December 21, 2007 by Rick.

In the ritzier hotel in Hong Kong, I went out shopping alone one evening and came back with the new Sanyo waterproof digital video (640×480 only) and 6MP digital still camera for Alex that we had been eying up for awhile. We first saw he Olympus one in Fiji back in Sept for almost $500. That included a lot of extras, but I still didn’t care for the fact that it used an XD card, since we already had various devices with SD and Sony Memory stick cards on the go. The thought of having another format of card to carry around all manner of accessories for just made my head spin. Luckily the Sanyo one uses SD, and the price on it had been slowly decreasing as we made our way North up through Asia. Prices on electronics in Hong King were generally OK, but not near as spectacular as I had expected. MP3 players specifically were no better, and in fact were often higher than North American or Australian prices. Ipods of every color, size and derrivation filled up huge amounts of every store. I had no interest in a genuine ipod due to the highly restrictive software and their poor price/feature index compared to almost every other brand available. Anyways, I digress… At the same place I bought Alex’s camera I also grabbed a 120GB hard drive small size media player. The brand is not one I had heard of in North America before, but that hardly means anything. It is a Vosonic 8360 and includes integrated video and audio recording. It’s not near a large and bulky as the Archos model I intended on buying, but the Archos was slightly more money and on top of that it still requires a separate cradle for about $120 to hook up to a larger sound system or to record. Another bonus on this one is that it includes a SD and CF cardreader into the chassis for PALM or Alex’s Sanyo camera backups. Very cool and handy! Our intention when we get back home is to have this adjacent and hooked up to the living room stereo system for playback of any of our entire music collection, without needing CD’s ever again. We concluded that this was maybe a better option rather than streaming them by WIFI from a server computer downstairs. We will probably still buy one video/audio streaming receiver when we get home for playback on the TV and audio system downstairs though. Lastly I managed to grab a CREATIVE brand MP3 player speaker set that’s specifically designed for the Zen V we have. It docks right in the front of the speakers and they provide incredible portable (or plug-in) sound while charging the player. Since the Zen V model is discontinued the speakers were about 1/3 of the original price! Well, they were half but since I bought them with the camera and 120Gig portable player the total price got drastically reduced. That cost a good hour investment of my life, but it was pretty worth it considering what I ended up paying for everything.

A few days later we all went about ten blocks North to another shopping district known to be not quite as ritzy as the one by our first hotel. This one area had all similar stores focussed in an area, so the consumer didn’t really have to go far to compare. The prices here were actually stickered (marked) on most items and were cheaper than the fancier area at the very South end of Kowloon. At the South end the stickers just had cost codes that the clerk would look at and then look at the consumer to size up how much he thought he could get away with before reciting a price. So while the Northern area prices were all cheaper, there was very little (if even none at all!) room for negotiating. In this area we were slightly looking for a new, larger, MP3 player for Alex and I was checking prices on a bluetooth microphone for our video camera. This would allow the person to wear a mike and transmit the audio up to 30m away to the cameraman. It was pretty cool, and something I had been looking at since we left home (at $400!). In Malaysia the price was about $300, (but that’s also possibly mainly due to the decreasing price over time) and in Vietnam I saw it for $250. In a couple places in Hong Kong I saw it for $175, and then $151 that day. My target price had always been $150, but I held off to try and get it with other things for a combined reduced rate. At one place we saw a new mini computer from Asus, called the EeePC 1701 that had a 7″ screen, was ultra portable with a battery, ran Linux or Windoze XP, had WIFI, a built in web cam and was only $385. This was a brand new item and NO STORE would go down on price, (as we eventually found out from repeated asking). So, finally at one store (we were running out of time before a booked space show at the science center that evening) I arbitrarily asked for a price on the 16GB flash MP4 player Alex had been eying up. The attendant made a mistake of $74 less on her verbal quote to me. I immediately agreed to buy it and also inquired if the had the Sony bluetooth mike. It turns out that they did, and better yet it was the best price I had ever seen at $138!!! I didn’t even bother trying to negotiate and just whipped out my VISA urging her to ring it up before some manager came along and knocked her to her senses.

We had been having quite a bit of difficulty connecting to the internet lately, (since half way through Thailand). It was becoming increasingly expensive, and the hotel “business centers” were almost cost prohibitive! The funny part was, most hotels we had stayed at in the latter part of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam & Hong Kong, all provided wired internet access for free in the rooms. This must have twigged Claudette’s nerves, because she was actively pursuing this little Asus ultra-light laptop, (with my approval of course!). We went back to the original place we hahd seen it and grabbed one before rushing off to the show on Black Holes. So, we spent a poopload of cash, but got some pretty good deals on “stuff” that we were planning on buying anyways or would be quite useful to us. I’m still typing this on the Palm, but no one else seems to like using it due to the keyboard occasionally acting up. For two thirds of the rest of the family, it has become a very expensive portable solitaire game…

Posted in 2007-12 to 2008-01, Hong Kong & China | 1 Comment »

December 21, 2007 by Rick.

This “Administratively distinct” region of China was really fun and interesting. Well, except for our feeble attempts at finding a reasonable hotel of course! We expected that before arriving, but we were still shocked to be paying CAN $300/night for only three beds, but downtown. Crazy! We stayed on the Kowloon side, across Victoria Harbor from Hong King Island. It was pretty cool, but we later discovered that we were in the slightly ritzier district for shops and hotels. Traffic was solidly busy everywhere we could see as well, so NOBODY jaywalked here. Hong Kong reminded both Claudette and I of Singapore in a lot of ways. After watching the discovery channel Extreme Engineering show on building the Hong Kong airport, tunnels, bridges and high speed train system it was pretty cool to see it all and ride it.

Sadly, a few days before while looking up activities to do in HK we found out about the gondola car dropping from the cable thus closing down the entire ride to the big Buhda that we had also watched an episode about on Extreme Engineering. We had seen quite enough Buhda’s in all shapes, sizes and mannerisms (believe me!) in Thailand and Laos, but we had been looking forward to this billion dollar gondola ride. We still managed to take the street cable car up the side of very steep hills on Hong Kong Island though. That was certainly a big highlight, even with heavy smaug obscuring the other side of the harbor, (At least, I thought I saw a dragon flying around???). Madam Tusseau (sp?) had a wax museum up there too, but we didn’t bother buying tickets since Claudette only wants to see the original (apparently?) in France. From the top we could see down to the ocean on both sides of the mountain. There were some pretty spectacular homes up here too! I can’t even imagine the price…

We looked for a venue to watch the (Guinness Book of of World records approved) world’s largest permanent light show, and caught most of it for fifteen minutes at 8:00 PM. It was OK, but not near as spectacular as we had heard and read about from so many different sources. We assumed that there was music, but it wasn’t played at our location and we didn’t have a radio. The next night though, after watching a great show on Black holes at the Science Center, we watched the light show from the opposite side. The whole area alongside the harbor was developed and had speakers to play music matching the light show. This was clearly the place to be to see it, and we went to the second floor balcony of the Art Museum to get an uncrowded view. There were scads of people crowding and elbowing in the other areas, but apparently none had thought hard enough to look for the obscured stairway coming up where we were, with only five or six other people along a huge 200m long deck area. On some of the video we captured, it can clearly be heard two and a half of us saying:

“WOW!!! Halifax doesn’t have ANYTHING like this!”

Posted in 2007-12 to 2008-01, Hong Kong & China | No Comments »