Exchange Student Program   Hong Kong

There is no place quite like Hong Kong on this earth. As a destination, Hong Kong sells itself through contented shoppers, sightseers, and gourmands, who return home extolling the experience of a few days spent in frantic pursuit of pleasures around the perimeter of the world's most exciting harbor.

What Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria's foreign secretary, once called a "barren rock" has become one of the 20th century's most astounding products. Its prosperity and vitality result from the city's the ability to bend with political winds from all directions. Great fortunes can be made almost daily.

With the opening of a superhighway through the New Territories, the rest of China will become an even more attractive extension of Hong Kong visits. The construction of more and more first-class hotels and the reduction in transpacific airfares also add to Hong Kong's appeal as the second most popular destination on Asia tour programs.

The 1990s have been one of Hong Kong's more interesting and eventful periods, as the territory has prepared to become a "Special Administrative Region" of the most populated country in the world—with its own laws, currency, and guarantees of individual liberties.