I had kind of a last minute vacation last week and so I snuck off to Hong Kong for four days. Mostly I just walked around the city soaking it up, had some good food and drinks, and went to a few tourist locations. I’ll let the pics do the talking!
I did the audio tour at the Hong Kong art museum and it was amazing. I was most impressed upon by the ceramics and pottery, much of it thousands of years old. It was incredible to me to see these beautiful ornate objects that have survived for so many years and to thik about the places they have been and the things they must have been used for.
Sadly the lighting for this picture was terrible, but it’s a “Thousand Year Egg” that I ate (some of) at a nice Chinese restaurant. In my picture the egg is the dark stuff at the far left, but in reality the egg was a translucent caramel color around the shell, and the yolk had turned a blue green color that I’ve never seen in food. Thousand Year Eggs are goose eggs that have been wrapped in either plaster (traditional method) or plastic (modern method) and left to soak in a highly acidic mixture. There’s a picture on the Wikipedia page for “Century Egg” that looks a lot like what I ate. It’s the picture in the “Use” section, to the left side. Eating the egg itself was unpleasant. The texture is very strange because the outside is like jelly and the inside is pungent tasting, but slippery also. My favorite Chinese meal on this trip was a dim sum breakfast, but I didn’t have my camera with me, although I wish I had taken some pictures of the steamed pork buns because they were incredible!
Here’s a picture from my hotel room 0ver looking the light rail station (the two long orange-ish rectangles middle right in the picture). My hotel was in the New Territories, which is pretty far (30 minutes+) from Kowloon and Hong Kong island, where I spent most of my time. Luckily, it was really easy to get around. It was maybe a two minute walk from my hotel to the light rail station and then three stops to the subway and then eight subway stops to Tsim Sha Tsui in southern Kowloon, which was kind of my home base. Notice in the picture it’s raining, which it did everyday I was there. The rain and high winds were from tropical storm Haima, which was cruising by to the east of Hong Kong when I was there, and later caused a lot of flooding in southern China. I was a little bit worried my first day there because I kept seeing signs all over the place, on the streets, subway and in business warning about a tropical storm.
At the very southern tip of Hong Kong island there’s a place called Stanley and one day I took a double decker bus there. Hong Kong itself is so metropolitan and packed together it was kind of strange to discover this place with a real tropical island feel. I lucked out weather wise, since the day I went was the nicest I had. Stanley also kind of shows the strange mix of British and Chinese that is Hong Kong. Placess have British names, like Stanley and Austin, but stand next to things with Chinese names. Chicken feet restaurants next to things like horse racing betting outlets and imperial style tailor, things like that.
Here’s a view of Hong Kong from its most famous scenic point, The Peak. That’s Hong Kong island in the foreground and Kowloon in the background, separated by Victoria Harbour. You get to the top of The Peak (really just a big hill) by taking a tram, which goes disconcertingly straight up. At the top there’s a bunch of shops and a viewing platform. I walked down these really steep roads shortly after taking this picture, into a hauntingly blue sky.
Looks like Blade Runner.