It's raining in Hong Kong

It's currently raining like crazy here in Hong Kong, so Julie and I are hanging out at the library waiting for it to die down a bit. Just walking from the MTR to the City Hall Library resulted in my legs and feet getting s-o-a-k-e-d. Thank goodness I picked up a little umbrella at the Fa Yuen Street market we checked out yesterday.

We have figured out what the mystery charges on our food bills are all about, apparently it's common practice here for restaurants to bring things to your table like tea and snacks and then just charge you for them.

there are markets for everything and the variety is astounding

Wednesday afternoon we went to Victoria park and walked around a bit. We happened to walk by a vegetarian take-out place so we got some delicious rolls of some sort. Later, we ended up taking the tram up to The Peak. There wasn't much of a view due to a heavy heavy fog, but that didn't stop me from taking a lot of pictures of fog. We ended up walking back down, and passed through the Zoological and Botanical gardens on the way down, where we saw a jaguar and some nice plants. We saw signs for an escalator and wanted to take it down, but we didn't end up finding it. However, I read in the Hong Kong Walks guide that this escalator only runs up after 10:30am, so we wouldn't have been able to use it anyway. The Hong Kong Walks book (free from Tourist Info booth) is pretty great, Ernest recommended I pick it up but I didn't until yesterday. It's too bad because there is a lot of great stuff in there that would have been useful to us. If the rain dies down soon, we will plan on walking around the central district this afternoon and checking out the escalator (longest covered one in the world!).

Yesterday (Thursday), I had to go to the bank to get some cash. Wednesday was actually a public holiday so I wasn't able to get any and was getting by on minimal cash. So I walked to the nearest HSBC to our guesthouse, where the very helpful teller gave me directions to a nearby money changer on Cameron Lane who wouldn't charge me a traveller's cheque fee like HSBC would, and I also got a wicked wicked exchange rate. So I was quite pleased about that.

Then Julie and I hopped on a bus to go to the Kowloon Walled City. It was quite beautiful and we took a lot of pictures. I also got bitten by a mosquito I think, which makes me paranoid for Dengue Feaver and Japanese Encephalitis. While in that area we also walked in to this old temple and were given little pouches of tea and nuts. Interesting.

On the way back we stopped in the market district and did a little shopping. I got a shirt and a tank top for $10 HKD, which is just a little over $1 CND. There are so many fun cheap clothes and shoes I had to constantly remind myself that anything I buy I will have to cart around for the next three months. Too bad we didn't leave Hong Kong until the end of the trip so shopping would have been allowed.

For dinner we went to this vegetarian restaurant called Kung Tak Lam. It's the fanciest place we've eaten at so far. It was on the 7th floor of this nice building and had a beautiful view of the harbour. The waiters pulled out our chairs for us and did the napkin shake deal before they put it on your lap for you, and were topping up our tea every three seconds. Interesting experience and it didn't even end up costing that much, although I do think that I enjoyed the meal from the night before at a random tiny restaurant where I got a huge plate of noddles and veggies and assorted mushrooms for about $5 CND. We were hoping to catch the light show at the harbour at 8pm, and figured we would see it out the window of the restaurant. It was a bit after 8 when we finished our meal and since we hadn't seen it happen yet  we rushed down to the harbour in hopes of catching it, but at 8:45 when nothing had happened yet. We asked some guy and he said the show was indeed at 8pm and we had missed it. So we are going to try again tonight.

One thing I've heard enough already on this trip is "M'am copy? Copy watch? Copy bag?" "Copy! Copy! Copy!" these men on the streets are constantly approaching passerbys trying to sell their immitation goods.

So the plan for this afternoon is to find the escalator, maybe check out the photography market area and some others. The markets here are really great, there are markets for everything and the variety is astounding, for example the Goldfish market is a whole street full of stores selling all kinds of fish and aquariums and other related goods, same with the Flower market, electronics market etc.

Julie and I both wanted to check out the racetrack, since horse racing here is supposed to be really popular and it would be very interesting to see how the horses live in such an urban area, but unfortunately there were no races happening during our visit.

Tomorow morning our flight leaves early for Bangkok (with a stopover in Singapore).