Visiting Hong Kong

In the middle of the New Year holiday here in Our Fair City (OFC) before school started again I took the teenage children with me down to Hong Kong to go to the temple.  (DW, Harvey Jr, PTHK, and Laundryman.)  Although the Moroni is in the image I posted as I Spy a Nephite #2, it looks like the focus was on the leaves nearer the camera so the steeple and Moroni look white against a light blue sky...  hard to pick out.

We flew down on Jan 2nd and returned on the 5th.  While we were there we stayed at the temple patron housing and went to the temple every day.  We visited a number of places in the city too - although the children would probably have been happy to just do three baptismal sessions each day.  They were required to do one baptismal session for each night we stayed in the patron housing but did twice that amount.  

In the patron housing we met three young families from the Hyderabad, India stake.  It was fun to get to know them a bit and to learn something of their stories.  We watched their children one afternoon so they could all go to the temple together and do sealings together.  Travelling to the temple is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity for them, and they probably could do it only with help of the temple patron assistance fund. 

Hong Kong is rather different from OFC - HK is smaller and much more compact.  It is cleaner - both in the atmosphere and in the streets.  Although OFC has a.. uh... high incidence of reduced visibility due to manmade environmental effects - HK was free of the man-made variety.  There were still two days where there was some mist throughout the day because the weather had cooled off rapidly from the 60s to the 50s, raising fog from the sea & Pearl River.  OFC is very flat - while HK is not at all flat.  

In OFC there are cranes everywhere.  (Construction cranes rather than the kind with feathers.)  In HK I saw only 4 cranes though we went lots of different places in the city.  It is probably an effect of the relative stage of development of HK vs OFC.  Also in OFC it is common to see buildings that are empty - either because construction halted in the middle of the project or because they are obsolete or dangerous.  We saw no buildings in HK that were obviously vacant, though maybe we didn't find the right neighborhoods...

It was wonderful to go to the temple for all of us.  It was wonderful to travel with teenagers; they are very self sufficient and I mostly don't have to watch to make sure they and their bags don't get lost.  In addition to the temple, they really enjoyed a small noodle shop restaurant not far from the temple, and travelling on the subway.