When shopping for cameras in Hong Kong be sure to count all your fingers.   So really, what was there to do here?  I was already living in Thailand for 8 years and had traveled to many spots in the country as well as going to Vietnam four times, and Cambodia, and Malaysia once.  As far as the shopping, it was all pretty much the same old shit except that Hong Kong had all sorts of high dollar shops where one can easily spend several times what one normally pays for things.  Sure, if one came over direct from the U.S. or Europe and had not spent any time in Asia, some of this might be new and rather quaint, but as my girlfriend pointed out, "What is there here really for us?"   Well we did manage to get over to a camera shop where I wound up spending $330 for a Panasonic LX-7 camera for my girlfriend.  That's actually a pretty good price--equivalent to the best prices I can get over at Amazon and roughly$100 less than I'd have to pay in Thailand for the same camera.  The problem with Thailand if you are buying a camera is if the camera is not made in Thailand you wind up having to pay huge import duties whereas in Hong Kong and the U.S. you don't.  Let me give you an example.   Recently I bought a small external hard drive at Super Walmart in the U.S.  This external hard drive was made in Thailand and yet Thailand could ship it over to the U.S. where it would be sold cheaper than one can buy it in Thailand.   The problem with buying cameras and other electronics products in Hong Kong is you had better be counting your fingers both before and after entering the shop.  The Panasonic LX-7 is basically a Leica camera that has been primarily designed in Germany but which is a joint venture between Leica and Panasonic.  It's made in Japan.  And that's why it sells for a hundred dollars more in Thailand whereas my Nikon D300 SLR was made in Thailand and therefore sold for a price which was about the same as one would have to pay for it in the U.S.  Now the equivalent Leica camera to the Panasonic LX-7 sells for $750 to $800 at Amazon so you wind up having to pay double the price to get the prestigous Leica logo on the same camera. But this was Hong Kong.  What are the changes that the outer shell of the camera is Japanese but the inner parts were made in China?   I had already been stung once by the Chinese and the Thais working in concert.  Just over a year ago I had bought a cell phone over at Tuk com here in Pattaya.  And here I must emphasize that Tuk.com is a recognized electronics super store instead of being a cut rate outdoor market affair where one never really knows what one is getting.  The phone had a lot of features that I really didn't need.  But it hardly worked at all so I wound up taking it to a Nokia dealer were I was informed that it wasn't a Nokia at all.  In fact even though it had Nokia written all over it but it was made in China it wasn't a Nokia at all.  It wasn't licensed by Nokia and it never had Nokia specs.  The dealer told me that no Nokia phone had all those features that my phone had.   So I can only hope that the Panasonic LX-7 is the real deal as engineered by Leica and Panasonic and manufactured in Japan instead of a cheap Chinese copy.  Somehow I think I got a real LX-7 though because the Chinese shop owner kept trying to get me to buy an inferior Casio model after telling me that a lot of Chinese girls are buying the Casio since it has all this wonderful software inside that makes them look more beautiful than they really are.  He would have wound up selling me the Casio for almost twice as much.  Thankfully I had read a large number  of reviews about the LX-7 over at Amazon and the Digital Camera reviews which informed me that it was by far the best camera in the pocket camera class.  I also had been using its predecessor, the Panasonic LX-5 for a couple of years and I already knew that nothing could touch it when it came to doing video, particularly in low light situations.   This particular Chinese shop owner was a lying scumbag.  For instance, he tried to sell me a 16 gigabyte memory card for the LX-7 for $100.00.  When I told him I wanted to buy the cheaper one for $30.00 he told me it was not up to producing full HD video.  I insisted on buying the $30.00 card.  Immediately upon returning to Thailand I found that it worked just fine for doing full HD video.  Moreover my LX-5 Panasonic camera card was rated a 10, which was the same rating the cheaper camera card I got in Hong Kong had printed on it.   This shop keeper tried to sell me a filter for my Nikon D 300's lense for $100.00 when equivalent lenses can be bought at Amazon for less than $30.00.  But the man's most outrageous attempt at swindling me came when he tried to sell me a wide angle lens attachment for $400 when these things can be bought at Amazon for around $20.00.  This is an a wide angle lens but an attachment that fits over the camera lens in much the same way that a filter screws on.   Memories come back to me about the Pentax ME camera I bought in Hong Kong back in 1979.  When I got back to the U.S. I found that this was an old model that had recently been replaced by what was called the ME super.  Looking back on the many years I used this SLR, I had always felt it did not produce nearly the quality of pictures that a Nikon would.  Of course the Nikon back then was the real choice of the pros.  Nevertheless, I had never, not once ever had anyone ever produce a good enlargement of any picture I ever took of this picture that exceeded an 8 by 10 in size.  Looking back on it all, I think the Hong Kong shop had sold me a camera that had never met Pentax's specs.   The shop owner also had a Nikon D 600 Slr.  But I had already priced a Nikon D 610 over in Macau.  The reviews on this camera are all over the amazon.com web site.  With the D600 there is apparently a problem with oil getting on its sensor and whatever causes this problem has now been rectified by the D610.  In fact one of my best friends has the D600 and he assures me that this oil problem is very real.  But when I mentioned this to the shop owner he told me that it was not oil that was causing the problem.  It was a shadow effect, the details of which I got entirely lost in, which is very understandable since it was all complete bullshit anyway.   Now if you think this is only a one camera shop phenonemon and that I was unlucky enough to have simply picked the wrong camera shop at random just consider that when I came back to my condo here in Pattaya and showed the new Panasonic LX-7 camera to a couple of my German friends, they both told me, "I'd never buy a camera in Hong Kong because Hong Kong's notorious for selling cheap electronic copies of cameras and other such items.   Hopefully it is not a Chinese copy.  But the supplied software was made in China, including the specialized video editing software that is required to edit movies taken in Panasonic's native AVCHD format.  The program was defective on both computers I tried to install it to.  Enough said.  Night Clubbing in Wansai Rory knew Hong Kong like the back of his hand.  After all, he had spent years in the area and even spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese.  He recommended the Empire Hotel in Wanchai to us which at a little more than a hundred bucks a night was a pretty good deal for Hong Kong.   This was in the infamous Susie Wong district which had moved decidedly upscalel through the years.  Thankfully it still oozed girls, girls, girls.  But expensive cars such as Ferraris and Porcshes were parked along its streets.   Rory pointed out several bar girls trying to hawk customers into a girlie joint.  Then he told me, that's the kind of place to avoid if were were going to go in without your girlfriend.  Such places have drugged people I know, they have piled on unasked for charges and the ladies drinks are extremely high there.   Then he took us into a couple of night clubs that supplied its own women in house.  But it was still too early.  And the women were not yet up to full speed.  Had we come in an hour or two later, without my girlfriend, we no doubt would have been set upon like a bone in a dog pound.   Speaking of--that was our next stop.  The Dog House.  Rory had told a friend he'd meet him there for a beer so we met the friend sitting just outside the Dog House's front entrance.  The service was good here.  A Chinese waiter immediately took our drink orders after recommending a bucket of beers, so that's what we got, a bucket containing five or six bottles of Tsingtao beer smothered in ice.  We spent the next hour talking to the friend, an Englishman, who I took a liking to immediately as we drank down the bucket of beers while watching all the Wanchai street life pass us by.   By now Wanchai had woken up to hit its full stride so it was time for us to move on.  The Englishman took us to a nearby disco where we found a surplus of women upstairs.   As we drank our first beer, we eyeballed a dozen available women out on the dance floor dancing in twos.   Meanwhile the Englishman headed straight to the bar while I spotted a shapely slender woman who appeared somewhere around thirty.  She didn't smile so at first I thought she felt I was either too old for her or too poor.  I figured her to be a Chinese hooker on the make.   It didn't take long for Rory to make a connection to her though.  But he's over twenty years younger than I am, and he didn't have a woman with him.  I did so perhaps the woman had seen that I was already taken and that was the reason for her disinterest.  After Rory bought her a drink she brightened considerably.  But she sure in the hell wasn't Chinese.  She was Indonesian, and her English was quite good.   Meanwhile the Englishman insisted on buying Rory and me a Long Island Tea, but only after warning us that it would put us on our asses.  For the uniniated a Long Island Tea has four or five kinds of alcohol in it.  It was one of my standbyes back at the Centara Hotel's happy hours where they are well worth the money given that I can get two for one specials at $7.00 with spectacular scenery all about me.  At this discoteque both Rory and his friend watched the bartender mixed the drinks.  Afterwards both assured me that my entire glass was composed entirely of alcohol with no mixers or anything else put in to dampen its effect.   By the time we were on our way to the next night club I was well on my way.   But first, Rory got all of us beers for the road in 20 ounce cans which we drank while walking around Wanchai.  Now here I must interject, strongly I might add, that one cannot do this in cities in the U.S. where the police would probably arrest you for disturbing the peace or having an open container of devil juice.  But we were, I suppose in Communist China.  After all, the British delivered Hong Kong along with Macau back to the Mainland Chinese after running it as their colony for the past 100 years.  So when the lease period was up, in 1997, we were all used to calling Mainland China, Red China because back before that there were two Chinas, Good China and Bad China which went by the names of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China.  So I suppose that technically even though we were all cavorting around the seediness of Wanchai that we  were doing it in Commieland.   By now practically everyone knows that capitalism has taken firm root in Red China and that the Chinese economy has been exploding to the tune of 8 percent annual growth rates.  But there still is a Communist Party.   Yet Americans really should be ashamed over just how much of a police state their country has become.  You really can't have any fun anymore in the U.S.  For one thing in most places you really need a car so if you go anywhere at night and drink more than two beers you stand a very good chance of getting a DWI (drinking while intoxicated) and having to pay over $10,000 in lawyer's in court costs, losing your driving privileges for at least one month and having your record permanently blemished.  One must also go through all these classes in order to arrive at the true meaning of why you ever committed such a psychological travesty as to drinking so much in the first place.  Believe me, I can have a lot more fun in Communist Vietnam were I feel a lot more freedom and sense of fun than I can ever have in the U.S.   About the only thing that's still fun on the American night life scene are strip clubs, but people have gotten to be very busy trying to close them down.   Let me assure you that most strip clubs are very milk toast and sedate compared to what one finds in most of the rest of the world.  And yet, all these do gooder Christian groups keep trying to paint them as the work of the devil whose mere existence is corrupting the morals of every child who's within two miles of them.   I'm telling you that this is all pure bullshit what's been happening to America, that supposedly land of the free.   Here I'm in Commieland even if it is in Hong Kong and I'm heading over to the next disco where they actually have got lots of prostitutes posing as normal women on the make.  We enter the next place.  Immediately an attractive slender woman (they hardly exist in the U.S. anymore) who's sitting with two or three companions looks me directly in the eye and gives me a cheerful hello.  I, of course immediately want to sit down with her, but my girlfriend's somewhere closeby and I can be sure that she's watching my every move.  I might be 66 whereas she's 28, but she's the watchful one, not I.   Welcome to Asia where a man with a little money can have the whole world by the tail.   Ugh.  Rory's found a gal already who he brings over to introduce  to the rest of us.  She's from Venezuela  (note, this one's not Chinese either).  But she's pretty much of a cow, carrying too much additional weight.  After all, if I at the ripe old age of 66 can still weigh must 75 kilos or 165 pounds, the same weight I was at as a Senior in college, I think I have a right to expect women in their twenties to be thin and trim.  And just the other day I tipped the scales at 162.5 pounds which is exactly what I weighed at 19 while earning my letter for my university's cross country running team.  Thankfully, Rory did not keep this woman with him for very long.   We moved over across the room away from the dance floor where he had found the Venezuelan woman.   It was there that the third woman of the evening latched onto him.  This one was Vietnamese and she was most definitely porkable.  But he left the place without her after muttering something about her having too professional an attitude about her.   The next disco brought in a Filippino who wanted him (me, his friend) in the worse way.  She'd spend the rest of the night with any of the above for $150.00.   Well, shit, if I lived for a long time anywhere near Wanchai for very long I'd sure be getting that price down.  In the meantime I'm sure that many of the guidebooks are saying that Hong Kong whores are expensive at $150 to $300.   But I've got age on my side.  I happen to know better.   The thing that's a little difficult for me to understand is that not one of the prostitutes that we met were Chinese.   Oh I'm sure there's a lot of Chinese girls selling their bodies, but, on this particular night the girls were all from other Asian countries with the exception of the South American girl.  And yet, when we entered Hong Kong from Macau we had been detained at passport control for over twenty minutes longer than we should have been.   I had thought that once we entered Macau were had entered China so that would be that.  But there were separate immigration departments for Macau and Hong Kong just as there had been separate currencies, the Macau and the Hong Kong dollar.  Things had gone quickly for my girlfriend and I when we got to Macau, but not here.   As soon as my girlfriend showed her passport to the Hong Kong immigration official at Passport control she was asked to come over to a small group that was not being allowed into Hong Kong.  There my girlfriend was met by another immigration official who asked her a few questions.  Then he politely told all of us to wait.   Another official came over to my girlfriend to ask still more questions while looking at her passport.  Meanwhile I jammed a couple of documents into her hands such as our airline e ticket that showed we had traveled together from Bangkok.  And of course, if need be our passports matched up showing that we had traveled together twice to Vietnam and once to Malaysia thus showing clearly that we were a couple traveling together, and that she wasn't just some prostitute that I was trying to inject into the Hong Kong economy.  The immigration officials were very polite, however.  Still, we were detained for twenty minutes after we had already had to go through a long line just to get to passport control in the first place.  I must say that the Thais do a much better and more efficient job at their passport control points in the Bangkok airports than I ever saw in Hong Kong.    See what you missed on the Trip to Macau                     View My Stats