Michele’s overall impression of Hong Kong is that everything is so alive, mine is that everything is so modern and works so well. All the cars are new, the subway is BART plus 10 years, the buildings are new, the hotel we are in is new….with a view that shows how dense Kowloon is.

We started the day looking for a Starbucks or something. The Chinese breakfasts really looked unfamiliar. We ended up at a sort of French place where we had tea/coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast called egg mayo toast with egg –  sort of like eggs with eggs. But good eggs with eggs. After breakfast we went on a ATM hunt – the exchange rate is about 7 to 1 so you get HG$100 bills out of the ATM and they go very fast.

We spent the day sort of just wandering around Hong Kong gawking at the buildings and the people like the rubes we are. This is a huge tourist town and we are everywhere (I read somewhere that Paris is the biggest tourist town in the world with 35 million tourists a year, London second with 15 million, and Hong Kong third with 12 million.) By the end of the day, we had taken a ferry to Hong Kong island,

walked around the business district,

 

had lunch at a random restaurant,

taken an escalator up to the zoo which was not much of a zoo but a great escalator,

 

 

a tram to an overlook to watch the sunset, and the subway back to our hotel.

Everywhere, the natives seem young and hip – especially the girls (women?). The natives seem to be mostly Chinese, naturally, with a sprinkling of Brits. Lots of trendy stores that are familiar.Lots of sightseeing buses. And lots of tricked out vans, with drivers waiting in them, that seem to fill the eco-niche of limos.

Typical street scene downtown.

Everybody seems to love mirrored glass buildings.

Another street scene.

Michele trying to figure out how to get a ferry to Guizhou- we gave up and are going to take the train.

Did we mention that Hong Kong is dense? Very dense.

Hong Kong is definitely in the tropics and everything grows even better than in LA.

We came up here to watch the sunset which didn’t happen. Hong Kong just sort of faded into the merk.

-S