signal.")

Here there are some rolled-up towels, backed by long green sand bags to slow water flowing in under a door to our hotel.

Across from our hotel was a piano store. As for all buildings with ground-floor glass windows, they have applied 4"-wide masking tape to the windows to keep control of the glass if it is broken by a big object being blown through it.

They have also put the sand bags along the bottom of the door, but even though there was at least a 1 cm gap between the two doors, they did not put tape along this opening.