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Published: January 4th 2010
Happy, Happy, Happy
This was waiting for a parade at Hong Kong DisneylandWe went from Chiang Mai to Sukhothai, which are these old Thai ruins from the 1200s. They were neat, but I got Purple Cow Fever, so I couldn’t see them very much.
Then we went to Bangkok for four days. We didn’t do much. The King of Thailand’s birthday had just been, and everyone was celebrating. They closed off streets and night and had a sort of festival.
We flew from Bangkok to Hong Kong. We spent Ella’s birthday and Christmas in Hong Kong, around 10 days total.
Hong Kong is made up mostly of a bunch of islands. There are three main parts: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories. We stayed in Kowloon. Since it’s a bunch of islands, we took the metro under the water regularly. Once we took a ferry called the Star Ferry. It’s a boat that takes you across the water from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon.
Hong Kong was fun. Here are some thoughts about Hong Kong:
What I liked best. Oh gosh, that’s hard. We had three very special days, and they were all very fun. I liked them all the best.
Special Day #1: Disneyland Hong Kong. We took the subway for a long time out into the suburbs of Hong Kong. When we got there it was misting and cold. We were worried that it would not be a very good day to be outside. It turned out to be nice but chilly.
When we first walked in the park, Donald and Daisy Duck held me and Ella and Jordan’s hands, and we walked along with them holding hands and then got to take a picture with them. I’m not in the picture, because I took it.
Disneyland Hong Kong is like a smaller version of any other Disney park. One difference is the language. Instead of just English, things are in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. People in Hong Kong speak Cantonese, and people from mainland China speak Mandarin.
There was one show that was different from anything you could see at home. It was called The Golden Mickeys. It was very different, but it’s hard to describe how. It was a show with a lot of songs from various Disney movies, with the characters singing and dancing.
What made it different was Bebe (Bee-Bee).
Bebe was the hostess of it, like a Master of Ceremonies on an awards show. She spoke Cantonese. She called Mickey and Minnie My-kai and My-Lai. My-kai and My-Lai spoke Cantonese too. Something about Bebe’s entire character was different than at home. She was extremely spunky and bubbly, but in a very Chinese way that’s impossible to describe unless you see it. The Golden Mickeys was probably the most fun thing we did at Disneyland Hong Kong.
Special Day #2: Ella’s 11th Birthday. In the morning on Ella’s birthday, we tried to go to the Hong Kong Science Museum, only to discover that it didn’t open till 1:00.
Instead we went to a mall that was 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) long. We walked around, and Ella got a maple bread (hot fresh bread coated with light maple syrup) from a Japanese bakery that was hot and fresh.
We ate lunch at California Pizza Kitchen, which was really, really yummy. Purple Cows love pizza.
By then it was about 1:00, and we walked back over to the Science Museum. It was very big and fun, and not too crowded. It was similar to any other science
museum, but it was still fun.
Ella and I ate dinner at McDonald’s. Everyone else was still full from the pizza. We sat at McDonald’s for a while, and instead of birthday cake Ella had a piece of cheesecake and a hot chocolate from McCafe at McDonald’s.
In front of the long mall there was a waterfront that looked over an incredible skyline of skyscrapers that seemed to go on forever and ever. Every night there was a sound and light show. We went and saw it that night.
We walked back over to the waterfront. We looked around in a department store until it was time for the light show.
We walked along the waterfront for a while until we saw a good place to watch the light show. The waterfront was a wide path right on the water. You could walk along it, and look out across the water to all of the skyscrapers.
The sound and light show was fun. It wasn’t great, but it was neat to see all the skyscrapers all lit up with lights. The neatest thing was these green laser light sort of things that shone off the
top of some of the tallest buildings. There was one building in particular that was fun to watch. It a building that had triangle designs on it, and the lights would shoot up the side of the building, tracing the triangles. Some of the buildings had things like Santa Claus on them. Christmas was very big in Hong Kong.
On the way back to our hotel, we sat in the front seat on the top deck of a double decker bus. That was really fun. The bus goes down this road called Nathan Road, the road we were staying on. It’s a giant road that goes on for miles and miles. In a part of it, there are neon signs that sort of come out into the middle of the road. They’re made so they come out into the middle of the road. It seemed incredible that the bus didn’t run into them.
Special Day #3: Christmas. On Christmas, we went to Disneyland Hong Kong again, except that we didn’t go in the park.
We got there about mid-morning. We strolled around the grounds of the two resorts. One of them had a maze that we did.
Crowded
This picture gives a sense of how crowded the streets get. At 12:30 we went and ate at Chef Mickey’s, which is a buffet restaurant in one of the hotels. It was very good. My favorite thing was the rolls with smoked salmon on them. Purple Cows love smoked salmon.
After that we went out onto a big grassy space. There aren’t many grassy spaces in Hong Kong, so this was a special treat. May and Paul took a nap laying on the grass. Ella and me and Jordan read.
There was a waterfront walk that we walked on for a while. It was a very pretty day, about 75 degrees and sunny.
This day was fun because we had been going very hard and doing things for a long time, and this was our first resting day. It was also fun because everywhere we went there was Christmas music playing and Christmas trees. It was relaxing and easy and fun. It’s also fun to be in Disneyland Hong Kong even without going in the park, because there were statues of Mickey everywhere and hedges shaped like Donald’s face, and we could go in the Disney shops.
What I liked least. The crowds. Hong Kong is
incredibly densely populated. We were staying in one of the most densely populated places in the world, an area called Mong Kok, in Kowloon.
One Saturday afternoon we went over to an area on Hong Kong Island. Saturday afternoon is the most crowded time of the week; it is very, very, very crowded.
