Larry and I started out Day 3 at Pacific Coffee for espresso and a quick email to our moms. We decided that this was the day to explore Hong Kong’s subway system.
Once we got the process of ticket purchases figured out (it’s an automated touch-screen!) we were on our way to Kowloon, the area just north of Hong Kong Island that is actually on the Asian continent. We disembarked the subway at the Prince Edward station, which was north beyond our map. We used our compass to find out which way was south, and began walking south back toward Hong Kong along Nathan Road.
You know how in movies about Hong Kong there are street scenes with signs all over the middle of the road? Kowloon is like that. The streets are full of signs in Chinese and English for products, services, hotels, and restaurants. My favorite sign was for a hotel that rented room by the night, or for two hours.
The best parts of this vast city’s street life are its markets. There are street markets everywhere. I don’t know if they move daily, or stay in the same place for a few days. The ones we saw took up the entire street, and sold anything you can imagine. Many of them sell silk items, but there’s also clothing, knock-off designer purses, chopsticks, jewelry. In Kowloon we walked through the Ladies Market and the Jade Market, where we were given a brief tutorial on the quality of jade by one of the vendors. She clanged one jade bracelet of an inferior quality with another piece of jade. Then she clanged on jade bracelet made of a better quality jade. There was quite a difference in the sound. As we perused the jade market, we could hear the jade quality demonstration all the way to the far side of the market.
The wet markets are what gave us a bit of culture shock. They sell every kind of meat imaginable; much of it is still alive. We knew we were getting close to a wet market from the smell. The variety of seafood at the wet markets is what we found the most interesting – shrimp, octopus, and fish we’d never seen before, all still alive.
By the afternoon we’d walked all the way to the southern tip of Kowloon, still on Nathan Road (with a long diversion through Kowloon Park). This part of Nathan Road, called The Golden Mile, looks like the Champs-Élysées in Paris, with a wide boulevard and upscale shops.
We eventually ended up on the Sea Walk at the very southern tip of Kowloon. In movies when you see the shot of Hong Kong’s skyline with Victoria Harbour in the foreground, those shots are taken from Kowloon looking south toward Hong Kong Island. I’ve always had the image in my head that those shots are looking north.
The joke of the day: Larry said he must be terribly dressed – he had so many offers to get a tailored suit!
This was a long day that ended up with us getting lost in the rain very close to our hotel. (We would have been fine if we’d consulted our compass, but we were tired and had forgotten we had it along!) The streets were very crowded with umbrellas carried by people all shorter than us, so the umbrellas were hitting us in the face. When we finally found our hotel, we immediately went to the lounge for a beer and another beer. It was our last night in Hong Kong for a week. The next day, we were off to the People’s Republic of China.
