After arriving in Hong Kong early in the morning, we were taken to the Hong Kong Conrad Hotel where we were staying for several days. We had a short sleep, then I took the grandchildren for a walk and we found Hong Kong Park, with a Fountain Plaza, waterways, a waterfall, and turtles.
Part of the fountain area.
Turtles resting on a rock
A turtle about to go in the water
The waterfall.
It was a pleasant surprise to find this park in such a highly built-up area.
Nearby was a multi-story underground shopping center that was huge, and very conveniently accessible from our hotel.
I was told a long time ago I wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t bother me. Then.
But it’s true. I don’t always get it right, sometimes I get annoyed and say things in the heat of the moment that perhaps shouldn’t be said, and sometimes I can be ‘difficult’.
I’ll be the first in line to say my blog isn’t perfect, in fact sometimes it bothers me some of the bits and pieces that go up because I doubt if they’re interesting, at the time, to anyone but me.
Perhaps it’s because I chose to be a writer.
It’s a hard slog at the best of times. Getting ideas, carving out time to write, having to live a normal life as distinct from that of living in a garret, on your own, writing that next great Nobel prize for literature, or is it a Pulitzer?
I don’t get that, I don’t have that, and I don’t want that.
For those of us living on that ‘edge’ of finding time to write, maintain a blog, keep up with social media, do the daily chores and watch some television, something has to give.
So, I’m not getting any writing done if I’m working on the blog, or I’m on social media. If I’m doing the blog, something else has to be sacrificed.
Mostly it’s my blog. My blog is about writing stuff, visiting places that have been or will be used in stories, and once, a recalcitrant cat who sadly has passed on. It also has running episodic stories, usually four different at a time.
It also had about 2,000 past posts. When I don’t get the time to do my blog, which has been mostly for the last three months off and on, I sometimes repackage or repeat past posts, just to keep it ticking over, much like a scoreboard.
It is also a tool for advertising my books and stories, and what’s coming (if only I stopped using social media) and these are repeated every four or five days. It’d the equivalent of advertising because I can’t afford other advertising. If this is an annoyance, I’m sorry.
And just so everyone knows, I will always keep writing, not because I want to become the next James Patterson, though it would be nice, I write because I want to, and it pleases me when someone reads something I write, and they like it. It is the greatest compliment of all, and I believe in encouragement. It’s why I spend a lot of that social media time highlighting other writers so they can build a following.
After all, we are all in the same boat, it would just be nice if we were all rowing in the same direction.
I’m back to writing, sitting at the desk, pad in front of me, pen in hand.
The only thing lacking, an idea.
It’s 9:03 am, too early to start on a six pack.
I need a distraction.
Blogging, web sites, twitter and facebook, all of these social media problems are swirling around in my mind.
The more I read the more it bothers me that if I don’t have the right social media presence, if I do not start to build an email list, all of my efforts in writing a book will come to nought.
Then I start trawling the internet for information on marketing and found a plethora of people offering any amount of advice for anything between a ‘small amount’ to a rather large amount that gives comprehensive coverage of most social media platforms for periods of a day, a week or a month. I don’t have a book so it’s a bit early to be worrying about that.
I move onto the people who offer advice for a cost on how to build a following, how to build a web presence, how to get a thousand Twitter followers, how to get thousands of email followers before the launch. The trouble is I’m writing a novel not a non fiction book, or have some marvellous 30 page ebook on how to do something, for free just to drive people to my site.
I’m a novelist not a handyman so those ideas while good are not going to help me.
Yet another problem to wrestle with along with actually creating a product to sell in the first place.
Except I’m supposed to be writing for the love of it without the premeditated idea of writing for gain or getting rich quick.
What am I missing here?
So should l be writing short stories and offering them for free to drive people to my site? These would have to be genre specific so it needs time and effort and fit into a convenient size story that will highlight or showcase my talent.
Or should I create a web site for the novel and set up pages for the characters an get some interaction going that way?
It will be difficult without giving the whole plot away so if I do it will have to be carefully managed.
I don’t think I will have a good night’s sleep again with all of these social media problems I’m going to have.
Oh well, back to the book. It’s time to have a nightmare of a different sort!
