Hong Kong for Lunar New Year

Asia » Hong Kong
January 31st 2009

Published: January 31st 2009

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griffster

Bamboo Scaffolding

The online hotel registration failed to mention that the Regal Kowloon Hotel was under construction. Oh well.

The day after my HAIL gig, I got on a plane to go wander around Hong Kong for a few days. Lunar New Year is a three day holiday in Korea, so I wanted to take advantage of the time. My friend Kye-Ok came with me, too. Hong Kong is a really progressive city. They call it the International City, and it really is. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to get around and communicate with people (much simpler than Ulsan). There's a LOT to see, I'm sure I could have spent many more days there with new things to look at, but time always runs short. We saw the Kowloon area (mainland "downtown"), Hong Kong Island (the "meat" of the town), and Lamma Island, a small fishing island. Basically, we had no real plan, and just walked around with a map deciding where to go next. It worked out really well.

The first night we went to the street markets. You could get some pretty cheap stuff there. I got a Billabong shirt for about $10 CDN, for example. Apparently Beijing is the place to go for the super cheap stuff, though. On the other hand,

Kowloon area

I saw a lot of shopping centers there that were ridiculously expensive in the downtown core, especially on Hong Kong Island. There you will find the Gucci, Prada, Armani sort of scene. It was impressive to see the extravagance, but was not really "my thing".

Since it was Lunar New Year, there were lots of decorations and we saw a parade. It was fun, but not overly spectacular, I thought. They were bringing in the Year of the Ox, so there were a lot of cartoon cows all over the place. One afternoon we went to a popular temple, I think the area was called Wan Chai, if I remember correctly. I was NOT expecting the crowd, but we walked into a lineup of a trillion or so people who were going to pray for a prosperous year! It was actually really neat to see, although it did take a few hours to get through the crowds. And the smell of all the incense was very overpowering. I have to say though, the crowd control put in place by the police was quite clever. The whole thing was set up with gates like a maze, so that it wasn't

Mong Kok Street Market

just an onslaught of people charging the front gate. They had sort of traffic control guards for herding people.

Lamma Island was nice to see, but kind of a shenanigan. We took a ferry over to see the fishing community and decided to go for dinner. There were a lot of people at one of the restaurants, so we figured it would be good. And it was good, excellent, actually. But the bill turned out to be about $300 for one lobster and a few side dishes! It was such a dumpy little place, too, with cheap plastic patio furniture. Oh well, live and learn. I'm suspicious that I paid a much different price that the local customers... After that, we went to get on the ferry to go back to the mainland, but the ferries were closed for an hour while for the fireworks show over the water that night. So not only were we stuck there in the cold, we missed the fireworks...

I would have liked to see a big nature reserve farther north, and I also would have liked to go to Hong Kong Disneyland, but sadly I had to go back to work...