Hong Kong

We had a layover in Hong Kong on our way to Nepal, so JJ arranged for it to be extended and we got to have about 48 hours seeing the city/territory. We had no idea what a treat we were in for and we barely skimmed the surface of activities! First of all, Hong Kong is probably one of the top 5 easiest cities to go visit. It jumps to that ranking because it has excellent and easy to understand public transportation, plus a bus that takes you right to the city center from the airport for cheap and it has wireless internet on it! As we left the airport, we immediately passed some of the tallest high rise apartment buildings I think I have ever seen. Not only were they massive, there were about 25 of them in a row, all lining the coast on the South China Sea. Can you imagine how many thousands of people lived in those buildings?! As we went over numerous bridges, I realized that half of Hong Kong is comprised of islands, while the other half is actually connected to mainland China. When we got to the Canadian Hostel, right by the Kowloon Peninsula on Nathan Street, we were introduced to the typical South-east Asian dorm-style room. It was so tiny, you could hop from the bed into the bathroom and back, but it was cheap and had a great location!

It was pretty early in the morning, so we dropped our stuff off and set out for some exploring. We walked to the water on the edge of the Kowloon Peninsula and found ourselves on the Avenue of the Stars. Movie Stars from Hong Kong that is! This seemed to be exactly like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, by Sunset Blvd, but it was a walkway right on the water. We walked by many of the cement sets of handprints, but could not help taking silly tourist pictures of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan’s handprints. We also had other tourists taking pictures of us! Apparently, many Asian people like to take pictures of anyone and everyone doing anything! Since we fell into that category, many random people snapped pictures of us, and so of course, we took some random people pictures too! After the Star Walk, we found a very helpful Hong Kong Information Office, and decided to take the Star Ferry across the causeway bay to the “central” area of Hong Kong Island. The nice lady in the tourist office gave us a few maps with walking tours and information included, so we embarked on our self-guided tour. First stop, dry seafood market! Ewww! Dried sea cucumbers really do look like turds in every size and color! Not only that, but we saw everything else imaginable from the ocean that was dried and treated to go in your food, hair, bathtub or whatever! We also saw a handful of places that just had hundreds of bags of shark fins lying on the floor. Sadly, we assumed that these were for shark fin soup, when we tried to take a picture of these fins, the people running the shops all freaked out! Does that mean they feel a little guilty? I hope so!

We continued along the walking tour into the herbal Chinese medicine market district, a very interesting herb garden with marked indicators of the herbs and their uses, and a beautiful Buddhist Temple. There was more sandalwood incense burning than I thought there should be without the fire department shutting the place down, but despite the all the fumes, the sights inside the temple were really beautiful. After leaving the temple, we wound up in a really swanky area that seemed like Soho in New York City. There were tons of cute boutique shops and restaurants and lots of foreigners! Although, I think the Hong Kongers dress more fashionably! Everyone is wearing different shades of black, grey, blue, and brown designer clothing and bags. It seemed like there was a common uniform to look stylish, have expensive designer taste, and wear dark clothes! We walked past art galleries, antique shops, and then past city hall to Dim Sum! We got a recommendation to eat at Maxims, one of the best places, which also happened to also be expensive and fancy, with fancy people, but hey, the food was great! Thank goodness we had our friend’s John and Jonathan show us how to go through many sessions of Dim Sum in Downtown LA before we got to Hong Kong! We knew exactly what to do and waved over the ladies pushing the carts of delicious goodies, while we ate and they stamped our card with some sort of Chinese (Cantonese) characters that said what we ate.

When we got to the lobby of City Hall, we were amazed to see a string quartet set up and playing classical music for a lunch concert. As we made our way back to the other side of Hong Kong on the Ferry, I took time to absorb all of the incredible sky scrapers and architectural masterpieces I had seen throughout the day. I have not seen any tall buildings that can match the grandeur of the ones in Hong Kong. They are truly a sight to behold! The weather was not very clear all day or we would have taken a trip up to the top of Victoria Peak to get a good 360 degree view of the city, but instead we took the metro subway to Prince Charles area for a walk around the flower market and bird garden.

I have never seen so many amazing orchids at one time! At the flower market, there were shops crammed full with gorgeous, exotic orchids. Too bad we could not take some with us! The bird market was set in a pretty garden, but all the birds in cages bothered me, so we wandered another direction into a veggie market with mountains of bok choy and other tasty greens. In South America, green veggies are not a staple in the diet by any means, so I was very excited about this!
We continued walking towards the Mong Kok area where we found the streets lively and full of people shopping, eating, and taking in the scene! From there, we walked all the way back to the Peninsula Area and staked out a good place on the Avenue of the Stars to watch the nightly Hong Kong laser light show across the causeway bay. Soon after, the music started and because it was synchronized with the lasers, the show was pretty cool! Colorful lasers bounced across buildings and the water to the music for about 15 minutes. Afterward, we exchanged picture taking with a set of software engineering students who could work a Canon camera like a video game controller and ended up taking an excellent picture of us! We took a survey for one of their classes and then walked to the night market. We had an incredible dinner right in the middle of the market. JJ had beef and Chinese broccoli and I had bean curd and mushrooms. Afterward, we went shopping at the night market, looking at imitations of everything imaginable, including: watches of all brands, movies, software, ipods, clothes, purses, you name it, they got it! Finally, we walked back, had an incredible sweet waffle on the way from a packed stand, and then made it into bed!

The next morning, we walked back to the Avenue of the Stars, where the rainy clouds from the day before had cleared and we got nice views of the skyline and Victoria peak in the background of the city. We took the metro subway to the “ladies market” where there was an entire street cut off from traffic and packed full of the same imitation goods. I guess there were a few more purses though, since it was the ladies market after all. For lunch, we went into a Japanese ramen restaurant where we enjoyed observing other people eating their food as much as the food itself! I guess the traditional way of eating Ramen is with a pair of chopsticks to pick up the goodies and a ladel for slurping up the broth. So you can imagine the sound effects were awesome. After we bought a few watches and ipod accessories at the ladies market, we took the metro back to our hotel and then transferred to the airport bus to make our way to Kathmandu, Nepal!