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Published: June 22nd 2017
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Geo: 22.2951, 114.171
The day started with an Easter Egg hunt. I would love to say that these three 'older' girls found the eggs within a minute or two but it took a bit longer - quite a bit longer and quite a few hints later to find them all!! And, no I'm not talking hundreds of eggs, just a big bunny each and a few small eggs each!!!
After we all got ready and a small (or not) amount of chocolate had been consumed, we went out.
After crossing hundreds of bridges (well, that;s what it felt like when your scared of them!) we went for a walk/ride up and up and up the escalators, stopping half way up for a subway lunch.
The escalators are 800 metres (2,600 ft) long with a vertical climb of 135 metres (443 ft). The total travel time is twenty minutes, but most people walk while the escalator moves to shorten their trip. Due to the geographical situation, the same distance is equivalent to several miles of zigzagging roads if travelling by car. It consists of twenty escalators and three moving side-walks. According to Guinness Book of Records these escalators together form the longest outdoor covered escalator
system. (Everything in these Asian countries have to have something, or MANY somethings, that are world records. The tallest, longest, oldest, biggest.......)
The escalator daily runs downhill from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and uphill from 10:30am to midnight. Apart from serving as a method of transporting, it is also a tourist attraction and has restaurants, bars, and shops lining its route. There is an entrance and exit on each road it passes.
We walked through the Hong Kong zoo and Botanical gardens on our way back.
We had a ride on a double decker tram. We decided to go there and back (where-ever 'there' was) on the tram but saw some street markets so jumped off the tram and went through the markets.
We went through a park and saw a large gathering of Filipinos. It is maids day off and they are sitting talking everywhere we walked. They lay cardboard down on the ground, sometimes erected cardboard walls, neatly took off their shoes before they went into their 'room' and sat and talked and ate and played cards and had manicures etc. The gathering was a demonstration of sorts to highlight the awful conditions that the Filipino workers have to put up
with. We stood and spoke to a Filipino lady for a while as she explained how hard it is for them. As most of them live in the house where they work, they don't have anywhere they can meet up with their friends on their day off which is why they set up these make-shift rooms right across this section of town. Now the government is trying to stop this happening – to stop the paths looking 'messy'. They also have to pay large fees to work in the country and have to keep paying these fees to an employment agency of sorts every couple of years so they can keep working here. It doesn't matter that they might have an on-going job.
As we were walking along the street, we were suddenly assaulted with this loud noise - a Christian Easter parade was going along the footpath. Bad luck that we also wanted to use the footpath!! We all squeezed in next to the railing on the road side as this loud and colourful procession passed by!
A short time later, we walked passed a Louis Vuitton store. There was a guard at the door letting in a few people at
a time and a queue out the front of people wanting to go in!!!! Can't really see the point myself...
We went and ate at the night market again - same place as last night - before trying our bartering skills again.
On the way back to the hotel we stopped at Maccas and bought some Fries, an Apple Pie and two Double Sundaes (chocolate in the middle and on the top)
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