HK cont'd from last post/day 3

...from last post.  The view from "The Peak" was really amazing.  You could see the entire HK skyline lit up, and it was quiet and breezy...tons of people fighting for the best picture spots (tourists everywhere...it was interesting to hear so many different languages and accents all around). Some pictures below.

After the peak we decided to go out for our first beers in HK (sad, I know) in Lan Kwai Fong, which is pretty much the only area of HK to go out...not many bars anywhere else.  Here, there are several streets of bars and clubs, and it was pretty crowded with locals and tourists alike (even on a sunday night).  Going on little sleep, alot of jet lag, and no dinner, a couple of beers = drunk.  We really just planned on sitting down for a mellow beer or two, but wow, i've never felt so buzzed off of 3 beers.  I settled for Tsing Tao, which is a semi-local chinese beer, and it was pretty shitty--think coors light.  We had a great time people watching and taking in the hk bar scene, and then found our way back to Ah-Shan and called it a night.  Sidenote: we had to move rooms in ah-shan hostel, from the 14th to 8th floor, and wow, what a huge pain in the ass the 8th floor is.  To get from the 8th floor to the 14th, which is where the reception area and computers are, you have to go all the way down to the ground floor, which takes about 10min after waiting for the slow elevator (speed is seemingly not a priority in hongkong anywhere), and then go all the way back up the 14th floor.  GREAT engineering--could've used some poly help on that one.

Today was our third full day here, and although crappy weather put a bit of a damper on the day, it turned out to be almost as fun as the first two.  We got kind of a late start, paid the hostel for the next two nights, and then were off to lunch at Harbour city, the same mall as yesterday.  We tried to flag down a cab, and the first cab we got in didn't know what harbour city was.  Wtf?  It'd be like flagging down a cab downtown SF that didn't know where union square was.  The dude had to have been drunk.  Anyways, we made it to harbour city via a 2nd cab, and ate some crazy taiwanese dumplings that turned out to be really good.  We walked around the mall a bit, and then decided on going to the Stanley Market--a pretty famous touristy market--for the afternoon.  Sidenote: Emily thought Stanley was a hotel when her mom said we should check it out, and had been asking around the past few days for the stanley and people kept looking at us like we were idiots from america...turns out, we are.  Stanley is a market.  Hah, sorry Emily.

We took a ferry to a bus to another bus and were on our way.  To get there, we had to take an epic trip on a super narrow road up a moutain overlooking the ocean.  I swear we almost drove off the cliff four times, ran over 3 people, and tapped at least 5 cars.  We both feared for our lives the entire time.  The bus drivers here have zero sense of space, and think that their double decker busses can fit in a mobile home carport.  Anyways, we made it, and the market was basically what you'd expect of a touristy market in a foreign country--alot of jewelry, sculptures, scarves, t-shirts, etc...kind of cool, but the drive up was really the coolest part.  The bay view was awesome--an island off in the distance, some huge boats, cliffs on one side of the road and really green moutains on the other.  We passed by the most giant cemetery I've ever seen with the most elaborate grave stones ever---there must've been 10,000 of them, if not more.  We were starving by the end of this trek, and settled for some horrible pizza because there was really nothing else---terrible tourists, i know.  It was so bad that emily put tabasco sauce on it...not sure if that made it better or worse, but at least it gave it some taste.

We left the stanley plaza area and made our way back down to the main harbor for the "famous" hong kong light show.  The tops of all of the skyscrapers have elaborate lights shooting up into the sky while loud music plays that souds like something you'd hear on an underwater disney ride.  But it was still pretty sweet, and the skyline at night is great from every angle.  Google hong kong light show, or laser show, and then throw on it's a small world after all, and you'll get a virtual experience.  We met a couple from dallas while watching it, chatted for a bit, made fun of asian husbands taking hundreds of pictures of their asian wives posing, took a few pictures of emily posing like the asian wives, and then were off to harbour city mall food court for some quick dinner.  I had curry-in-a-hurry, yes that's really the name, thought of amrit, and then we hopped on the bus back to the hostel and called it a day.  Still jet-lagged and exhausted, but really enjoying hong kong.  Tomorrow is our last full day here before we're off to Thailand.  Here's a pic from the peak last night...I'll post more later--they take too damn long on this computer.