These are the rest of the street market photos. Lots of fruits and vegetables are sold as well, but the meat is more interesting. As far as I could tell, ALL parts of the animal are sold. The fish was so fresh we saw some still- beating hearts. Sanitation looked iffy, though. And I decided I would probably skip the markets in August. One can only imagine the smells....On Saturday we took a cable car up to Victoria Peak, which I'm assuming is the highest point in Hong Kong. Unfortunately no pics because it was so foggy we couldn't see anything. We did, however, appreciate how high we were.
For lunch we had dim sum, which is very traditional Hong Kong. Jim said he'd never had dim sum before. I was shocked, but dim sum is usually served late morning to early afternoon, and since Jim doesn't eat lunch out often, that explained that. So, we went to an old school restaurant. It had a huge dining room and women pushed trollies of food in between the tables, yelling out what they had on their carts over the din of conversatuion. It was a somewhat raucous atmosphere. Jim and I were not too successful at picking out dishes we liked, mostly because there was no English on the menu or spoken by the trolley ladies. We ate enough to sustain us till dinner and put that experience in the "fascinating, but wouldn't go back for the food until our Chinese is better" column.
Later that afternoon we ferried over to the island of Kowloon. Travelling to the different islands that make up Hong Kong is like travelling to the different boroughs of New York City. We liked Kowloon, I think because it didn't seem as sensory-overwhelming. Leave it to Fitz to find an Irish pub. After a couple of pints of Guiness we did a little shopping, then went to the waterfront to watch the "Symphony of Lights". That's a laser light show that involves about 20 skyscapers on Hong Kong Island, across Victoria Harbor. Very cool. Afterwards we had dinner ina hotel with a lovely view of Victoria Harbor.
Sunday we took a ferry to the island of Lantau to see the giant Buddha at a Buddhist monastery. We got a cab and thought that pointing to a photo of said statue was clear enough to indicate where we wanted to go. The guy drove us to a beach. No, we said. Again, pointed to a photo of the statue . Ohhhhhh. The driver seemed to "get it" this time, but I'm convinced he took us the long way. Oh well, we said to each other, what are we going to do? Lantau reminded us of a Caribbean island. One that is sparsely populated, mountainous, no-frills cement houses, cows in the road and limited transportation options. So we got the scenic route to the monastery. It was worth the trouble. A gigantic bronze Buddha sits on top of a mountain. I think there are 268 steps leading up to it. Despite my Achilles tendonitis, I did it. I'll try and post those photos later. We took a cable car back down the mountain. I'm so afraid of heights I distracted myself by getting to know the Welsh couple who shared the car with us. It took about 20 minutes to get down. From there we took the subway back to Hong Kong Island, had a superb Szechuan lunch, then flew back to Shanghai. We were exhausted, but we got a lot out of our weekend.
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