Merrell/Chong Family travels: Hong Kong Mega Ice hockey 5's tournament

The end of April marked the halfway point of our time in Kaohsiung and also the time of the Hong Kong Mega Ice Hockey 5's tournament. This is I guess the biggest tournament in Asia. It's all held at a giant mall in Hong Kong called MegaBox in an ice rink just slightly smaller than NHL sized. The rink is on the 10th floor with views out over the Hong Kong harbor. The whole rink is surrounded by a big food court. The tournament has kids as young as 4 or 5 competing in the U6 division and kids as old as 13-15 competing in U15. At many levels they have an A and B division as well. With all of that happening on one rink they run games from 6AM until midnight for 5 straight days. Since our kids were in the U15 division we had games usually after the mall closed at 10pm. We had one game per evening on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then the semifinals on Friday and finals on Saturday. Nick and Piper's team was one of the ones sponsored by the International North Stars organization from Taipei. It's composed of a mix of expat kids and Taiwanese kids along with expat kids who used to play with them and are now scattered all over the world. They had so many kids coming back to play with them in Hong Kong that they fielded 3 U15 teams, 1 A team and 2 B teams. Nick and Piper's team had a win, a loss, and tie in the opening round of the tournament which meant they ended up playing their sister U15 team in the semifinals. The game was tied at the end of regulation which meant it went to a shoot out. The other team won the shoot out and that was the end of the tournament for our kids. Still we had a lot of fun. The kids could run around the mall with their teammates between games. At one point they actually had the whole team playing hide and seek in Ikea. It was also fun to meet hockey players from all over the world. Nick and Piper's team had kids from China, Phillippines, Canada, America, Taiwan, Japan, and I'm not sure where else. The tournament had teams from Canada, China, Hong Kong, Australia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and I'm not sure where else.

Nick on offense

Nice portrait of Piper by Syd

Piper attacking the goal

Piper about to drop gloves during heated semifinal with our sister team. Fortunately for the other kid, little Nico, number 98, jumped in to defend Piper and she didn't have to thump him. Check out HK skyline in background.

figure 8 ferris wheel at Studio City Casino

Huge ad in HK subway station

With all the time off during the day we were able to tour around HK some. We've been to HK before but my mom hasn't. She had a chance to see the harbor lights and we went over from Kowloon where we were staying to HK proper. Took mom on a tour of the midlands escalators and some of the malls. We also had a chance to go to Macua which we've never done before. Macau is a weird mix. On the one hand it has giant new casinos even bigger than the ones in Vegas. They are totally self contained with hotels, malls, food courts, amusement parks, even a scale model of the Eiffel tower. On the other hand Macau is this incredibly old city with narrow winding walks, little markets, 500 year old churches and forts. Over the course of two visits to Macau we saw some of each side of Macau.