May 7
Paulie and I get up early and decide to head to 7Eleven for
a coffee. We return to the room and get
the kids to wake up and get ready.
Despite our best efforts, we only depart the hotel around 11:00. After we get going, we walk toward the MTR
station and underneath the busy street and out the other side to the Star Ferry
terminal right at the waterfront. We are
taking a short ferry ride to the Hong Kong Island and then a tram up to the
very tippy top to the “Peak”. There is a
very old cable car that takes you on a nearly 90 degree climb up the mountain
from where you can go to an observation deck and see a panoramic view of Hong
Kong and Kowloon. The day is pretty
cloudy so we aren’t sure there will be much of a view, but we’ll see what we
can see. We arrive at the Central
station on Hong Kong and make our way to the bus for the short ride to the
tram. We get onto what looks like a tram
that is still in use in San Francisco and we start the steep climb up to the
top of the peak. When we arrive we are
inside of a very modern, air conditioned building with a large array of
souvenir shops, toy stores, restaurants, etc. through which you must maneuver
before arriving at the nice view of the city below. We manage to extract ourselves from retail
heaven and out into the open air of the observation deck. It is really nice up here and reminds me of
the view of Sydney harbor from the zoo area. I cannot distinguish whether the
overcast skies are smog cover or cloud cover or a little of both, but the grey
skies make it hard to see all of the remarkable architecture. You can
definitely sense that this is a relatively small amount of land to have so many
huge skyscrapers….the opposite of urban sprawl I guess….vertical sprawl! We can see the back of the island where there
is a bay with beaches and a large lake….more skyscrapers and we spy some very
large hotels with crystal blue pools on them.
We are jealous. We look around
through the binoculars and see speed boats and ferries and other assorted boats
jetting across the canals. After we
finish our viewing, we head back down to the retail floors and out to a
courtyard where we find a lovely noodle restaurant and have a most satisfying
lunch of noodle soups. The restaurant
has been reviewed by Michelan and has received reviews in countless foodie
magazines and in Time. This award
winning restaurant is very inexpensive but offers really good food and we eat
up our meal greedily. After lunch, we
head back to the tram after doing a little shopping at “Bubba Gump’s Hong
Kong”. We get back to the ferry landing
and return to Kowloon and search out an English bookstore to stock up before
our departure to China. We end up
finding one of the fanciest streets in all of Hong Kong where we can shop at
the likes of Chanel, Ferragamo, Gucci, etc…..don’t get me wrong, but we are not
exactly in the market for a $10,000 suit.
We are in the market for books and they ain’t easy to find in Hong
Kong. If it doesn’t ring, have a screen
or project an image, it is not a hot commodity here in the wild world of
connectivity. Amazingly, we find one and
a good one at that. We stock up on books
as we have heard that in China we might as well forget finding an English
language bookstore. Once we have an
ample supply of reading material, we return to the hotel for a rest. Afterward, we venture out to a nearby
restaurant for a meal of crispy duck!
Turns out that our meal is so-so…..we cannot read the menu that is
written in Chinese and we simply point at the different foods that look like
they might taste good. Turns out we are
only slightly successful and our meal is very lackluster. In any event, we return to the hotel for the
evening and sleep very well at that.
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