White Devil Abroad: An election on a Sunday?! Madness!

I had no idea that district council elections were scheduled for my second day there. My first clue was when I woke up Sunday morning to the shouts of these protesters across the street (the college next door was a polling station). Wish I'd gotten a shot of a woman towards the right end breaking away from the protest area and running down the street a minute later, yelling and waving her sign, pursued by the cops.

This was a particularly important election because many of the council members will be involved in choosing Hong Kong's next Chief Executive later in 2012 (there are no direct elections for the top dog, although that's supposedly coming... sometime... maybe). As it turned out, the results were a big setback for the pro-democracy factions and very good for the groups connected with the mainland government in Beijing. Reading the postmortems in the paper over the next couple weeks was fascinating. Too complicated to go into here, though.

Below, candidate Jackie Cheung gladhands and kisses babies just down the block from the hotel. As far as I can tell he is not the same as the pop singer/movie star Jacky Cheung.