Hong Kong skyline at night from the Peak is quite the spectacular view.  But, you really need to have a panorama shot to even start to appreciate it.  Our stay in Hong Kong has been great and the Combined Congress of the APPOS and APSS was the perfect conclusion to our trip.  We have meet new friends and had an opportunity to catch up with old friends (from Australia and the SRS traveling fellows).  The amount of neglected cases that our colleagues in the Asia Pacific see is amazing and we believe it gives them a really unique perspective that lends itself to necessary creativity.  We are grateful for the opportunity to have undertaken this trip. To make new friends. To learn innovative concepts in pediatric orthopedics.  And to help bring the two societies closer together.  Thank you for reading our blog.

We arrived safely into Hong Kong, and then we hit the ground running.  We visited with both the faculty at Duchess of Kent Children's Hospital and the pediatric orthopedic surgeons at the Prince of Wales Hospital. Completing the day with a joint session that included the APPOS Visiting Professor Stuart Weinstein and POSNA member Ken Kuo.  After that latest round of academic exchange, we we were then treated to a traditional banquet dinner with roughly 9 courses (we admittedly lost count).  We agreed that the whelk (or sea conch) was perhaps our favorite dish, that the bird nest soup and the lion fish noodles were nice, but the duck tongue and sea cucumber were perhaps wasted on our Western palates (although most of us ate it).  In the end we were satisfied and appreciative of a lovely meal with our new friends.

The sea cucumber is on the bottom left juxtaposed by a shiitake mushroom and an abalone.

Today begins the APPOS combined meeting.  We will be engaged in a full day of free papers and lectures with plans to go to the 'peak' tonight, in order to catch a view of Victoria harbour and Hong Kong.

We departed ways with Haemish Crawford, but picked up our North Island local host Dawson Muir.  He treated us to some Maori culture in Rotorua before taking us up to Tauranga for our academic session with Bay of Plenty surgeons (and surrounding area).  The ladies learned how to dance with a Poi ball and Eric had to learn the Haka.  Although the geothermal springs that made the Rotorua area a cultural center for the Maori were fascinating, the natural beauty of the region was tainted slightly by the sulfurous fumes that filled the city.  Fortunately, the rain kept this issue mostly at bay and allowed us to concentrate on the many interesting cases that were presented by the local surgeons.  Our stay in New Zealand was wonderful and we are now looking forward to Hong Kong.