After arriving in Hong Kong early in the morning, we were taken to the Hong Kong Conrad Hotel where we were staying for several days. We had a short sleep, then I took the grandchildren for a walk and we found Hong Kong Park, with a Fountain Plaza, waterways, a waterfall, and turtles.
Part of the fountain area.
Turtles resting on a rock
A turtle about to go in the water
The waterfall.
It was a pleasant surprise to find this park in such a highly built-up area.
Nearby was a multi-story underground shopping center that was huge, and very conveniently accessible from our hotel.
Sometimes the experiences we have often find their way into stories. This was certainly one of them:
Remarkably, the Peninsula Hotel experience began at the arrival gate.
The moment we stepped out of the air bridge and into the terminal building, a representative of the Hong Kong airport was waiting with a card with our name on it. She was there, with driver and electric car (sometimes called a golf cart) to ease our way through the immigration and baggage formalities.
No walking for us, which was fine by me. It’s a train ride and a long walk from the gate to immigration. And after all the sitting on the airplane, walking was not the first thing I was looking forward to.
The drive took a few minutes, slowed down by many other passengers walking towards the same destination, most wondering why two relatively young people like us (even if we are in our 60’s) were getting a ride.
After clearing immigration, which took very little time, and where there was a very short queue considering the number of arrivals they handle, we were met on the other side by our airport representative, and taken to the baggage carousel.
Another simple process, our bags were almost waiting for us. From there we exited customs, and out representative handed us over to the representative of the hotel. I thought he was the driver.
He took us through to the limousine lounge and directly to our car, a very clean shiny new looking green Rolls Royce, the ultimate in the airport to hotel transportation.
Inside it was immaculate, and astonishing, and very, very comfortable. I could image the Queen riding in the back of one. It took about 30 to 40 minutes, one of the quietest, most smooth rides I’d ever had, and worth every cent we paid for it.
The bucket list now has one less item on it.
The arrival at the hotel was effortlessly handled. We were met by two of the check-in staff and escorted to our room on the fourth floor.
There was just enough time to take in the amazing foyer, front entrance and twin staircases leading to a mezzanine floor, before getting into a waiting elevator and taken to our floor. As an aside, the mirrors in the elevator were like something out of a hall of mirrors, you look into the mirror and see dozens of yourself looking back.
It’s an effect I’ll have to take a photo of.
We have been upgraded, and out room is larger than the one originally allocated. It has a view of the Space Museum, the Veranda Cafe roof, and parts of Hong Kong harbor. It is overcast and raining so it does not matter about the view.
It’s Hong Kong, and that view will change every hour.
Formalities over, we are left standing in stunned silence.
We have arrived.
They say getting there is half the fun.
They’re wrong.
Or at least in the case of the Peninsular Hotel they are.
If just getting to the hotel via the signature Green Rolls Royce is any indication, there had to be a lot more in store.
We booked a room in the ‘old’ hotel and it was categorized as ‘deluxe’. The Peninsula adds a whole new meaning to the word Deluxe. If this was one of their lower priced rooms, then I’d love to see their better rooms.
But the room itself is not the sum of the experience; it is also the aura within the building, the service, which is quiet and unassumingly polite and unobtrusive. You are ushered from the front door, held open by a very elegantly dressed concierge, to your room without so much as a heartbeat.
The details, well, they are mere details that cause no concern, all taken care of before you arrived. We arrived early, before the advertised check-in, and this fazed no one. Room available, tired travelers sigh in relief, knowing a hot shower and several hours sleep would not be possible.
I was more than pleasantly surprised, and exploring the hotel would have to wait.
So, I wonder if it’s true, any port in a storm, except perhaps Marsailles
Or, if you are a lothario type sailor, you would have a girl in every port.
Yes, the most common definition of a port is a place where ships dock.
And, while talking of ships we don’t call the sides left and right, we call them port and starboard. Just in case you didn’t know, port is the left side of the ship when facing forward.
And of course, ships have portholes, ie windows, traditionally round and rather small.
It could be an alcoholic drink, imbibed mostly after dinner with coffee and cigars, though no one seems to smoke cigars any more.
There is still coffee, for now. No doubt sometime in the future someone will link it to death and dying, and it will fall out of favour, like sugar, weedkillers and asbestos.
