Thursday

I've been meaning to point this out: over the last week I've been working on photos I took while we were traveling in Hong Kong last Thanksgiving (a trip that was conceived as a slightly belated celebration of our first wedding anniversary). In the last few days, I've uploaded something like seventy pictures. Mostly these are from the streets of Central District, Hong Kong island, and the streets around the neighborhood where we stayed in Kowloon, Mong Kok. If the map was made of nice straight lines and perfect symmetrical shapes, Hong Kong would look like a fat exclamation point, the dot at the bottom being the island itself. The linear stroke is Kowloon, part of the Hong Kong autonomous zone, and the flat northern border of the stroke is the international boundary line where the People's Republic of China begins, north of Hong Kong's New Territories. The stroke would be bisected lengthwise by Nathan Road and the red Metro line that travels along beneath it. The bottom portion of this bisection is referred to as the Golden Mile, The northernmost point on the dot, where the Metro terminates, is Called Causeway Bay. These are the two hoity-toity shopping districts in the two-part city, and where many of the photos uploaded to date were taken. Others were taken in the nearby autonomous zone of Macau, which was settled, like Hong Kong, by European colonists before being recently returned to China with the stipulation that they would remain autonomous for decades. Macau has long been a European-type gambling city, a Monte Carlo of the East, but has lately been colonized yet again by the burgeoning empire of Las Vegas, as US casinos discover amazing profits, low overhead, and certain operational freedoms in Asia. The photos can be found here. [Cavin]