Hong Kong Adventure, Day 2

The second full day of our adventure was actually Christmas day.  Which was a little weird because I've never been out and about on Christmas day.  I've always been at home, or on my way to home to celebrate with family, not staying in a hotel. But it was fun!

This year on Christmas, however, we headed out to Kowloon, via Star Ferry, which took about 15 minutes to get over to the Tsim Sha Tsui landing.

View of our hotel (the shorter of the two buildings) from the ferry.


A purple Christmas tree.


A sign for the Hong Kong Ballet's Nutcracker.


Sign outside the performing arts center.  Queuing is not something commonly seen in some parts of Asia.  When the ticket counter opens, say at the train station, it's a free-for-all to work your way to the counter to buy your tickets.  Throughout this area in the subway stations, we saw signs saying crowd control would be in effect beginning at 6 p.m.  Which to me meant that that was not a place I wanted to be after 6 p.m.

Street view from pedestrian walkway.  Hong Kong has a system of raised pedestrian walkways on both the Hong Kong and Kowloon sides, so you can get from one part of town to another without stepping foot on the street.  It's almost like a maze, and without the street level information, it's a lot harder to navigate and figure out where you are, unless you know the names of the different buildings.


On the Kowloon side, there are different market streets, such as the goldfish market, the ladies market, and the flower market.  The goldfish market has stores on both sides of the street selling goldfish in plastic bags, and tanks and anything you could think of for your fish tank.  The ladies market was a street lined with stalls, which reminded me of the Dongdaemun and Namdaemun markets in Seoul.  The flower market was a whole street of florists, with cactus, bamboo, real and fake flowers, and herbs, plus even a few Christmas trees for sale.  We didn't make it to the bird market.

After a morning walking through Kowloon, up Nathan Road, we took the MTR (subway) back to Tsim Tsa Shui station.  The escalators in the MTR station move quick, so you have to be on your toes.

Street on the Hong Kong side (I can tell because of the tram -- the double decker trams only run on the Hong Kong side).

We stayed near the Convention Center, in the Wan Chai area.  Wan Chai is what used to be the center of the red light district in Hong Kong.  It's been cleaned up considerably and is now home to restaurants and bars that cater to tourist/ex-pat/conventioneer clientele.  The Bottoms Up as seen in James Bond no longer exists.  But this corner is where it was.  Now it's a bar called Typhoon, with an Indian Restaurant and vacant space upstairs.  Around the corner is a British style pub, and down the street is a wide range of south-east Asian restaurants.


View of the main street through Wan Chai from raised walkway.  For Christmas, the buildings had these elaborate holiday decorations up.


Lights on the buildings as seen from our hotel room.  Every night at 8 p.m. there is a laser light show featuring buildings on both sides of the harbor.  So, before we had our Christmas dinner, we turned out the lights in our room, and watched the show.