We planned to take a train from Shanghai to Hong Kong or Shenzhen, but all seats were full, so we took a flight to Shenzhen and spent a night in a motel near the airport, where signs such as these attracted our attention.

The so-called "Chinglish" signs in China and Taiwan are often a source of amusement to native English speakers. For their part, the Chinese can laugh at the ridiculous mistakes we make in speaking Chinese when we get our tones wrong.

Cute Chinese mascots. These goats celebrate the 16th Asian Games, held in Guangzhou, China. They are both sporty and cute.

Chun-Chih and the boys went to Dongguan to visit Jeri's Third Brother, and this gave Arthur and Sebastian a chance to work in Chinese factory with other low-skilled Chinese workers. Was it fun? Not really.

But after the work in the factory, the boys were able to relax in the living room of their uncle's home in Dongguan. Here Arthur is lazing on the couch.

Back in Hong Kong, I kept marvelling at the massive scale of the built environment. Not really a human scale. But, all this crowding in high apartments allows the preservation of tremendous tracts of green space and park land and rural areas.

Here is my dear friend Hong Li with her daughter Lindsey and my family. Hong and I were in the same doctoral cohort at Washington University, and then we were both neighbors and colleagues when we lived and worked in Urbana. We've been good friends for a long time.

Hong and her family slept in the very nice Renaissance Hotel across the street from our more modest Harbourview. But Arthur and I joined Hong and Lindsey for a swim in the lovely pool on the roof of their hotel.

The dining area in the Harbourview where we stayed (with many other conference attendees, including Michael and Margaret Sherraden) had a fall display for decorations. It was June. I'm not sure why the autumnal colors were emphasized. The breakfast foods were good, by the way.

Sebastian Victor (our son) with Victor (our Concierge) as we load up our luggage into the hotel car for transport to the airport train terminal in Central. We checked our baggage in Central, and then spent an hour or two downtown before taking a train to the airport terminal.

Sebastian and Chun-Chih went for some exploring while Arthur and I were swimming in the pool at the Renaissance. The found the long escalator system Sebastian and I used back in 2007 during our last visit to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has many of the restaurants and shops that are established chains in the USA. Here Sebastian and Arthur are pleased to find a Mrs. Field's Cookie bakery in one of the Metro stations in Wan Chai.

Chun-Chih and Arthur set out to explore the Wan Chai neighborhood and have dinner with me at a vegetarian restaurant.

Hong Kong has toy stores, and this one, called "The Toy Museum" was worth a couple visits (and Sebastian and I had visited it three years previously in our last visit here).

After our swim, Arthur and I played briefly in this park outside the Hyatt at the Convention Center, which was across the street from our hotel.

On Sunday night we had dinner at the Loving Hut, a vegetarian chain restaurant (I'd eaten at one in San Francisco in January). This was a drink I enjoyed.

Arthur and Sebastian weren't too excited about the food, but they did eat enough to satisfy themselves.

Here is the family in the Loving Hut. On the wall a television was broadcasting the message of the Supreme Master.

At the Loving Hut, Arthur was curious about the pumpkin dessert, so we ordered it, and got a Chinese pumpkin (similar to an acorn squash) with some sweet vanilla cream in the center.

This was Chun-Chih's vegetarian noodle soup. The other religious vegetarian restaurant I've enjoyed (Govinda, the ISKCON restaurant) is almost as tasty as Loving Hut, but given a choice, I'd go for Loving Hut.

This is a vegan substitute for fried chicken. It's almost as tasty as real chicken, and certainly it's a kinder way to eat.

Any trip to Asia should include a stop in a Japanese candy store.

While in Asia, you might see the dreaded Durian. Avoid it. Here the cut-open fruit has been mercifully covered with plastic to prevent the stench from overpowering shoppers in the produce aisle.

Hong Kong has lovely bakeries with delicious buns. I like the buns with sweet bean paste inside.

Here is some authentic Chinese Chicken. It's cut up with a very heavy and sharp knife, which enable a diner to get cross-sectional views of the Chicken carcass, almost like sections of a CT scan.

Look at the size of these buildings near the Hong Kong Airport. They are nearly as big as the hills.

In the toy store I liked this positioning of the bust of Lenin among the scary monsters. It's as if Lenin (I've seen his corpse in Red Square, by the way), was sending this alien monster henchman to do some dirty work like killing sailors of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol in Krondstadt.

I wish the Toys R Us stores were stocked the way this one in Hong Kong is.

Is the loud robot showing Gumby how to wave, or is the robot copying Gumby's move?

What is that character with the long red nose peeking over the letter "P" at Pooh and his friends?

My dear friend, Chung, who has been a friend of mine since we were grad students together in the early 1990s, is from Hong Kong, and so his mom came to visit us and say hello. We had last seen her about 12 or 13 years earlier when she visited us in Saint Louis.

Here Chun-Chih and Chung's Mom are getting ready to say good-bye in the metro station. It was a thrill for Jeri and me to see her again. The last time we were with her, Sebastian was just a toddler.

Sebastian took this photograph of Jeri while they were out exploring Hong Kong. We didn't have time to really do much exploring, and we didn't have time for any museums, but we had a couple walks around town.

This amazing building stretching up into the clouds is the International Commerce Center over in Kowloon. Since we didn't have much time to see museums or visit interesting sites in Hong Kong, I mainly just have photographs of tall buildings.

Hong Kong keeps pedestrian traffic up on skywalks above the busy streets in some areas of Hong Kong and Kowloon. This is Gloucester Road, looking east as we crossed from our hotel to the Hyatt and Convention Center.

This is the Ting Kau Bridge, which takes cars and trucks toward the Hong Kong airport.

We had just been to the World Expo in Shanghai before coming to Hong Kong, so we were familiar with Haibao, the ubiquous Expo mascot seen all over Shanghai and in many Hong Kong sites, such as the airport.

This was my first time in the Hong Kong Airport. I had frequently flown into the old airport that was near Kowloon in the early 1990s, and lately I've flown into Macau rather than Hong Kong. It was indeed impressive.

A gift shop in the Hong Kong airport had these cute magnets. I suppose they might represent the various ethnic minorities in China. Someone once described the Han Chinese attitude toward ethnic minorities as like that of a person toward a cute pet.

Related pages:

More photographs from Social Work Conferences

• Society for Social Work and Research 2009 in New Orleans.
• Society for Social Work and Research 2010 in San Francisco.
• Photos from Asia, including some from the International Consortium for Social Development's 2007 meeting in Hong Kong.
• European Network of Territorial Intelligence in Strausbourg in 2010.

More photographs from Hong Kong and elsewhere.

• Hong Kong in 1992 (and other places in Asia)
• Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2010
• List of my pages of photography

Photos related to the 2010 Joint World Conference.

• Conference Web Site
• Cultural Night photo album by Kenneth Chan
• Photo Album of the 2010 Hong Kong conference opening.