Heading East

At the end of March I will be heading to China, specifically Hong Kong and Shenzhen for a little over a week.
A few months ago I came to the decision that this year I would go to Shenzhen to checkout the amazing electronics markets and hopefully come away with a suitcase full of awesomeness.

I was hoping to make it a bit of a holiday and go with my girlfriend but she has no interest in going to China and no matter how many times I explained how cool the electronics markets were she wouldn't change her mind.
About 6 years ago now I went over to the US to attend Google IO, this was the year before they started giving away thousands of pounds of free stuff to attendees (I am not bitter at all!). I went over on my own and had a couple of days to explore San Francisco after the conference, this was great but I would have definitely prefered to travel with someone else.

So, back to China. I was planning on going towards the end of the year once the hot summer period was over but through a rather serendipitous encounter (I read a blog post) I discovered a Shenzhen introduction and market tour being run by Dangerous Prototypes! This is a four day event which includes a market tour, introduction to living and working in Shenzhen, language guide, advanced soldering workshop and a lot more. This finishes on Saturday and then on Sunday is the local Maker Faire!
The only downside is that this event was at the beginning of April, a lot sooner than I had wanted, but being able to travel around Shenzhen with a group of people rather than by myself wasn't something I was going to miss.

Not wanting to travel almost 6000 miles just for the electronics markets I decided to extend my trip and take in Hong Kong as well.
I will be heading out a few days earlier and staying in Hong Kong and taking in the sights before moving on to Shenzhen. As Hong Kong used to be "run" by the British I am hoping there will be enough English spoken and enough English signs to get by as after a few days trying to learn Cantonese I know I have no chance of speaking the language!

Header image courtesy of BBC World Service