3 currencies

Spent the day moving from China to Taiwan via Hong Kong. Not bad if you can spend the day in Hong Kong and not have to pay for the privilege.

Transit details: after a huge and luxurious breakfast buffet at the hotel a private car picked me up at 8:30a and drove me down and across the border to HK. 2h20m because of the wait to clear out of China. Checked in at the HK airport at 11am for an afternoon flight. Took care of e-mails and then took a high-speed train to Kowloon – old stomping grounds, however I exited a little early and there was a lot of construction (as always-Hong Kong has not changed), so I got a little lost (always a good thing in my opinion) and spent too much time walking around Jordan Road when I meant to be farther south. Plan B was to get on the subway, which I did. Went to HK Island. Downtown. Once there I decided to go HK Bank HQ (still a very cool building) – there is still a small Occupy! encampment there – and close my old savings account at the bank. The teller was impressed I could remember the name of the branch where I opened the account 24 years ago – good golly I am old

The bank balance was only enough to pay for the high-speed train and lunch. The leftover change included HKD2.70 – small coins in this currency that I did not want to carry  – so to get back to the airport I took the famous Star Ferry across Hong Kong Harbor. Because I felt rich I splurged and went for the high-class upper deck – HKD2.50 (32 cents!)- which got rid of the coins.

I seem to have some ferry thing going on this year. This is my fifth ferry trip, though it is not fair  to compare this to the kayak walk-on in Anacortes in April. The video is accelerated 4X which means that a 2 minute video shows a 8 minute crossing – which does not seem right in retrospect but it was certainly worth all 32 cents. Youtube modifed the video to stabilize it – I will post a better version later, not that it matters much to my huge fan base, but it does to me.

Oh, yeah, then I went back to the airport and flew to Taiwan. I am in Taipei as I write this. I exchanged all my NTD for RMB before I left so I had to go to the ATM to get more NTD when I arrived back here. In DG, I used up all but 90 RMB and then most of my HKD in HK but not all. Thus the post name – 3 currencies (actually 4 since my base currency is USD).