Stars on the Water

I don't generally like to give out locations, but I'm in "Asia's World City"--Hong Kong --for a couple days. Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Change-over, when Britain gave Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. Now it's an SAR, Special Administrative Region, and it has more freedoms than the rest of China. Despite this, it's crowded and rather hot. The humidity saps you. Thank God for air conditioning! It's everywhere.

I was simply going to write that I saw the fireworks over the harbor last night--I was on the Peak. We took the tram up with a friend and wiggled our way through crowds to find the best viewing spot. I stood in an outdoor pavilion, so to speak, with a circular doorway. I stood on one side of the doorway until the crowds thinned a bit. My feet hurt from bending them.

The fireworks were awesome. They were all colors, beautifully coordinated. Red and yellow, colors of luck and fortune, predominated. As the yellow ones shimmered, I remembered the Chinese flag, red with five glittering stars. Yellow stars for China, and all colors of fireworks blossoming for the flower of Hong Kong. It was beautiful.

I can see why there were crowds. Some sights, though, carry such feelings for only one person that they would be better watched from a lonely hillside...

From London to Bombay

Last night we watched 2 or 3 episodes of Michael Palin's Around the World in Eighty Days. I loved it. I think I surprised our British neighbors, one of which asked me if I enjoyed it and got the enthusastic and sleepy response of "I loved it!!!" in a shaky voice, for parts of it were deeply moving, at least to me. As a side note, apparently Michael Palin went to the guy's school and was in his brother's class. Talk about a small world!

For those of you who don't know, this is a documentary of a man trying to go around the world in eighty days without using airplanes in modern times (1989). It's wonderful. I don't know if he makes it or not. While I encourage you to comment, don't tell me if he does or not. I'm hoping that I might get to see the rest somehow. Anyway, the inspiration was Jules Verne's classic (which I read and very much enjoyed!) and Phileas Fogg got around the world in exactly eighty days. Pity, Michael Palin seems to be already married, so he can't go rescuing a future wife from a sati, can he?

Well, suffice to say, this is really doing it all through the back door. True, Palin does start off on the Orient Express, but after that, we see him doing everything from collecting garbage in Venice to riding a dhow from Dubai to Bombay. He was just getting off the dhow when the episode ended.

I was amazed. My sister and I--Becky is four years younger than me but we're huge pals--are going to look up some of the things we saw. We even saw some of Saudi Arabia, which, as you may know, is a place where you can't go as a tourist, then or now. I guess the BBC pulled some strings or something. Amazing!

There's just too much to tell, and I cannot do it justice. My writing skills are meager at best, and I doubt that even the best writer in the world could do it justice. The only better thing, I think, is to actually go to the places he went. Of course, now I want to. I've been to: Thailand, China, and Canada. Almost went to both Indonesia and Cambodia, but that didn't work out. However, some day I hope to add some more to the list.

I'm curious now. Palin's going to be going through America. Just how will my country show up under a British tourist's point of view? I'm definitely curious...because there are at least two sides to every country, and living in a place automatically and completely shuts off the other one, unless you can get your hands on some tourists' impressions that are unabashedly simply their point of view. Scathing where scathing is deserved and all that. Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

And I highly recommend this title.