Runnin' Roun' China Town

So yesterday was my first whole day spent on the other side o' the world. I woke up around 3am and couldn't get back to sleep. made for a tough day but still had to check this place out.

Decided to head out on my own, sam had his last day teaching, over to the island...aka the main island of Hong Kong. turns out I'm staying with Sam on Kowloon, which is the part of Hong Kong that is attached to china. I took the MTR to the main island where I decided I was going to Victoria's Peak, aka the Peak. It's basically a mountain overlooking Hong Kong (nice view). to get up to the Peak I took this trolly that rode up at what seemed like a 45 degree incline (pi/4 radian's if that's your deal). I then took some pictures form the top and went on a little walk around the peak. it was nice and relaxing.

when I decided to ascend to the highest point of the Peak I was followed closely by a really nice couple of Canadians who live in NYC (Mark and Amanda). we got talking for a while and descended from the peak of The Peak. I was going to hit up a botanical garden and hong kong park, but ended up joining my two new friends on their journey to some noodles that they heard have to be tried before leaving HK and then an escalator ride through midlevels - or middle earth as i called it. I have no idea what the escalator thing meant, nor where "middle earth" was or what there was to do there, but figured "why the heck not?"

In a nut shell, the noodle place, mac's noodles, was down an alley and behind a clothing stand and had no discernible name in english (there's actually a lot of english in HK). The noodles were pretty good, but the company was better. I guess we didn't know how hungry we were; but the mood went from cordial to quite fun. turns out mark was involved with sketch comedy so was a pretty funny dude. we then spent the next hour or so riding up a series of escalators through middle earth. it was pretty cool seeing like 3 noticeably different areas just while riding up escalators. we then walked down, as the escalators only went up at that time of day and stopped at a bunch of little stands and just had a good ol' time. HK is very interesting place with these rinky-dink stands interspersed with high end shopping that reminded me of New York's fifth ave.

After A long day of running around, sam and i went to Jimmy's place. this awesome lil barbecue shop where i got some duck curry and pork neck. yum.

Today was cool as well. I went to this awesome tea shop where the girl who worked there made us a ton of different teas. She seemed impressed with how much i knew of tea despite my round eyes and american accent. after this i decided to see as much of HK island as i could so hopped on the trolly. its a $2hkd trolly that goes all the way across the island. Beginning near the NYC type retail area all the way towards a more residential and low key part of the city/country. It still really amazes me how much of HK reminds me of every chinatown i've ever seen.

After running around for the day I came back to sam's place and rested for a little bit and then went for a lil run in a nearby park. there were lots of old people running, one dude practicing with this gigantic sword, old dudes doing Tai Chi and me running around in my little orange shorts. overall, not a bad day either. Today also marks sam's last day at work for the next few days so I'll prob actually get to hang out with him soon, yay!