The Ferry

To start off, how about a cool barley drink?  Yes, that is barley at the bottom and with an extra big straw, a person can suck up juice and barley and be able to eat and drink at the same time. Yum! This might not be Elder Chandler's all time favorite drink, though.

Watch out! Here's Elder Chandler on a typical day walking to the bus station.  This particular crossing has been named "suicide alley" by the missionaries as it is has a blind curve where cars magically appear that weren't there a second ago. It's a great way to get your blood pressure to go up quickly in the morning and at night on the return trip.

This photo doesn't do justice to these beautiful buildings that we see each day when we are walking.  They are green and pink and blue.

Here's the line-up for the bus and the line usually goes on forever, but amazingly enough, everyone seems to fit in the bus, although most of the time there are so many people crammed in the bus that the driver has a lot of people standing right beside him and clear up to the windshield. It seems like the bus rules state that 40 people are allowed to stand in the aisles but an accident would not be a good thing with all of those people crammed in the bus.

Do you see the wind-up handle on the back of the little pink Volkswagen?

This is the traffic day and night in front of the Church office building. It is a very, very busy street.

This week we had Perpetual Education Fund training all day long, Monday through Thursday, because in a couple of months, the church is opening up more countries to be allowed to participate in it. Here are two of the self-reliance managers who came for that training.  On the left is Bobby who is from Malaysia, and on the right, Steve, from Taiwan. They are wonderful people, Bobby is currently a Branch President and Steve is a stake president.  If you would like to know more about the perpetual education fund, click on this link: PERPETUAL EDUCATION FUND

Friday we facilitated our new Friday group self-reliance class after work with these wonderful Filipina sisters.  One of them, Beth, (second from the left) is investigating the church and decided to join in the class.  She is excited to come to this 12-week class and learn about starting and growing a business.

After the class and a bite of dinner with the Kendells, we decided to walk to the ferry to go home from work.  Here it comes.

These are what the men at the docks wear who tie up the ferry while we are getting on.

This is what we saw going back across Victoria Harbor on the ferry.

Here we are passing another ferry going the other way.  Everybody wave!

Now we are arriving at Tsim Sha Tsui on the Star Ferry.

Checking our watches, it was almost 8 pm and time for the nightly light show so how could there be anything better than an ice cream and to watch that?

The link below came out a bit strange but if you click on it a couple of times you should be able to see a bit of the light show.

Actually the light show isn't all that great and lasts only fifteen minutes, but it was better there because we could hear the music.  After that we rode the shuttle the rest of the way home. It was a very long day!

By the way, it has been raining a lot lately and some of the street cleaners are wearing umbrella hats as they work.  To end on a "bright" note, we thought you might like to click on the link to see the Lightning in Hong Kong!  Happy Weekend!

Scaffolding in Hong Kong

Hi Everybody,

Isn't this a great photo of Hong Kong with the clouds at night?

This week we have mostly just worked and the weekend looks busy so we thought you might like to see some images of the amazing scaffolding work that is done in Hong Kong all with bamboo, and the workers who are pretty scary looking as they climb and strap up the bamboo poles.  There is construction in many places here in Hong Kong.

Here's an interesting video if you are interested, of course:

 Putting up scaffolding

This guy was really surprised to look up and see me there taking his picture (ha! ha!).  You might want to read this article, too: scaffording on wikipedia

Our celebration for the 4th of July consisted of working all day at the office but then participating in a fun potluck to celebrate.  We had sloppy joes, potato chips, potato salad, fruit salad, etc, etc.  It was great to have American type food to celebrate. We are very grateful for our country and all of the great principles that it was founded upon.

Many of the sisters wore red, white, and blue, too!

 Here's Elder Chandler with the newest self-reliance class that just started on Friday after the Friday branch "Sunday" meetings.  These are dedicated sisters who want to improve their lives. We're not so sure that we would be able to work all week long like they do, have only one day off a week, and then spend that day going to church for three hours and then adding two more learning about improving their self-reliance so that they will someday be able to return to the Philippines to live with their families.

Also, you might enjoy reading about the church in Asia in this article from the Deseret News: News of the Church

 .

Here's a couple of sweet little girls at the bus stop.  Notice the portable fan the older girl is holding, and the smallest girl is holding her own Octopus card so she can get on the bus.

When it rains here, it really rains and that is pretty much every day from May to October. These pictures are looking out our office window at the rain storm.  A typhoon passed by to the north of us but didn't affect us.  Every day now the temperature is in the 90s and the humidity is 70-90% and a "feels like" temperature of 106 to 115 degrees.  It's best to stay indoors unless you are a frog or a fish.  It must even be too hot for cockroaches here as we have never seen one anywhere.

We see these rickshaw sightseeing buses going through the city. A person probably wouldn't want to be on one when it rains, though!  This next little video isn't related to anything, except it was produced by BYU animation, and we saw it and thought you might enjoy it, too:  "Papa" video.  We hope you all have a great weekend!

