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Dancing Dragon
More Friendly than Fierce...esp to the tourists!!! We’ve moved from our plush Harbour View suite in Kowloon over to Hong Kong Island, we’re staying at the Express Holiday Inn (£63 per night with breakfast thrown in for free). The hotel is in Causeway Bay and is in a great location for everything. There are hundreds of restaurants, bars and shopping malls’ surrounding the hotel and the whole place feels a lot less touristy to us - which we prefer! We had our first trip on the Star Ferry from Kowloon to HK Island, it only takes about 7 mins and even with bags and backpacks it was a very smooth journey, the transport systems here are fantastic; everything is well signposted and really cheap too.
I think we’ve overdone the shopping now, even I’m getting bored of it, there are millions and millions of shops, malls and markets and they stay open until late at night, the good thing is that there are quite a few sales on at the moment so we’ve been buying new
t-shirts rather than send the dirty ones to the hotel laundry…it works out at about the same price, ok they’re not designer but they’ll do for the next few weeks.
Nice Noodles
"These cornflakes 'av gone soggy" We had a really busy day today, probably the best day since we arrived. We were up and down at breakfast for 9.30am, had the pork & veg vermicelli soup with glutinous rice dumpling……wicked!! We caught the MTR to Shau Kei Wan on the east side of HK were there was a festival happening for the birthday of Tam Kung who is the patron of fishermen and boat people. (If my prayers are answered Lucky Strike and Uncle Mick should be ok). We arrived just in time for the start of the procession which makes its way down to the temple where offerings are made and hundreds of incense coils are burned. Somehow we got pushed through the barriers and found ourselves in the thick of the festivities….what an experience!!, we didn’t see any other tourists for the whole 3 hrs, there were TV crews and newspaper photographers and they all kept focussing on “the two western tourists”. The procession included lion and dragon dances and the locals kept urging us to run underneath or touch them for good luck. There was lots of noise from drums, bells, massive party poppers and cymbals and even though it was a cloudy
Gatecrashing the parade
"Bev, take the photo quick....there's a dragon about to breathe down your neck" day it was really colourful. The dragons and lions were surrounded by hundreds of young lads waving 12 foot tall satin flags in bright greens and oranges, the dancers wore brilliantly coloured costumes and the offerings being pushed down the streets on trolleys were decorated in all kinds of bright and jazzy tat.
When we arrived at the temple, again for some reason??? we were pushed through the barriers and the police turned a blind eye for half an hour; they let us stay in the thick of it taking pics and videoing everything that was going on. Eventually we were ushered inside the temple where the offerings were being left for Tam Kung….I bet the monks will be feasting for a month!! There were huge roasted pigs, loads of ducks, fruit, veg, sweets and cakes all placed in massive piles around the temple. Anyway by this time we were in need of a coffee so decided to make our way back to the MTR taking more pics and doing a bit of souvenir shopping from the street stalls along the route.
After coffee we had a wander around Central and saw most of the sights around that
area including the massive sparkling skyscrapers which are packed into the small area that overlooks the waterfront. We had a look around the Tea Museum - more for the A/C inside than anything else, also had a look around the park and saw the Anglican Cathedral - looks weird surrounded by massive modern towers. We noticed today how clean HK is, there’s never any rubbish on the streets, no graffiti or chewing gum stuck to the pavements; even the underground (MTR) is spotless.
After a busy day we decided to eat close to the hotel at a Japanese place, the food was great and really cheap. Tomorrow we’re off to watch the Noonday gun being fired then a harbour cruise (if it doesn’t rain),there’s another temple festival over in Central in the evening so it looks like we’ve got another packed day ahead of us……hope my feet can stand the pain!!!
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Jon Redmond
non-member comment
Ride on!
Hi kids! Keep doin what you doin! You should weigh about fifteen stone when you get back if you eat all that yummy pig! TTFN Jon