Hong Kong - One Last Time

From Hong Kong May 2010

Jamie and I spent Saturday and Sunday afternoon in what will be our last time visiting Hong Kong. I have really fallen in love with that city and would move there in a heartbeat. It wasn’t in the cards this time, but perhaps down the road, we’ll find our way back there.

Saturday afternoon we took the ferry across to Central, had lunch at our favorite Mexican restaurant, Tequila, and checked into our hotel, Bishop Lei International Hotel. It is a great place that is half a block from the mid-level escalators in Central with a usually great price for being in the center of the city.

We had wanted to catch the nightly 8:00 pm light show that projects across Victoria Harbor onto the city skyline, so we took the Star Ferry across to Kowloon and checked out the Hong Kong Science Museum. Great museum that we wish we could take our students to, but several of our students have only Chinese visas and can’t enter Hong Kong and re-enter China, so field trips to Hong Kong are sometimes pretty iffy. After the science museum, it was pouring down rain, so we didn’t catch the light show. Instead, we headed toward Lan Kwai Fong, the famous bar street in Hong Kong, and ate at a great place called Bulldogs.

We slept in because our bed was very comfortable, but after lunch at Just Salad (wonderful salad only restaurant) headed out to see an art exhibition called Hope and Glory by Simon Birch. It was a multi-media abstract art exhibition that was really way over our heads. We both agreed that we weren’t artsy or art intelligent enough to understand or appreciate it that much. Nonetheless, it was free and only cost us the metro ride over there. We then headed to the horse tracks where I bet on 2 races and won 1 of them. Sweet! I paid or my lunch with that one. Our next stop was a place I had been wanting to go every since I saw the map of Hong Kong, the cemetery.
I have been amazed by cemeteries ever since a project I had to do in an undergraduate Tennessee history class in college. The Hong Kong Cemetery is right in the middle of the city and sits on the side of a mountain, so the graves are terraced, very old, and has sections for the different religions, mainly Jews, Muslims, and Christians. We found some cool headstones and some that I need to research further to understand their meaning.

We headed on the trolley (still the best way to get around Hong Kong Island), and headed back to Soho and the mid level escalators and found lunch/dinner at Build a Burger (wonderful hamburgers), picked up our stuff at the hotel, bought our ferry tickets, dropped by IFC Mall for some dessert, stopped by Dymocks one last time to purchase more magazines (entirely too expensive), and waved farewell to Hong Kong for what could be the last time on the last ferry back to Shekou for the night.
Be sure to check out a few of our pictures. Some cool ones of Hope and Glory, the cemetery, and just us having a blast in Hong Kong.