Today will be my third full day in Hong Kong, and day 2 was just as good as day 1. The weather the past few days has been perfect--mid 70s with pretty mild humidity. Unfortunately, I woke this morning to the person in the room next door hammering a nail or something into the wall (wtf?), and you guessed it, rain. But oh well, I guess a little rain in the spring in HK is too be expected.
Yesterday was a blast. I woke up, did a little prison workout in the 4x4 space that I had, and then got ready for the day. In the morning we walked down Nathan street again--the main drag near where we are staying in Kowloon, and did some window shopping. Usually, I'm not much of a window shopper, but it's actually pretty fun to see some of the weird stuff they sell here and to see the HK version of western fashion. Case in point: One of the main brands we saw was "O Yeah!", and wow, they make some hideous sh*t. This became an ongoing joke the rest of the day, saying o yeah wherever we could fit it in. I'll post some pictures of their sweet apparel lineup later. We walked by the cage court again and there were about 8 guys running full court--Asian street ball at its finest. I really wish I didn't have a bum ankle so I could get out there and be caucasian shaq. There was this crazy traditional chinese pharmacy (probably not crazy to them) that sold a ton of natural remedies--like stuff you eat in big glass jars...I can't really explain it, but google image hong kong pharmacy and you'll get the idea.
After we walked around all morning, we met Emily's family that lives in hongkong for some dim-sum at harbour city mall. Apparently it's the most famous mall in HK, and it was easy to see why. It was 4 stories, over 700 stores, high end restaurants, designer stores, etc...really sick. The dim-sum place we ate at was really good as well. I've only had dim-sum a few times before and have generally found it to be kind of slimy and not something I'd volunteer to eat. This was a completely different story. Bbq pork rolls that were slightly sweet, a ton of shrimp/noodle dishes, fried noodles, spounge cake, jasmine tea, and more--it was great. Her family was really welcoming, her old aunt was hilarious, and it was great to get to talk to and be shown around by locals. They were all dumbfounded by how tall I was (they were about 5' flat), it was pretty funny--I was probably the tallest dude in the 700 store mall. I was talking to her cousin about standard of living here..salary, rent, things like that--it was pretty interesting. She said that the avg salary is only about 140k per year in HKD (it's about 7.8 hkd to 1 usd, you do the math), but the tax rate on that is only 5-15%. Imagine that, a place where you get to keep most of the dough you work hard for!
After lunch they showed us around the mall, which was great, and then we walked around the area surrouding the mall which was insanely CROWDED with tourists, locals, and salesmen alike. You can't walk 5 feet without an indian guy with a thick indian accent coming up trying to sell you something, and if you stop in the flow of sidewalk traffic you will surely be run over. Her fam walked us over to the ferry that crosses the bay---a short but incredibly scenic trip--and then we bussed it over to the base of this mountain that you can go to the top of to get the most incredible and famous view of Hong Kong, known here as "the peak". You're supposed to take a tram up to the top, but there was an insane line (I'd guess 3hours long...we had actually seen the crowd the day before and had no idea why there were 5000 people waiting in line like a new harry potter movie had just been released or something), so we splurged and took a cab for 50HKD. The view from the top was absolutely incredible....
gotta go convert some USD to HKD to pay for the hostel by 11am, i'll post again later with some awesome pictures.
Sorry this post was all over the place, it was pretty rushed. Here's a link to emily's blog for a different take: empowertravel.tumblr.com
GO BUTLER!!!
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