Arriving in the Hong Kong airport to find western style toilets in a bathroom that also had hand soap and hand dryers was luxurious. Having an excellent public transit system and air temperatures significantly lower than triple digits was an added bonus. I was both excited and a bit relieved about the next part of our travels through Asia.
Not in the airport bathroom, Ryan spotted this gem on a wall in a bar we passed through in Hong Kong. The guy with the gun seems a little over the top. Also, what is he standing in front of?
One our of priorities included visiting the Hong Kong Heritage Museum to see the Bruce Lee Exhibit because Bruce Lee was awesome and we’re in Hong Kong! I've seen the Bruce Lee exhibit in the Wing Luke Museum located in Seattle’s International District. They did a good job at the Wing Luke showcasing a lot of his work in television and sharing poems and letters he’d written while in Seattle. The Hong Kong version of Bruce Lee included a lot more pieces and videos including two 3D videos; one of Bruce warming up and working with a bag and another where he spars his Wing Chun teacher Ip Man. The video experience was vastly improved compared to what we've seen in the States as well as in the museums we've visited in Southeast Asia.
I thought it was remarkable how involved Bruce was in movie and television productions he worked on. In addition to fight choreography he was involved in the costumes, writing and, possibly, camera work. Ryan hypothesizes he really wanted to be a director. There were numerous examples of his handwritten sketches for action sequences. For example in Enter the Dragon, where he also has a writing credit, he sketched out the fight with the main henchmen. This fight was playing on repeat next to the sketches.
I'm really pleased and Ryan is ready to spar his cell phone.
The lead into the exhibit was really promising. Sigh.
The weirdest art exhibition we've ever seen was also in the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, "Claude Monet: The Spirit of Place”. For some reason, I thought we would see paintings by Claude Monet. Instead we saw a lot of tablets and video projections with digital images of Monet’s work arranged in a pond setting and recreating parts of his home.
The exhibition space was pretty busy as we walked through confused as to where the actual paintings were hiding. We found them in the last room, three paintings hanging in a space jam packed with people. (More than Tokyo Station during rush hour). I thought it was weird that there were no museum staff controlling the amount of people in the part of the exhibit where the actual art was located. Throw selfie sticks into the mix and you’ve got a wild introduction to crowd dynamics!
Another priority for us was ditching our mandals. That's the utilitarian word I use to describe our ugly sandals. Because there are cute, fashionable versions of those shoes but they weren’t going to cut it for the 15,000 steps a day were were averaging throughout the hot ass part of our travels. Fun fact! No one on sneaker street carries size 9 women's shoes. In fact, nearly everyone I asked laughed at me when suggesting there are women who could use a shoe larger than size 6. We exist! Just not in large numbers in Hong Kong I guess.
Fancy cars and lots of signs occupy the streets of Hong Kong.
People and signs. In Hong Kong.
To escape the city one afternoon we ventured into a park with an aviary on Hong Kong Island. The transit system in Hong Kong was really easy to navigate and super efficient. We purchased Octopus Cards that we put some money on which worked for the Subway and Ferry Network, to visit several locations in the city.
Besides watching birds, watching Colored Carp is another one of our favorite hobbies.
Hong Kong city park with colorful cartoon mushrooms.
This turtle scene made Ryan laugh out loud. A lot.
Don't forget to look up every once in a while. Otherwise you could miss out on a sculpture contemplating it's purpose on the edge of a skyscraper.
This partridge has serious attitude. I like.
Later we took a train and then a gondola to visit the Big Buddha on top of the hill and the Po Lin Monastery. It was really peaceful to walk around the park and courtyard areas. Except for the kids with selfie sticks screaming when they passed by in their gondolas, it made for a very pleasant afternoon.
Zoomed in portion of some of the residential towers in Hong Kong. These were at the bottom of the Big Buddha hill.
The entrance to the Po Lin Monastery.
Go old Big Buddha stair climb. We had a lot of practice climbing stairs to visit temples in Cambodia. Piece of cake!
The clouds started to roll in while we were there. Atmospheric Buddha.
A foggy cable car ride from the Big Buddha Monastery.
The other tourist attraction we'd heard about was the light show down along the harbor, "A Symphony of Lights!". It starts every night at 8:00 PM so we made a point to stop by one evening so Ryan could take 30 videos of lit up skyscrapers. The light show was just meh. There were a lot of people there to watch it. The scale was impressive but if you've been to Singapore or Vegas you know what light shows are all about.
A lot of people making videos of the light show. This happens every evening at 8:00 PM at the harbor.
Also, there's a bunch of delicious food to be consumed in Hong Kong. I think it took us three days to realize what we thought was coffee was really tea and coffee mixed together, from the diner close to our hotel where we ate breakfast. But whatever. Coffee and tea from the diner in Hong Kong was delicious! So was sweet and sour pork (which Ryan ordered about once a day), steamed buns and any kind of dumplings. And street waffles. Street waffles are amazing.
Speaking of delicious foods - we left Hong Kong to spend 25 days eating our way around Japan! Ryan will say more about that in the next post. More soon.
Another picture of tall buildings. In case you were wondering what the city with the largest number of skyscrapers looks like.