Monthly Archives: March 2014

19 February 2014 Sun Yat-sen Museum

The agenda for today was simple. Because today was Wednesday, and most museums in Hong Kong are free on Wednesdays, I wanted to visit a museum. I decided to visit Sun Yat-sen Museum. Finding the Sun Yat-sen museum was not extremely difficult, but did require a little bit of effort,  and using the GPS on my phone. Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 was the man who in 1911 led the overthrow Qing Dynasty and started the Republic of China. A good link to learn about him more is here. Randomly, I I tried a new brand of chips which I thought were quite delicious. They are called Calbee BBQ flavoured potato chips. Calbee is a Japanese company. I put a picture of them in this post. After going to the museum, I had a nice dinner at a pizzeria.

IMG_20140219_004909 IMG_20140219_152749 IMG_20140219_154134 IMG_20140219_155909 IMG_20140219_155918 IMG_20140219_160916 IMG_20140219_160940 IMG_20140219_161008 IMG_20140219_161945 IMG_20140219_164940 IMG_20140219_170047 IMG_20140219_212547

16 February 2014 Going To A Hostel and Learning About The Hong Kong Monetary Authority

One of the biggest things of the day was leaving my Couchsurfing host’s apartment for a hostel. I greatly enjoyed staying at his apartment, but had to be moving on. I moved to a hostel called Dragon hostel in Mongkok which I had stayed at before. Today, I took a few pictures of some HK money because I think Hong Kong dollars are very cool. I learned a bit about the HKD from my friend today. I noticed that private banks were printing some of the bills, and that greatly intrigued me. Normally, in countries, a central bank owned by that county’s government prints the currency. I don’t know exactly how Hong Kong regulates its currency, but I do find it very interesting that private banks in Hong Kong such as Standard Chartered, HSBC, Bank of China can print large bills for the currency of Hong Kong. I talked to my local friend who said that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority mints all the coins, but private banks print much of the bills. Here is a good link about the Hong Kong Monetary Authority from Wikipedia. And according to that link on Wikipedia “The HKMA issues banknotes only in the denomination of ten Hong Kong dollars. The role of issuing other banknotes is delegated to the note-issuing banks in the territory, namely the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Standard Chartered Bank and the Bank of China.”

DSCN0877opt DSCN0878opt DSCN0879opt DSCN0880opt

15 February 2014 Day Trip in Shenzhen, Window of the World, Milk Smugglers in Shenzhen, and Coming Back to Hong Kong

The big event for today was doing a day trip to Shenzhen, and seeing The Window of The World. The Window of the World (世界之窗) in Shenzhen is a place where you can see nearly perfectly replicated famous buildings from around the world, but on a smaller scale. It is somewhat similar to Epcot in Disneyworld in the US. There was a free show that I saw in the Window of the World. I was not expecting a very good show, but was actually surprised how good it really was. I was VERY impressed by the Window of the World, and hope to go again sometime in the future. I saw some milk smugglers almost immediately upon entering Shenzhen, and as I was leaving Shenzhen to go back into Hong Kong. I never imagined that milk is a product that someone would want to smuggle, but apparently, in China, there is a big market for good quality imported milk. Coming back to Hong Kong  again felt really great!!!

DSCN0665opt DSCN0669opt DSCN0673opt DSCN0681opt DSCN0682opt DSCN0683opt DSCN0697opt DSCN0699opt DSCN0705opt DSCN0724opt DSCN0726opt DSCN0749opt DSCN0757opt DSCN0761opt DSCN0768opt DSCN0773opt DSCN0784opt DSCN0799opt DSCN0801opt DSCN0832opt DSCN0839opt DSCN0855opt DSCN0863opt DSCN0864opt IMG_20140215_180615 IMG_20140215_180658 IMG_20140215_180747 IMG_20140215_180907 IMG_20140215_180944 IMG_20140215_181146 IMG_20140215_181742 IMG_20140215_181950 IMG_20140215_182039 IMG_20140215_182449 IMG_20140215_204914 IMG_20140215_210700 IMG_20140215_212021 IMG_20140215_223857 IMG_20140215_223859 IMG_20140215_223900