Saturday 3 November – Our first day in Hong Kong and we went on a walking tour with our tour guide Apple, visiting the central part of Hong Kong Island and then crossed Victoria Harbour to visit Kowloon.

So what is Hong Kong like: Lots and lots of people its very crowded: the metro is modern but even more crowded: there are lots of shops selling everything you can imagine: lots of restaurants;  posh shops mix with run down areas and street markets; the place is filled with very tall sky scrapers.

Everywhere you look there are great contrasts between wealth and people struggling to put food on the table and exist.  Very expensive modern apartment blocks and office building looking over street markets and run down shopping areas.  Modern shops selling expensive goods and then in the next street seedy looking shops, massage parlours and hotels which rent you a room for an hour.

The average working week is 80 hours, the minimum wage is £3.30 per hour, this in a city which is one of the most expensive places to live in the world. No wonder you see people falling to sleep on the Metro.

But the thing that will stick with me most about today’s tour was the site of hundreds and hundreds of female Filipino and Indonesian women sitting on blankets in groups on a covered bridge and in the entrance to a large metro, eating, chatting, sleeping, dancing.

These women work as maids, nannies, cooks for families in Hong Kong. If they work for a good family they get two days off, Saturday and Sunday others only get Sunday off.  But they can’t stay in the house / apartment where they work so they gather together to socialise on their days off.

Some of them only get Sunday off so the number of them doubles on Sunday, there are so many of them that they block off a whole street for them to sit and spend the day.

Its a very sad reflection of the world we live in that these women have to leave their home countries to work in a foreign land, for very little money and that on their day off they spend 8 to 10 hours sitting on concrete floors  because they don’t have the money to do anything else.