Tuesday, October 11, 2005

 

China's National Day

On October 1st, China celebrated the 56th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. China and Hong Kong celebrated it with lots of carnivals, dragon dances, Chinese opera performances and fireworks. My dad was in town so we decided to go to dinner over in Tsim Sha Tsui (which is on Kowloon and not HK Island) with some friends then head down to the waterfront to watch the fireworks over the water. As we started walking down the main road toward the water, I realize the street is blocked off and there are masses of people moving in the same direction as us. We got about 2 blocks from the water and stopped. In fact, Troy and Chris got to a point where they literally could not move in any direction. They finally where able to push them (and us) back and out onto the street where at least we could breath. There were so many people there to watch the fireworks it was almost unbelievable have no idea how many people were in this area but we could only guess 20,000-30,000 people.
That is Shelly's estimate, I - Troy- think it was a lot more then that! TST is one of the most crowded places on earth and if a percentage of all those people decide to go out and watch fireworks...I think more like 100,000+. There were people as far as you could see down Nathan road. This is the equivalent of 6 land road packed with people for at least 1 mile.

And that was just in the area we were. I don't know how many were watching from Hong Kong island - talk about a quick immersion for my dad into the 8 million people of Hong Kong.

The funniest thing about the mass of people was the collective oohs, and ahh's when the fireworks went off. It was almost like they had never seen fireworks before. And the people were so loud. Just imagine being surrounded by several thousand people, jammed packed next to you and all at the same time they shout "ooh" "ahh".

The irony of all the parties and excitement is that the holiday is celebrating the rise of communism. Rock on communism!!!! Down with freedom of speech. Down with freedom of religion. Damn those bastard journalists that dare say anything bad about China. Hooray for the spies watching over the Internet. Who cares about Greenpeace, their not welcome here! :-)...Fortunately Hong Kong allows most of those things (e.g. freedom of religion and speech) - at least for now.

1 Comments:

Hi Shelly & Troy,

next time come with us, to view the firework from a boat, it's not so crowded. We went with some friends from Northpoint Pier for a half day tour to Clearwater Bay for swimming and we catched some very small crabs too. Later we had a nice seafood dinner before we left just in time to reach the Victoria Habour at 09.00 pm.
There' ve been a lots of boats as well, but it's by far not so scary as being in the middle of this crowd.

Best regards
Achim and Micha

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:24 AM  

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