Hong Kong is a very vertical city - and I don't just mean the skyscrapers. Since central Hong Kong is on a tiny island with a bunch of tall mountains in the middle, everything is packed onto the mountain sides. So not only are you always surrounded by tall buildings, they are also at different ground levels along the slope. There are tons of stairs everywhere and with all the building being interconnected there's also a whole lot of escalators and elevators. For example yesterday Elise showed us the Hong Kong University campus. Basically we went up/down stairs/escalators/elevators about 10 times and when Marc and I were totally lost we came out at a plaza that was actually on the roof of a 20+ story building. From the plaza you could enter other buildings and take more escalators to take you up/down. It's pretty nuts and my legs are actually pretty sore after walking up/down tons of stairs the last two days. In the end we walked down a massive staircase to a grocery store that Elise shops at. They provide an escalator to take you back up after shopping, but it stops at 11pm, so if you're shopping late you're screwed!

Also, in the plaza at the university there was a memorial for the Tienanmen Square massacre. Hong Kong definitely isn't the same as China.

Anyway, now we're in Hanoi and we're leaving in about 20 minutes to catch a bus to Halong Bay. We're going to cruise around the bay for a few days before heading back to Hanoi. Yesterday we just traveled from Hong Kong to Hanoi via Macau and Bankok. It was a pretty uneventful day.