Hong Kong!
Why am I going? Many reasons. I like Hong Kong, and haven't been there for a year. Though I've been several times, it's never been long enough to do all the things I want to do there. This time I'll be able to spend my time in leisure, going from place to place at my own pace.
What is my mission? I have a few: I'd like to see the Big Buddha at Lantau, I'd like to see Aberdeen in the evening as the Jumbo floating restaurant lights up. I'd like to hike a section of the Dragon Back Trail. And of course, I'm going to have some Ben & Jerry's ice cream (not available in Taiwan).
But one thing I'm also going to do also is indulge myself in a hobby I have developed over the past few years. Yes, I have a confession to make.
Hi, my name's Chris, and I'm a graver.
What is graving? Essentially, it's cemetery research: visiting cemeteries, taking photos, transcribing data, searching for graves of famous people, and so on. It even includes re-discovering long-lost cemeteries, preserving condemned or deteriorating cemeteries, and making hard-to-find information about obscure cemeteries findable online. I'm a volunteer cemetery researcher for Find A Grave, an online database of burials built entirely by volunteers, whose goal is to enable people to search for the graves of relatives and friends, locate the graves of celebrities, see full transcriptions of cemeteries, and leave flowers in honor of the dearly departed. It's a hobby that grew out of my fascination for genealogy and family history. Who knows, the grave records I submit may be those of someone's long-lost relatives.
Why Hong Kong for graving? Because with its colonial past, it's a graver's paradise. Thousands of Westerners, mostly British, many Portuguese, and more from other places around the world, are buried in Hong Kong. And a wide variety of cemeteries: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Parsee, Muslim, Chinese and two World War II military cemeteries.