The best port seems to come from Portugal, strange about that.
You can port a program (app in phone speak) from one platform to another, which basically means from Android to Apple IOS, but not without a reasonable amount of work.
It can also be an outlet plug on a computer that accepts cables from other devices (USB) and many years ago, a printer port, and a serial port.
In certain places in the world a port is a child’s schoolbag, a definition I was not aware of until we moved to a different state.
Sometimes the experiences we have often find their way into stories. This was certainly one of them:
Remarkably, the Peninsula Hotel experience began at the arrival gate.
The moment we stepped out of the air bridge and into the terminal building, a representative of the Hong Kong airport was waiting with a card with our name on it. She was there, with driver and electric car (sometimes called a golf cart) to ease our way through the immigration and baggage formalities.
No walking for us, which was fine by me. It’s a train ride and a long walk from the gate to immigration. And after all the sitting on the airplane, walking was not the first thing I was looking forward to.
The drive took a few minutes, slowed down by many other passengers walking towards the same destination, most wondering why two relatively young people like us (even if we are in our 60’s) were getting a ride.
After clearing immigration, which took very little time, and where there was a very short queue considering the number of arrivals they handle, we were met on the other side by our airport representative, and taken to the baggage carousel.
Another simple process, our bags were almost waiting for us. From there we exited customs, and out representative handed us over to the representative of the hotel. I thought he was the driver.
He took us through to the limousine lounge and directly to our car, a very clean shiny new looking green Rolls Royce, the ultimate in the airport to hotel transportation.
Inside it was immaculate, and astonishing, and very, very comfortable. I could image the Queen riding in the back of one. It took about 30 to 40 minutes, one of the quietest, most smooth rides I’d ever had, and worth every cent we paid for it.
The bucket list now has one less item on it.
The arrival at the hotel was effortlessly handled. We were met by two of the check-in staff and escorted to our room on the fourth floor.
There was just enough time to take in the amazing foyer, front entrance and twin staircases leading to a mezzanine floor, before getting into a waiting elevator and taken to our floor. As an aside, the mirrors in the elevator were like something out of a hall of mirrors, you look into the mirror and see dozens of yourself looking back.
It’s an effect I’ll have to take a photo of.
We have been upgraded, and out room is larger than the one originally allocated. It has a view of the Space Museum, the Veranda Cafe roof, and parts of Hong Kong harbor. It is overcast and raining so it does not matter about the view.
It’s Hong Kong, and that view will change every hour.
Formalities over, we are left standing in stunned silence.
We have arrived.
They say getting there is half the fun.
They’re wrong.
Or at least in the case of the Peninsular Hotel they are.
If just getting to the hotel via the signature Green Rolls Royce is any indication, there had to be a lot more in store.
We booked a room in the ‘old’ hotel and it was categorized as ‘deluxe’. The Peninsula adds a whole new meaning to the word Deluxe. If this was one of their lower priced rooms, then I’d love to see their better rooms.
But the room itself is not the sum of the experience; it is also the aura within the building, the service, which is quiet and unassumingly polite and unobtrusive. You are ushered from the front door, held open by a very elegantly dressed concierge, to your room without so much as a heartbeat.
The details, well, they are mere details that cause no concern, all taken care of before you arrived. We arrived early, before the advertised check-in, and this fazed no one. Room available, tired travelers sigh in relief, knowing a hot shower and several hours sleep would not be possible.
I was more than pleasantly surprised, and exploring the hotel would have to wait.
So, I wonder if it’s true, any port in a storm, except perhaps Marsailles
Or, if you are a lothario type sailor, you would have a girl in every port.
Yes, the most common definition of a port is a place where ships dock.
And, while talking of ships we don’t call the sides left and right, we call them port and starboard. Just in case you didn’t know, port is the left side of the ship when facing forward.
And of course, ships have portholes, ie windows, traditionally round and rather small.
It could be an alcoholic drink, imbibed mostly after dinner with coffee and cigars, though no one seems to smoke cigars any more.
There is still coffee, for now. No doubt sometime in the future someone will link it to death and dying, and it will fall out of favour, like sugar, weedkillers and asbestos.
The best port seems to come from Portugal, strange about that.
