Hong Kong Star

So we started our second day in Hong Kong with a walk on Hollywood Boulevard. Of Hong Kong.
It is called Avenue of Stars and it's on the bank of Victoria Harbour, on Hong Kong island. As in Hollywood Boulevard, movie stars left their hand marks on the pavement, but there is also a display of the history of Hong Kong cinema, a Bruce Lee statue, and other nice decorations along the way. The harbor is gorgeous, especially seeing the other side, but the pictures in Hong Kong generally don't turn out great because there's a lot of smog. Unlike Bangkok, however, you don't feel like you're breathing dirt.

Rony comparing his hands with Jackie Chan's

Talia lives in a movie :)

We the went to Landau Island to see the Po Lin Monastery and the giant Buddha statue on the top of the hill. The trip there is a bit long and we started to be a bit hungry, so we decided to stop for lunch at the local mall. And we found the best lunch deal in town: All you can eat sushi for 78 HK$, which is 10 US$! How could we resist that?! So we went there and after eating everything we ordered (there was a 10$ fee policy for each gram you left on the plate!) and a bunch of random sushi off the sushi train, we noticed that there is a weird fashion among the youth in Hong Kong: Apparently it's very fashionable to ware big fake glasses, some without lenses at all! One of the waitresses was wearing them and one of the cooks at the sushi place we well. It was really strange. Anyway, we took a picture and you can see it on the link below.

Now that we were full, we could go to the monastery and enjoy the sightseeing. We got there by bus, though all the tourists go by cable car, which we didn't do because we want to be able to afford food in Japan the bus is much cheaper and more authentic: Everybody was Chinese on our bus.  Once we got off the bus, we couldn't miss the huge Buddha statue that was looking at us. It's the biggest Buddha statue in open air in the world! And it's beautiful.

Buddha on top of the hill

After a long walk up a zillion (268) stairs, and after a few minutes of admiring the statue, Rony noticed a little English boy who got lost and was looking for his mom. So Talia went to look for his mom and Rony stayed with him and tried to calm him down while trying to get some information from the kid: "What's your mom's name?" "Mom!" "Ok, and what's your name?" "Hayden. My mom left me." "No she didn't. I'm sure she's looking for you right now. Let's go find her!" After 5 hugely stressful minutes - more for us than for the kid - we finally found his mom and they ran into each other's arms. Let's say it was due to the good karma of the place. The big Buddha shined on all of us and it all ended well.

After all those emotions, we needed to cool down and went to "The Path of Wisdom".

Path of Wisdom

It's a display of suttras written on wood in the shape of the lying-down 8 that stands for infinity. It was nice but was getting late and we had to go back to the hotel if we wanted to make it on time for the evening light show on Victoria Harbor.

We got back to the hotel, but we were too tired (again) to leave the hotel and we decided to go to sleep early.

The next day, our last full day in HK, we decided to take things easy so we could see the light show this time and because Talia has a cold too. We went to Hong Kong island to see one of the famous bakeries in town called Tai Cheong Bakery to try their famous egg tart.

We tried one.

We guess it was good, since we don't have anything to compare too. And one was enough. It's not really our thing. Sorry if we offended anyone. But the dough part was good...

Next we went to the botanical and zoological gardens. It was really nice: The gardens are well designed and the mammals we saw were some rare specimens: Orangutan, lemur and sloths.  It was hard to see those animals in cages, especially the Orangutan, who was gorgeous, but the gardens are participating in breeding those mostly-endangered species and re-releasing them into the wild.

Orangutan in Botanical Gardens

After that, we were ready to go see the highlight of our day, the light show on Victoria Harbor.
For that we decided to go to The Peak and watch it from the best possible view. So we took the tram together with the half a million people that were with us and had the same idea. We thought israelis were the champions of pushing in queues, but Chinese are pretty good too! In fact, they may have us beat - at least Israelis respect personal space!

At the top of the Peak, there is a Madame Tussuad museum which we didn't go to, and 2 or 3 malls where you can find shops, restaurants and good views of the light show. We decided to do it with style and go to a Japanese restaurant (again) to see the light show from, while eating a fancy dinner ($90 US for both of us, including dessert and alcohol. Not that we were drinking alcohol, of course, it was just there to be pretty.)

So at 8pm the show was supposed to start, but we saw nothing special: The lights on the HK buildings was the same as an hour before. Every now and then there was some laser that bounced around,We waited 15 more minutes, but nothing happened.

So Talia went to ask if the show was canceled tonight. But no, that was the show. Just some building showing their usual lights with some music in the background we couldn't hear because we were too far. But the dinner was very good and Talia tried her first sashimi of her life (salmon and tuna).

On our way back (with another half million people) we decided to use another transport back to Kowloon, where our hotel is, and got on the ferry and enjoyed a beautiful night view of both banks.

 

Hong Kong view from the ferry

We finally got back to the hotel for a good night's sleep before flying today to mainland China to spend a few days in Beijing and Shanghai. We probably won't be able to update the blog during our stay in mainland China, so we will write about it when we get to Japan, in 9 days.

All the pics from Hong Kong (including the ones from before):

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=598379&id=906005363&l=c7ada97e68