Day 277 - ‘Come on Irene, sell us a screen’

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So we made our decision - we decided to buy the screen but take it back ourselves on the flight. Lufthansa said this would be fine, although excess baggage is charged at GBP20 per kilo. And the screen weighs 26kg! So the day’s first task was to see just how light we could make our rucksacks by ruthlessly ditching anything unnecessary and/or heavy, and shifting the remaining heavy things like books to our hand luggage that wouldn’t count when they weighed our bags and calculated our excess baggage. Satisfied that we could get our checked baggage weight down to a reasonable level, we went to the shop, found our helpful sales assistant Irene, and arranged to pick it up the following morning professionally wrapped on our way to the airport.

Hong Kong has a great thing called the Central Escalator, which is a chain of lots and lots of escalators going from central up into the residential areas in the hills. The longest escalator in the world in fact, apparently. We went up these for a bit before cutting across to the Peak Tram station. The Peak is a viewpoint way above Hong Kong island, and there is a funicular railway to the top. It says the maximum gradient is 27 degrees but it feels a lot more vertical than that. On a clear day the view would be amazing, but today it was cloudy and we could hardly see across the water. Back down in the town we found a great little street called Stamford St and ate and drank there for the rest of the evening chatting and people watching, wondering whether the Chinese have some sort of genetic reason for phlegm gathering and spitting.

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