I was in Hongkong in the second half of 1999, living in the expat district of the "Mid-Levels".
Hint: most of the sites listed below offer you a choice between English and Chinese text. If you do not know Chinese but choose it out of curiosity, be aware that you are likely to be prompted to download a Chinese font before proceeding. This may take some time.
The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is semi-independent of that of the People's Republic of China in Beijing, under the principle of "One Country, Two Systems."
The weather is monitored by the (formerly "Royal") Hong Kong Observatory, which issues typhoon and rainstorm warnings, etc.
The Hong Kong Tourist Association issues useful leaflets and maps which are available to the visitor at the airport - much of their content is available on their web site.
Hongkong's new International Airport at Chek Lap Kok on the island of Lan Tao has been open for a new years now. You have the equivalent of the Heathrow Express (but at half the price), to bring you from the airport into Kowloon or Hongkong Island. Hint: when flying out from the airport, if you want a proper meal at the airport before you fly, the restaurants are BEFORE Immigration, and of course once you've gone through Immigration you can't go back.
For the tourist, there is the famous Star Ferry to take you between Kowloon and Central on Hongkong Island. Also for the tourist, the Peak Tram takes you (part of the way) up the Peak on Hongkong Island - I preferred to walk up as my weekly exercise before Sunday lunch.
There are 18,000 taxis in Hongkong, but never one when it is raining! They change shift around 4 p.m., so it is often difficult to get one then also.
The Mass Transit Railway is the equivalent of the Underground. It was built in the 1970s and has been extended since then. London Underground were used as consultants, because of their experience in building and running electric underground railways. Peter Ford, former managing director of the parent Hong Kong Mass Transit Authority later became Chairman of London Regional Transport. The MTR is a sub-surface system (as opposed to deep-level) and construction was mainly cut and cover. The observant user will note that many of the problems faced by London Underground were avoided on the MTR. It is state-owned.
Amongst newspapers, the South China Morning Post is the leading English-language daily. There has been interchange of staff with the Guardian in the UK, in the persons of John Gittings and his son Danny (one of my contemporaries at Oxford) who is now a columnist on the SCMP.
Apple Daily is a very popular Chinese language tabloid. I suppose you could think of it as an equivalent of the Sun. Please note that the Apple Daily site is Chinese language only.
The three big banks in Hongkong are the two Anglo-Saxon, colonial banks, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd and the Standard Chartered Bank, and the Chinese Bank of China. The Bank of China Tower on Hongkong Island was designed by Chinese-American architect I.M.Pei and is worthy of architectural study.
Some of the famous commercial/ trading/ property conglomerates are Jardine Matheson, Swires, and Hutchison Whampoa.
TOM.COM is one of the recently-floated dot-com companies.
The Walled City of Kowloon was an area of Kowloon, covering a square mile or so, nominally under British control, but within which the writ of the colonial government did not run. A densely-packed warren of high-rise apartment blocks and alleys down which the sun never shone, it was demolished in the early 1990s, and its site is now occupied by a park. Now celebrated in a number of large-format books of photographs, the Walled City has attracted retro-enthusiasm from anarchists and libertarians seeking models for an ungoverned community.
The (formerly "Royal") Hong Kong Jockey Club was founded in 1884 to organise all horse racing in Hongkong, and is one of the most important and richest institutions of Hongkong. It is a non-profit organisation and its surplus goes back to community projects.
As a developed economy, Hongkong has a number of professional bodies. On this subject, Nury Vittachi, formerly author of the "Lai See" column in the SCMP, offered the following comment: "Quote from rule number one of the official articles of the Hong Kong Computer Society: 'A member of the Hong Kong Computer Society... will at times exercise competence at least to the level he claims.'"