Friday, February the 9th.

Alright, so my last full day in Hong Kong, and true to my word, it was a grab-bag of various things that I'd missed out on over the course of the last 10 days or so.

So my first task for today was to head out to Sheung Wan. Now, nearly every day that I've been here in HK, I've heard someone say "Sheung Wan". Admittedly, that's because it's the last stop on one end of the Island MTR line, but still it sounded like an interesting place, so I decided to head down there and check it out. Sheung Wan is one of the older parts of HK, and while it hasn't been spared the same constant re-building that's gone on everywhere else in the city, it has retained a certain amount of its old identity. Back when Hong Kong was a newly acquired British territory, Sheung Wan was a densely populated part of town which functioned as the city's very own Chinatown. With all of the chinese residents, certain businesses grew up in Sheung Wan that remain part of the area to this day.

One such business is herbal medicine. Now, I don't think I've mentioned this before, but here in Hong Kong (and throughout China, I would guess), there's an odd combination of traditional and Western medicine - pharmacies sell regular, packaged up drugs just as you'd expect them to, but they also have a wide variety of herbs, dried goods and traditional remedies, which are used both medicinally, but also in general cooking. And if you're looking for such things, Sheung Wan is the place to be. Walking past shop after shop of these type of places, I was amazed at the range of things that they sell. It ranges from the mundane (dried mushrooms, cashews, cured meats) to the wierd (whole dried starfish?) to the bizzare ("I swear, that stuff looks like cow dung.") and the incomprehensible ("I swear that stuff is steel wool"). But the sights and the smells are exciting - if not always appetising.

Once I had taken a wander through Sheung Wan, I headed back to Central MTR station, and to Sai Wan Ho, on almost the opposite end of the island. What took me all the way out there? Other than curiosity (and the subway :p), I went to visit the Hong Kong Film Archive. After a bit of walking around (all of the tourist attractions in HK are very well signed, but if you stray off the path a little, you have to kinda backtrack to wherever you saw the last pink coloured signpost), I got to the film archive and had a poke around their exhibition, which was all about set design in film. Some interesting stuff there, though admittedly, it's no ACMI. After half an hour or so I set off from the Film Archive, walking alongside the harbour through the very pleasant Quarry Bay Park, then hopped on a train back to Central (did you know that I've travelled on the MTR 16 times since Monday? You get these bonus points every time you travel, though as far as I can tell, the only thing you can spend them on at the moment are free red packets for the Lunar New Year, which I don't really need). At any rate, I hopped off the train at Central to do a little photography in and around the Business district there - all of the photos I've taken in the area previously have been kinda incidental to whatever else I was doing at the time, and there were a few things I specifically wanted to take some photos of.

Anyway, I saw something -very- interesting while wandering around the place this afternoon. As you may know, Hong Kong is home to some -super- rich people - 18 billionaires live in the city, putting it behind only New York, LA, Moscow and London in that respect. And I think I saw one of them today.

So I was crossing the road across from Exchange Place (home of the Hang Seng stock exchange) and I saw a Rolls Royce. Ok, no big surprise there, luxury cars are nothing special in this city. Sure, a Rolls is astep above a Mercedes or BMW, but there's a few of them rolling around. But here's the kicker. The license plate of this particular chauffered Rolls Royce? "HK 1". Now that's impressive. So who has enough clout in this town to get the number plate HK 1? I decided to stick around and find out. after a few minutes of waiting, an older looking man comes along, surrounded by 3 well dressed guys (personal assistants? Bodyguards?), they all hop in the car and in drives away - as does the dark tinted Mercedes Benz which has been sitting behind the Rolls the whole time. I still don't know who this guy is, but either way he was a real big fish.

After that little bit of excitment, I hopped another train back to Kowloon to do a bit of market-trawling and orgainses my stuff, ready to leave for Shanghai tomorrow!

Just a note, as my plane leaves just before 7 tomorrow evening, and doesn't arrive in Shanghai until a quarter past 9, I'm unlikely to get the chance to update the blog tomorrow - I'm not sure what the internet situation will be like on that end, either, so expect an update 2 days from now, not tomorrow evening as per usual.

Until then!

Jono