Update #1

HONG KONG

I arrived safe in Hong Kong late Tuesday night and enjoyed a speedy train ride to Hong Kong Island where we are staying for a few nights. It was a challenge to find our hostel but I finally discovered the secret gate by accident. My classmate Josh made it to the hostel late Tuesday night.

Today I dedicated to getting a large scope of the whole city and checked out many hot tourist spots. These included taking the star ferry from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon. It was a quick 8 minute ride, but it was gorgeous view of the seemingly hundreds of skyscrapers and green mountains in the background. I also hit up the "Mong Kock Market" and knocked out a good portion of my souvenir shopping. I knocked down a $HK 250 price down to $HK 60. FYI 1 US Dollar = 7 Hong Kong dollars. It rained hard for about half of the day and I didn't find out until later that it was a Level 3 Typhoon. In Texas we call it "relief".

I was lucky to meet a few Canadians that took me deep into Kowloon for dinner and drinks. We ate above this really "raw" market. By raw I mean they were grabbing live fish out of buckets and scaling and chopping them up the second someone ordered it. In addition, there were huge baskets of toads for a lickin, sea creatures, fried and grilled chicken feet and best of all: fried ducklings (head included only HK$ 31). Dinner was actually really good but I still dont know what we ate. Lastly, we saw the view of Hong Kong Island at night from Kawloon. I forgot my camera but will go again tomorrow and post some pics. It is the prettiest man made view I haeve ever seen.

I have never been to a place like this in my life. The city is so packed with people and buildings and parks and roads and sidewalks and canals and mountains, it can be a bit overwhelming. However, they really try to incorporate feng shui into nearly every building you enter, so you never really lose your cool (despite the pouring rain, high temps and crowded everywheres). Nearly every sign is written in English and Chinese and the city is very easy to navigate.

Here are a few pics. Enjoy--

Bamboo scaffolding and some night activity.

Just of few of the hundreds of Hong Kong skyscrapers.

In need of a shower.

Welcome to the China Blog

Ni Hao!

Thank you for visiting my blog of my trip to China! Here you will find updates of where I am and what I am doing while we are here. Although I would have preferred to simply send out a few e-mails with pictures and such, I am afraid that the wonderful Communist Party of China has restricted the uploading of files/pictures in e-mails (namely g-mail). I have heard that they allow such uploadage with blogs so that is why we are here. If this is the only blog post on this blog, know that that this site too has been flagged. Let's hope not...

Quick Breakdown:

I will be working with 9 other graduate students of the Planning and Architecture programs at UT. The purpose of the trip is to study international transportation. It is my understanding that we are going to be working mainly on the transit corridor between Guangzhou and Wuhan (two very large cities in southern China), learning about how the Chinese have designed and built their booming cities. Thankfully I am extremely pumped about the crew we have going and good (safe, Mom) times will be sure to follow.

My trip here can be easily broken down into three stages. They are as follows...

Stage 1: Hong Kong - An unstructured survey of the great city of Hong Kong. We will be staying in hostels and hotels for about 5 nights visiting the city, buying gadgets, and eating strange foods.

Stage 2: The Transportation Workshop, 10 days. We are partnered with the Southern Chinese University of Technology and the Wuhan University of Technology to do work. We will split time between Guangzhou and Wuhan. It will be really fun to work with Chinese students in the same field as us.

Stage 3: Shanghai - Once our workshop is complete, many members the group will head to Shanghai. We are mainly interested in the World Expo, French Concession and the 3x as many skyscrapers as NYC...

I am really looking forward to the trip and and thankful that I am able to share this amazing opportunity with you all. Feel free to comment on my postings, email me (ptconnor@gmail.com) or skype me. If I don't post for a while, please don't worry about me as I am obviously having an awesome time.

I head out Monday morning at 7am and arrive in Hong Kong Tuesday at 7pm (23hrs of travel and 13 hour time differential). Bon voyage and please check back here in a couple days for updates. FYI: I will be back in the states Aug 7.

Zài Jiàn!
Patrick