There are a lot of things you can take if you leave for a year, but we left with about 12 to 13 kg in each of our backbacks. We don’t miss much and there are still a few items we would not have needed. I wanted to dedicate a few posts to some of the more or less necessary items in our luggage. As we just bought a new gadet we did really miss, I will start out with our new netbook.
Hong Kong is an experiment of free market economy, an island with a long history in international trade, long before the word globalization was even invented. It is a tax heaven and shopper’s paradise and especially for electronics this is nowhere more so than in the ‚Golden Computer Arcade‘ in Sham Shui Po. It is located in one of the poorer quarters north of the city center, where happiness and underbelly of capitalism live side by side. Most apartments here are shared by several families and there are over 100 000 so called ‚cage people‚ that live in iron cages as they cannot afford the high rents. Besides social tension Sham Shui Po features the temple of electronics, the place to buy the latest high tech as cheap as nowhere else on the planet.
During the first couple of months, we were really missing a small computer – mainly to manage our photos. I had the most ‚offline‘ time of my last 15 years and I rather enjoyed it. However with ever more wifi (free in hostels, cafes or at McD) there are less and less internet cafes with proper computers – and our iPhones don’t help much with sorting photos. So we wanted to get a cheap netbook and were happy that the computer festival in Sham Shui Po had just started – thousands of people come to the Computer Arcade, a two storey shopping mall completely cramped with electronics. They sell a dozen or so brand new computers every day for 1 Dollar as a promotion, if you wait in line from the evening before you might get one. We got our hands on a small Samsung N-150 for 2000 Hong Kong Dollars, less than 180€.
It’s my first Windows computer for more than a decade, but I kind of like it. So we caught up with (selecting and uploading) our photo collection, added some new stuff on the blog and can surf websites in more than 960×640 pixels again. Battery life so far is really amazing and it even has a slot for the SD cards from our Canon. We bought a 64GB usb key with it, to backup some stuff.
So we are happy about the latest addition to our luggage, though it did add a bit of weight.But it does add a bit of convenience as well for some of the digital tasks of today’s traveler.
