Another round of pictures culled from my Hong Kong trip, this one mostly featuring the people. Just a few highlights:
The first three days of the Chinese New Year celebrations are public holidays. Most of the domestic helpers (predominantly Filipino immigrants) have that time off, which they seem to spend on the streets chatting, eating, and playing games; some of them seemed to spend their time making small trinkets, presumably for later sale. Seeing all these people spilling over into the streets and just hanging around was fascinating; there were plenty of better photo ops than this one, but this was the only one I had the nerve to take. 
The famed shopping district of Mong Kok was pretty busy, although “light” due to the Chinese New Year. I found it a little bit stressful; it’s not so much the number of people that bothers me, it’s the feeling of being trapped in a slow “flow” of people, where changing direction or stopping is difficult… blech.
Dogs taking their owners for a walk along the pier. It was fun to see the dogs play with each other, but it was also a great opportunity to practise the technique of panning the camera with a fast subject to catch the subject while letting everything else blur. It took a lot of attempts!
Most of the crowds in Hong Kong were reasonable in density, probably due to the Chinese New Year holidays, and so didn’t stress me out much. In the tourist areas of Macau, however… boy oh boy, I had to clamp down on the claustrophobia feelings a couple times. Especially when I was buying the special almond cookies to bring back as gifts. Tight quarters, lots of people, many moving slowly or not at all… urgh!
Ruins of St. Pauls in Macau. I think it was here that I really cemented the damage to my ankle from walking around too much on my trip. While the initial damage was caused two days ago walking around Causeway Bay (and in particular window shopping the several floors in Times Square repeatedly), and worsened by Advil-masking in the intervening days, after braving the seasickness to get to Macau and the crowds in Macau, I was adamant in making it to these ruins despite very loud protests from my body. For what I saw it was completely not worth it, but it was more of a “mind over matter” issue at the time. I wish I had been mindful of that “matter” instead.
The full set of pics:
