I spent this week in Hong Kong as a delegate to the World Statistics Congress. I presented a literature review of the state of the science on applying Structural Equation Modelling to complex survey data. While I am not completely at home in a city this large, this has been a great educational experience beyond what I am learning attending the conference sessions. It has been interesting experiencing a city that intersperses ultra modern business and architecture with traditional open air markets with on site food preparation including butchering. I've ridden subways, trains, and ferry's, none of which are common in the places I have lived though I have finally used enough times to suppress the initial panic of not being in control of the vehicle I am on. Or the realization that the number of people in the subway station exceeds the total population of the town I live in.

I occasionally see small families with children Payge and Quinton's age, usually tourists from mainland China. (How do I know they are tourists? They could pass for locals, but they are holding maps and are as lost as I am trying to find places.)

The pictures below are to some places I've been, including the Hong Kong Conference and Exhibition Center where I've been during the day, the harbor with ferries, and some markets nestled among sky scrapers.

Update: I went with my colleague Marcus to see the big Buddha statue East of the city.

An now for some perspective. Hong Kong has over 7 million people living in 1/4th the geographic area as Cache County's 112,000 people. That is over 6000:1. Assuming an average household of 4 in Cache County, we would have to put 24,000 people on the geographic footprint of each Cache County house to support a population of 7 million. Nothing but sky scrapers here (note that the Buddha statue I visited was ~11 stories high, the Eccles Business School at USU is only 9). This is why the mass transit is so dirt cheap ($2.46 US$ for the longest ride you can take on the subway without changing stations). Also note that half of Hong Kong is uninhabitable mountains, much like Cache County. By comparison, New York City has 8 million is the same square mileage as Hong Kong, but essentially no mountains.