Sunday in Hong Kong

Well the good news is I'm on the upswing healthwise, so I'm finally catching up with a few pics. I barely logged onto email the last few days, felt much like blogging...so I've spent a fraction of the day today coughing compared with the last week plus, which is fortunate considering my cough drop supply was rapidly dwindling. I went to the drugstore last night with another colleague who was ill and needed cough drops, and the first cough drops they offered had Opium in them!! Needless to say, he passed those up!

Friday one of my colleagues (who had never been to asia before) and I flew to Hong Kong. We arrived on Saturday night, and had a full day layover before coming up to Fuzhou in Fujian province for a week. It was a perfect opportunity to play tour guide in one of my favorite international cities, so we took the Star ferry over to the Kowloon side, walked up to the Jade market, and back down through the Kowloon Park.
Outside the Jade market was a small market of sorts- they were selling lime peels. I imagine it was for tea or possibly some sort of Chinese medicine, but there were probably a dozen women neatly cutting the skin from limes- three evenly spaced lines and off came the skin. They were then stringing the skins up to dry, and throwing the limes into a box. The smell was intoxicating, the visuals were nearly awe inspiring...as simple as a lime peel is, seeing so many so cleanly cut and hung was amazing. They might well have been flowers.
It's common in China to take your bird (in his cage) to the park so he has the opportunity to socialize with the "outside birds" and to feel like he has some fresh air & be in his "natural environment". It's quite common to go to a large park in china and see older men carrying one or two cages to the park to hang up in trees. There were a few cages hung in the trees where the lime peeling was going on, but unfortunately the photos did not come out well enough to post, but this one had just finished getting an "outside bath".
On the way back from the Jade Market we walked through a vegetable market, and through the main strip of butchers. Vegetables and fruits in the stalls lining the streets, Meats mostly behind those in the actual store fronts.
And then we ran into this guy- I'll call him Gus because, well, he just looks like a Gus to me. He was painting coconuts gold. He asked where we were from & when we said USA, he said he had lived in NY and in Portland, and cooked in restaurants, but then assured us that he was retired, pointed out his wife standing in a booth, and said he was painting coconuts gold for a wedding celebration, and would be painting "double happiness" on them all.
He was very anxious that we wait around and see him write "double happiness" on one of the coconuts, so I had to take a photo. He was really such a sweet man, I hope that the coconuts bring him double happiness in his retirement...