You can port a program (app in phone speak) from one platform to another, which basically means from Android to Apple IOS, but not without a reasonable amount of work.
It can also be an outlet plug on a computer that accepts cables from other devices (USB) and many years ago, a printer port, and a serial port.
In certain places in the world a port is a child’s schoolbag, a definition I was not aware of until we moved to a different state.
In 1974 a 26-year-old farmer, Yang Jide, was drilling a well and found fragments of the terracotta soldiers and bronze weapons.
What was discovered later was one of the biggest attended burial pits of China’s first feudal Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the following years remains had been found in 3 pits, yielding at least 8,000 soldiers and horses, and over 100 chariots. The soldiers were infantry, cavalry, and others.
Emperor Qin was born in 259 BC and died in 210 BC. He began building a mausoleum for himself at the foot of Mount Li when he was 13. Construction took 38 years, from 247 BC to 208 BC. It was divided into 3 stages and involved 720,000 conscripts.
The pits of pottery figures are 1.5 km east of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. Pit 1 has about 6,000 terracotta armored warriors and horses and 40 wooden chariots. Pit 2 is estimated to have over 900 terracotta warriors and 350 terracotta horses with about 90 wooden chariots. Pit 3 had so far yielded only 66 pottery figures and one chariot drawn by four horses.
Official records say it was discovered later that it was likely Xiang Yu, a rebel, intentionally damaged the Mausoleum and the soldiers in the pits, by setting fire to the wooden roof rafters, and these fell on and broke the warriors into pieces.
However, we were told that after the terracotta warriors were completed, the Emperor ordered the builders to be killed so that they would not tell anyone about the warriors, and then of those that remained alive deliberately smashed all of the artifacts.
The thing is, all of the terracotta figures that have been found are in pieces, and they need computers to piece them back together again.
The visit: The first impression is the size of the car park and the number of buses parked in the lot, and a hell of a lot more outside up the road an off on side streets. Obviously, it costs money to park in the parking lot.
The other first impressions; the numbers waiting to get in were not as many as yesterday outside the forbidden city, in fact, a lot less.
Be warned there’s a long walk from the entrance gate where your bags are scanned and a body scan as well, before admittance. This walk is through a landscaped area which it is expect might sometime in the future reveal more soldiers, or other artifacts.
At the end of the walk that takes about ten minutes, you can get a one-way ride to the second checkpoint, but we opted not to as no one else in our group did.
That walk is the warm-up exercise to an organized viewing of the exhibits after going through a second ticket checkpoint. On the other side, we had to hand our tickets back to the tour guide which was disappointing not to end up with a memento of actually having been there.
So, on the other side in the courtyard, the guide told us the most important parts of the exhibition, that we should spend most of the time looking at pit 1, and then spent a little time in 2 which is only there in the first stages of excavation. Then move onto the museum if only to see the replica chariots.
We do.
The chariots were small but interesting
The horses were better and intricately detailed
These are soldiers, perhaps complete examples of those types found in the end pit.
This is one of the archers. You can tell by the way he wears his hair.
Pit 2
The excavation of this pit has only just begun, so it is possible to see where they have carefully removed the top cover, and you can see the broken parts of the warriors lying in a heap.
Some parts of the warriors are more discernible closer up
These parts are carefully extracted and taken to the ‘hospital’ where they are digitised and the computer will match each part with the warrior it belongs to.
Pit 1
This has quite a number of standing soldiers that have been glued back together, but not necessarily complete and I notice a number if the statues were incomplete. And if they cannot find the missing pieces, then they are not added to or filled in.
The scale of the pit is enormous, and they have hardly scratched the surface in the restoration process.
What is there is a number of horses as well.
That’s at the front of the pit, a long line of statues, and what is clear is the location of the well where the first fragments were found by a farmer.
There are about eight lines of soldiers, and some lining the sides.
Midway down there is a large area currently under excavation
At the back is the hospital where the soldiers are reassembled. There’s nearly a hundred in the various stages of rebuilding. These days the soldiers are rebuilt using computer imaging.
The hospital area is where they are put back together
And these are some of the statues in various stages of reconstruction
Another two views of the size and scale of the reconstruction project
The coffee shop is also a sales centre, but there are too many people waiting for coffee and too few places to sit down.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 