JAE and I spent our honeymoon in Hong Kong, November 18th - 26th, 1999. Hong Kong the "City of Life" is a huge, wonderful, vibrant city handed over from British control in 1997 back to mainland China. While the British influence is still quite noticeable, the Chinese are slowly erasing the colonial culture. Make no mistake, though, Hong Kong is an incredibly modern and wealthy city no matter who is pulling the political strings. We found it to be clean, litter and trash wise, compared to other cities its size (ie: New York, London, and Los Angeles), but the overwhelming air pollution makes you want to scrub your face and hands clean every couple of hours with a chemical peel. Almost everyone we encountered was friendly and helpful, including the hotel staff, which has not been my experience in other large cities. Everyone in Hong Kong proper speaks English, at least to some extent; however, in the New Territories outside of Hong Kong, where some of the really cool sights to see are located, we found it much more difficult to find English speaking cabbies and shopkeepers. The New Territories are where you tend to feel like a "Stranger in a Strangeland."
Since the pictures tend to be large, and not all connections are high speed, I have broken up our photos into four sections:
