First Asian Encounter

After we had recovered from our night at the Octoberfest, our General Manager and his brother left for Amsterdam (if I remember correctly) and our Production Manager and myself went to the Munich airport to board a flight to Hong Kong.  Naturally, I was very excited for a number of reasons.  The Adrenalin rush from our exhibition success had not completely gone away, I could see my whole career changing and I was going to experience a completely new world for the first time.  It began in a very spectacular fashion.  To approach the old Hong Kong airport of Kai Tak the aircraft had to navigate through high rise residential buildings.  It sometimes felt that you could almost pick the laundry from their balconies, nothing for weak nerves.
 
Hong Kong was unlike anything I had ever seen before.  The city was bustling with people, fragrant and exciting.  It never seemed to sleep.  By the 1980’s Hong Kong had established itself as a major financial and cultural hub, one of the most important cities in the world.
 
We stayed at the Hong Kong Hotel next to the Ocean Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui, an excellent hotel close to the major shopping and nightlife district of Kowloon.
 
The new laboratory was to be set up on the 16th floor of an industrial building.  Although there was a freight elevator, I did not envy our installation crew to get the processor up to the lab.

​We took all measurements of the processing room so that I could prepare the layout back in the office in Sydney.
 
On the last evening at the hotel before returning to Sydney we decided to have a relaxing massage at the hotel spa to get over the tensions of the past weeks.  Unfortunately, that was not to be.  While we were getting ready for our massage a slightly inebriated gentleman came into the treatment room also for a massage and when he was told to place himself (on the massage table), he misunderstood it as undress yourself and he pulled his shorts down.  Seeing this, all therapists screamed and left the room, never to come back in.  This was the end of our massage and we went to the hotel bar for a final drink to farewell Hong Kong. 
 
After this first visit, I have been many times back to Hong Kong.