Big Buddha

The man himself
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Yes, the buddha is indeed very big.  Cool spot too, especially since neither of us had ever been to a buddhist monastery.  We were interested to find out that the buddha was only built 15 years ago - seems more like a tourist attraction than a religous icon, but it is different things to different people I suppose.  Lots of people buying incense and putting it into big pots out front of the monastery - we would have done so too, but of course we had no idea of the meaning behind it so refrained so we didn't offend anyone.

They forgot 'no bogans'
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The big attraction for us was the vegetarian feast they put on at the Po-Lin monastery, and we were right stuffed at the end.  An awful lot of mushrooms in Chinese vegetarian cooking though, D is not too happy about this, due to his fungus-phobia.  The follow-up to this was our first squat toilets! Takes some getting used to, but at least there's no footprints on the seat...

Food was good. Buddha was big and Buddha-y

Apparently Santa is a golfer?
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Our bus ride up to the monastery was an event in itself, since our bus broke down and died right in the middle of a big hill, so we had to wait and cram into the next one.  Good thing about HK's high density is that the transit runs really often so we only had to wait 20 minutes or so.  The subways run every 2-3 minutes on most routes - very nice!

Max was looking extremely tired today - still overstimulated.  With so much going on around he's finding it hard to stay asleep in the baby trekker, even face-in to D's chest, he's always craning his neck around to see what's going on.  We're having to get him asleep in quieter spots and then going about our travels again.  Even at his most red-eyed and tired though, he can still spare a smile for a friendly stranger - he is constantly having smile-offs (mostly with women, but men in suits are not immune to his charms) in the subway, on the bus, in restaurants, wherever we go!

Buddha on hilltop
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At the end of the day, T 'twisted' D's arm into actually shopping.  He was happy to oblige and bought an alarm clock that projects the time on the ceiling and a PSP with a racing game.  Christmas comes early in Hong Kong - it's hard to resist the shopping, even for diehard non-shoppers like us.

Much quieter day today - it was nice.  Off to Macau tomorrow.

Cheers,

T&D&m