Hong Kong Adventures: Hong Kong Day 17

(No Internet at the apartment today. Posting this from my phone, will have the real post once we get Internet back. Did a lot and have lots of pictures today.)

Got back from work to find we have internet!! Here's my post about yesterday, with lots of pictures (and some video)...

Today is a holiday and we did not have work so we slept in a bit. Felt a lot better after getting a bunch of sleep, not completely back to normal in the morning, but pretty close. June 12 is the Tuen Ng Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival. There are dragon boat races all around Hong Kong, some are parts of really big festivals, and some are just races.

Ciara and I decided that we wanted to go see the dragon boats. Evelyn and Yan went to a couple of museums and to a shopping mall. We went to the Stanley Beach Dragon Boat races. It is a HUGE festival, with 200 teams, both international teams and local teams. We took the MTR to Admiralty and then took a bus from there to Stanley Beach The Stanley International Dragon Boat Championships can have over 30,000 spectators. There were a lot of people there, and it took a long time to get there by bus. The bus was completely packed, and there was a lot of traffic so it was pretty slow getting over there. Once we were there, we walked down to the beach to see what was going on.

The beach was really crowded, we just went up there for a few minutes and then decided to go around and see what else there was. We walked over to an area with a bunch of canopies/tents that were set up. They were giving away popsicles at one place, so we got one of those. There were a few other displays, and some of the tents were also set up for teams to eat and rest. After seeing that area, we walked over towards Stanley Market, to see what it had. The Festival had a tent set up with a game where they set up 4 foam disks on a box and you use a mallet to try to knock off all but the top disk. Ciara was able to do it, I almost had it but the disk landed on the mallet. There was also a sand art activity of filling a little vial with colored sand. We each made one, it was fun and they look pretty cool. We also go “instant tattoo stickers.” They are basically the temporary tattoos we have at home, but are a bit thicker. Stayed on a lot more than I expected.

After that, we walked down to Stanley Plaza and walked around the Murray House. It is a big old house that has been refurbished and has restaurants inside it. We also walked out onto the pier, and then watched a band playing at the plaza for a bit. We stopped at a little restaurant and got some food. There weren’t really a lot of food choices, mostly western-style restaurants, and a lot of them were pretty fancy and expensive. I wasn’t that hungry, but I decided that a salad sounded okay. It wasn’t quite what I was thinking of when I decided on salad. It was just lettuce and a few tomatoes and they gave us oil and vinegar for dressing and also a bottle of something that looked and tasted like Mayo, but it might have been something else similar. The vinegar was also the chinese red vinegar, so it isn’t exactly the best vinegar to use for salad.

After eating, we went back to the beach to try to watch the races for a bit longer. We were able to find a spot up on a building, I think it was part of a restaurant. It was a pretty good view of the area that they were doing the races, so we watched a few from there. It is pretty cool, each boat has a person at the front beating a drum to keep all of the rowers in time. There are a lot of people on each boat and they move very smoothly. I was able to record a couple of the races. After we watched a couple of races we went back up to the street and over to the bus stop. There were a ton of people lining up to leave, the line for our bus wrapped around a few times near the stop, and it also went up around the corner and onto the street above the stop. Luckily they had a lot of busses so the line moved pretty quickly and we got on a bus within a few minutes.

The bus ride back went faster than the ride there, and we were sitting on the 2^nd level and on the side away from the mountain so we had views. We drove past a couple of pretty bays and we could also see Ocean Park (kind of a six-flags Marine World) type of thing. It looks huge, we are hoping to go over there next weekend.

Once we got back to Wan Chai, we decided to go down to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, and the Golden Bauhinia Square. This is where the handover of Hong Kong occurred in 1997, and they have a statue of the “Golden Bauhinia” there, which symbolizes the handover. The statue is really pretty, and there were a lot of people taking pictures with and of it. We each took pictures of it and a picture in front of it. We walked around the promenade between the convention centre and the harbor, and we were able to see the building where we work. We took a picture with the building in the background. As we were leaving, they were lowering the Chinese and Hong Kong flags that fly near the statue. We stayed to watch that, and then headed to the MTR station to go back to our apartment.

Dinner was back at the Hysan Place food court, today I got a ramen and dumpling set meal. It was ramen, dumplings/gyoza, and green tea for $80 HKD, a tiny bit over $10 US. It was really good, and definitely hit the spot. I was feeling better and better all day, but getting some real food helped a lot.

Video of the Dragon Boat race