On The Streets Where We Work and Live

Hello again,

Here we are again with some of our Filipina church "family" here in our branch.  We love all of the sweet sisters who are here.  Often they call us mommy or daddy in jest.  Even though many of them have very challenging lives (here and their families back in the Philippines), they always try to be happy and are always smiling.

Are you ready for lunch!  Just kidding, this is an advertisement that was in one of the buses that we ride.  We looked up Donkey Hide Gelatin to see what  is used for and this is what we found:

Donkey-hide gelatin or ass-hide glue (Latin: colla corii asini) is gelatin obtained from the skin of the donkey (equus asinus) by soaking and stewing. It is used as an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, where it is called ejiao (simplified Chinese: 阿胶; traditional Chinese: 阿膠; pinyin: ē jiāo).

So there you have it! Doesn't that sound like great medicine?

Okay, so now it was really time for lunch.

Wow, I hope Gary has another $100 for lunch (of course that's Hong Kong dollars which are worth about 13 cents US). We thought you might like to see how much personal space there is in some of the restaurants. There are other people who they seat at your table besides other tables that are in very close proximity.  This would have been a good missionary opportunity if only we knew the language!

Here is some really good ice cream that our neighbor from India made for us.  It is flavored with saffron and  cardamon in it and it is very good (at least in Carol's opinion). Listed below is a recipe we found on the internet, although our neighbor said she used canned milk in her ice cream recipe.

Safron and Cardamon Ice Cream

Ingredients

8 tsp chopped agar-agar
2 1/4 cups low fat milk
3 tsp sugar
2 pinches cardamom (elaichi) powder
2 pinches of saffron (kesar) strands

Method 

1. Add 1 teacup of water to the China grass and cook on a slow flame until it dissolves completely. Strain.
2. Boil the milk (keeping aside a little) and add the China grass, sugar and cardamom.
3. Warm the saffron, add the skim milk kept aside and mix until the saffron dissolves.
4. Add to the mixture and heat for 3 to 4 minutes.
5. Pour the mixture into an ice tray and put to set in the freezer compartment of a refrigerator.
6. To serve, churn the solid ice-cream in a mixer to make it soft and fluffy.

Remember the restaurant blog with photos taken looking down at the buildings?  In case you are interested, that restaurant is on top of that cylindrical building located almost in the middle of this photo.

Everyday the temperature has been hovering around ninety degrees with ninety percent humidity, except it feels like 100+, so we are grateful to be able to hit the apartment complex pool occasionally, although it is usually closed when we are at home except for Saturdays, if there aren't any thunderstorms.

Yes, it even has lifeguards, except the lifeguards are often just on their phones the whole time.

As we walk along in the city, we've actually seen quite a few of these signs with some depicting a man with fangs, etc, which would make the average person think this is an evil cult.  After checking out Wikipedia, it appears that isn't the case.  You can go to the link if you want to see what it says:  Falun Gong

Everywhere we go on the streets, people are handing out newspaper and flyers. We thought you might like to see one that we got.  I'm not sure what some of these are but maybe we should try an ear candle/naval candle pedicure! Actually we don't think we want anything from someone named Fang.

Cute dog, huh?  He is inside a dental office. Elder Chandler broke a crown while eating pizza so we have been spending a bit of time here.  With nothing to do while waiting, why not take a few photos? Part of the dentist's dental training was in Hong Kong and part in Korea.

This patient seems to have the right idea.  With all the magazines in Chinese, there really isn't much to do while waiting.

As we walked back from the dentist office, we passed these people.  It looks like they are doing some kind of healing or fortune telling or something.

This was there, too, but what does it represent?

In the city there are many different sections where sometimes there is store after store with tile or plumbing or electrical etc.  This section had jewelry store after jewelry store with beautiful gold jewelry in every window.  Here are a couple of examples.

So yesterday, July 1st, was a national holiday commemorating the nineteenth Anniversary of Hong Kong being returned to mainland China rule .  You can read about it if you click on the link.  We saw the police and crowds and the bus routes were changed, too. It was a big deal.

We took these photos as we were walking there. We thought about inviting all of  them to church but there were too many.

We got this photo from the bus on our way home. We were at the church preparing food for our branch of about 120 people for Sunday.  It was our turn to prepare dinner for everyone.  You should have seen us lugging food all over Hong Kong in our bags and boxes of oranges on a little cart.  And it was so hot we nearly melted. California Pizza Kitchen just opened a couple of blocks from where we live so we had some good old American food last night with our friends, Elder and Sister Orton from Tucson, Arizona. 

Christmas in July? Okay, we couldn't resist but it's from another mission in another place in another time. Happy 4th of July, everybody! By the way, if you have time, like 30 minutes, you might like to see what our mission with self-reliance is all about, just click on this link: Self-Reliance