We walked a pretty long ways through the crowds, and they were just never-ending. It was like a sea of people. You couldn’t walk freely at all, and you were always bumping into someone or in someone’s way, and you had to walk around people and you bumped into things, and you couldn’t really see anything, and you had about two inches of personal space. It got old. Me and Ella and May had to go back to Mong Kok when we came to the next subway stop.
The most fun I had. Probably Ella’s birthday. I had a ton of fun, because it was Ella’s birthday, and I love her. I got to help her choose what to do, and it was fun to choose what to do. It was just special.
Another really fun thing was walking around a mall near
Ella is a Crab
We went to a museum that had a kids' room, and Ella dressed up like a crab. our hotel. It was 15 stories high. Huuuge! It had two escalators, each of which went up five floors. Purple Cows love escalators. There were people everywhere, but it wasn’t overcrowded. It played Christmas music, even after Christmas. Malls in general are fun, but especially huge malls. It was never-ending.
The top 10 or so floors had a huge open space. This was where the five-story escalators were. Instead of the floors being complete floors, there was an empty space in the middle, so you could see down into the open space, where there were stores down near the bottom.
Also, the floors were arranged in a spiral. You walk down five stairs, and there are a few shops, and then you walk down five more stairs…. And it goes on like this, slowly making a spiral that goes down around 10 floors. You can also use the five-story escalators that take you up to the top very quickly. We went up on the escalators and came slowly down through the spiral. It’s hard to describe - the layout was very unusual for a mall.
The most like home. Hong Kong is such a big city that
not very much reminded me of home.
Even though Hong Kong has malls, they are different from malls at home. Malls at home are all dark and closed-looking and empty, usually. All malls in Hong Kong had lots of windows and were always crowded with people, and every store was always open, and the malls were huge, huge, huge. They were also much newer-looking than malls at home.
The cutest thing I saw. The little kids. They were princesses.
For example, there was one little girl, around two, that we saw on a mountain peak park overlooking the city. She was at the peak with about 14 grownups, who all clearly loved her very much.
We were sitting on a big viewing platform, like a square, watching her. She was in her own world. She would hop to a certain place and bend down and touch the ground, and run over to a grownup and hug them. And the grownup would chase her, and she would laugh. And then she would run about and do these little skipping dances. She was all-around adorable.
All the while she was doing this, her 14 grownups watched her,
talked about her, pointed at her, squealed at her, laughed at her, took pictures of her. They obviously thought she was the center of the world.
Every little kid you saw was treated like a princess like this. They were cute, and they knew it.
The best food I ate. The food in Hong Kong wasn’t great. The best food I ate was the maple bread thing that me and Ella got on her birthday. We got it again on Christmas Eve. It is delicious.
The weirdest food I ate. Claypot rice. It wasn’t very good, but it was weird.
There were these clay pots filled with rice and chicken and vegetables. They were cooked on a fire in the pot, and then brought to you to eat. Some of the rice was kind of burned, and the chicken had bones and gristle.
The restaurant was weird too. It was packed full of tables, and all the tables were packed full of people. We shared our table with a Hong Kong lady. There weren’t any other tourists in there; it was a very Hong Kongy place.
The most interesting thing I did. Probably Christmas
Eve. On Christmas Eve, me and Ella and Paul went to the two-mile long mall. We walked around there for a while.
Then we went out to the waterfront. It was very crowded, and for some reason traffic police had made lots of barriers, so you couldn’t go many places. We looked at the skyline at night for a while, then we walked back into the city, thinking that we were going to take the metro back.
To our surprise, the roads were closed off. Giant, 12-lane, monster roads. They were crowded with people. The people were sort of strolling leisurely around and shopping in malls and generally having fun. There was Christmas music everywhere, and neon lights everywhere, and it was very festive.
Where we slept. Oh dear, oh dear. We slept in a room that was much too small to accommodate four people and one Purple Cow, not to mention all our stuff.
It had a bunk bed, a single bed, and a bed frame that you pulled down every night from where it was stood up on it’s end against the wall during the day. The mattress for the against-the-wall bed was stacked
on top of the mattress on the single bed. The room was about 8 feet wide and 10 feet long. Ella and I slept on the top bunk.
In the morning when we wanted to take showers, and at night when we wanted to brush teeth, we had to do it one at a time, because two of us couldn’t stand up at the same time - the room was too small and crowded for more than one person to move around.
It was a ridiculously small room.
Where we ate. This was different from anywhere else, because the food in Hong Kong wasn’t very good.
Usually we would eat a Big Breakfast at McDonald’s.
For lunch we would eat fruit, usually an orange. Chinese oranges are delicious, delicious.
Around five we would usually eat at a Japanese fast food restaurant called Yoshinoya. Ella and I split a chicken bowl, which was rice with chicken and vegetables and a teriyaki-ish sauce.
Yoshinoya had these things called tea sets. Hong Kong was recently (until 1997) a British colony, and the British often have tea (a light meal) between 2 and 6 in the afternoon.
The tea sets were really cheap, so that was what we ate for dinner.
How we got around. Mostly we used the metro. Hong Kong’s metro is very nice, and it goes almost anywhere. Most of the subway stops have a least one exit that lead out into a huge, fancy mall.
Hong Kong money. Hong Kong money is called Hong Kong dollars. Around 7 Hong Kong dollars makes 1 US dollar. Hong Kong is part of China, but Chinese has one kind of money and Hong Kong has a different kind of money.
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Joyce H.
non-member comment
Where's Ella's body?
Dear Patsy, I hope Ella is more than just a head -- that would be scary. But at least she could still eat pizza with you. I'm glad you enjoyed Hong Kong and I hope you aren't too covered in snow in China. We miss you here at the farm. Happy New Year! Joyce